Arts, Pedagogy and
Cultural Resistance
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Arts, Pedagogy and
Cultural Resistance
New Materialisms
Edited by
Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
www.rowmaninternational.com
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA
With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Copyright © 2015 Anna Hickey-Moody, Tara Page and Contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7834-8486-7
PB 978-1-7834-8487-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
<to come>
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
List of Illustrations
vii
Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction: Making, Matter and Pedagogy
Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
1
1
2
Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Pedagogy:
A Single Vision
Aislinn O’ Donnell
21
Probeheads of Resistance and the Heterotopic Mirror:
Tiffany Chung and Dinh Q. Lê’s Stratigraphic Cartographies
Colin Gardner
41
3
Dorothy Heathcote: Practice as a Pedagogy of Resistance
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
4
Art, Resistance and Demonic Pedagogy: From Parasite
Capitalism to Excommunication
Charlie Blake and Jennie Stearns
59
79
5
A Pedagogy of Possibilities: Drama as Reading Practice
Maggie Pitfield
6
‘Let me change it into my own style’: Cultural Domination and
Material Acts of Resistance Within an Inner City Dance Class
Camilla Stanger
113
From Art Appreciation to Pedagogies of Dissent:
Critical Pedagogy and Equality in the Gallery
Esther Sayers
133
7
95
v
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vi
Contents
8
Ethnocinema and Video-as-Resistance
Anne Harris
153
9
Manifesto: The Rhizomatics of Practice as Research
Anna Hickey-Moody
169
References
193
Index
211
Notes on Contributors
000
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List of Illustrations
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2
Tiffany Chung. Dubai 2020. 2010
Tiffany Chung. When the Sun Comes Out
the Night Vanishes. 2013
Figure 2.3 Dinh Q. Lê. Persistence of Memory. 2000–2001
Figure 2.4 Dinh Q. Lê – The Farmers and The Helicopters.
Installation view MoMA NYC. 2010–2011
Figure 2.5 Dinh Q. Lê. Barricade. 2014
Figure 8.1 Adiba. Still image from ‘Sailing into Uni’. 2013
Figure 9.1 Sylvano Bussoti’s Piano piece for David Tudor 4.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 3)
Figure 9.2 Touch me—Series of lines for making a text. 2014
Figure 9.3 Clare Stanhope. Glue skin. 2014
Figure 9.4. Beyond Technique Dance Workshop, The Centre
for the Arts and Learning (CAL), Goldsmiths
University of London. 2014
Figure 9.5 Amba Sayal-Bennett, In The Background
of Carlo Collodi, 2014
Figure 9.6 Amba Sayal-Bennett, Narcopolis, 2014
45
48
51
55
56
164
173
174
176
178
189
190
vii
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the contributors for their involvement and we
extend our deepest thanks to Martina O’Sullivan at Rowman and Littlefield
for her support and patience.
Tara Page would like to acknowledge and thank Bam of Bamage for being AQ: Please
my constant and Anna Hickey-Moody for her collaboration and unwavering check
whether the
belief that everything is possible.
text ‘for
Anna Hickey-Moody would like to acknowledge the support of all mem- being my
bers of the Centre for the Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths, especially the work constant’
reads okay
of the doctoral students who continue to question and inspire.
as given.
ix
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Introduction
Making, Matter and Pedagogy
Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
Practices, teaching and art production practices are modes of thought
already in the act. Contemporary arts practices call us to think anew,
through remaking the world materially and relationally. Building on this
ethos of practice as thought already in the act, this collection from practitioner arts educators and cultural theorists responds to the increased attention being paid to matter and creativity in social sciences and humanities
research, often referred to as ‘new materialism’ (Van der Tuin, 2011)
and the often associated Deleuzian informed methodologies (Coleman
and Ringrose, 2013; Springgay et al., 2008). Among other things, these
approaches are brought together by a shared belief in the transformative
capacities (or ‘pedagogy’) of matter. Such research practices posit affective, machinic, enfleshed, vital approaches to research in ways that embody
ideas developed in Continental philosophy (Ahmed, 2006; Whitehead,
1926; Heidegger, 1962) and, specifically, through the work of Deleuze
and Guattari (1985, 1987). New materialism (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008;
Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Barrett and Bolt, 2012; Coole and Frost,
2010; Hekman, 2010) calls theorists to revisit a Marxist emphasis on
materiality in research; it calls for an embodied, affective, relational understanding of the research process. So too do theories of practice as research AQ: Please
such as those developed by Carter (2004), Sullivan (2005), Smith and Dean check the
edits in the
(2009), Barrett and Bolt (2010), Manning and Massumi (2011) and Nelson sentence “So
(2013), who each, in their own way, argue that the intersection of making too do…”
and thinking is important. In this collection, we show that the way making
impacts on thinking is a material pedagogy.
In Material Thinking (2004) Carter argues that ‘the language of creative
research is related to the goal of material thinking, and both look beyond the
making process to the local reinvention of social relations’ (10). Building
1
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
on the material transformation that Carter (2004) advocates through creative
processes of material thinking, Barrett (2007, 1) proposes that ‘artistic practice be viewed as the production of knowledge or philosophy in action’ and
specifically argues that
the emergence of the discipline of practice-led research highlights the crucial
interrelationship that exists between theory and practice and the relevance of theoretical and philosophical paradigms for the contemporary arts practitioner. (1)
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“New materialism posits…” please
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“reforming”
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“re-forming”
since it
seems to
mean “forming again”
As suggested by the quote at the beginning of this chapter, Manning and
Massumi (2011) also explore the many ways ‘making’ produces and requires
new thought. These are but a few of now established debates around creative
practice as research. In building on these debates, this collection brings some
concerns raised in arts education practice as research as a field to bear upon
recent developments in new materialist thought.
New materialism posits matter as agentive, indeterminate, constantly
forming and reforming in unexpected ways (Coole and Frost, 2010). Such a
perspective abandons any idea of matter as inert and subject to predictable
forces. Matter is always becoming. Matter ‘feels, converses, suffers, desires,
yearns and remembers’, and since ‘feeling, desiring and experiencing are
not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness’ (Barad in
Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012, 16), new materialism offers a redefinition
of liveness and human–non-human relations. In order to incorporate such a
perspective, Barad (2007) explains:
What is needed is a robust account of the materialization of all bodies—‘human’
and ‘nonhuman’—including agential contributions of all material forces (both
‘social’ and ‘natural’). This will require an understanding of the nature of the
relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena; an accounting of ‘nonhuman’ as well as ‘human’ forms of agency; and an understanding of
the precise causal nature of productive practices that take account of the fullness
of matter’s implication in it’s ongoing historicity. (66)
Bodies and things are not as separate as we were once taught, and their
interrelationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as human and
interact with our environments.
Exploring the porous nature of bodies and their co-construction through
and with systems of meaning, Blackman (2008) maps a selection of concepts (and constructs) of the body including regulated and regulating bodies, communicating bodies, bodies and difference, lived bodies and the
body as enactment. Blackman (2008) rejects naturalistic views of the body
‘as entities which are singular, bounded, molar and discretely human in
action’ (131), arguing rather that bodies, knowledge systems, sociability and
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style mandates that
quoted text
less than
four lines
are to be
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the quoted
text could
be run-in
with the text
‘specifically
argues that’.
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Introduction
matter are co-constructed. Blackman (2008) explains that ‘the psychological, biological and social are discrete entities that somehow interact’ (131).
The body is pivotal to new materialism; it is a complex intra-action (Barad,
2007) of the social and affective, where embodiment is a process of encounters, intra-actions with other bodies (Springgay, 2008). Thinking about matter matters—if bodies and things are produced together, intertwined, then
‘things’ and how they act on bodies are co-constitutive of our embodied
subjectivity.1
Bodies acting on things is, similarly, an important part of making subjectivity. Manning (2009) explains that sensing and feeling are acts that matter:
A body . . . does not exist—a body is not, it does. To sense is not simply to
receive input—it is to invent. . . . Sense perceptions are not simply ‘out there’
to be analyzed by a static body. They are body-events.’ where ‘Bodies, senses,
and worlds recombine to create (invent) new events’. (212)
Thinking through events as the way that matter comes to matter, or matter impacts on bodies and futures, Whitehead (1926) theorizes bodies as the
catalyst of events. For Whitehead, bodies are processes of senses and feelings
that inform us about current but also past place-worlds, prehensions.2 These
prehensions involve the ‘repetition’ of the world, and it is through these
prehensions ‘that the treasures of the past environment are poured into living occasions’ (Whitehead, 1926, 339). Manning (2009), in her research on
touch, further explains Whitehead’s (1926) prehensions as embodied through
explaining that
we sense on top of senses, one sense experience always embedded in another
one: cross-modal repetition with a difference. We conceive the world not
through a linear recomposition of the geometric vectors of our experience,
but by the overlapping of the folds of sense-presentation emerging alongside
pastness. (215)
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opening
quote for
the closing quote
in “They
are bodyevents’” in
the quoted
text. Also
check
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full stop
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a comma
in “They
are bodyevents’.
where…”
Thus, there is a temporal folding embedded in the notion of prehension and
in the materialist concept of the body that it mobilizes. Explaining this idea,
Braidotti (2000) asserts that the ‘enfleshed Deleuzian subject . . . is a foldingin of external influences and a simultaneously unfolding outwards of affects.
A mobile entity, an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats. The Deleuzian
body is ultimately an embodied memory’ (159).3 However, for Coole and AQ: Please
Frost (2010), a new materialist approach to embodiment is more phenomeno- check the
edits in the
logical than Braidotti’s Deleuzian embodied memory, in the respect that it is sentence
not only concerned with how power is produced and reproduced by bodies, “However,
but emphasizes the ‘active, self-transformative, practical aspects of corpore- for Coole
ality as it participates in relationships with power’ (19). Such a perspective and Frost
(2010)…”
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clearly has implications for how we understand the politics and significance
of being a body, contemporary practices of art making, viewing, teaching and
learning and, indeed, the constitution of thought.
A materialist ontology, concerned with matter and the processes of matter,
and intra-action between human and non-human things and worlds, recognizes the intertwining of all phenomena—human, non-human, social, physical, material and immaterial. This intertwining, ‘withness’ (Whitehead, 1926)
or ‘mingle and mangle’ (Bolt, 2013, 3), is where phenomena are entangled—
‘the ontological inseparability—of intra-acting agencies’ (Barad, 2007, 338).
The concept of intra-action is central to Barad’s (2007) new materialism and
refers to the movement generated in an encounter of two or more bodies in a
process of becoming different:
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quoted text,
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if “exit”
should be
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The neologism ‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled
agencies . . . the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not
precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-actions. It is important to note
that the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute,
sense, that is agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement;
they don’t exit as individual elements. (33, original emphasis)
In other words, focus shifts from the subject and/or the object to their AQ: Please
entanglement; the event, the action between (not in-between), is what mat- check the
edit in
ters. Building on this meaningful intertwining in relation to the research “In other
process, Taguchi (2012) details what she terms a
words…”
‘diffractive’ analysis, a ‘transcorporeal process of becoming-minoritarian with
the data, the researcher is attentive to those bodymind faculties that register
smell, touch, level, temperature, pressure, tension and force in the interconnections emerging in between different matter, matter and discourse, in the event
of engagement with data’. (267)
The empirical and conceptual nature of our engagements with knowledge
are co-constitutive of knowledge itself:
AQ: Please
check if the
word “bodymind” in “to
those bodymind faculties” in the
quoted text
is correct.
We do not simply respond to sense perceptions, we activate them even as they
activate us. No two experiences can be exactly the same because they are always
made up of different prehensions leading to new actual occasions (events).
(Manning, 2009, 315)
Not only are we always with/in bodies, but we are always with matter. So,
not only do we make matter and meaning, it also makes us; we are entangled, co-implicated in the generation and formation of knowing and being.
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Introduction
5
As a way of exploring the entanglement and co-constitution of matter
and subjectivity, new materialism is a methodology, a theoretical framework and a political positioning that emphasizes the complex materiality
of bodies immersed in social relations of power (Dolphijn and van der
Tuin, 2012). Inventive methods (Lury and Wakeford, 2012), including artsbased (Jagodzinski and Wallin, 2013), visual (Pink, 2007; Rose, 2012) and
embodied/sensory methods (Ingold, 2008; Pink, 2009; Page, 2012a,b) are
increasingly being mobilized to explore the agency of matter and advance
vitalist frameworks. Moving beyond the problem-focused approach that
focuses Lury and Wakeford’s (2012) engaging intervention into methods,
this collection works the intra-actions of theory with practice to develop new
approaches to materialist research and to position the agency of matter as
pedagogical in its resistance. Matter teaches us through resisting dominant
discourses, showing us new ways of being. Bodies resist dominant modes
of positioning, political acts defy government rule, sexuality exceeds legal
frameworks—resistant matter shows us the limits of the world as we know it,
and prompts us to shift these limits.
This collection shows the pedagogical nature of matter, and catalogues
different kinds of arts practice and arts pedagogy as material cultures of
resistance, yet, we attempt to do so in a speculative rather than conclusive
fashion. Furthering what we hope is a generative, evolving approach, rather
than introducing all the chapters in this collection at the same time, we will
introduce the chapters at different points in this introduction with the theoretical content that relates to the argument of the chapter. Each chapter can be
read independently, and all chapters are intended as diverse responses to our
initial provocation4 that matter is pedagogical and resistant. There are threads
of praxis (theory-thought with practice, Freire, 1970) that are entangled in this
collection, and in mapping the intra-actions of these chapters throughout this
introduction, rather than the usual separate section, we come to see matter mattering in new ways. We hope this is demonstrated in the chapter by Amanda
Kipling and Anna Hickey-Moody, in which they discuss the materiality of
learning in terms of the continuity of knowledge production and developing
learning communities in drama education that operate through pedagogies of
engagement, rather than being driven by curriculum and policy agendas.
THE AFFECTIVE TURN AND NEW MATERIALISM
The concept of affect, and what Brian Massumi (2002) has famously
referred to as the affective turn, draws substantively on the work of Deleuze
(1988, 1990a,b, 2002) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987, 1994).
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mentioned
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do so…” has
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the in-house
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
Increasingly, over the last 10 years, affect has been utilized as a conceptual
resource in educational theory. Here, we consider some of the theorists who AQ: Please
brought affect into education, because the conceptual moves that accompany check the
this turn created space for embodied knowledges of art making to inform ped- edits in
“Here, we
agogy. Affect validates emergent epistemologies, or subjugated knowledges, consider…”
which all too often remain silenced from theorizations of education. Christa
Albrecht-Crane and Jennifer Daryl Slack (2003), Megan Watkins (2006) and
Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) are theoreticians working in and across education
who pioneered the use of affect for education. Other cultural studies theorists
who take up the concept of affect in ways that are of use in considering classrooms include Elspeth Probyn (2000) and Anna Gibbs (2002). We would like
to point towards their scholarship, as well as that of Brian Massumi (2002),
Felicity Colman (2002, 2005), Gregory Seigworth (2003) and Melissa Gregg
(2006), as resources of use in the theoretical project of taking up affect to
consider the pedagogical nature of matter and culture.5
There has been work on Deleuze in education since the late 1990s, notably AQ: Please
becoming part of dominant educational discourses with Lather and St Pierre’s check the
edits in the
(2000) collection Working the Ruins pioneering feminist approaches of sentence
Deleuze in education. The concept of affect was not specifically introduced “There has
into educational practices until 2003 when Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack been work
(2003) made the argument that ‘the importance of affect in the classroom is on…”
inadequately considered in scholarship on pedagogy’ (191). While the work
of the theorists cited above moves to address the current gap in research on
affect and education, the potential of affect to reconfigure materialist theories
of education in significant ways is increasingly being realized. Julie Allan’s
(2013) work on the disabled body and arts practices in special education is
distinctive in showing the potential of work in this area. Affect maps the
micro political relations that constitute the beginnings of social change. In
order to understand the lived politics of disability in education, and indeed
to read disability as a kind of cultural pedagogy, we must begin by thinking
through affect (Allen, 2013; Hickey-Moody, 2009; Lines, 2013). It is our
contention that understanding, naming, illustrating and analysing the affective agency of material is imperative.
Albrecht-Crane and Slack (2003) provide a critical structure for thinking
pedagogy through affect by establishing a framework well suited to educaAQ: In the
tional research. They do so in a discreet chapter in a cultural studies style sentence
anthology of applied Deleuzian theory, titled Animations (of Deleuze and “They do
Guattari). Taking Deleuze’s Spinozist body as a point of departure, Albrecht- so…” please
check if
Crane and Slack (2003) note:
In most pedagogical models, individuals are defined or positioned to take
up posts or places in terms of who they are; that is, in terms of their social
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7
Introduction
identities, gender, race, class, ethnicity, and so forth, and they are seen as possessing varying degrees of agency—that is, an ability to act—as an attribute of
who they are. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari do not begin with the question
‘What is a body?’ but ‘What can a body do?’ and ‘Of what affects is a body
capable?’ (192)
While Albrecht-Crane and Slack’s (2003) reading of the body as affective
is core to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, this model for thinking of the body is
not contra-agency. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Within Deleuze and Guattari’s work, agency changes along with subjective experience and evolves in
relation to the affects of which a body is capable. Agency is conceived as an AQ: Please
inherent part of any body, be it a human body, a body of land or water, or a check the
in the
political party. Following Spinoza, Deleuze (1988) takes material bodies as edits
sentence
a challenge to think through the physical dimensions of agency and states: “Agency is
conceived…”
Spinoza . . . proposes to establish the body as a model, ‘we do not know what
the body can do’. . . . We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and
of its effects, of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body
and the passions—but we do not even know what a body can do. (18)
‘What a body can do’ is a material act and it is also a degree of agency.
After establishing the affective body as the primary site—or origin—with
which a pedagogy of affect would be concerned, Albrecht-Crane and Slack’s
(2003) focus shifts from the body of the subject and the micro-political realm
to social machinations, and it is here that their theorization gains particular
momentum. It is this positioning of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2003) work as a
tool with which to analyse the ‘Molar lines [that] “overcode” dual segmenta- AQ: Please
tions that follow “the great major dualist oppositions, social classes, but also check the
opening
men-women, adults-children, and so on”’ (194–5), which lends Albrecht- and closCrane and Slack’s (2003) work to analysing affective movement of social ing quotes
in “‘Molar
bodies more than of individual bodies.
In contrast to Albrecht-Crane and Slack (2003), Watkins (2006) takes a lines
[that]…”
micro-analytic approach to illustrating the possibilities of affect through a
research methodology designed to evaluate pedagogy through the concept of
affect. Watkins’ (2006) research is of particular interest because the methodology she employs is designed specifically to record the embodied negotiations pertaining to—and arising from—affect in the classroom. Whereas
Albrecht-Crane and Slack (2003) offer affect as a tool that will support a
meta-analysis of classroom politics and discourses, Watkins (2006) takes up
affect with a focus on learning and teaching literacy where in her fieldwork
she maps affective negotiations between students and teachers that are central
to the embodied affect occurring in the classroom, and are essential parts of
constituting a kinaesthetic economy of knowledge exchange.
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“This process also…”
Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
Learning becomes about the process of moving the margins of knowledge
from exterior to interior locations and this process of movement, or folding,
as an embodied act. This process also elucidates the kinaesthetic economy of
relations between teacher and student that leads the student to ‘invent’ or arrive
at the affective images that are part of learning to read and write, where the
teacher employs affects in her pedagogic practice: ‘She took on the character of
the pirate she was describing using an exaggerated tone in her voice to heighten
the impact of what she was saying’ (278). Ellsworth (2005) also addresses
pedagogy and affect as a material entity but also as a mode of cognition.
Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) does not underpin her research with Deleuzian
theory; however, her arguments pertaining to affect have strong parallels to
those advanced by Deleuze. Deploying the word ‘affect’ to articulate a material state of affairs, Ellsworth (2005) says:
Experience, of course, presupposes bodies—not inert bodies, but living bodies
that take up and lay down space by their continuous, unfolding movement and
that take up and lay down time as they go on being. When we begin to think of
experience as an event in time that also takes place, we can see why a number of
contemporary theorists are using media and architecture to help them structure
their concepts about experience. . . . The visual experience of watching a film
entails not only representation. It has a material nature that involves biological
and molecular events taking place in the body of the viewer and in the physical
and imagined space between the viewer and the film. Affect and sensation are
material and part of that engagement. (4)
Regarding cognition and affect, Ellsworth (2005) develops a theory of
pedagogy as an interleaving of the materiality affect and subjective processes
of cognition where
there is a difference . . . between the ‘evidence of the ocular senses’ in which
one notices ‘that the sensorium has been stimulated’ and this other way of
knowing, which he [de Bolla 2001, p. 49] describes as an interleaving of affect
and cognition. (4)
On one hand, Ellsworth (2005) conceives affect as taking something on,
changing in relation to an experience or an encounter, and on the other hand,
an affect is a material entity, an aesthetic compound produced in relation to
particular assemblages of space-time.
As discussed by Hickey-Moody (2009) and Hickey-Moody, Windle and
Savage (2010), there are parallels between the notion of affect as the concept of taking something on, of changing in relation to an experience, and
the process of changing bodies that theorists such as Giroux (1999, 2004),
Lusted (1986), Ellsworth (1997, 2005) and Mc William and Taylor (1996)
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confirm
whether the
quoted text
‘there is a
...’ could be
run-in with
the text ‘of
cognition
where’.
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Introduction
call ‘pedagogy’. Just as the readings of affect discussed above each differ, so
too do the theories of cultural pedagogy put forward by Giroux, Lusted, Ellsworth and Mc William. Affect can thus be considered an emerging point of
intervention and analysis in education, pedagogy and schooling. It expresses
the embodied experience of learning, the places in which we learn and the
histories and desires we bring to learning. Affect cannot be brought to bear
on a lived situation—it is the lived reality of the situation—the feeling of
learning and the excesses not captured through academic frameworks for
considering teaching, learning and making.
MATTER BECOMING ARTS
From a psychoanalytic perspective, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984),
Kristeva suggests that creative practice does not name, but rather enunciates,
the very places of the material dialect that human science has yet to approach.
She explains that ‘practice is determined by the pulverization of the unity of
consciousness. . . . It is the place where signifying process is carried out’ (203,
original emphasis). The political power of creative action is core to Kristeva’s
(1984) argument, just as it is to the work of Carter (2004), Barrett and Bolt
(2010) and Manning and Massumi (2011, 2014), introduced above. Each of
these theorists, ‘with’ the work of new materialists such as Barad (2007) and
Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2011), argue that matter needs to be conceptualized as an active agent. We contend, with Carter (2007), Barrett and Bolt
(2010) and Manning and Massumi (2011, 2014), that matter needs to be
conceptualized as an active agent within discussions of practice as research.
This materialist approach draws on Marx’s work in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845) and Engels (1888), who stated that ‘those who asserted the primacy of the spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world
creation in some form or other—comprised the camp of idealism. The others,
who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism’ (14). As Harper (1942) asserts:
What distinguishes Marxism materialism from other schools must be learned
from its various polemical works dealing with practical questions of politics and
society. To Marx materialistic thought was a working method. In his writing he
does not deal with philosophy nor does he formulate materialism into a system
of philosophy; he is utilizing it as a method for the study of the world. (1)
because
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it. (Marx, 1845, 13)
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the quoted
text ‘philosophers
have only
...’ could
be run-in
with the text
“because” in
the previous
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
This method of study or praxis, ‘that concerning the relation of thinking
and being’ (Engels, 1888, 14) underpins our approach to contemporary arts
practice, research, curriculum design and pedagogy within the Goldsmiths’
University of London research Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL).
CAL is a practice-led research centre where knowledge is conceived as
co-constructed through action, praxis. CAL’s aims are to enable, explore and
curate critical processes of socially engaged praxis that effect social change
through a variety of ways and means. Extending and enriching CAL’s praxis,
this collection shares responsive, located research that draws on arts practices,
modes of community engagement and collaboration. We do so with a particular focus, namely, we take matter as pedagogical, and focus on the pedagogy
of matter teaching the maker how they might make differently. Matter calls us
to respond to it, and this requisite responsiveness can rupture human ideology
and human design. Building on this collective focus, various chapters in the
collection engage with methodologies and frameworks that have not previAQ: Please ously been considered within—or as part of—practice as research. These
check the
include inventive methods, arts-based research, philosophy, media studies
edits in
and educational research. Hickey-Moody’s chapter, a manifesto for arts prac“These
tice, carries on the feminist tradition of the political manifesto to suggest that
include
inventive…” the materiality of making must be always already acknowledged as a political
act. Anne Harris’ chapter is an excellent example of the relationship between
arts-based research and new materialist frames of thought, as Harris employs
a video methodology to tell new youth narratives of subjectivity through
creative practice that are resistant to the hegemonies of video-based methods.
AQ: Please
Until now, arts-based research, media studies and educational research
check
have not explicitly been concerned with matter as a post-human pedagogy,
whether the
although this collection invites authors to explore the embeddedness of matsentence
ter as post-human pedagogy within these fields. Elsewhere, Hickey-Moody
could be
split for
(2009) has argued that the concept of post-human pedagogy posits a way of
clarity. Thus thinking about post-humanism that moves beyond the cybernetic models of
“Elsewhere,
thought, such as the work of Katherine Hayles (1997), that was developed in
Hickeyresponse to Ihab Hassan’s (1977) now famous statement that ‘we need first
Moody ...
models of
to understand that the human form—including desire and all its external repthought.
resentations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We
The work
need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to
of Katherine Hayles an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly
(1997) is
call posthumanism’ (205).
an example
Building on this idea of post-humanism, as Braidotti (1994), MacCorof this way
mack
(2012) and many others have done, some of whom we cite above,
of thinking,
we
are
interested in Deleuze’s (1988b) Spinozist concept of affectus and
and was
developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) perception of art as distinct from, yet proresponse ...” duced within, an embodied cultural space. These tools offer valuable ways of
Hickey-Moody & Page_9781783484867.indb 10
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“This
method
of…” please
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Goldsmiths’
University
of London
research
Centre for
Arts and
Learning”
should be
changed to
“Goldsmiths
University
of London,
research
Centre for
Arts and
Learning”
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Introduction
reconceptualizing the post-human, as art is a post-human project that acts on
bodies within Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) thought, and affect is the means
through which this post-human pedagogy occurs. Or to put it another way,
affect is the way in which art speaks and the materiality of voice is part of
the way art speaks. In this theoretical context, art has a politically effective
capacity, the capability to rework a body’s limits, to reconfigure individual
arrangements of structure/agency, augment that which a body is or is not able
to understand, produce, and to which it might connect.
Post-human pedagogy thus facilitates moments of contact with Other/s
that enable thought and art to access what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) have
called ‘the people to come . . . mass-people, world people, brain people, chaos
people’, people who open up passages ‘from the finite to the infinite . . . ’
(180–1, original emphasis). People who, indeed, ‘beckon a moment of the
infinite . . . [of] infinitely varied infinities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 181).
Such a process of materially reimagining constitutes a politically invaluable
aspect of both art and everyday life.
PEDAGOGY OF MATTER
Pedagogy can be defined as the ‘theory and instruction of teaching and learning’ coming from the Greek ‘to lead the child’ (Pearsall, 1999, 1051). This
definition resonates with Freire’s (1970) concept of ‘banking’ where teaching
and learning is conceived as concerned with processes of transmission, in
which ‘students are regarded merely as passive consumers’ (hooks, 1994, 40).
However, in opposition to such a conception, Freire (1970) and hooks (1994)
critically conceive pedagogy as a ‘union of the mind, body and spirit, not just
for striving for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the
world’ (15); here, pedagogy is an entanglement. Explaining this notion of
entanglement, Ellsworth (2005) states that ‘specific to pedagogy is the experience of the corporeality of the body’s time and space when it is in the midst of
learning’ (4), and with a focus on natural history, Barad (2007) reminds us that
AQ: Please
check if
“spacetime”
in “but happens in the
making of
spacetime”
in the
quoted text
should be
changed to
“space-time”.
‘In an important sense, both the special and general theories or relativity are
a part of classical physics’ . . . and this comes to matter because ‘Reality is
composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of all
things-in-phenomena. The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity and
materialization in the enactment of determinate causal structures with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies.
This ongoing flow of agency through which part of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another part of the world and through which causal
structures are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time
but happens in the making of spacetime itself’. (140)
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check if
“theories
or relativity” can be
changed to
“theories of
relativity” in
the quoted
text.
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
As stated previously, bodies and the process of embodiment are core to our
ways of knowing-being. However, they are also fundamental to the entanglement of matter and learning and teaching (pedagogy). This embodied entanglement of matter and teaching as pedagogy—the moments when materials and
spaces impact on bodies and bodies impact on ideas—is our primary interest.
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, through bodies and with matter,
we are always making, performing and learning. Therefore, we posit that new
materialist pedagogy is embodied and is an intra-action between bodies and
matter, as ceramic artist Edmund de Waal (2011) articulates:
Centering the clay, bringing the small ball into perfect reactivity for throwing,
involved a ripple of different movements from hand and wrist, an inclination in
the head and neck a slight tautening in the shoulders. It was . . . learning that
I could not articulate. (1)
AQ: Please
check if
a comma
should be
inserted
after “an
inclination
in the head
and neck” in
the quoted
text
This creative act of learning with body with matter (clay, wheel, water)
is what Van der Tuin (2014) asserts as an example of Barad’s (2003) study
of practices of knowing in being (262). Explaining the narrative of sculptor
Souriau, van der Tuin (2014) says that through the relationships of the clay, the
person, in the practice of working with, ‘the hand, the thumb, the chisel that a
statue comes about’ (263), or in the case of de Waal, hand with wrist with head
with neck with shoulder with clay learning comes about, intra-acting, entangled.
However, new materialism does not focus on the individual’s practice but
the relationalities of matter with bodies (sensation with memory), as stated
by Haraway (2003), who explains, ‘Through their reaching into each other,
through their “prehensions” or graspings, beings constitute each other and
themselves. Beings do not preexist their relatings’ (6). Connerton’s (1989)
work on collective memory indicates that ‘social memory is embedded in
the performativity of commemorative ceremonies’ (4) in which bodies are
central and that through the repeated performance of acts such as walking,
journeying, ceremonies and rituals, groups, communities and cultures can
share sensory memories or, as Seremetakis (1994) calls them, ‘mediation on
the historical substance of experience’ (7).
Seremetakis (1994) maintains that these sensory memories are not fixed in AQ: Please
repetition, but are continually reconstituted through the practices of bringing check the
the past into the present, and therefore become an inextricable element in our edits in
“Seremetaways of learning, like Whitehead’s (1926) prehensions, Manning’s (2009) kis (1994)
folds of ‘sense-presentation emerging alongside pastness’ (215) and Barad’s maintains…”
(2007) concept of memory in which she maintains that
memory does not reside in the folds of individual brains; rather, memory is the
enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe, or better, the enfolded
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Introduction
articulations of the universe in its mattering. Memory is not a record of a fixed
past that can ever be fully erased, written over or recovered (that is, taken away
or taken back into one’s possession, as if it were a thing that can be owned).
And memory is not a replay of strong of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. Re-membering and
re-cognizing (sic) do not take care of, or satisfy, or in any way reduce one’s
responsibilities; rather, like all intra-actions, they extend the entanglements and
responsibilities of which one is part. The past is never finished. It cannot be
wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook …; we never leave it and it never
leaves us behind. (ix)
We fold the past back into the present every moment as we encounter ‘the
now’ through our embodied histories. However, the pedagogy of matter is not
about describing sensation, or memories, but is about the learning and teaching that these entanglements constitute (Page, 2012b). They are continuous
processes of embodied learning and teaching that are relational by definition.
Wenger (1998) developed various theories of learning, including ‘knowing in practice’ (141), which was originally conceived by Lave and Wenger
(1991) as ‘situated learning’, a process in which learning is no longer a passive absorption of factual information (after Freire, 1970) but is a social and
participatory process where theory is entangled with everyday practice with
others. This is demonstrated in Page et al.’s (2011) research with students
enrolled on the Goldsmiths MA Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practice
programme, in which students articulated that the sharing of practices with
fellow artist teachers had an impact on their emerging artist-teacher identities
but also increased their making skills, knowledge, understanding and confidence. Situated learning is, as Wenger (1998) states, ‘the ability to negotiate
new meanings’ (226) that are ‘fundamentally experiential and fundamentally
social’ (227, original italics). Consequently, in Page et al. (2011), pedagogy
is continually being created through the relationalities of the social and material. One student explains the pedagogical nature of this rationality through
highlighting
the excitement of feeling part of the creative process, along with the ability to
begin to locate my work within critical theory and contemporary practices and
making… moving from an isolated position on the periphery of the community
towards feelings of inclusivity within the centre of a group of practitioners.
(Hyde, 2007, 298)
This ‘group of practitioners’, or learning community, ruptures the concept
that learning is a passive process where information is ‘acquired’. Learning
is conceived as a relational process where theory is entangled with everyday
practices, with others. However, pedagogy is not all ‘conflict-free, caring and
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confirm
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quoted text
‘the excitement of ...’
could be
run-in with
the text ‘this
rationality
through
highlighting’.
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
nurturing’ (Rose, 1993, 56); there may be tensions, conflicts, oppression and
domination.
The theories of critical pedagogy (Gallop, 1988; Giroux, 2003; hooks,
1984) and the work of Freire (1970) draw on anarchism, feminism and
Marxism, and are a teaching and learning approach that attempts to enable
the questioning and challenging of domination, and the beliefs and practices
that dominate (Shor, 1992). Shor (1992) defines critical pedagogy as follows:
Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface
meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep
meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of
any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter,
policy, mass media, or discourse. (129)
The three assumptions of critical pedagogy are that praxis can enable social
transformation, that learning and teaching are not neutral, and that society
can be transformed by the engagement of those who are critically conscious
(Grunewald, 2003). These assumptions resonate with Barad’s (2007) distinction between critique, as an evaluative sensibility, and being critical as
reactionary.
A critical pedagogical approach also enables thinking through the intraaction of pedagogized identities. Freire (1970) states:
Through dialogue, the teachers-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teachers
cease to exist and a new term emerges; teacher-student with student-teacher,
the teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but the one who is himself
[sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also
teach. They become jointly responsible for the process in which all grow. (80)
Page (2012b) rewords Freire’s statement replacing the word ‘student’ with
‘learner’, which results in the following:
Through dialogue, the teachers-of-the-learners and the learners-of-the-teachers
cease to exist and a new term emerges; teacher-learner with learner-teacher, the
teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but the one who is himself [sic]
taught in dialogue with the learner, who in turn while being taught also teach.
They become jointly responsible for the process in which all grow. (160)
AQ: In the
quoted text
“taught in
dialogue
with the
learner”
please check
if “learner”
should be
changed to
“learners”
These intra-actions enable the continual reproduction and renegotiation
of learner, teacher, learning, the meanings of which are not predetermined,
therefore resulting in the creation of a ‘shared place of discovery and learning’ (Page, 2012, 73), that is not specific to an educational setting, but rather,
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Introduction
AQ: The
chapter title
is worded
differently
here. Please
confirm
whether
this could
be changed
to “A
Pedagogy
of Possibilities: Drama
as Reading
Practice”
and enclosed
within
quotes.
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Drawing
on literary
theory…”
and “Pitfield argues
that…”
AQ: In
“These
chapters
show…”
please check
if “effect”
should be
changed to
“affect”
is entangled with wider, global, discourses and power relations. These wider,
global, discourses and power relations are constitutive of pedagogy. Freire
AQ: Please
(1970) explains that this becoming-other is effected through intra-action as confirm
‘transformation’, and although we disagree with the ruminants of theology whether the
echoing in this word, the marked, material change (or becoming) in capacity quoted text
being signalled is important. Freire (1970) goes on to explain that pedagogy ‘becomes
becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal
critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (16)
the practice
...’ could be
run-in with
the text ‘to
explain that
pedagogy’.
Therefore, this practice of freedom is ‘about how we learn together and
AQ: In the
make changes together’ (Page, 2012, 73), a practice in which learning as sentence
responsiveness to matter and to space-time-mattering occurs within the con- “Pitfield
examines…”
tingencies, differences and diversity of life.
This responsiveness, and the material aspects of responsiveness, is dem- there is no
opening
onstrated in Maggie Pitfield’s chapter, A pedagogy of possibilities in the UK quote for
secondary English classroom. Pitfield examines the practices of a secondary the closEnglish teacher with her pupils’ in a London urban school, with a focus on ing quote
the ways the teacher’s practices resist policy-directed discourses. Drawing on given after
“pupils”.
literary theory, Pitfield analyses the ways drama, as an embodied art form, Please insert
is integral to the pupils’ and teachers’ shared meanings in their intra-actions the openwith literary texts. Pitfield argues that the dramatic activity, in which the ing quote
teacher learners are materially and conceptually entangled, enables not only or delete
the closing
relationalities of criticality and creativity but also the emergence of teacher quote
learners’ becoming active in their readings and production of culture.
Pedagogy can therefore be conceived as an open, continuously created AQ: Please
and recreated process that is specific to intra-actions of difference that make check the
a difference, not grounded in existing knowledges that attempt to equal- edits in
“Pedagogy
ize, normalize or fall back on traditions of established values, concepts and can…”
practices. This conception of pedagogy is further explored by Esther Sayers,
who worked as a gallery educator for Tate Modern (London, UK) for over
AQ: In the
ten years. Sayers’ chapter explores the pedagogic entanglement of the audi- sentence
ence with this unique contemporary art space. She considers how, through “She considthe intra-actions of learner, teacher and cultural institutions, the differences ers how…”
of matter and meanings emerged in ways that enabled the creation and re- “recreation”
has been
creation of pedagogies and methodologies that responded to local ways of changed to
being and becoming.
“re-creation”
Both Pitfield and Sayers do not perform an epistemology/ontology hierar- for consischy but are both epistemological and ontological in their reconceptualization tency with
other occurof the role of matter in processes of learning. These chapters show us that we rences in the
may effect matter but matter also affects us in profound, although often subtle book. Please
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
or hidden and inescapable ways, and that this is a necessary entanglement
that is altered with the different intra-actions of sociocultural constructions of
matter, and here, matter is also constructed as part of human existence. It is AQ: Please
the action between that matters; therefore, just as we know and learn matter check the
edits in “It
pedagogically, we also know and learn matter just by being.
is the action
between…”
RESISTANCE AND RESONANCES OF MATTER
AQ: Please
check
the edits
in “This
analytic
focus…”
Matter can be inherently resistant, but as the works in this collection show
us, matter can often teach us through showing us otherwise. Bodies resist
instruction, ideologies and political boundaries, and in so doing they show
the limits of political, educational and popular discourses and policies.
Matter resists manipulation; it inspires and demands attention, and through
engagement with matter, new modes of practice transpire. Yet, when the
praxis of seemingly heterogeneous scholarship is entangled, as it is in this
collection, ‘the patterns of difference that make a difference’ (Dolphijn and
van der Tuin, 2012, 50), the very intra-actions of matter and meaning are
made visible. In different ways across the works brought together here, we
see that intra-actions of matter and meaning enable dissent, change structures and ask for new responses, but they also generate resonances and are
therefore not only resistant to existing practices and ways of being but are
also pedagogic.
This analytic focus on resonances, and the pedagogical nature of things
and viral changes, is one of the ways the works collected here build on, and
contribute to, existing discussions of critical pedagogy. To be plain, we are AQ: In the
not just interested in how the pedagogical a/effects of objects change ideolo- sentence
gies and popular practices, but in the rubbing up against each other, the reso- “To be
plain, we…”
nances—the material cultural and affective dimensions of change that make please
subjectitives and make people aware of, and open to, change. More than this, change “subas Charlie Blake and Jennie Stearns’ chapter shows us, matter causes change jectitives” to
and the matter of parasites transforms bodies and capacities, illustrating a “subjectivities” or as
material agency that interrupts consciousness and conscious choice.
appropriate
As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, new materialism concerns
itself not only with relationalities of power, constituted and reproduced by
bodies, but also with how bodies participate in/with these relationships. Coole
and Frost (2010) assert that there is
‘increasing acknowledgment within theories of politics—and especially in theories of democracy and citizenship—of the role played by the body as a visceral
protagonist within political encounters’ . . . and ‘thus reveals both the materiality of agency and agentic properties inherent in nature itself’. (19–20)
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Introduction
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Everyday
practices
of…”
AQ: Please
check the
edits in the
sentence
“The entanglements
and…”
17
Everyday practices of democracy and citizenship are exactly such sites of
political reproduction and production. This is highlighted in a recent issue AQ: In the
of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine (24/25 May 2014) that aimed sentence
“This
to ‘give a sense of what today’s Europe feels and looks like- and how it is is highchanging’ (Kuper, 2014, 7). This popular commentary illustrates the ordi- lighted…”
nary, yet always political entanglement of bodies and matter and the intra- please
actions, the differences that make a difference, of how and ‘Why Europe check if
the hyphen
Works’ (Kuper, 2014, 10–11) or at times does not work. The entanglements in “like-”
and intra-actions of bodies and the materiality of place, language and climate should be
changed to
are pedagogic.
Kuper (2014) asserts that Europe works because ‘little differences encour- a comma or
deleted
age cross-border learning . . . partly because European countries remain
slightly different from each other’ (Kuper, 2014, 10). The intra-actions of
the transport networks, rail, commercial flight companies, climate and the
proximal geography of Europe (higher ratio of coast to landmass than any
other continent or subcontinent) have enabled mobile Europeans to share and
exchange ideas and learn ‘with’ each other and place.
This place pedagogy emerges not only in the resistances of everyday prac- AQ: Please
tices, tables and chairs on pavements in London, gay marriage, hybrid accents check the
in
and languages, but also in politics. Through the founding of the European edits
“This place
Union, European countries taught democratic systems across borders, ‘from pedagogy…”
1995–2013 the world’s fastest growing middle-income economics were the
Baltic states, Poland and Slovakia . . . ’ (Kuper, 2014, 11). Europeans transnationally debate different ways of knowing and understanding; employment,
AQ: The
free markets and the environment in ways that are prompted by the shared sentence
proximity of communities.
“employIn a different capacity, the same principle of intra-action operates in geog- ment, free
raphies of art. Explaining this radical materialism, Deleuze (1988a) suggests markets and
the …” is
that the arts have the capacity to operate in terms of general rather than fixed incomplete.
limits. In his book Spinoza, Practical Philosophy (1988a) Deleuze describes Please
‘affectus’ as ‘an increase or decrease of the power of acting, for the body and change it to
the mind alike’ (49).6 So, to be affected is to be able to think or act differently, “employment, free
though, as responses, affects easily become habitual. Familiar responses are markets and
learnt in relation to bodies and subjects, and it is only through challenging the environa ‘truth’ that is acknowledged in an expected or popularly known response, ment are
or habitual behaviour, that we can create and adopt new ways of responding debated in
ways…”
and being affected.
or as
Contemporary arts practices can offer these new ways of knowing, being appropriate
affected and new intra-actions between bodies. Systems of affect, kinaesthetic economies of relation, established through, or in response to, physical
discourses effect pedagogy through intra-action. People establish economies of relation based on physical responses and world views. Deleuze and
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AQ: Please
change
“rather than
as a singular
‘truth’” to
“rather than
a singular
‘truth’” or as
appropriate
Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
Guattari’s (1994) thought on affect and sensation extends this position that
ways of understanding are a product of a system of knowledge and material
beliefs, rather than as a singular ‘truth’. Such understandings enable alternative stories and knowledges of bodies, and ways of being a body, to be
developed with dominant systems of knowledge. The concepts of corporeal
and artistic affect developed in Deleuze’s (1994) work and in Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987, 1994) joint scholarship explicate the ways artworks emanate
force and impact on bodies. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1994) scholarship
models understandings of ‘minor’7 knowledge systems and develops a particular perspective on the kinaesthetic economy of relations created within art
as a minor knowledge system.
Duffy (2006) explains that Deleuze’s idea of an affective limit, or ‘threshold’, has a specific meaning:
for Deleuze, the term ‘limit’ defines a margin or threshold beyond which a
mode’s capacity to be affected ceases to be animated by active affections and
therefore ceases to be expressed altogether, that is to say, beyond which a finite
mode ceases to exist. (151)
Affective, bodily limits shape the material world—they are thresholds
for what can be actualized. Additionally, the body is an extensive physical
mass; it fills space. But the body is also a liminal space that connects context
to subjectivity through a network of affective systems. As Graham (2004)
notes, we cannot assume ‘a clear boundary between objects and persons’
(299). We must remember virtual8 possibilities for body–space connections
and changes, and an absolute belief in unambiguous boundaries ‘must be
abandoned . . . [as] persons do not finish at their skins’ (Graham, 2004, 299,
square parentheses added). The body and intra-actions between things form
extensive spaces; bodies produce virtual spaces and inhabit shared spaces.
Playing with notions of the body-in-space, the body as space and the possibilities of virtual space, the chapter by Camilla Stanger discusses the politics
of choreographic techniques employed to devise the work around untrained
dancers’ bodies. Stanger develops a frame for thinking about bodily actions
as (re)positionings of racialized embodied histories.
Barad (2007) has also highlighted the importance of in-between bodily
spaces, those that we simultaneously inhabit and move away from unwittingly in the pedestrian experience of living. It is in, and through, proximal
spaces that embodied histories are carried, performed and reframed. Indeed, AQ: In Note
as Anna Hickey-Moody’s chapter shows in its discussion of the re-appropri- 9, please
check the
ation of the Fremantle Asylum, embodied histories of corporeality and spa- edit in “In so
tiality can be re-territorialized9 through creative work. Hickey-Moody shows doing…”
that the space that bodies perform in becomes more than a given condition
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Introduction
of performance; space and place and traces of intra-action in space and place
need to be acknowledged as historical and political artefacts. This is what
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a ‘smooth space’, a place in which ratios
between matter and virtual possibilities are reworked (488). Art can teach
through challenging ready-made perceptions, slipping between cracks in
consciousness, assumption and the ‘known’, through making new bodies and
creating accompanying ways of knowing.
Collective arts practices redefine communities through articulating a virtual body of difference. As Colin Gardner illustrates in this collection through
the employment of videotext, and the accompanying creative method of
sourcing lived experiences of the Vietnam war and the affective experiences
of war, proximal spaces become zones of corporeal learning, as viewers of
the film text extend and embrace space as ‘an intensive discontinuity in which
the subject degenerates’ (Braidotti, 1996, 74). Arts practices are, then, a form
of material thinking:
A thinker may . . . modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of
thought. . . . But instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or
musical entities. . . . These thinkers are ‘half’ philosophers but also much
more than philosophers. . . . They are hybrid geniuses who neither erase
nor cover over differences in kind but, on the contrary, use all the resources
of their ‘athleticism’ to install themselves within this very difference, like
acrobats torn apart in a perpetual show of strength. (Deleuze and Guattari,
1994, 66–7)
Artists are also material thinkers, ‘hybrid geniuses . . . philosophers but
also much more than philosophers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 66). As
material thinkers, artists give form to new aspects of the world. The ‘very difference’ to which Deleuze and Guattari (1994) refer is sensation, the aesthetic
compounds created by artists. Such aesthetic compounds—sensations—are a
material realization of a new aspect of reality. Indeed, as Aislinn O’Donnell’s
chapter shows us, philosophy and science have long understood material acts
to impact on thinking, yet art has not always been conceived in such terms.
The matter of thinking is thus as important an ontological question as the
matter of making.
We hope this collection shows you some of the ways the materiality of
the arts teaches. More than this, we hope the social and cultural changes
that emerge through intra-actions between people and matter in processes
of making, collaborating and observing contemporary arts seem more
significant or are of increased interest after your engagement with this
collection.
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page
NOTES
1. After Deleuze (1995, 99), we read subjectivity as ‘a specific or collective individuation relating to an event’. Human subjectivity is a collection of dividuations
which are activated differently in various machinic arrangements.
2. ‘Prehension is the basic, extrasensory awareness, or grasping, that all experiences have of all earlier experiences. One might call it the super intuition on which all
conventionally recognized extrasensory perception and sensory perception are built’
(Anderson, 2000, 1).
3. And here we also remember Bourdieu (1990), who asserts that
The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence
of past experiences. (54)
In other words, through the ‘repetitions’ or practices (habitus) of bodies (sensation
with memory) with matter, we are constructing, performing, relating, knowing, learning and being.
4. Question-led, themed seminar series on material cultures of resistance for the
Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL), Goldsmiths University of London.
5. More recently, Body and Society have published a special edition on the turn to
affect, see 16 (29) 2010. Of particular interest is Patricia Clough’s ‘Afterword, The
Future of Affect Studies’ (2010, 222–30).
6. Deleuze expands this definition through arguing that ‘affectus’ is different
from emotion. ‘Affectus’ is the virtuality and materiality of the increase or decrease
effected in a body’s power of acting. Deleuze states:
The affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting
body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage [or movement] from one state to another,
taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. Hence there is a difference in nature between the image affections or ideas and the feeling affect. (1988a, 49,
author’s square parentheses)
‘Affectus’ is the materiality of change, ‘the passage from one state to another’ which
occurs in relation to ‘affecting bodies’ (1988, 49). In their collaborative work, Deleuze
and Guattari work with a concept of affect, which has three specific iterations, corporeal
affect, affect in art and affect in thought.
7. Politically marginalized.
8. Deleuze develops a specific notion of the virtual. After Henri Bergson, Deleuze
characterizes the virtual as possibilities for the actual, as the non-material aspect of
the actual world. The virtual has a different temporal structure from the actual, and as
such it folds in upon the actual in ways that bring the past into the present and connect
the present to the future. While the actual and the virtual are distinct, they are also two
halves of a whole; one exists in relation to the other.
9. The act of re-territorialization changes the aesthetic tropes and bodies of knowledge through which a spatialized body is known. In so doing, re-territorialization
augments what the spatialized body ‘is’ and what it can become.
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Chapter 1
Experimental Philosophy and
Experimental Pedagogy
A Single Vision
Aislinn O’ Donnell
In a short essay in MaHKUzine, Irit Rogoff (2010) writes of the emergence in the seventeenth century of a society for the study of ‘Experimental
Philosophy’. Their commitment to ‘take nothing on authority’, combined
with the value that they set upon ‘experimental philosophy’, constitutes, she
argues, some of the features of ‘creative practices of knowledge’ that might
serve to offer a form of resistance to the
endless pragmatic demands of knowledge protocols: outcomes, outputs, impact,
constant monitoring of the exact usefulness of a particular knowledge or of
its ability to follow the demands and imperatives of cognitive capitalism—
demands to be portable, to be transferable, to be useful, to be flexible, to be
applied, to be entrepreneurial and generally integrated within market economies
at every level. (39)
Rogoff (2010) acknowledges that the legacy of the Enlightenment is one
that seeks to verify through experiment or argument and suggests that it might
be rather better to think of singularizing knowledge and the ways that creative
practices of knowledge might enable the contestation of truth regimes. It is
useful to reflect more deeply upon this idea of experimental philosophy, both
in terms of its trajectory through the centuries and its subterranean potentials
in the present. The experimental philosophers to whom Rogoff (2010) refers
were indeed mavericks in many ways, engaged in collective forms of inquiry
(often through necessity), passionately curious and truth-seeking. Yet the
legacy of Francis Bacon and others was one which created experimental philosophy as a practice enabling mastery over nature, abstracting phenomena
from their ‘natural’ environments, privileging replicability, generality, and
even universalizabilty, over singularity, locality or context. These practices
21
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Aislinn O’ Donnell
claimed the power to identify, classify and categorize. The complex rela- AQ: In the
tionship between truth-claims and power has been well documented, yet sentence
the co-imbrication of truth-regimes and power remain resistant to efforts to “The complex relademystify and dismantle them. This essay acknowledges this and looks to tionship…”
uncouple truth and power through a more tentative, mischievous, oblique, please check
joyous and experientially oriented ‘experimental philosophy’, resonant if “remain”
with the recent turn in research called ‘new materialism’. The refusal of the should be
changed to
demand for explanatory force and the demand to give an account of itself, “remains”.
as is commonplace in practices framed as research in art, philosophy and
pedagogy, is accompanied by resistance to both the imperialism of methodology and the hierarchy of theory. Experimental philosophy favours instead
material encounters, the genesis of ideas, creative methodologies and new
concepts that accompany and engender different more subtle sensibilities,
patterns of thought and singular knowledges.
Suspicion of all forms of hegemony, intellectual and otherwise, led Paul
Feyerabend (1993) to argue that science is an essentially anarchic enterprise.
His position was that ‘the only principle that does not inhibit progress is:
anything goes’ (5). In order to challenge the prescriptive notion that one first
has an idea or a problem, and only thereafter one acts, Feyerabend (1993)
pointed to the playful activity of young children as they explore the world. He
believed that ‘general education should prepare citizens to choose between
standards, or to find their way in a society that contains groups committed
to various standards, but it must under no condition bend their minds so that
they conform to the standards of one particular group’ (61). For the same
reason, Feyerabend resisted the notion that ‘knowledge [should] be changed
so that its presence can be checked by a single algorithm’ (218) and was critical of early philosophers saying that they ‘do not enrich existing concepts,
but they void them of content, make them crude, and increase their influence
by turning crudeness into a measure of truth’ (260). Moreover, Feyerabend
argues that the scientific and philosophical commitments and beliefs that
have shaped and informed the ‘rationalist’ imaginary, which offers an image
of itself as both objective and tradition-independent, constitute a ‘secularised
form of the belief in the power of the word of God’ (218). Such a rationalist
imaginary is impoverished, and its claims to identify the essential are premised on the elimination of the immeasurable or the singular. The idea of AQ: Please
objectivity as a form of secularization of theological belief is provocative, in check the
edits in
particular given the performative force of much of the language that circu- “The idea
lates in educational research, policy, corporations and institutions, academic of objectivand otherwise. One example of this is found in the KEA report Impact of ity…”
Culture on Creativity (2009) commissioned by the European Commission.
This report advocates for the development of a European Creativity Index
(ECI) consisting of 32 indicators with six central pillars—human capital,
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Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Pedagogy
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institutional environment, technology, social environment, openness and
diversity and creative outputs. It justifies the quest for creativity by arguing
for its instrumental value in driving economic and social progress.
Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987) draw upon How to do Things
with Words by John Austin (1962) as well as Michel Foucault’s (1973, 1984,
1986, 1991) corpus in order to locate different elaborations of performative
speech. This informs their innovative concept of the order word. Unlike the
examples given by Austin (1962) that embed particular utterances within
social norms and practices, such as ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’,
order words can include words or phrases that lack signification or content, while retaining the power both to command and to produce subjects
and subjectivities. Examples today might include words like ‘creativity’,
‘innovation’ and ‘excellence’. The material force of this pervasive though
curiously empty, redundant, generic, abstract language that is encountered
in many policy reports and reviews is resonant of both Orwell (1946, 1948)
and Kafka (1989, 2009) as it aims to set standards, simplify, compare, effect
outputs, designate outcomes, and design evaluations across a wide range of
practice and activities of human existence, with little sense of the diversity
of purposes or material practices of human activity across the long natural
history of humankind. ‘“Is it not really strange”, asks Einstein, “that human
beings are normally deaf to the strongest argument whilst they are always
inclined to overestimate measuring accuracies?”’ (quoted in Feyerabend,
1993, 239). Instead of emphasizing operationalization and formalization of
procedures across all spheres of existence, Feyerabend (1993) asserts that
‘there are many different maps of reality, from a variety of scientific viewpoints’ (245). Indeed, Ian Hacking (2000) writes in a review of his last book,
a compilation of unfinished manuscripts, that what Feyerabend (1993) most
resisted was what William Blake (1956) called ‘Single Vision—Newton’s
Sleep’; the image of single vision is very different from an epistemological
approach that values singularity, or is attuned to the specificity of diversity,
capacities required to develop the acuity and sensitivity needed for conscious
experimentation.
SINGULARITY AND EXPERIMENTUM
In order to foster an imaginary premised upon ‘experimental philosophy’,
points of affinity or connection might be developed between practices of philosophy, art and pedagogy. These might include the seventeenth-century society of experimental philosophers described by Rogoff (2010), and the image
of life as experimentation found throughout all the writings of Nietzsche
(1984), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Spinoza (1996). Nonetheless,
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Aislinn O’ Donnell
Feyerabend’s (1999) remarks on the use of experiments in the search for
‘reality’ offer a useful note of caution:
But the search [for reality] has a strong negative component. It does not accept
phenomena as they are, it changes them, either in thought (abstraction) or by
actively interfering with them (experiment). Both types of changes involve
simplifications. Abstractions remove the particulars that distinguish an object
from another, together with some general properties such as color and smell.
Experiments further remove or try to remove the links that tie every process to
its surroundings—they create an artificial and somewhat impoverished environment and explore its peculiarities. In both cases, things are being taken away or
‘blocked off’ from the totality that surrounds us. (5)
The interference that Feyerabend (1993) outlines is only a symptom of
the will to mastery guiding experimental science and he acknowledges that
‘understanding a subject means transforming it, lifting it out of natural habit
and inserting it into a model or a theory or a poetic account of it. But one
transformation may be better than another’ (12, original emphasis). As Henri
Bergson argued in Chapter 1 of Matter and Memory (2004), perception is
always a subtractive enterprise—to be able to act, to choose and to move
involves blocking off and ignoring much of the rich variety of life. However, a concerted effort to deploy a unidimensional and reductive method
that seeks to simplify the abundance of life is a matter for concern that has
existential, political, pedagogical and philosophical implications. It is not,
says Feyerabend (1993), that we do not need scientists, poets or philosophers but rather that their interaction with their material of inquiry involves
a complicated interplay ‘between an unknown and relatively pliable material
and researchers who affect and are affected and changed by the material
which, after all, is the material from which they have been shaped. It is not
therefore easy to remove the results’ (146). These subjective elements create
conditions of existence, animating the dynamics of the world rather than just
registering ‘what is there’.
I am not averse to those practices of experimental philosophy and
pedagogy that invite abstraction in thought or create artificial conditions,
but with Hannah Arendt (1958), I resist equating experimentation with
hypothesis testing. Arendt writes critically of the way the understanding
of truth changed from theoria into the practical question of ‘what works?’
so theory became hypothesis, and the outcome of the hypothesis became
‘truth’, ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’. As she writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), her fear was that the experiment produces reality and thus
guarantees its own success. I understand her reservations; however, I do
not wholly agree with her suspicions of pragmatism. I am inspired by the
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Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Pedagogy
subtle responsiveness of practices of empirical enquiry that are attuned to
the matter or material of inquiry, and to the possibility of unexpected lines
of enquiry and questions such as those opened up by Dada, Fluxus and contemporary art practitioners such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Seamus Nolan, and
Fischli and Weiss. Rather than seeking the ‘single vision’ of truth, such an
approach looks to create the conditions for new modalities of affective and
existential engagement that can serve to punctuate habits of cynicism
and ressentiment. Examples might include Suddenly an Overview, Fischli
and Weiss’ tender series of tiny clay figurines rendering the monumental
events of universal history or the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, or Thomas
Hirschhorn’s (2009) collaborative intervention in an estate South-East of
Amsterdam, which he creates because he is a ‘fan’ of philosophy. My interest is not in the new field of ‘experimental philosophy’ that generates ideas
to be applied by empirical scientists, in particular cognitive psychologists,
but rather in the way in which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) take up the
functionalist and pragmatist commitment to ‘what works’. This, combined
with their vision of experimentation, involves singular practices and situations, and a pluralistic approach to epistemology, entails the retrieval and
assembling of an image of experimental philosophy that is more attuned to
singularity and more open to rich descriptions of particulars, to practices of
observation and to what Deleuze (1995) has called transcendental empiricism—an experimental approach that seeks to create the conditions for real,
rather than possible, experience. This approach is both oriented by, and
seeks out, passion, curiosity, interest and wonder in a manner redolent of
early modern and medieval intellectuals. Thomas Hirschhorn’s (2009/10)
description of himself as a ‘fan’ of philosophy, in an interview with Birrell,
captures some of the naivety, enthusiasm and excitement that can help to
dissolve what William Connolly (2011) has called ‘embers of resentment’
(293). In that interview, Hirschhorn (2009/10) says:
I am passionate about Spinoza because the lecture of Ethics had a real impact
on me and I am passionate about Philosophy in general because I enjoy not
understanding everything. I like the fact that, in Philosophy, things remain to
be understood and that work still has to be done. (2009/10, 1) . . . Again, I am
not illustrating Philosophy with my work. I am not reading Philosophy to do
my Artwork and I am not reading Philosophy to justify my work. I need Philosophy for my life, to try to find responses to the big questions such as ‘Love’,
to name one of the most important to me. For this, I need Philosophy—please
believe it! But of course if connections, dynamics, influences or coincidences
exist in my work—as you pointed out in ‘It’s Burning Everywhere’—I am
absolutely happy. I want to be touched by grace, without belief in any correlation to genius or obscureness or that it has something to do with artistic
ignorance. (4)
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Aislinn O’ Donnell
Such a sense of wonder, enthusiasm and fascination is vital to sustain and
energize practices in philosophy, art and pedagogy. In Lorraine Daston and
Katherine Park’s (1998) mapping of the histories of wonder, we are reminded
that it was seen as a ‘cognitive passion, as much about knowing as feeling’
(14), and are told that the cognitive passions of wonder and curiosity ‘briefly
meshed into a psychology of scientific enquiry in the seventeenth century’
(20). They describe the scepticism of natural philosophers in respect of the
possibility of a ‘philosophy of particulars’ because such phenomena were of
the order of chance, quoting De mirabilius mundi, whose author says:
‘One should not deny any marvelous thing because he lacks a reason for it, but
rather should try it out [experiri]; for the causes of marvelous things are hidden,
and follow from such diverse causes preceding them that human understanding,
as Plato says, cannot apprehend them,’ observing that ‘thus natural wonders
often overlapped with “secrets” and “experiments” (experimenta), another
group of phenomena accessible only to experience; these craft formulas, or
proven recipes for medical and magical preparations, often drew on the occult
properties of natural substances, and they were excluded from natural philosophy for the same reasons’. (Daston and Parks, 1998, 129)
Openness to contingency and chance, as well as sharing of recipes, secrets,
experiments and ideas, are key features of my re-envisioning of ‘experimental
philosophy and pedagogy’ and in certain respects offer the possibility of what
Sarat Maharaj (2009) calls a ‘lab without protocol’ following Hans Ulrich
Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden’s (1999) exhibition/project Laboratorium.
An experimental philosophy lies outside the strict parameters of natural
philosophy because of the value it places on the singular, in know-how,
instructions, secrets and recipes. This interests me because it interrupts the
image of knowledge, or what Deleuze (1994) calls the dogmatic image
(or tribunal) of thought, that seeks to prove, show, identify, classify or justify. An experimental approach is more interested in creating opportunities
for the sharing of ideas and practices that might enhance potentials for singularizing encounters and material engagement with and by students, situations, materials, disciplines, bodies, affects and ideas. This re-appropriates AQ: Please
the mantra of ‘what works’ from its universalizing, ahistorical and founda- check if
seems
tional pretensions to the kind of toolbox methodology of ‘trying it out’, and “thus
to me”
thus seems to me more faithful to the nuanced responsiveness of pedagogy should be
and the practices of inquiry of many scientists, artists and philosophers who changed to
try to cultivate fine attunements to the terrains of the materials and ideas “thus seems
that they are exploring. Wonder sustains attention and curiosity provokes to be”.
questioning, yet these qualities are not mentioned in those learning outcomes
detailed in course descriptors or funding proposals. Indeed, in my own
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university the word ‘explore’ is prohibited from learning outcomes. This
is primarily because such forms of engagement are unpredictable, and thus
their outcomes are not guaranteed.
Avicenna observed that ‘so to whatever object the eye first turns, the same
is a wonder and full of wonder if only we examine it for a little’ (original italics, Daston and Parks, 1998, 136). Over two centuries from about 1370, many
people engaging in philosophical inquiry were not academic philosophers, but
were involved in practical fields of exploration like alchemy, materia medica
(pharmacology) and magic. A taste for the particular was essential in such
empirical investigation because particulars cannot be known through theory
or deduction. Daston and Parks (1998) call this ‘preternatural philosophy’ as
it ‘rehearsed new empirical methods of inquiry’ (137) and forced an abandonment of the ‘limpid certainty of scientia for the muddy waters of sensory
experience and probable opinion’ (141). They distinguish this epistemological model of natural enquiry from the demonstrative ideal, suggesting that it
required a different sensibility. Later Belon would speak of the ‘singularities’
he found in the footsteps of Galen (Daston and Parks, 1998). The use of words
such as ‘wonder’ and ‘singularity’ have a curious ring to the contemporary
ear, yet creative and rich encounters with that which is new for us in the lines
of inquiry that emerge in our disciplines and practices as students or teachers
or apprentices or artists, or in our encounters with the ideas of our students,
can echo that sense of wonder as the world is disclosed anew. After a long
hiatus, they tell us, the language of marvels re-entered natural philosophy ‘in
the context of a new epistemology of facts and a new sociability of collective
empirical enquiry’ (Daston and Parks, 1998, 218) in the seventeenth century.
While Francis Bacon in 1620 constructed a New Organon to discipline the
mind’s aversion to particulars and to shuttle between the universal and the
particular, the early scientific journals, according to Daston and Parks (1998),
abound with the language of ‘new’, ‘remarkable’, ‘curious’, ‘extraordinary’
and ‘singular’. In contrast with Aristotelian empiricism, ‘the empiricism of
the late seventeenth century was grainy with facts, full of experiential particulars conspicuously detached from explanatory or theoretical moorings’
(Daston and Parks, 1998, 237). Of interest were strange facts—and facts
were themselves uncertain, unlike demonstrative knowledge.
In Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), Lorraine Daston and
Elizabeth Lunbeck say that the history of observation in the sciences needs
to be told, just as abstract terms like ‘experiment’ and ‘classification’ have
been shown to be rooted in concrete practices; ‘for example, how the first sci- AQ: Please
entific laboratories drew upon the skills and furnishings of the workshops of check the
phrase
early modern artisans, or how late nineteenth century astronomers employed “embroidery
women whose eyes had been trained to discern the tints of embroidery skins skins” in the
to classify stellar spectra’ (2). They argue that the coupling of observation and quoted text.
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Aislinn O’ Donnell
experiment did not occur until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
‘many practices that from a modern (or even early modern) viewpoint seem
to be clear examples of the observation of nature were instead designated by
the terms experimentum (a trial or test) or experiential (cumulative experience)—two words often used as synonyms, because they both referred to
results that could not be deduced from first principles’ (Daston and Lunbeck,
2011, 12). There is no sense with these stories that the diversity of the world
might be reducible onto a plane of comparative equivalents. The rise of generalized monetary equivalence emblematic of capital, and the prevalence of
discourses in education and culture premised upon formalization, measurability, standards and comparison are, it seems, the air that we breathe today; yet,
a standard is, after all, an artificial affair, even if it has been reified to the level
of idolatry. Knowledge itself has taken on the features of the commodity, as
described by Marx in the Grundrisse (1993) and Das Capital (1906). For
instance, the primary features of the Bologna Process that sought to reform
and integrate European education systems are reminiscent of the commodity
form. These include:
Generalizability (rather than singularity)
Transferability
Portability
Standardization (must be comparable)
Measurability (tied to some standard of measurement)
Homogenization (required for comparison and transfer)
Alienation (no direct relation to material practice)
Equivalence
Abstraction (no attention to genesis or process other than formal)
Simplification
Abstract and homogeneous labour time.
Data or outcomes are viewed as more legitimate sources of evidence if
methods that have produced their ‘truth’ are replicable, comparable and
verifiable, the process and methodology operationalized for securing such
knowledge or information are ‘transparent’, the observational language ‘neutral’, and the findings measurable. An aura of objectivity accompanies the
presentation of data secured in this fashion; however, the implicit metaphysics that accompanies claims that what counts is what is measurable, that we
don’t understand until we measure, and that ‘the world comes as measurable’
(Hacking, 1992, 50) is seldom acknowledged. This is not simply a matter
of concern for epistemologists; it frames the ways practices of knowledge
and creativity are valued or not, and it is inscribed in funding guidelines,
policy documents, mission statements, module descriptors and evaluative
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tools. Indeed, it seems that the idea of ‘impact’ as potentially progressive AQ: In the
also owes something to the image of causal force or collision in mechanical sentence
philosophy because impact too must also be measurable, differentiable and “Indeed, it
seems…”
even predictable in advance of the intervention, event or exhibition. Interven- please check
tions the effect of which may be ephemeral, intangible or involve a temporal if “impact
lag, or might be better expressed in stories or images, or may be singular, too must
anomalous or unclassifiable may be deemed, in comparison with the security, also be measurable” can
certainty and stability of quantifiable data, as just as occult and as ludicrous be changed
as appeals to magic or phlogiston. Yet these immeasurables are the ether of to “impact
too must be
our practices.
measurable”.
CREATIVE METHODOLOGIES AND THE
SINGULARIZATION OF EXISTENCE/THOUGHT
In part as a counterbalance to these trends, and in part because I think it
would be more useful and more truthful, I suggest that we might return to
other ways of thinking about both experiment and observation by looking
at the medieval concept of experience as test or trial. I am curious about the
idea of observation as inquiry, and associated ideas relating observation to
meditation, consideration, experience, investigation and contemplation, a
shift involving the slow evolution from the monastic writers to writers in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Park (2011) writes that ‘the experimentum, a
well-established genre of scientific writing in medieval Europe, was typically
a set of directions—usually a medical, magical or artisanal formula—purportedly derived from and tested by experience, including both purposeful
experience and trial and error. More broadly, ‘experiment’ corresponded to
knowledge of singular, specific or contingent phenomena that could not be
grasped by deductive reasoning as well as the process by which such knowledge was obtained’ (Park, 2011, 17). This is distinguished from a concept of
experiment understood in terms of artificial manipulation designed to identify hidden (occult) causes. Daston and Parks (1998) note that the meaning
of experimentum changed in order to emphasize the elements of proof and
spectacle, and causal inquiry, but also observe the lingering etymological
affinity of experiential/experimentum. While I acknowledge the dangers of
‘mixing and matching’ concepts, such as losing the specificity of a concept,
or misreading a concept, new ways of thinking and sensing might open up
in the assembling of an eclectic collection of ideas that promote sensitivity
to the singular and to trial and error, alongside an image of observation as a
form of inquiry at once contemplative, meditative and investigative. These
might offer conceptual resources to think anew about practices in philosophy,
pedagogy and the arts.
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AQ: Please
check
whether the
word “ostension” is okay
as given..
Aislinn O’ Donnell
In many respects, this chapter is trying to respond to a deceptively simple
set of questions: What are we doing? What is the purpose of research and
practice in pedagogy and in the arts and humanities? What matters to us
in these practices? Are there ways of re-engaging with them so that they
can become more alive, more vital and more creative? Are there ways of
describing them that are more faithful to the diversity of practices, that value
the singular potentials of different modalities of engagement, and that can
share ideas like recipes, secrets—the experiments of five hundred years ago?
Offering rich descriptions or sharing questions, tasks, ideas and experiments
is not the same as offering proofs or evidence. Problematizing the thinness
of discussion of practice in education and the abstraction of philosophical
thought from the everyday, and offering rich descriptions of creative methodologies, material content and experimental practices, does not seek to inure
philosophy or pedagogy from normativity. Rather, such a methodology can
help us to notice the multiple constitutive flows that orient our practices,
including those of a more reactive or visceral timbre. Practices of research
in, for example, education that develop ‘what works’ theories, or that appeal
to randomized controlled trials, which retain little sensitivity to the complex
relational dynamics of the pedagogical endeavour or practice, arguably tell
us little about the world, and even less about how to orient ourselves in those
spaces as teachers and students. So too, philosophies that forget the world,
forget the origins and genesis of the ideas that move us. Learning with both
the matter of thought and engagement with others helps to foreclose the likelihood of objectification or reification. However, I think there is still scope for
the more modern understanding of experiment in terms of the artificial creation of situations of thought or encounter. This does not aim to control either
output or variables, but rather to temporarily suspend the habitual responses
of the day to day, creating the potential for different modalities of attention
through ostension or through practices that abstract ideas or experiences from
their habitual unfolding, for example, in order to intensify or enrich the experience of them. Much can be learnt from ideas like Sarat Maharaj’s (2009)
dada epistemics that draws upon Aby Warburg’s dada methodology. This
methodology involves the assembling of components, non-representational
thinking and the kind of feeling for the reality of relations, as William James
(1912) elucidates in his descriptions of radical empiricism.
Ian Hacking (1992) has argued that the theories of laboratory sciences persist ‘because they are true to phenomena or even created by apparatus in the
laboratory and are measured by instruments that we have engineered’ (30).
As I indicate above, I am agnostic about the artificiality of the production of
phenomena in pedagogical situations, which I distinguish from those pedagogical situations in the service of research agendas. However, I see that at
times such artificiality can be a useful tool in the construction of what I call
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AQ: Please
check if the
meaning
of “inure
philosophy
or pedagogy
from normativity”
is clear.
Should
“from normativity”
be changed
to “to
normativity”
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situated thinking, as long as those practices are at the service of life rather
than truth, understood as proof, evidence, demonstration or determinative
judgement. Although I agree with Hacking (1992) that we should not equate
‘laboratory’ with ‘experiment’ (despite the popularity of such terms in recent
contemporary art practices), I still think that the artificiality of the laboratory
can be of service in creating a space that permits of the provisional suspension of the affairs of the world such that a different way of living the everyday
might be permitted, even temporarily, offering a freedom that allows one
to play with ideas, materials, knowledges, and different ways of imagining
one’s existence.
A practical example may illustrate this. In one philosophy class that I offer,
most of the men have spent some time in prison, and a number are homeless. I mention their background because they are placed to the margins of
society and are often without voice or access to those quasi-public spheres
that allow for those difficult conversations that move between philosophy
and life, navigating complex images of what it is to be a man, what it is to
be human, and what it is to be a citizen. An interplay between philosophical AQ: In
ideas and existential preoccupations allows spaces to be opened in which we the sentence “An
can explore the concept of melancholia or anxiety, the relationship between interplay
melancholia and philosophy, or anxiety and existentialism, the stories of between…”
Ancient Greece and Kant’s long walks, lunar cycles, the humours, as well as it is not clear
their own stories and observation. This process is about venturing thoughts what “their”
refers to in
and allowing them to be suspended and held within the space as they are so “their own
they can play off against other ideas. It involves sitting with what emerges, stories”.
rather than dissecting or analysing stories or digging to the roots of existential Please check
crises or problems. This is an artificial space that allows us to breathe without and rephrase
if necessary.
having to constantly react, as we must in the world outside. For these men,
these classes allow for conversations, so they tell me, that they are ordinarily
permitted to have given the social norms of the worlds that they navigate as
men, men who have often been marginalized at that. There is an experimental quality as we move our lines of enquiry in response to whatever emerges
through our philosophical conversations. It is that ‘suspended’ quality of the
laboratory that I wish to retain. However, I do not believe that it is the only
kind of space that allows for surprise or engagement; many others might be
constructed in line with different sensibilities, dispositions and territorialized
identities.
SITUATED THINKING
Other voices that contest the hegemony of theoretico-experimental sciences
and their counterparts include those of geologist, evolutionary biologist,
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palaeontologist and zoologist Stephen Gould (1980) and philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2000). Stengers writes that ‘the science of evolution
learns to affirm its singularity as a historical science faced with experimenters
who, whenever there is no “production of facts”, can only see an activity of
the “stamp-collecting” type’ (2000, 141); however,
in Darwinian histories, a cause in itself no longer has the general power to cause;
each is taken up in a history, and it is from this history that it gains its identity as
a cause. Each witness, each group of living beings, is now envisioned as having
to recount a singular and local history. Scientists here are not judges, but inquirers, and the fictions they propose take on the style of detective novels, implying
ever more unexpected intrigues. (141)
Stengers (2000) is attracted by the lack of a defined object and the impossibility of judging a priori, saying, that in this case, ‘it has discovered the
necessity of putting to work a more and more subtle practice of storytelling’
(148). She calls this a style or an example, but not a model. Something of
such an inquiring and singularizing approach to practice might be of benefit
in pedagogy, and it also might open up ways of doing philosophy that are
less reverential towards authority and more reverential towards the abundance of life and the potentials for constructing other futures, more singular
knowledges, and more ethical and creative responsiveness. At play here is
not simply the notion of ‘letting be’ that we find in some philosophers but
a more active and delighted ‘listening’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘conversation’,
alongside the exercise through artifice of finding oneself situated differently,
allowing for the experimentation with different ways of encountering the
richness of the world. Again, Stengers quotes the embryologist Albert Dalcq,
who wrote:
In experimental biology, and in particular in the domains that touch on morphogenetic organization, deduction often requires a kind of art, in which sensitivity
has perhaps a place. . . . The very object on which the embryologist is working
is capable of reacting, and the research readily takes on the appearance of a
conversation: the riposte has all the unexpectedness and charm that one finds in
the response of an intelligent interlocutor. (cited in Stengers, 1997, 124)
No divide need be forced between the existential and the ‘objective’.
To refuse such oppositions might invite an ethos of engagement that could
inform a different interplay with the world, one involving the concomitant
cultivation of attention, wonder, curiosity and interest such that we might
even become attuned to the ways in which we are constituted by many forces
beyond the human, and the ways in which our affective lives often rumble at
a subterranean level.
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It can be easy to close off to experience because of a visceral, pre-reflective AQ: In the
reaction; however, this may simply indicate the genealogy of our singular sentence
histories, our beliefs, encounters, experiences, attitudes, dispositions, all of “It can be
easy to
which were formed and oriented by a thousand tiny encounters which remain close off…”
unnoticed until they rupture the threshold of consciousness and appear to “which
have the quality of ‘mineness’ and ‘chosenness’. If we wish to maintain the remained
language of creativity in education, it must not be overcoded by the image unnoticed
until they
of the created product or that all-pervasive slogan ‘innovation’. Learning rupture”
itself is a creative and a singular endeavour of understanding and attunement. has been
Creativity lies in a disclosure of the world for me in dialogue with it, much changed
as I might come to know another person somewhat more intimately. I learn to “which
remain
this. I know this person.
unnoticed
until they
rupture”.
Please
check.
EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS
I feel that the Idea . . . grows according to the needs of a new community, based
on creative affinities, regardless of cultural or intellectual differences, even
social or individual differences. I’m not talking about a community to ‘make
works of art’, but something as a living experiment—every type of experiment
we could develop in a new sense of life and society—a kind of environment
constructed for life in itself, based on the idea that creative energy inhabits
everyone. . . . It would be an open space, an environment for any conceivable or
imaginable form of creative experiment. (Helio Oiticica in Lima, 2009)
Deleuze’s (1995) writings on societies of control, Hannah Arendt’s (1958)
identification of the algorithmic turn, the rise of doubt and world-alienation
in the Human Condition, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) examinations of
the implications of the formal and axiomatic nature of capitalism which mean
that the most diverse forms of resistance can be re-encompassed or quantified, are all useful in helping us to understand our present condition. The
surplus of information produced by algorithm-based exchange-flows of data
and information exceeds any human capacity for assimilation or comprehension. It verges on an experience of the sublime, paralysed, but without the
moment of redemption or any sense of the power of one’s faculties. I think
here of Mark Curran’s (2013) recent powerful work ‘The Market’ and his
large teetering piles of A4 paper filled with the code of market transactions,
and of Marx and Engels’ (1998) prophetic statement that ‘all that is solid
melts into the air’ (3) in the Communist Manifesto. This melting into code,
information, algorithms and flexible rules is not confined to financial markets; AQ: Please
the
the propaganda is that all activities and knowledges can be translated into for- check
edits in “I
mal language. Deleuze’s (1994, 1995) concept of ‘society of control’ might suggest
better be renamed ‘society of quality control’. I suggest that the didactic and that…”
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content-heavy image of ‘banking education’ described famously by Paulo
Freire (2005) has been supplanted with Bologna by ‘investment banking education’, some of the features of which I sketched above, which incorporates
the language of credit swaps, capital and investment. Paradigms that privilege formal and generic appraisals of practice serve to occlude and partially
eliminate the significant and transformative elements of the arts and humanities and pedagogy in practice. Again, instead of appealing to epistemologies
grounded in an image of knowledge that sees its role as one of provision of
evidence, presentation of findings, justification of practice or exposition of
argument, I argue for an approach to pedagogy and philosophy that is more
attuned to life and to the materiality and situatedness of the practices of thinking, making and teaching. Moreover, in my view, this is also more faithful to
what matters and the kinds of intuition and openness grounded in experience
that govern such practices. Here I join Friedrich Nietzsche (1984), Baruch
Spinoza (1996), William Connolly (2011), Jane Bennett (2010), and Tamsin
Lorraine (2011) and others involved in developing research in new materialisms who seek to articulate visions of philosophy and pedagogy informed by
an ontology of material vitalism, oriented by and through the richness and the
abundance of life. Rather than the hierarchical aspirations of theory that serve
to unify narratives, experimental philosophies and pedagogies seek out and
value immanent lines of enquiry and encourage collective and collaborative
practice. This, in part, is why Stengers (2000) speaks of propositions rather
than theories.
Can practices such as these count as research? Are they are too singular,
too situated, too aspirational to be of value? Where might they sit in terms
of pedagogy? What possibilities are opened up by them? Can dissemination of an artwork to a public be to an audience of one, even just to the one
who made the piece? Could an elaboration, even an institutional critique, of
philosophy serve to open up other forms of philosophical practice? Most of
my students in prison think a lot, and our conversations are sustained, engaging and dynamic, but most would not have a body of knowledge to show
after weeks of discussion, though they may speak of existential shifts and
openings. Neither they nor I could pin down what precisely is happening
in our classes, and our interactions ebb and flow in their dynamics. I refuse
to adopt a social-scientific or even ethnographic approach to research that
would render those in my classes my objects of study, so my reflections on
encounters in the site remain indirect and philosophical, focused on the matter of thought. Sometimes we collaborate, and when they write, their writings
speak for themselves without need for further mediation and explication by
a ‘researcher’. They are the researchers and they speak in their own voice.
Sometimes I/we make up tasks that undermine the pretensions of academic
philosophy like the following: write the story of the Communist Manifesto
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AQ: Please
check the
edits in “The
intimacy of
the…”
35
in the voice of a seven-year-old Marx and a five-year-old Engels, or do a
list of questions in the style of Fischli and Weiss, or work through text and
image to describe the disjunction between the description of meals and the
sensory encounter with prison food. In a total institution, the sheer absurdity
of some of the exercises helps foreground the surreal nature of the environment: a rather literal over-identification can operate as a critical form of
resistance. Maud Cotter’s question at a presentation of some of these ideas
in the National Sculpture Factory in Cork was ‘Is the prison your studio?’
Perhaps this is the right way of thinking about it, this site that provokes my
thinking and deepens my understanding of philosophical questions and the
nature of our world.
I think also of the Young EVA International project co-developed with gallery educator and curator Katy Fitzpatrick, which aimed to introduce children
to art and philosophy. We spent a good deal of time in preparation, trying to
think up those questions, exercises and tasks for the children that might crack
open clichéd forms of art making, drawing and responding in such a way that
a more singular and imaginative response might be engendered. Sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn’t. Asking children to respond to ‘My journey
to school’ or ‘My neighbourhood’ precipitated a range of postcard assemblings of text and image, whimsical, poetic, humorous, all giving insight into
not ‘the life of the child’ but the ‘life of this child’. These ventures, tasks and
exercises are little experiments, opening up spaces and interstices between
stimulus and response, and trying to create the conditions for not just the
singularization of knowledge but the singularization of existence. It is a process of trial and error. We found that thinking about our sessions in terms of
rhythms moving between the discursive, looking and responding, and making work helped to sustain the aliveness of our encounters. We thought about
the physical format of our bodies and objects in the classroom. One session
was called ‘museum in a schoolbag’ in preparation for our visit to the Hunt
Museum in Limerick. Having discussed with the children their ideas of memory, preciousness, history and collecting, we asked the children to bring an
object or idea that could be part of our museum collection in the classroom.
The intimacy of the stories of the children was revealed in the interweaving
of their stories, of the journey to live in Ireland, of leaving, or of being with,
people they loved, of wit, wisdom or humour, and responses to the Koran, or
Arabic scripts; each of their voices and little stories revealed the singularity
of each child in a way that was deeply moving. Although museums and galleries often aim to celebrate diversity and the identities of children, we felt
that by asking a child to identify himself or herself as X, the more nuanced,
subtle and gentle forms of storytelling, observation and the relationship to
their singular objects could too easily be coerced into a more heavy-handed
and clumsy, albeit well meaning, framework.
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Those genealogies of the children’s lives involved a delicate interplay of
a range of experiences, part of which involved neighbourhood, pets, country
of origin (for some), ethnic or religious affinity, football, people they loved,
people they missed, the sky, concepts like freedom or voice, and so forth.
The artificial nature of the museum session and the creation of a different
space and atmosphere allowed for different kinds of experiences to come
into being. We did not aim to locate the ‘truth’ of the life of the child or to
provide evidence for the impact or replicability of this approach. Given our
commitment to an immanent and emergent method of pedagogical, artistic
and philosophical enquiry, we hoped to offer the possibility for each child
to find creative ways to manifest his or her singularity as well as to set up
the conditions for collective engagement in the interplay of responses of the
class. Following artist Garett Phelan’s slogan for the zine co-produced with
the class, our only principle was ‘Everyone gets it right here’. One session
focused on examples from contemporary art, and the children offered their
responses to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the outrageous idea of the readymade constituting a provocation to the inherited idea of art as drawing, painting or sculpture. Another session that required more thought and time than
we gave it, as we learnt, was a ‘Museum Curated by an Animal’. The danger
with a more standard social-scientific approach that would require a research
question or hypothesis to be posited in advance of our encounter with the
children and their teachers was, in our view, that such framing of the territory
could well dampen the liveliness and interest of the children by prescribing
what we wished to discover in advance of its invention. It would preclude the
experimental composition of new lines of subjectivity and the assembling of
different maps of existence, cartographies of desire, observation, perception,
sensibility, techniques, relationality and thought. There is, oddly, an arguable
precedent for this kind of approach, ethic and epistemological vision in elements of the evolutionary sciences as I described above.
One of the current terms used in regulatory discourses for evaluating
research and knowledge transfer is impact, and the dissemination dimension
of impact is supposed to be measurable. Were we to reflect on this question
of impact through the lens of contemporary art practice, more latitude might
be permitted, although arguably there would be pressure to document work
and to tell stories about the process. But what does dissemination mean? And
what if a singular encounter has a profound impact on only one, two or three
people? Some time ago, I wrote a long review of a man’s artwork that he
made in prison. Only three of us have seen the film and review. Indeed, I am
its sole audience in that I was not involved in its making. It seemed important
that it would have a public, even if only a public of one. I watched the film
with him in the studio, in his cell, which was also the space for his exhibition.
The review was written both for him and to him, as a kind of gift, an intimate
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gesture. I am not sure what, if any, value would be placed on this in terms of
broader research parameters; indeed, only contemporary art practice might set
some value on the anomalous nature of the process, the space and the encounter. I think of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s reflection on the physical encounter with
exhibitions and the possibilities of minor forms of curating like ‘The Kitchen
Show’ (1991). Here is a lengthy quote from the piece that I wrote:
What follows is the story of a film and the thoughts that awoke in its witnessing. This is a film about time, doing time and our existence as temporal beings.
It reaches across decades and intimates the promise of a future, where time is
not done or done with, but can take on the fullness of an existence in the world.
The man who is the artist and the central character is seen episodically across
decades, as younger, as ageing, and the film refuses a strict chronology as
memory and perception skip back and forth through the years with a Proustian
quality through the returning epiphanies through the piece as a series of ritornellos: pacing, boxing gloves, steel, vibrant paintings, television, sounds, the
earth’s atmosphere. Together we sit in the room, his room, his studio, watching
this film. At this moment, all of this is what it means to watch this film. It must
be something that happens between us, no longer an object, or a screen, but the
ebb and flow of relations between me, him, the film, the room, the prison, our
world. And so I bear witness.
The prison is a strange institution. It seems so solid in its tedium and
routines yet beneath the repetition lies an air of menace. It is tightly coiled,
wrapped in procedure, but so tautly wound that it can snap at any moment.
Its universe is a precarious one. The Law is for the making. One day something will be prohibited, the next permitted, and nothing is permitted unless a
rule has dictated so. This is the inverse of ordinary life where one ordinarily
knows when one has infracted the law; here one has to presume that all is
infraction. This is the world where arbitrariness rules, the bureaucracy where
logic takes an implacable form but makes little sense. Truths are made, laws
are concocted at whimsy, in the manner of other bureaucratic institutions, but
with more severity and absurdity. The evenness of an atmosphere here is not
grounded but hovers at crisis point—slow movements or reformations are
less likely than sudden explosions. In the 1700s, David Hume challenged a
human disposition that favours complacency and certainty by asking how can
we know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Given its rhythm one may believe
this will be the case, but one cannot know with any certainty. Prison life does
not even permit of justifiable belief. One must be prepared for anything to
happen at any time. For laws to be created and destroyed. For a thousand
petty rules to pervade the fabric of the everyday, rules whose origins have
been lost in the shroud of time while the force of law lies in its form rather
than content. It is a Kafkaesque universe.
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There was a time before, there is this time, and there will be another time
to come. This piece is about this time, the elongated stretch of time that is the
long ‘now’ and its temporality bears witness to the complexity of the impossibly stretched present with its bare circular temporality. The head appears
framed by the window, younger, in silence, simply looking at the world
and the camera contemplates with him in silence, sitting, staying, as though
eternities pass with the gaze of the lens. What would Levinas say here? Not
the face-to-face but the face in side profile that allows us to look without the
challenge of the eyes, to observe with the tactile eye, just as I am observed
as I watch the piece, from the side and behind. There is an intimacy to these
shots in which nothing is said, in which the singularity of this face, this man,
comes into view, a saying before anything is said, reminding us that humanity
always arrives in the singular. He looks out the window and the bars vanish
as the skies and space, the element of air, the only element not forbidden by
the prison, levitates and offers a sense of the infinite. The sky. The infinite.
This face. Infinity. The mood stays slow and meditative until the camera
jerks back—bars, mesh, barbed wire, soldiers, rifles, a screw, another tower.
‘Really not a lot going on,’ the voice says talking past the camera, and the
world seems full, saturated with nothing but images of confinement as the
skies vanish and the tedium of policing an institution suffocates, overt symbols of power and violence are fore-grounded and the palette moves from the
soft light of the skies and soft tactility of skin to concrete and steel. A siren
sounds. I wonder whether it is from the film I watch or elsewhere. The senses
go on alert in this space and only on the second viewing do I determine its
source from the film. And the voice speaks, the head looks, observes. Nothing
to be seen. Ecce homo.
CONCLUSION: WHAT GOOD IS PHILOSOPHY IF IT DOES
NOT GIVE BIRTH TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE?
In their book of interviews, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time
(1995), Michel Serres asks Bruno Latour, ‘What good is philosophy if it
doesn’t give birth to the world of the future?’ (79). This question raises
concerns that are different from those interpretations of Dewey (1938) that
emphasize preparation for the world of the future such that, presumably, we
might be better equipped to respond to novelty. Instead, philosophy and pedagogy are here understood to be acts of creation, both in terms of inventing
new concepts and engaging in the kind of de-selfing that encourages one to
experiment with virtual relations rather than remaining stuck in habitual patterns of familiar lived experience. Tamsin Lorraine (2011) writes, ‘[Concept
creation] is but one component in an art of skillful living that entails coming
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into attunement with the world around us in ways that unfold our capacities for joyful living rather than engage us in deadening repetitions of what
worked for us in the past’ (28). These experimental practices open up the
spaces and interstices required to nurture the capacity for creative responsiveness. Even the simple gesture of reading and understanding a text or thinking
about someone else’s idea invites habitual modalities of reaction to be suspended, allowing for new kinds of connections to be made. Lorraine (2011)
calls these practices ‘joyful participation’ and describes how attunement to
our thresholds and habits, feeling for ‘resistances and resonances’ and ‘pursuing new connections’ (159), can help us to reorient our attention and open up
new lines of becoming. We need to make philosophy that gives birth to the
world of the future. In pedagogy, in philosophy and in art, we cannot prove
or show what does not yet exist, but we can follow the immanent lines of
enquiry opened up through responsive engagement and exploration in the
situations in which we find ourselves alone and with others.
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Chapter 2
Probeheads of Resistance
and the Heterotopic Mirror
Tiffany Chung and Dinh Q. Lê’s
Stratigraphic Cartographies
Colin Gardner
In a key passage in What is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
discuss the differing viabilities of various planes of immanence, they pose
the question of whether one plane is ‘better’ than another in responding to
the requirements of a given age. ‘What does answering to the requirements
of the age mean,’ they ask, ‘and what relationship is there between the movements or diagrammatic features of an image of thought and the movements
or sociohistorical features of an age?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 58).
These questions can only be answered if we resist the dominant discourse of
a strictly historical and/or dialectical approach conditioned by issues such as
before and after, cause and effect, in favour of what they call a stratigraphic
time, ‘where “before” and “after” indicate only an order of superimpositions’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 58). The result is a heterogeneous pluralism
which transmutes itself, as different features of time switch transversally
from one plane to the next through a series of developmental becomings.
Thus, ‘very old strata can rise to the surface again, can cut a path through the
formations that covered them and surface directly on the current stratum to
which they impart a new curvature’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 58–9). This
alters the strata and gives them a new order so that as Craig Lundy points out
in History and Becoming (2012), ‘When a historian engenders an historical
event or culture (as opposed to “passively observe” historical “facts”), they
do so in relation to others; their event is linked to other events in the same
way as concepts are, and their culture is as interleaved and holed as a plane
of immanence is’ (161). In this way, historical-stratigraphy emphasizes the
significance of lines that move between planes of coexistence according to an
ontology of historical creativity—a fluid combination of intensive emergence
and the universal-contingent.
41
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Colin Gardner
This new materialist conception of a discontinuous, stratigraphic time is all
well and good, but what does it have to do with pedagogy and perhaps more
importantly, a pedagogical aesthetics of resistance? Clearly, what we need
is a ‘bridge’ between history-as-becoming and cultural pedagogy as an autopoetic intuitive event that might teach through affects, aesthetically crafting
visceral and cognitive refusals in its individual and collective practitioners.
In short, how might we link becoming with affect and aesthetics to create
a new form of critical historical subject? As Anna Hickey-Moody (2009)
points out, such refusals are innately material insofar as affect—derived from
Spinoza’s ‘affectus’—refers to the ‘virtuality and materiality of the increase
or decrease effected in a body’s power of acting’ (273). More importantly,
affectus is at the heart of pedagogy itself, ‘namely a relational practice through
which some kind of knowledge is produced. Such relational cultural practices
need to be understood as occurring both within and outside places that are
understood as being “educational” settings’ (Hickey-Moody, 2009, 273).
Hickey-Moody’s (2009) argument thus allows us to radically redefine the very
nature of resistant art as itself a material pedagogic practice (and ethics) that
cuts transversally across and between conventional ‘sites’ of institutionalized
subjectivity—embodied cultural spaces such as the gallery, the museum, the
classroom, the lecture hall and the internet—but also between the human and
the non-human (as a rhythmic trace of the world), whereby the material is
taken up into the affective body through an expressive logic of sensations.
It is the latter that allows art to radically rework the body’s limits (whether
defined by the division of labour, confining nationalisms, convenient cultural
pigeonholes such as West versus Non-west, colonial or postcolonial) and
allows it to forge new connections, giving rise to the idea of a people yet to
come. As Simon O’Sullivan (2012) convincingly argues, ‘Contemporary art
can operate on a cusp between the present and the future. It is “made” in the
present, out of the materials at hand, but its “content” often calls for a subjectivity to come. This stuttering and stammering of existent materials and
languages, this deterritorialization of existing regimes of signs, constitutes
the ethico-aesthetic function of art’ (200). More importantly, the artist doesn’t
necessarily have to be a specific product of his/her time or place, for as
Deleuze (1989) notes, the pedagogic author ‘can be marginalized or separate
from his more or less illiterate community as much as you like; this condition
puts him all the more in a position to express potential forces and, in his very
solitude, to be a true collective agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst’ (221–2).
Following this ‘untimely’ logic, ‘As affectus is a subjective change, and
affect a product of aesthetic labour that may cause subjective change, affect
in art is a vector of pedagogy’ (Hickey-Moody, 2009, 274).
It is also, one might add, a vector of aesthetics (aisthesis as sensual
as well as intellectual perception) which plays a key, constitutive role in
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subject formation (albeit less as a stable Cartesian cogito than as a decentred multiplicity). The philosopher and educator Alfred North Whitehead
(1861–1947) acts as another useful bridge here (linking Deleuze and Guattari
with Hickey-Moody) insofar as he associates affect with aesthetics, becoming and education. As Steven Shaviro (2009) points out, becoming in AQ: Please
Whitehead ‘is not continuous, because each occasion, each act of becoming, check if
“becoming
is unique, a “production of novelty” that is also a new form of “concrete in Whitetogetherness”, or what Whitehead calls concrescence. Something new has head” should
been added to the universe; it marks a radical break with whatever was there be changed
before. . . . An object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates to “becoming for
itself afresh, over and over again’ (19). In other words, the subject gives birth Whitehead”
to itself (autopoetically in Guattarian terms) in each fresh sensate encounter:
The word ‘object’ . . . means an entity which is a potentiality for being a component in feeling; and the word ‘subject’ means the entity constituted by the
process of feeling, and including this process. The feeler is the unity emergent
from its own feelings. (Whitehead, 1978, 88)
More significantly, in his educational writings, most notably The Aims
of Education and Other Essays, Whitehead stressed the importance of the
creative imagination in generating the free play of ideas necessary to be a
powerful catalyst for generating a becoming on the lines of Deleuze’s ‘people
yet to come’. Thus, in ‘Universities and Their Function’ (1929), he writes:
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts, it is a way of illuminating the
facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as
they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which
are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual
vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of
satisfying purposes. (Whitehead, 1967, 93)
This affective, intuitive pedagogy as a wilful strategy of resistance is central to the work of Tiffany Chung (b. 1969) and Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968), two
Vietnamese artists educated in the United States who examine the scars of
postcoloniality by interweaving actual historical situations—wars of national
liberation, rationing, genocide, deindustrialization, enforced migration and
natural disaster—with more virtual, sensate and heterotopic encounters, what
Chung evocatively defines as ‘an archaeology project for future remembrance’. This stratigraphy of various strata of coexistence—what Nietzsche
dubbed the ‘untimely’ and Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call haecceities—
allows the two artists to dissect different historical and geopolitical levels with
transversal flows, tangents and dynamic movements between different ‘sheets
of past’ and ‘points of present’ that defy majoritarian (i.e., ‘western-centric’)
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classification. ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity,’ declares Foucault (1986),
‘we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the
side-by-side, of the dispersed’ (22). Deleuze (1988) agrees, noting in his own
book on Foucault that ‘One must pursue the different series, travel along the
different levels, and cross all the thresholds; instead of simply displaying the
phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must
form a transversal or mobile diagonal line along which the archaeologistarchivist must move’ (22).
TIFFANY CHUNG
In the case of Tiffany Chung, this transverse stratigraphy is most fully developed in her cartographic pieces, which were successfully showcased in her
2010 exhibition, ‘scratching the walls of memory’ at Tyler Rollins Fine Art
in New York. Heavily inspired by her ongoing interest in bacteria and fungi,
Chung works at both the micro- and macroscopic levels, weaving together
spidery webs and intricate skeins of carefully rendered lines through a combination of drawing, embroidery and appliqué, often punctuated by clusters
of glistening beads and metal grommets. Eschewing strict historical and geographical accuracy for a more expressive layering of spatio-temporal disjuncture, Chung generates topographic renderings of the twentieth century’s most
traumatic historical atrocities, including the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall,
a tracing of the atom bomb blast zones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well
as a mapping of the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam
along the 17th parallel.
There is of course a considerable danger in reducing such cataclysmic
events to a form of decorative aestheticism. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno
(1981) famously warned us, ‘Even the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced
with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it
has become impossible to write poetry today’ (34). On the other hand, art can
also act as a form of affective pedagogic catalyst for generating a new form of
collective thought, for as art critic Zoe Butt (2010) points out, ‘these artistic
fungal growths seek to reveal the people who suffer and persist through the
reality of these diagrammatical enigmas’, to the point that the works’ sheer
lack of subjectification allows trauma to exist as a purely mental function. In
other words, Chung eschews the false pieties of recollection and voluntary
memory in favour of an abstract, impersonal and non-subjective cognitive
mapping that produces undecidable alternatives between sheets of virtual past
and the simultaneity of peaks of de-actualized present, what Deleuze (1989)
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calls a crystal-image, ‘the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to
the point where they can no longer be distinguished’ (335). Following novelist and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet, Deleuze (1989) notes that ‘what we
will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates
and erases it . . . and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones. It is now the description itself
which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object’ (126).
This wilful, Nietzschean utilization of the ‘powers of the false’ is more
fully developed in Chung’s cartographic piece, Dubai 2020 (2010) (see
Figure 2.1), where the artist constructs a sociopolitical palimpsest of the emirate city from the perspective of three different historical time frames. Starting
with a 1973 map of the city, she overlays an updated 2010 satellite rendition
before adding a fictional projection for the year 2020, thereby eschewing
strict accuracy (and its associated historicist determinisms) in favour of a
more heterotopic mirroring, whereby virtual and actual, reality and fantasy,
here and there are mutually deconstructed as an infinite series of crystalline
reflections that refer as much to an unknown future as to the historical past.
Indeed, the mirror is central to Foucault’s discussion of sites of encounter as
deterritorializing points of connection with both a finite interior and an infinite outside. First we have utopias, ‘sites with no real place. They are sites
that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space
of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society
turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal
spaces’ (1986, 24).
Figure 2.1 Tiffany Chung. Dubai 2020. 2010.
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AQ: In the
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“This visually references…”
please check
if “duel”
should be
changed to
“dual”
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In contrast, there are places that do exist but which behave like countersites. The latter encompass all the other sites within a culture, but they are
simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. ‘Because these places
are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about’,
argues Foucault (1986), ‘I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias,
heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these
heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be
the mirror’ (24). For Foucault (1986), ‘The mirror functions as a heterotopia
in this respect, it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at
myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that
surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to
pass through this virtual point which is over there’ (24). More importantly for
Chung, this archaeology of the mirror represents an ‘excavation in advance’,
whereby the artist eschews the conventional ex post facto placement of
peoples within already historicized places in favour of situating them as a
Deleuzian ‘people yet to come’ for future remembrance, as an act of becoming that presupposes a projected collective agency.
Chung expands this strategy in her latest films and videos. Thus, in Wellside gatherings . . . (2011), she films a highly visceral, martial arts-style
performance of young people lining up for rationed food and other necessities. This visually references two actual historical events but folds them
together into a duel, stratigraphic emergence. On one hand, this ‘line up’
is temporally linked to Japan’s 1918 Kome Sodo (rice riots) that took place
during the otherwise stable regime of the Taisho democracy (1912–1926).
Far from being a moment of collective solidarity, the self-interested, violent
desperation of participants suggests that heterotopia and dystopia share
common ground at similar moments of national crisis. On the other hand,
the piece references a similar period of rice shortages and long queues for
rationed food in Vietnam during its ‘black hole’ or subsidy period from
1975 to 1986. Although the latter assemblies were actually peaceful and
well ordered, Chung makes the transverse historical jump by highlighting
the subsidy period’s most iconic object, the red brick that was used to mark
a person’s place in line in case he or she needed to take a break during a
long wait. Even then, the person had to keep an eye on the brick in case
someone moved it or jumped ahead in line. To this day, one can still see
on the sidewalks of certain areas of Saigon a number of bricks topped with
paper funnels to signify the presence of black market gasoline vendors. Like
Chung’s palimpsest-like maps, the confusion of Japan with Vietnam and the
former’s violence with the latter’s ordered marking of place creates what
Foucault (1986) calls the heterotopia’s third principle, that it ‘is capable
of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are
in themselves incompatible’ (25). Of course, this affective form of history
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could easily be extended to any era of rationing in any country, including
the United Kingdom in World War II (with the concomitant rise of black
market spivs and Wide Boys) or le système débrouillage (resourcefulness)
in France under the Occupation.
Interestingly, the violent struggle between the performers in Well-side
gatherings… makes a brief appearance in slow motion in the right half of
a split-screen sequence in the work’s sequel, Recipes of Necessity (2014).
However, in marked contrast to the earlier film’s desperate competition for food, the latter sees a generous sharing of dishes (and personal
histories) within the broader community as a means of overcoming the
loss of Vietnam’s basic rice staple as a catalyst for creating a new socioeconomic, cross-generational dynamic. In alignment with our focus on
stratigraphic markers, the film unfolds between two framing actions—the
failed attempts to get a somewhat archaic period fan and a transistor radio
to work—thereby creating twin planes of dystopic malfunction. In contrast,
the main body of the film consists of several generations of Vietnamese
coming together to sample the dishes that were created during and after the
war to substitute for the heavily rationed food staple, that is, rice. First, the
older generation were selected from many different backgrounds to share
their stories of the collective hardship of the subsidy period, most notably
their use of cassava root, coixseed (i.e., sorghum from China), wheat flour,
powdered milk and yams, and the various ways they tried to make it edible,
much like the ubiquitous use and doctoring of the dreaded Spam in Britain
during the 1950s.
Meanwhile, individual vignettes tell terrible, gut-wrenching stories of
malnutrition and hardship, exacerbated by the constant introduction of
new currency which devalued everyone’s existing savings and resources.
However, the film also generates a heart-warming sense of community and
mutual self-help. This culminates in a number of intercut scenes where every
participant was brought together with the younger generation (who were
born at the tail end of the subsidy period and thus have little or no recollection of it) to enjoy a meal made exclusively of these alternative recipes.
However, Chung is careful to add a heterotopic twist; these ‘recipes of
necessity’ are now being served in a period of relative economic affluence,
so that there is a stratigraphic disjuncture between the two time frames as
well as what constitutes political and economic necessity. Indeed, as one of
the interviewees points out, the gap between rich and poor was much narrower during the tough times than it is now, suggesting a greater degree of
camaraderie between the classes. The result is less a personal archaeology
of past and present conditions in Vietnam (and the implied impact of US
imperialism both on the ground and in the current context of globalizing
late capitalism) than a future-perfect projection forward to what will be a
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subsequent set of memories recalled by the young generation. This cyclical
renewal as becoming is thus a classic example of Whitehead’s concrescence
or ‘concrete togetherness’ as itself an act of affective pedagogy, both on
the part of the film’s participants and Chung’s film itself as a stratigraphic
document.
Finally, utilizing on-site interviews, participant observation, anthologies
and Chung’s own fictional writings, the film essay When the sun comes
out the night vanishes (2013) (see Figure 2.2) explores the devastation and
depopulation of the small industrial towns and coalmining villages in Japan’s
Yamaguchi Prefecture following post-war modernization. Chung’s main
focus is on the different personal experiences of two main characters from the
younger generation. One has lived in the town of Isa-Cho his whole life and
seems happily content watching baseball games and visiting friends while
also noting the ubiquitous layer of dust that blankets the community, blown
by the wind from the nearby Ube Cement works. The other undertakes what
amounts to an archaeological tour through the region’s past, telling tales of
his parents and grandparents as we see the effects of deindustrialization on
the landscape and the community’s collective memory. Thus, what were
once thriving streets and shrines are now forsaken and reclaimed by nature,
while the entrance to mineshafts are woefully overgrown and boarded up to
the point of being unrecognizable. These sequences create a tension between
majoritarian signifying structures that attempt to ‘explain’ the transformation
in causal and linear terms (post-war Japan’s rapid growth has necessitated
a Darwinian ‘evolve or be left behind necessity’) and a minoritarian, more
Figure 2.2 Tiffany Chung. When the Sun Comes Out the Night Vanishes. 2013.
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Probeheads of Resistance and the Heterotopic Mirror
empathetic stratigraphic mode that transgresses space and time, so that past,
present and future are both intertwined and collapsed.
As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) condemn this majoritarian reading as a form of abstract machine which they call ‘faciality’. This is
based on two co-ordinating axes, that of signifiance (the white wall) and subjectification (the black hole)—two contrasting but complementary semiotic
systems or strata which serve to organize and capture ephemeral phenomena
into a tightly controlled representational system, much like the way we tend
to ‘see’ faces in landscapes (or landscapes in faces) or transform abstract
patterns into everyday phenomena, not unlike Rorschach inkblot tests. ‘Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and
redundancies,’ note Deleuze and Guattari (1987):
Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come
at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism
is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face, the white wall/black
hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for
a black hole. (167)
AQ: In the
sentence
“Probeheads thus
utilize…”
please
consider
changing the
comma after
“organization” to a
full stop or a
colon.
Fortunately, there is a way out of this facializing dominance. Firstly, this AQ: Both
takes the form of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call probe-heads (têtes “probehead”
and “probechercheuses), a more primitive, pre-signifying, pre-subjective regime—col- head” are
lective, corporeal, plugged into new becomings—that allows us to ‘go used. Please
through faciality’ to disrupt existing modes of organization from within the check if any
organization itself. Probeheads thus utilize the basic fabric of the world but one form
can be used
use it differently through alternative modes of organization, ‘Here, cutting consistently.
edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization
positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities.
Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 190–1). Secondly,
‘the face has a correlate of great importance, the landscape, which is not just
a milieu but a deterritorialized world’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 172).
In terms of Chung’s overall project, this raises the possibility that the landscape can ‘see’ us ontologically in much the same way that we can ‘see’ it.
‘The landscape sees’, confirm Deleuze and Guattari (1994), for ‘the percept
is the landscape before man, in the absence of man’, and we might also argue
that we, as human characters, ‘have passed into the landscape and are [our]
selves part of the compound of sensations’ (169).
In this respect, the film’s key trope is a group of white-robed ‘nomads’
who begin the film walking in single file through the barren countryside
(Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘compound of sensations’ searching perhaps for a
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future community or Whitehead’s ‘vision of a new world’) and who emerge
at the film’s end walking along the railway tracks in funereal attire holding
umbrellas against the drizzling rain. Significantly, a locomotive moves in the
opposite direction alongside them, so that these two probe-heads resemble
a pair of boats cutting opposed, dialectical swaths through the shifting tides
of history. For as Foucault (1986) reminds us, ‘you will understand why the
boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until
the present, the great instrument of economic development . . . but has been
simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates’
(27). In this respect, Chung’s films—fantastic psycho-geographical paeans to
collective difference and transformation—are themselves like boats of intellectual and sensual discovery.
DINH Q. LÊ
Throughout the bulk of his career, Dinh Q. Lê has focused directly on
American imperialist involvement in Vietnam and covert sanction of atrocities and pogroms worldwide. Born in Vietnam in 1968 and raised in Ha-Tien
near the Cambodian border, Dinh was literally born in the middle of the War
and eventually saw his own town fall victim to the Khmer Rouge invasion.
Although he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1979, the artist
returned from New York to Ho Chi Minh City in 1996 and founded San Art, an
artist-run exhibition space and reading room. Dinh’s early work falls into two
main series. Inspired by the techniques of his aunt (who made woven grass
mats), in Persistence of Memory (2000–2001) (Figure 2.3) and the subsequent
From Hollywood to Vietnam (2003–2005), he weaves together linen-mounted
strips of C-print photographs taken by western photojournalists during the
Vietnam War, pictures snapped from everyday life and stills from war films
such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now! (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July
(1989). The non-fictional images of the ‘real’ Vietnam—minoritarian because
they are produced by the colonized themselves—are thus interlaced, like
lattice, with images of majoritarian documentation and Hollywood fictions.
In this way, Dinh economically expresses the constructed nature of collective memory (or amnesia) that the culture industry employs to help America
‘deal’ with the war (or, more accurately, rewrite a genocidal colonial conflict
as the inoculating notion of a traumatic ‘bad experience’ that must be healed
and rationalized). In this sense, the cinematic images are much closer to a
contamination of collective memory than an aesthetic means of its retrieval.
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Figure 2.3
51
Dinh Q. Lê. Persistence of Memory. 2000–2001.
The result of Dinh’s rewriting of historicism as a form of pedagogical historico-stratigraphy is simultaneously hypnotic and defamiliarizing, with the
competing images literally forced together to create a pictorial simultaneity
or double exposure that looks computer-generated rather than painstakingly
hand-wrought. This results in a rhythm of mutual revelation and concealment,
disclosure and contamination, a postcolonial hybridity in which the glossy
‘beauty’ of the Hollywood fiction becomes the conceptual framework for
releasing and recognizing the presence of the ‘Other’. Dinh effectively takes
Gayatri Spivak’s (1994) famous dictum that ‘The subaltern cannot speak’
(104) and gives the subaltern a voice, but as a stratigraphic hybrid (whether
it be as an Asian-American, an artist-activist, or creator of the multiplicitous
contraction-cum-détente, the beauty-sublime).
Inspired by the title of James E. Young’s book, Dinh’s Texture of Memory
series (2000–2001) consists of white thread on white cotton tapestries of
hand-embroidered portraits of Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge
and Pol Pot’s infamous ‘Killing Fields’. Like Dinh’s earlier series Cambodia, Splendour and Darkness (1998) and The Quality of Mercy (1996), the
source material is derived from archival interrogation photos of the victims,
meticulously undertaken by the Khmer Rouge just prior to the prisoners’
execution in the Tuol Sleng death camp (a.k.a. S-21), a former high school in
Phnom Penh where over 16,000 men, women and children eventually died.
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The earlier series focused on the signifying classificatory role of faciality by
either distorting and enlarging the faces by interweaving them with Cambodian monuments, such as Angkor Wat, or reducing the victims’ personalities
to letterboxed strips of their eyes, arranged in a thin frieze around the gallery
space as if they were peering out of their prison cells into an interrogation
chamber. As Dinh (2006) explains, ‘Their eyes showed that they didn’t know
why they were brought to Tuol Sleng. They were the scapegoats of the Khmer
Rouge’s failed policies’ (64).
However, Dinh subsequently explodes this black-hole/white-mask system
in Texture of Memory by making both figure and ground a dazzling white, so
that we lose all co-ordination of how to read a face as a specific cartography.
As Patricia MacCormack (2004) points out, ‘“Thinking difference” requires
the majoritarian face to represent a temporal, temporary face as only one of
many facial forms’ (138). Thus, Dinh sketched each portrait on the cotton
cloth (white is a colour of mourning in Asian tradition, but it can also evoke
white flags of surrender, creating an aporia between insistent remembrance
and self-abnegation). He then commissioned a group of women in Ho Chi
Minh City to embroider the outlines—sometimes singly, sometimes overlapping—in white thread. The sheets are then stretched over a frame, much like
a painting. The overlapping images are often difficult to separate, forcing us
to work hard at deciphering the mugshot, to the point of touching the surface,
to bring the faces back to life.
The works also reference a group of Cambodian women who at that time
lived in Long Beach, California, and these references were designed to evoke
the hysterical blindness illness suffered by over 200 of the women, a symptom
of post-traumatic stress disorder generated from the direct witnessing of the
murder of their loved ones by the Khmer Rouge. Dinh always intended that
the embroideries should be touched and read like a form of Braille, so that
the spectator’s privilege of vision defers to the victims’ blindness as a form
of emotional and psychological empathy. Over time, the oil and dirt from
the fingers of hundreds of viewers builds up so that the raised sections of the
embroidery are darkened, ensuring that the image becomes more pronounced
with time. ‘In a way, the more people who participate in the remembering
process, the more these memories will become alive,’ notes Dinh (2001, 19).
The result is a reversal of the usual process of memory; instead of time fading
the images of horror, as a non-linear stratigraphic phenomenon, it makes it
clearer and more concrete, so that the process of mediation—rooted specifically in the sensate body—engages the aesthetic to reinforce the work’s shifting ideological position. The series thus lies in the impasse between unfeeling
aestheticism and tendentious propaganda, creating a space of simultaneous
pleasure and outrage that makes the political content of the work more, rather
than less, emotive.
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film…”
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Over the past eight years, Dinh has evolved from his signature woven
pieces to a combination of on-site sculpture and video. However, the three
intrinsic components of the weavings—documentary photography, indigenous imagery and Hollywood spectacle—are still an intrinsic part of the
work but are now separated into two- and three-channel projections to set
up a stratigraphic weave between past and present, war and peace, fear and
reconciliation. Perhaps the most deconstructive of these works is From
Father to Son, A Rite of Passage (2007), a two-channel video work that juxtaposes re-edited scenes from two seminal Hollywood films about Vietnam,
Coppola’s aforementioned Apocalypse Now! (1979), and Oliver Stone’s
Platoon (1986). Dinh isolates scenes featuring real-life father and son actors
Martin and Charlie Sheen from Coppola’s and Stone’s films, respectively,
so that they appear to be ‘in dialogue’ with each other across the gutter of
the split screen. Stripped of their complicating subplots, the films’ diegesis
is now reduced to an Oedipal drama between two generations fighting the
same war, as if each were witnessing the other’s post-traumatic breakdown.
Significantly, each film recycles familiar narrative tropes; both soldiers must
kill an older comrade who has lost all sense of reason in the face of wartime horrors—Marlon Brando’s Kurtz as he is driven mad by staring into
the heart of darkness and Tom Berenger’s scarred, sadistic, battle-hardened
Sgt. Barnes—as if the Oedipal cycle can only survive if the younger generation kills its castrating fathers, thereby justifying a form of ‘good’ violence
against its bad corollary. However, it’s not quite as simple as that, because
the personal Oedipal scenario is also the microcosm of a larger patriarchal
structure, in which concepts of honour and duty are circumscribed into a
larger, more timelessly hegemonic structure. The latter is dictated in turn
by American capitalism’s need to endlessly renew itself by transforming
all linear time into a form of non-chronological universal history. Thus, it’s
completely appropriate that Dinh should rewrite the father–son dynamic
between the two Sheens as a non-genealogical eternal return of the same
pathology, because as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, this is the ‘deepest law of capitalism, it continually sets and then repels its own limits, but
in so doing gives rise to numerous flows in all directions that escape its
axiomatic’ (472).
However, this deterritorialization can also be a strategy of resistance
against specifically hegemonic historicizing tendencies. Made in collaboration with artists Phu-Nam Thuc Ha and Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006) represents an important step forward in Dinh’s attempts to weave often incompatible lines of flight into a
more multiplicitous braid. The video opens with all three screens filled with
a seamless image of dragonflies fluttering in the sky to the accompaniment
of a Vietnamese folk song describing how their flight patterns will predict
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the weather. The idyllic scene is quickly interrupted by scenes of helicopters in combat derived from both documentary footage and Hollywood
films such as Apocalypse Now! As Holland Cotter (2010) vividly describes
the action, ‘We first see a panning shot of forests and rice paddies in aerial
view. Then helicopters arrive, swarming, landing, lifting off, buzzing and
shuddering through the sky, spewing men and rockets, crashing explosively,
then rising to buzz some more. Classic shock and awe’ (2010). Dinh (2006)
points out that
in Vietnam, the helicopter has become somewhat iconic because the Vietnam
War was the first time helicopters were extensively used as a killing machine.
This video is about two guys who are trying to build low-cost helicopters
in Vietnam. One of them [Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic] has seen
helicopters when he was growing up during the War and has since become
infatuated with them. Nowadays, he runs a small shop repairing farming equipment. [Le Van Danh], a farmer who comes to his shop has agreed to help him.
He hopes to use the helicopters to spray his crops. They also hope that the helicopters can be used in emergencies to evacuate people. More important, they
want to show the world that the Vietnamese can achieve anything. (66)
Thus, the central concept of the piece is the transition of the helicopter
from a death machine to a symbol of peace and reconstruction. The latter is
particularly hard-won, because we learn that Tran’s first helicopter took six
years to build, and its development was vehemently opposed by the local
government who disputed its safety and promptly seized it. Such was the
ensuing public outrage that a number of scientists and engineers stepped in
to lend their support and guarantee the machine’s functionality, causing the
government to back down. Perhaps more significantly, the end result closely
resembles an American helicopter because the inspiration for its design is
based on the close examination of wreckage left behind after the US evacuation. Dinh underscores the ambivalence of this outcome by intercutting the
story of the two men with interviews with former guerrillas and civilians who
were attacked by helicopters during the war. A former Vietcong fired back at
one incursion and the helicopter flew off, while a woman was so disconcerted
that she could only look up and smile at the pilot. For them, the helicopter
will always be a killing machine, although the former guerrilla hopes that it
will someday become a long-term enabler of peace and recovery as well as
communal spirit.
In a fascinating coda to the piece, The Museum of Modern Art in New
York acquired The Farmers and the Helicopters (see Figure 2.4) and installed
it as part of their Projects 93 series in 2010–2011. Dinh thus became the
first Vietnamese artist to have a solo exhibition at MOMA. More interestingly, spectators also got to see the real-life product of Tran Quoc Hai’s
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Figure 2.4 Dinh Q. Lê – The Farmers and The Helicopters. Installation view MoMA
NYC. 2010–2011.
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Among
Dinh’s…”
research—itself aided and abetted by the internet—for one of his helicopters,
pieced together from scrap parts, was installed in a gallery next to where
the video was playing. In many ways, this minoritarian appropriation and
recolonization of the symbol of American imperialism—not least through its
insertion into the context of the majoritarian art institution—acts as a form of
exorcism and self-assertion as the younger generation of Vietnamese move
beyond the limiting confines of historicism, where their identity is earmarked
by two sides of the same postcolonial coin, either submission to western-led
globalization or local indigenous resistance.
Among Dinh’s most recent works are Barricade (2014) (see Figure 2.5)
(produced in collaboration with Hame, the French-Algerian rapper Mohamed
Bourokba) and Erasure, which were showcased at a 2014 exhibition entitled
Residual, Disrupted Choreographies at the Carré d’Art in Nimes. Both
works transversally link different colonial and postcolonial conflicts across
space and time to form a minoritarian narrative that is resistant to the hegemonic discourse of the prevailing archive, defined by Foucault (1972) as
‘the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance
of statements as unique events’ (129). Dinh’s starting point in Erasure is to
question why the uninvited arrival of Captain Cook on the eastern shores
of Australia should be commemorated with a replica of HMS Endeavour in
Sydney harbour, while the refugee boats bearing Iraqi and Afghan refugees
are immediately quarantined and destroyed, their passengers refused entry
and expelled. Dinh attempts to turn the tables by projecting an endless loop
of a scaled-down replica of this symbol of colonial exploitation as it burns
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Colin Gardner
Figure 2.5
Dinh Q. Lê. Barricade. 2014.
in a howling wind while beached on a desolate coastline. However, before
the ship is completely destroyed, it is always resurrected as the video begins
its loop again, snaring this hated colonial trope in an eddy of its own eternal
return as if to express both imperialism’s resilience and its inevitable transformation into a postcolonial hybridity.
Dinh expands the metonymic connection by including a real wooden hull,
smashed against some strategically positioned rocks in the gallery space,
surrounded not by sand but rather a ‘sea’ of photographs, each placed with
its face down as if to hide its identity. It turns out that the images are part
of a huge, undocumented archive of personal photographs left behind by
thousands of South Vietnamese who took to the sea as ‘boat people’ in order
to flee the incoming Communist regime in 1975. However, at the same time
that visitors see the visible evidence of displacement, they can also hear the
almost imperceptible whir of a computer scanner as an archivist painstakingly enters the images into a digital databank for access through a public AQ: In
website. As in the case of Cook’s Endeavour, the hegemonic role of the “Effective’
discursive archive is turned against itself as the signifiers of forced emigra- history…”
is no
tion and anonymity become the lifeblood of a more interactive archive, a there
opening
veritable pedagogical probehead against a simplistic historicizing of events quote for
in favour of what Nietzsche called ‘effective’ history, a history based on the closdiscontinuity yet at the same time geared towards ‘life’. As Foucault (1984) ing quote
given after
argues:
“Effective”.
Effective’ history . . . deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the
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the closing
quote or add
the opening
quote.
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Probeheads of Resistance and the Heterotopic Mirror
usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who
had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry
of a masked ‘other’. The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny
or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. (88)
In many ways, Barricade (2014) more fully exemplifies this ‘haphazard’ or
transversal quality of conflict as a bridge between and across diachronic time.
It consists of a pile of French-Vietnamese colonial furniture jammed between
two gallery walls, thereby creating a visual and physical obstacle between
the two halves of the exhibition space. The barricade also hides speakers that
broadcast the sound of Hame’s rapping and revolutionary propaganda. The
work’s most obvious stratigraphic connection is through its overt reference to
the legacy of both the Vietnamese and the Algerian struggles against French
colonialism. However, the links are far more generationally transversal than
a common war for national self-determination, for the policing of Algeria
during the 1950s was aided and abetted by military veterans returning home
after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Because Algeria was an
incorporated part of France rather than a colony—the white population of
Algiers were fully enfranchised French citizens—the war for independence
was actually a civil war, not unlike the attempts of the western media to paint
the Vietnam War as an aggressive incursion by the communist north into the
democratic south rather than a war for national self-determination. In addition, the symbol of the barricade looks back to the revolutions of 1789, 1830
and 1848, as well as the abortive Commune of 1871, thereby linking the
modern ‘subaltern’ struggle to the French domestic working class as transhistorical, ‘Wretched of the Earth’ cohorts.
More importantly, the barricades also look forward from Dien Bien Phu
and the Battle of Algiers to the events of May ’68, when the students and
workers joined forces against the repressive de Gaulle regime and consciously
evoked—through slogans and banners—both the Charonne Métro massacre
of 8 February 1962 and the 17 October 1961 murder of over 200 Algerians
who were eliminated by Paris police on the direct orders of the former Vichy
collaborationist, Maurice Papon, following a peaceful anti-war demonstration. Needless to say, Dinh’s piece also encourages us to think critically about
current racist attitudes that permeate not only France—witness the 2005 riots
that swept throughout Arab and black African immigrant sectors in both Paris
and the provinces—but also the European Union in general.
In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) recipe for finding the appropriate line of flight for responding to ‘the requirements of a given age’ has
considerable resonance for understanding both Dinh’s and Chung’s work as
a provocative combination of aisthesis and affectus. ‘This is how it should be
done,’ they suggest:
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Colin Gardner
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find
an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization,
possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of
new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one
succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape
and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue, a whole ‘diagram’, as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 161)
In short, bring on the (pedagogic) probeheads!
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Chapter 3
Dorothy Heathcote
Practice as a Pedagogy of Resistance
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
This chapter explores the work of Dorothy Heathcote1 as a material pedagogy
of resistance. Taking the principles of Heathcote’s (Bolton, 1998; Booth,
2012) work from the drama classroom into online teaching and learning practices, we explore contemporary pedagogies that are resistant to what might be
considered neoliberal education (Giroux, 2012). We argue that such resistant
pedagogies can be facilitated through e-portfolios, developed with an ethos
devised from the work of Heathcote (Heathcote and Bolton, 1996; Booth,
2012). In order to consider the material nature of resistance and its impact on
learners, we draw on Deleuze’s notions of affect (Hickey-Moody, 2009) and
associated theories of new materialism (Dolphin and van der Tuin, 2011).
CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND
Dorothy Heathcote’s practice was devised within the politically left-wing
British Drama Education movement of the late 1960s and 1970s (Heathcote
and Bolton, 1996). This period in education is not necessarily seen as
resistant to innovation. The revolution of child-centred learning (Entwistle,
1970) was established as a particular set of practices and Heathcote’s work
was positioned as different to the norm. Her interpretation of child-centred,
intra-active dramatic exploration of learning was in contrast to mainstream
practices which, in the main, lay in the teaching of speech and theatre skills.
In the first section, Dorothy Heathcote: a Pedagogue of Resistance, we consider Heathcote’s work in a more finely grained context. Specially, we are
interested in the varying ways she challenged the notion of the teacher being
the ‘one who knows’ (Wagner, 1976: 38) and eroded the possibility of teacher
expertise as her practice grew.
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provide the
expansion
term for
“ICT”.
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
In the second section, Electronic Pedagogies of Resistance, we explore
contemporary contexts, using examples of Heathcote’s philosophy of practice
in the employment of electronic portfolios in initial teacher education (ITE) at
Goldsmiths, London. Heathcote challenged existing practices, such as the use
of lesson plans. Her methods were based on the developmental work of practitioners like Piaget (Mussen, 1983) to uncover what was already within the
child. In this respect, Heathcote can be considered as part of what Hornbook
(1998) describes as the ‘revolution which profoundly altered ideas about teaching, learning and how education should be organised, and which had at its core
the idea that the aim of education was to cultivate happy, balanced individuals’
(10). In similar ways, elements of the mainstream practice of ITE are challenged
by developmental models used by Drama student-teachers at Goldsmiths.
In the third section, Contemporary Pedagogies of Resistance, we bring the
two areas of drama education and technology for education together, through
Heathcote’s last pedagogical model, the Rolling Role. We examine the Rolling Role in two contexts, both of which involve the use of ICT and have created a pedagogy of resistance. This shifts existing mainstream models of the
teacher/pupil relationship, empowering pupils to be their own pedagogues.
This change is primarily effected through replacing the superficial lesson plan
with an intra-active class dynamic that shapes lessons, and breaks through
politically driven restrictions through developing post-human practices.
DOROTHY HEATHCOTE: A PEDAGOGUE OF RESISTANCE
Dorothy Heathcote’s developmental work followed Peter Slade (1954) and
his protégé Brian Way (Bolton, 1998), who made major contributions to the
field and whose work challenged what had been a well-established practice of
teaching ‘speech and drama’ and theatre ‘skills’ on the curriculum. Working
on performances and exercises designed to refine presentation skills had been
the basic provision in schools. However, Slade (1954) introduced the idea of
children’s fantasy play and ‘being’ something as a valid art form in its own
right, stating: ‘Child Drama is an Art in itself, and would stand . . . alone as
being of importance’ (105).
In his book, Acting in Classroom Drama (1998), Bolton describes a class
Slade taught, in which children were absorbed in being objects, animals and
elements of the weather. Compared to the rehearsals for often humanistic
school productions, this was a classroom with each child afforded creative
agency. Process was foregrounded over product. There was no show, audience, no finished product, simply the state of being and expressing. Bolton
(1998: 125) explains:
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AQ: Please
note that
both
“drama” and
“Drama” are
used, e.g.
Drama student-teachers, drama
education
and technology, drama
classroom,
Drama
teaching,
issues in
Drama.
Please check
if “Drama”
can be
changed to
“drama” for
consistency
in the book.
AQ: Please
check if
“There was
no show,
audience…”
should be
changed to
“There was
no show, no
audience…”
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Dorothy Heathcote
Slade . . . is disposed to perceive in children’s own drama the . . . language of gesture’, the ‘law of rhythm’, and the ‘contours of song’, but, Slade would have us
understand, their achievement of ‘higher realms of drama’ is . . . largely unconscious. Indeed it is the very lack of contrived artistry that contributes to its beauty.
This version of drama, based on imagining being outside one’s self,
requires scaffolding. Without some principles for intra-action, this exciting
and revolutionary practice was at risk of being reverted back to the study of
play scripts or narrative presentation for lack of ‘definable’ principles. Having
observed Slade (1954) as a critical agent who broke from the existing views
of ‘what drama should look like’ in schools, Way (Bolton, 1998) produced a
model of practice robust enough to hold this freshly broken ground and communicate to teachers, in order to prevent this development being subsumed by
previous practices for want of a more concrete material basis.
Through his focus on improvisation and imagination, Slade shifted the
emphasis of drama to empowering the pupil voice. Developing articulate
communicators is an essential strand of the fight against social and political
oppression, and this could now be taught in the drama classroom. While one
could say the structure and guidance from Way was formalized, thus lacking
the freedom which Slade’s (1954) model enjoyed, it did address the learning
of specific skills to increase pupil empowerment. It effected the communication of pupils’ own text—not Shakespearean, nor the play written by an adult
that the head of school had chosen, with all the hidden oppressions which lie
therein; this pupil-generated content was vulnerable in Slade’s (1954) model.
Way’s (Bolton, 1998) method enabled teachers to find and develop teaching
styles that retained an investment in student imagination and student voice.
This model encouraged a sense that the work in the classroom could grow up
with, and be informed by, the pupils.
Referring to the work of Freire (1970), Giroux (2003) argues pedagogy
can be ‘either reduced to a sterile set of techniques or dressed up within
the discourse of humanistic methods that simply softened the attempts by
the schools to produce an insidious form of oral and political regulation’
(Giroux, 2003: 6). Against the truth of this binary, Way was looking to cultivate a politically engaged, unregulated imaginary without the use of ‘sterile
techniques’. He faced the dilemma of how to move a progressive idea into
progressive practice and in translating, he had to ‘borrow’ structures from the
past in order to move forward. Teachers were still making the initial decisions, planning the lessons, planning the freedoms and defining the boundaries. In Freirian (1970) terms, even though the banking system of education
was being challenged, the teacher still had to be seen as ‘narrator’. While
Slade’s and Way’s methods increase student agency, in institutional and
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quoted text
“Slade … is
disposed…”
the opening
quote for
the closing
quote after
“gesture”
is missing.
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the opening
quote as
appropriate.
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
material terms, teachers and learners are still trapped by required intra-actions
between ‘lesson and classroom’. There was more to be done: the affecting
bodies of classroom and lesson plan remained in their original positions.
The work of Slade (1954) and Way (Bolton, 1998) paved the way for
Heathcote’s revolutionary practices. Heathcote moved drama beyond decision
making, being and voice finding, to enable learners of all ages ‘to think critically, take risks, and resist dominant forms of oppression’ (Giroux, 2003: 7).
Heathcote reduced the presence of the teacher in the traditional sense: instead
of being the ‘one who knows’ (Wagner, 1976: 38), she sat on the floor with
her class and joined in with improvisation. Instead of a pre-planned session,
she worked spontaneously, negotiating the subject of the lesson, responding
to the class and their direction, while ensuring challenge and depth of content.
Echoing the physical positioning in language, she referred to her class as ‘we’
and fell into role as a fellow ‘worker’ in the classroom. The role and function of the teacher was now under scrutiny. The status of the teacher as the
knowledgeable ‘one’ in the classroom was being challenged, and this left the
issues regarding the role of the learners under the spotlight for interrogation
and exploration (Booth, 2012).
Heathcote decentred the concept of the teacher as an affecting body. Her
model is one whose relationship with knowledge is that of co-discoverer;
student-teachers and teachers are part of material networks that intra-act.
Instead of being the active supplier of knowledge, Heathcote played her role
in reverse, encouraging pupils to become other than themselves through processes of learning.
A good example of this becoming-other can be seen in the BBC documentary Three Looms Waiting (Smedley, 1971). The documentary features a
number of projects, one of which is set in a primary school in the Hartlepool
area. The class had been told the Bible story of Ahab, featuring the relocation of citizens to make room for the new queen’s palace. The play, which
was presented on numerous occasions but with any child playing any role,
involved sociopolitical issues, such as the injustice of class division, and the
pupils wrestled with these in drama and arrived at a flexible presentation.
With no script and no cast list, school plays had never looked like this. Similarly unknown was the complete commitment to role and profound sense of
becoming-other. Heathcote had no part in this play; she facilitated its creation
by selecting it and telling it, but the transformation into a ‘play’ had been
wholly owned by the children and effected through the children imagining
life as a different person, through their becoming-other.
The Freirian ‘banking’ concept of education (Freire, 1970: 72) was
really challenged by Heathcote, as she framed the learning about what
is unknown both to teacher and class. The pitch has to be the job of
the teacher, as does the frame in which work gets started. However, the
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Dorothy Heathcote
concept of letting the drama carry the teaching and learning (rather than
the teacher) was revolutionary: ‘Rather than being the subject of pedagogy, drama in education became a sophisticated form of pedagogy itself’
(Hornbrook, 1998: 13).
The teacher as affecting body in this instance is quite different from the
narrating or directing teacher of more traditional methods. The focus for
the teacher is on the setting up of the affectus, which is operated by the
affected bodies in the classroom. Here the pupils are both affected (by the
Heathcote-initiated framework for the lesson — the affectus) and become
affecting themselves (the usual role of the teacher) as the drama unfolds and
the learning is shared and processed collaboratively: ‘The affectio refers to
a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body,
whereas the affectus refers to the passage or movement from one state to
another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies’
(Hickey-Moody, 2009: 273).
It is worth pausing here to consider the wider context of the times. In Sullivan’s Art Practice as Research, Inquiry in Visual Arts, having traced the
growth of empirical research and its need to hypothesize, measure, test and
‘prove’ a truth, he goes on to describe the movement in the mid-twentieth
century, the time when Heathcote’s work emerged:
AQ: In
the quoted
text “The
primary
task is…”
please check
if “reponsive” can be
changed to
“responsive”
Despite its impressive record of constructing knowledge, empiricism has its limits. Theorists who question the assumption that the observed experience is the
only viable basis by which phenomena can be studied argue that other dialectical or dialogical approaches provide more scope in using reason and argument
to come to understand things. The primary task is the need to amplify and contextualize phenomena found in the empirical world and this means being reponsive to external, situated concerns and internal, felt cues. (Sullivan, 2010: 38)
This challenge to the empirical practices of the time parallels the challenge
Heathcote was making to Drama teaching classroom practice. Her awareness AQ: Please
that the matter to be opened up for scrutiny was the ‘intra-action between check the
edit in the
bodies and matter’ (Hickey-Moody and Page, this volume: 13) provided part sentence
of the arts education backdrop for the works of later scholars of arts practice “Her awareas research, as examined in chapter one of this book (Hickey-Moody and ness that…”
Page, 2015).
The first of Heathcote’s models which emerged from this way of working was called Man in a Mess. The class was confronted with some kind
of dilemma; Heathcote would introduce them to the context, invite them
to invest in it, say, by spending a day creating a fictional ancient manuscript which contained all the community records. Then she introduced a
dilemma: for example, the students were under attack and the sacred place
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AQ: In the
sentence
“Heathcote
believed…”
please
change “the
dominant
values
knowledge
that are” to
“the dominant values
knowledge
that is” or as
appropriate.
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
which housed the precious scrolls was occupied. When the class was ready,
Heathcote would slide out of the drama and watch the class resolve the situation for themselves. The affecting body was simply the designer of the frame.
The pupils’ intra-action and imagination created the affectus that constituted
their own learning within this frame.
The next development was Teacher in Role. This involved Heathcote
‘playing the role’ of classroom teacher, becoming removed from the student’s
core creative activities. This is captured in ‘Albert’ (Heathcote and Lawrence,
1973)—a class of children with Special Educational Needs who meet a tramp
called Albert. Despite being branded as children with no social skills by the
educational system, they demonstrate that they knew exactly what to do to
improve his life situation. As Heathcote steered herself away to the edges of
the lesson, keeping it contained as a teacher, but remaining disengaged, she
allowed the drama to exist between the class and Albert. Albert was thrown a
party and taught how to dance because the students felt he did not know how
to be happy—so the class showed him. The oppression of labelling had been
challenged by the children. The teacher as narrator was disappearing.
Heathcote’s dismantling of the accepted structures in the education classroom became the careful designing of a resource—a teacher in role as a
vagrant—to simply ‘be’ and generate, diffract and channel affectus. This
teacher as an affecting, diffractive body made way for her subject, and dramatic energy, as the pupils took complete control. They were affecting bodies in a very positive sense, finding Albert some clothes and teaching him to
dance. Albert, the children and Heathcote were all affected by the role play, AQ: In the
in which usual roles have been reversed. Stepping outside the context of sentence
the lesson and considering the constructs of the time, pupils who had been “Albert, the
considered incapable of relational social skills had proved the system wrong. children…”
please check
The oppressive machine of labelling had been thwarted, and both teacher and if “have
pupils had become ‘oppositional intellectuals’ (Giroux, 2003: 7).
been” should
Mantle of the Expert is the next pedagogical strategy that grew from these be changed
two stages of Heathcote’s work. Heathcote believed that pupils could become to “had
been”.
‘experts’ and thus questioned the dominant values knowledge that are embedded within ideas of expertise, and the forms of subjugated knowledge ideas of
expertise produce. With carefully preselected research materials made available, in the Mantle of the Expert, children remained in role as workers: looking up information, and empathizing with the situation until the language and
notions they were expressing became identifiable as creative acts. Heathcote
played the ‘I have no idea register’ (Wagner, 1976: 38) and performed her
imagined ignorance to a high level, so as to act as the perfect foil for pupils
to become the ‘knowledgeable’ ones. Consequently, the class had to be the
affecting and affected bodies at once. They became their own pedagogues,
or more accurately, the process itself was pedagogical, the intra-actions
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65
between ideas, bodies, feelings, senses effected change. The ‘lesson’, as well
as teacher as we knew them, had gone.
It appeared to some that the traditional concept of theatre was being lost in
this improvisational educational practice. Clearly what a play might be was AQ: In the
changing in that the philosophy taught through performance did not align to sentence
“Clearly
previous schools practice such as Naturalism, Realism, Absurdism, Dada, what a
and so on. Heathcote argued that a play is ‘an ordered sequence of events play…”
that brings one or more of the people in it to a desperate condition in which please
it must always explain and should, if possible, resolve’ (Bolton, 1998: 177). change
“schools
This focus on group process expresses Heathcote’s practice very well, in the practice”
respect that the very fabric of all her lessons matched an ordered sequence to “school
of events that brings one or more of the people in it to a desperate condition practices”
and calls for the group to resolve this trouble. What is of interest here is that or as
appropriate.
while the discourses employed to communicate Heathcote’s methods were
very humanist, and linguistically centred on a human teacher and student, the
pedagogical processes were about being more than oneself, imagining otherwise, and intra-acting with other objects and people in ways that changed how
students machined their subjectivity.
While much child-centred learning acknowledges the natural development
of children and makes suggestions as to how teachers might harness this to
guide learning, Heathcote’s model enabled children to make their own foundations and effect learning through process, rather than hijacking learning on
top of a process already in progression.
This was substantial empowerment made safe by the skilled use of an art
form.
Heathcote moved on to the Commission Model of teaching, in which a
real commission—like the designing of a hospital garden—forms the focus
of a project, and the class thus spends time in roles as gardeners, botanists,
horticulturalists, and so on. Pupils develop the knowledge and expertise so as
to present their design to the hospital governors. At the National Drama Conference in York in 2000, Heathcote described the rationality between space,
place and pupils that this method engendered, as gardens, soils, weather patterns were pedagogical in this context.
It could be argued that this challenged the notion of drama being about
the ‘make believe’: drama is about making anew rather than making believe.
Although the hospital garden quest was real, the children were not gardeners,
horticulturalists and botanists—they had had to become versions of these in
order to complete the task. This brought a previously unknown reality into
drama and once again brought challenge and ownership and agency to pupils.
Heathcote did not actively oppose existing models of practice but rather
offered something else, something other, which would achieve the same ends
and also affect post-human pedagogies of becoming other than human.
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Ross (as cited by Bolton, 1998) argued the aesthetic in drama was sidelined
in Heathcote’s work when it was maybe truer to say that she was creating
a different kind of theatre. Fleming (cited by Bolton, 1998), pointed out
that this work pursued the idea of meaning making of an aesthetic nature.
If children were increasing their understanding of meaning making and
enriching the content of the work, then this was a critical part of the aesthetic
dimension. Form and content are inextricably entwined. The affecting body
was no longer setting up an imagined frame, but rather selecting a real one.
The affectus occurring within this frame was being generated by gardens,
weather, homeless people, pupils’ memories and imaginations.
ELECTRONIC PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Under the
Thatcher
government…”
Under the Thatcher government, 1979–1990, there was a sea change in
education, not only in the classrooms of the schools, but also in the lecture
theatres in training providers. The Education Reform Act 1988 saw the
introduction of the National Curriculum alongside other provisions which
tied schools more directly to government influence and this, in turn, saw the
arrival of a rigid system in schools. Similar changes came into universities.
Peter Wilby describes the legacy:
The government’s grip over higher education was never to be relaxed: it became,
over the following decades, ever tighter and more bureaucratic, as mechanisms
were invented to measure teaching and research ‘quality’. (Wilby, 2013)
AQ: Please
check the
word usage
“dictats”.
In ITE, the dictats of Special Educational Needs, literacy and numeracy,
behaviour management, and so on replaced psychology, sociology, politics
and philosophy. Student-teachers in the English system now have to ‘gather
evidence’ (for which one might read ‘gather qualitative and quantitative
data’) against the Teaching Standards as set out by the government. There
are eight basic standards. If you meet these standards, you can become a
teacher. The standards are lacking in depth, sophistication, political awareness and criticality. The crucial child-centred learning features are hidden in
a subclause referred to as
demonstrating an awareness of the physical, social, and intellectual development of children, and know how to adapt teaching to support pupils’ education
at different stages of development. (DFE, 2013: 11)
Ironically, just as the development of arts practice as research was finding
its way, the education system was catapulted in reverse to a system reliant
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Dorothy Heathcote
AQ: Please
check the
edit in “The
teaching
practice…”
AQ: Please
check
whether the
sentence
“Duplication
was widespread ...”
is okay as
given.
67
on proving a teacher’s worth by the gathering of hard data of experiences
had, books read and lectures attended. There has been a distinct return to
the ‘banking system’ (Friere, 1970) which is easy to measure and monitor,
and therefore to a certain extent research, but is hostile to innovation and
creativity, and criticality.
Despite the laudable work being carried out under the Creativity agenda
(Craft and Jeffery, 2008), much of this involves work within the existing
educational and curriculum structures rather than exploring what could lie
beyond them. According to Gibson (Shaheen, 2010), contemporary work
within existing structures is accompanied by an awareness that creativity
should be playing a key role in strengthening the economy. We propose
that, while the economic commodification of creativity cannot be ignored, it
should not overshadow its essential role in developing thinking and producing
visionary practice within existing structures and most importantly, beyond.
This point is acknowledged and considered by Julian Sefton-Green in his lecture ‘The Creativity Agenda’, where he highlights the need for ‘new forms of
measurement for attainment beyond the performance agenda’ (Sefton-Green,
2011). Here the need for a serious reconsideration of the materialism we are
discussing and ways of evaluating this in new non-empirical ways is echoed
once more.
At the time of its development, Heathcote’s pedagogy of resistance did
not meet with much opposition. As the late 80s established themselves in AQ: In the
statues written in stone, the climate had changed. Resistance was considered sentence “As
the late…”
foolhardy. The education system began to petrify. Drama is not a National please check
Curriculum subject and therefore in a stronger position than others to fol- if “statues”
low its own lines of development. However, there are restricting oppressive should be
structures which impinge on this, and it would be untrue to say that Drama changed to
“statutes”
has been completely unscathed by these. One critical area which has had an
impact is that of ITE.
Having worked in a number of teacher education establishments from 2001
to the present day, we detected a pattern. The teaching practice file required
to demonstrate that a student could meet required standards was duplicated AQ: Please
by student after student and covered in Post-it notes indicating standards note that
which were supposed to be ‘evidenced’ by this document. Consequently, “student
teachers”
teaching standards appeared to be about amassing lessons plans, schemes has been
of work and evaluations and observations. The files were massive—a lever changed to
arch file for each term for the tutor to go through at the end of the year, tick- “studenting off the standards as they searched. Most student-teachers sectioned their teachers” in
all occurfiles standards by standard, copying the scheme of work they made from rences for
scratch themselves maybe four times as ‘evidence’ against, what was ini- consistency
tially, 33 different standards. Duplication was widespread, as was the amount in the book.
of paper and time used. Student-teachers groaned under the pressure of file Please
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check.
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Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
production (duplication) and so did the tutors who had to go through the same
lesson plan submitted by hundreds of different students. According to these
evidence files, ITE was all about planning, lessons and delivery.
Student-teachers were not connecting their evidence file with what actually
happened to them on teaching practice. The standards had been set as targets
to ‘improve’ the level of initial teacher training, yet it was possible for studentteachers to present weak evidence and pass the standards. In this instance, the
government became the primary affecting body—and the government had set
up concrete directives as a vehicle for affectus. This was apparently done to
raise standards of practice and to make measurable what had hitherto been
difficult for the government to measure. However, it had the reverse effect,
with student-teachers providing superficial evidence which could be easily
‘ticked off’. It was failing to nurture the rich context for learning that was
apparent in the earlier models, including the developmental work of Heathcote. However, it did succeed in wielding a great deal of power and control.
Student-teachers were busily collecting artefacts about minutiae, and this
did not encourage them to lift their heads up and look at the bigger picture.
Student-teachers would relate inspiring accounts of how they had achieved a
breakthrough in their relationship with a pupil in their form, and then submit
a register with the names erased, as evidence of pastoral experience.
The teaching body became a vehicle of sad affect, as teachers started
to behave in a disempowered way and were reduced to being a ‘deskilled
corporate drone’ (Giroux, 2003: 7) as they busily collated scrapbooks to
satisfy standards, instead of satisfying themselves and by so doing, satisfying standards. In addition, evidence had been misunderstood, universally
it seems; what was in their files were artefacts. In order for an artefact to
become evidence, some contextualization, evaluation and/or reflection is
required. The example above would have been rich indeed, had studentteachers included copies of written accounts of pedagogical incidents; notes
from meetings with the pastoral team; minutes from meetings with teams
of specialists; and lessons which had been designed to feature some of this
advice/guidance. In fact, such a presentation of evidence would have claimed
a number of standards at once, achieving depth, an understanding of how
teaching elements relate to each other, a development of practice in the light
of learning and the new relationships formed in terms of expertise and support. Something had to be done to
engage (authority) critically in order to develop pedagogical principles aimed
at encouraging student teachers to learn how to govern rather than be governed,
while assuming the role of active and critical citizens in shaping the most basic
and fundamental institutional structures of a vibrant and inclusive democracy.
(Giroux, 2003: 7)
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69
At Goldsmiths, the process of building portfolios was redesigned to
heighten the student-teachers’ own personal learning, giving credence to the
standards but using them as markers on their own journey rather than reaching them as goals. These are government-stipulated standards which have
seen several changes since they were first created and lack the consistency
that true good teaching should enjoy (Alexander, 2011).
Student-teachers should be enabled to take a Freirian perspective in
this process and govern these standards, rather than be governed by them.
Amanda Kipling trialled such a model, focusing on student-teachers’ autonomous personalized learning. It acknowledged the authority of the standards,
but the quality of the evidence collected became much stronger. Studentteachers were asked to collect ‘episodes or chapters’ about their own practice
and then see what standards were covered, rather than the reverse. The files
transformed. They became slimmer and were a truer, richer reflection of the
student experience, rather than a scrapbook of disjointed paper artefacts. This
was akin to Heathcote’s practice in which all student-teachers were aware of,
and were developing, their own drama practice. Once the learner-centredness
had been established, the quality of the evidence soared, with the files taking
on individuality and engaging interesting content and reflection. In so doing,
the materiality of learning becomes a core part of what is perceived to be
learnt and how the body becomes.
A couple of years passed and electronic portfolios were introduced. This
opened up a few issues in Drama; the software was rather clunky, but those
who used Facebook, which was quite widespread in 2009, could manage to
make attractive pages evidencing both the standards and their own learning
at the same time, held together largely by reflective personalized writing
about processes, learning and creating, problem solving and engaging in challenging issues. The artefacts still included lesson plans and evaluations and
observations, but there were also photos, emails, memos, journals, extracts
from books and websites, links and records of pupils’ work, recordings and
short pieces of video of their own work and their class. Files were attached—
so tutors could open and read if they wished—while the really engaging and
educationally valuable part was the evaluative text itself. There is a space for
‘feedback’ at the bottom of each page.
Handy, user-friendly digital cameras—flip cams and then go-pros—had
become trendy—and the next two years saw a refining in the software
which added to the increased fluidity of page production. As online literacy
increased, the pages became pithier. In 2013–2014, student-teachers started
to share their pages with one another and take each other’s schemes of work
to use and report back to the original designer under the feedback section
hitherto used by the tutor in college and mentor in school. Student-teachers
enjoyed this sharing practice and had previously had limited opportunity
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70
AQ: Please
check the
edits in “In
this case,
the generation…”
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
to do so in the university calendar. So they share extracts in the university
studio, and if the work is liked, others can go to their electronic portfolio to
download the rest of the lesson or scheme. Hitherto this had been done by
email. Now there is evidence that this portfolio is significantly more than a
file of artefacts—this portfolio is an intra-active record of evidence which is
fuelling and supporting other student-teachers: an online learning community
(Wenger, 1998).
Reflecting on this, the online community is, in fact, initially framed by
the tutor but is engaged with, grown and redefined by the student-teachers
themselves. Once the frame is set up, the tutor ‘lets go’ and student-teachers
use it as they please. Just as Heathcote spent time and consideration in setting
up the learning frame for a drama class and ‘let go’ once they had grasped
it, the work for the student-teachers went into designing the skeleton of the
portfolio. Once they had taken over ownership, the tutor had to ‘let go’, and
learning became quite improvised in the online environment that the studentteachers had developed.
Heathcote facilitated students accessing and uncovering knowledge and
learning through group process, focusing on intra-active learning happening
between pupils, environments and curriculum frameworks. In the same way,
the electronic portfolios draw out collaborative intra-active learning between
student-teachers, classrooms, cultures, user-generated net content, web platforms, machines, and so on. Material exchanges of teaching and learning
processes placed the student at the centre of the learning process. In both
cases, what was being celebrated and nurtured was group-led processes, intraactions of the individual outside the individual, and child/student-centred
learning.
Affecting bodies are more than human. In this case, the generation of materials, experiences of teaching and lesson accounts are affecting bodies made
manifest through non-human technologies. Thus, the affectus exists in the
interaction between the human student-teacher as writer/sharer and a fellow
student-teacher receiving this through a non-human online channel, processing the material for themselves and projecting their imagined interpretation
onto a class before preparing to go into the classroom.
The student-teachers are affecting the learning community (Wenger, 1998)
and at the same time are being affected by it. This is a direct parallel to the
Heathcote drama lesson model where the pupils had become their own pedagogues. In this case, the student-teachers are becoming pedagogues of resistance, as they enrich their own empowered learning and claim the standards
as they pass them by. They collaborate so they enjoy more input from others
and learning becomes about material exchange and collective process.
In recent messages to a forum discussion on the electronic portfolio system
at Goldsmiths College, ITE students shared designs lessons for interviews,
Hickey-Moody & Page_9781783484867.indb 70
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Now there
is…”
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“In both
cases…”
AQ: Please
check the
phrase
“shared
designs
lessons for
interviews”
and change
if necessary.
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Dorothy Heathcote
71
interview questions and experiences and jobs coming up in schools they
knew. In participating in this forum, the student-teachers were helping each
other find and gain employment. A structure originally designed to test, measure (‘bank’) and check their suitability for teaching had been turned into a
tool of empowerment by these student-teachers. The affected body had overshot the demands of the dictating powers and transformed the affectus into
something of their own making. The government frame and the tutor frame
had been eroded and replaced by a new one forged by themselves. A structure
which could be described as rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) was
beginning to emerge.
CONTEMPORARY PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
In the summer of 2013, the National Drama Conference in Greenwich celebrated a project called The Water Reckoning. This was based on Heathcote’s
very last model—Rolling Role—which was still being developed when she
died in 2011. Akin to the processes outlined above, Rolling Role initially
involved a drama teacher running a lesson whereby the material left behind
by one class became the stimulus for the next. This required the teacher to be
skilled and responsive in picking up the needs and interests of the group and
shaping their learning—rather than teaching a lesson—around these factors,
using not their ‘own material’, but working with whatever the last lesson left
behind. The teacher again is squeezed out of the ‘teaching’ in the usual sense
of the word, and all the teaching and learning energies are within the class.
Heathcote continued to move the teacher away from their dominant knowledgeable role although the teacher. This method encouraged interest in drama
across year groups as classes wondered what the next class had done with their
work and wanted to leave something ‘good to work with’ behind them for the
incoming class. The focus was on the pedagogical link from class to class,
connecting through the learning process, rather than a teacher’s lesson plan.
In 2011 Heathcote delivered a videoconference about Rolling Role for the
Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) at Goldsmiths. This was the last major
event at a university before her death. By this time, the Rolling Role method
of teaching had undergone some changes. In this, she described a version of
the model she ran on the famous Burke and Hare murders that took place
in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1828. This involved a drama teacher—herself, a
history teacher and a geography teacher. The system depends on intra-action
between teachers. The material produced by the children is ‘published’ in
some way, so as to be built upon in the next lesson. There is no presenting of
‘the best work’ on the wall. All products of the lesson have value and may be
picked up as stimuli by another in the following class.
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AQ: The
meaning of
the sentence
“Heathcote
continued
to move…”
is not clear.
Please
check and
rephrase.
7/28/2015 5:46:20 PM
72
Anna Hickey-Moody and Amanda Kipling
For example, in drama, student-teachers would explore what might have
happened, and how, in a historically significant event. This, in turn, would raise
more questions to be followed up in the next history or geography class. The
teachers were largely information facilitators, ensuring the pupils had research
resources in order to understand what took place. These lessons cannot be
planned in the traditional way, as the direction of enquiry will spring from
what the children are interested in, while perusing questions arising from their
previous lesson. The project culminated in a large sharing, where all the classes
and areas were fused together making sense of one another in their context.
In this classroom, pupils are using maps, consulting documents, using
literacy and numeracy in complex ways, and discovering by investigation.
The requirements of the National Curriculum are being surpassed: boxes
are ticked as they are being passed by. The same can be said of the teachers
who were engaging with the art form as it emerged and supported it to maintain the chain of development. In the National Drama Conference of 2012,
schools from around the world joined by internet link to create a Rolling Role
which celebrated a new twist. These were all drama teachers, just as in the
early version of the model, but the classrooms were not in the same school:
these were many miles apart. The theme selected was the Water Reckoning—
every school was near the coast, and so a geographical common theme could
be enjoyed. Teachers ran lessons and classes produced sources which could
then be shared electronically.
The link between the way these teachers were working and how the
Goldsmiths student-teachers’ electronic portfolios had developed into an
online learning community showed that the perfect vehicle was already in
place for carrying this kind of project for student-teachers. Drama teachers
could now spread the impact of their students’ work using the internet. Schools
have increasingly become separated by competition, and the realm of teacher
education has fallen more and more into the hands of schools who increasingly come under the pressures of a right-wing government. The universities
who are still straining under the pressure of the obligations set by government
to cover certain aspects of the curriculum—for example, the emphasis on
phonics in the primary curriculum—fight valiantly to keep the sound, wellresearched principles of child-centred learning alive despite the system itself
firmly rooted in a ‘banking’ model described by Freire (1970).
Through Heathcote, and through our appropriation of Heathcote’s work as a
method for facilitating e-learning, teachers can now find a way of challenging
isolation and working across cultures and countries. Once again, in a system
designed to keep heads down and focused within the four walls of the classroom, teachers had found a way of breaking free, and technology had been the
vehicle by which this could happen. After Heathcote’s death, others were discovering the resistance in Heathcote’s last model, translated into a new platform.
Hickey-Moody & Page_9781783484867.indb 72
AQ: Please
check the
edit in the
sentence
“These lessons cannot
be…”
AQ:
“National
Drama
conference”
has been
changed to
“National
Drama
Conference”
for consistency. Please
check.
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Dorothy Heathcote
73
Up until this point, the pedagogy of resistance on the drama education AQ: In the
course at Goldsmiths had been triggered or raised by the tutor. What hap- sentence
pened next in this development lay in the hands of the student-teachers. “Up until
this point…”
Over the previous two years, teaching had seen the widespread impact of please
the 5-minute lesson plan (@Teachertoolkit.me, 2014). Launched on Twitter, change “on
it went viral very quickly and OfSTED (Office for Standards in Education) the drama
endorsed this practice shortly afterwards. This is a plan which contains a education
course”
simple outline of what is expected to be covered during the lesson and can to “in the
be shown as a flow chart. A flow chart is a quick and deep way of recording drama
a plan to oneself. It is ideal when a new idea is being sketched out and the education
direction of the lesson could go in several ways, and the teacher needs to course” or as
appropriate.
have considered a number of avenues to be prepared. The linear, fixed lesson
plan does not help these common lesson circumstances. It can be represented
using an electronic template of a flow chart or can easily be drawn freehand
with a pen on paper.
Student-teachers had met this idea in schools and wanted to try it out.
This would make massive demands on their spontaneous teaching skills, and
yet the simplicity of the plan enabled them to prepare the kinds of activities
they might do—but not be bound by them. It did, of course, leave the door
open for the early Heathcote practice—‘What shall we do today then? I have
no plan. I can’t plan till I’ve met a class’ (Wagner, 1976: 16), and several
were skilled enough to want to try this out without pre-designing the learning at all, leaving the work to the class and the sources to carry the energy
and direction, leaving them to chance their arms and do the shaping—a new
direction for them as student drama teachers. They were willing to ‘let go’
and trust the dramatic content to assist the class in being both the affected and
the affecting bodies. In varying degrees, these student-teachers wanted to see
if they follow the lead of their classes further, and do so without the safety net
of a lesson plan. They now had two technology-based vehicles with which to
work, and by putting the two together, the project took off.
Looking at The Water Reckoning project website (www.water-reckoning.
net/), the student-teachers could not see how the project’s sessions went.
There were the artefacts and beautiful, professionally made video sequences
capturing the essence of the work, with stunning underwater shots of sea statues. There was no process recorded though. In their position as student-teachers, the process of managing the learning in the classroom held their focus;
with the pressure of the next class coming through the door, they wanted to
know more about classroom management. Heathcote left the student-teachers
to figure out how to manage their classrooms on their own.
As student-teachers, they needed to share in order to learn, and so they
set up a rota: each week, two of them would run a session in their schools
and contribute something to a collective pool of resources grown from these
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sessions from which they/their pupils could feed. Everything would be
recorded on a shared page in their portfolio, so they would be collectively
gathering evidence of their venture into new pedagogy as they went. They
would provide an outline of what happened in the session, so there was a
story behind the resources. A meeting was held with the online pedagogy
specialist, who discussed the design of the portfolio and set it up for them.
The original stimulus they chose was urban housing, and so they named the
folio Tower Block. The stories they shared varied enormously. The tutor was
not present for this meeting.
Mentors in the placement schools shared some frustrations; despite the
freedom of not being on the National Curriculum, for years there had been
pressure to have set schemes of work and to have assessment weeks with
grades and comments and targets, some of which were incongruent with the
drama and associated pedagogies. They had seen targets dwindle into a list
pertaining to ‘facial expression’, ‘body language’ and ‘levels’ of learning.
There was pressure in some schools for drama to conform to this dominant
banking trend. In evaluations, pupils were saying more or less the same
thing in year 7 as they were in year 11, that they wanted to learn ‘because
this is what gets them marks in GCSE examinations’. This not only thinned
the quality of the work, while claiming to strengthen it, but also provided a
very flawed sense of what theatre is. This superficial use of concrete indicators echoes the initial manner in which the teaching standards were being
‘evidenced’.
Some teachers resisted this, such as Daniel Shindler. His workshop for
CAL, Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2009 utilized the archetypes as a vehicle for evaluating drama. Others who also demonstrated resistance grew their own theatre criticism language in their classes. This resulted
in rich, interesting critique of theatre, examining content and the challenge
facing the audience rather than the checklist-for-comment approach which
had become a fail-safe way of gaining marks in the written component in the
national public examinations.
The school-based drama mentors warmly responded to the idea of running with the Rolling Role project idea. However, most said they could
not let student-teachers do this in a lesson—it had to be in a club. Initially
disappointing, this in itself is an act of resistance. Mentors were not saying
no—they needed to position this responsive and critically engaged pedagogy
somewhere safe from criticism and scrutiny. Mentors were happy to support
the idea, and student-teachers set up the new portfolio which would serve as
the vehicle by which they could pick up resources and read about how these
were arrived at in these semi-improvised sessions.
The student-teachers found a picture of a Tower Block, and this was the
starting point. From this stage, the work became a fiesta of differentiated
Hickey-Moody & Page_9781783484867.indb 74
AQ: In the
sentence
“Mentors in the
placement
schools…”,
“national
curriculum”
has been
changed to
“National
Curriculum”
for consistency. Please
check.
7/28/2015 5:46:20 PM
Dorothy Heathcote
75
learning. The interest in classrooms was huge in terms of where the work had
come from and where it was going. Once again, it is evident that there is a
desire to reach out beyond the claustrophobic realms of the school classroom
and connect with what is beyond. One girls’ school was happy for their work
to go anywhere, other than the boys’ school next door. Not surprisingly,
there were a range of ways both pupils and student-teachers responded to the
theme.
This rhizomatic classroom was an organizational structure based on lateral,
intertwining connections across various contexts more than ordered, striated
hierarchical organizational structures: ‘a rhizome . . . is always in the middle,
between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25).
This model was arrived at by the student-teachers, and it gave them precisely the kind of flexibility they needed. It manifested ownership among the
students. Not only was this in keeping with the practice of Heathcote, but
student-teachers were required to pursue knowledge and this was entirely
sympathetic to the notion of arts practice as research.
Tower Block grew in many different directions. A few indicative examples
have been selected. One student working in a privileged boys’ school decided
to allow the club free-flow response to the photo of a Tower Block. What
resulted was some slick physical theatre, but the classist content developed
showed prejudiced images of people unemployed and watching TV all day,
with references to drink and drugs. At the end, the student reflected that
despite what has been ‘taught’, somewhere along the line, this is what had
been learnt. It is easy enough to mistake what is learnt for what is recalled
or understood for examinations. This caused the ITE student and his peers to
consider the nature of true learning and reconsider how far the slick lesson
plan that covers material and delivers a curriculum can be truly seen as educational. The Heathcote practice that student-teachers had been following, and
gradually learning about during the year, sunk in at yet another deeper level.
Critical engagement needed to be facilitated continuously if classist and racist assumptions that are taught through the hidden curriculum of the school
system are to genuinely be challenged.
Another had his ‘best lesson’ with a very challenging group in a one hour
and 40 minute lesson. He had prepared five layers to help structure the lesson but had no idea exactly how to use them in the lesson. Having not been
able to do this at all in previous lessons, the class showed they could build a
simple piece of theatre and show it making sense and having form, without
conflict within the working group. He felt he had truly focused on the learning
of the class rather than trying to get them through his lesson plan. He and his
mentor (who was fascinated by the previous lesson) decided to ‘just see what
happens if’ their challenging year 9 group played The Great Game of Power.
This is a game invented by Augusto Boal, involving a set of chairs, a table
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and a bottle, which are arranged and rearranged to try to make one chair carry
the highest status in relation to the other items. Once this has been worked
through and agreed, including people into the arrangement develops the game
and the task continues (Boal, 1992: 150). This resulted in pupils taking over
the game and playing it solidly for half an hour. Mentor and student simply
watched. Uncertain of what was happening, it was clear that this was feeding
some kind of learning need in the group, as they enthusiastically engaged
with the game. Something about status was being worked out in safe and
happy ways in that classroom, and they both knew that the traditional lesson
plan would never have allowed this to happen. It became part of the basis of
an experimental scheme of work on Boal’s Forum theatre (Boal, 1992). These
were small starting points, and larger things grew quickly from them simply
because the comfort blanket of the oppressive pedagogy was dropped. Feeling somewhat insecure about this, student-teachers and mentors alike took
a calculated risk initially but rapidly saw the benefits of taking this practice
into the classroom. They also saw how the curriculum was covering cracks—
rather than addressing them.
Another had lines of text on paper on the floor. She asked which lines of
text the pupils liked and invited the students to stand by the lines they liked.
After negotiating with the class, it was decided that they would work in the
groups into which they had fallen by text choice. She realized that one group
had formed which she would never have allowed had she been in normal
‘lesson plan and delivery mode’ as they were likely to be poorly behaved if
together. The group worked beautifully. On reflection, she asked when the
classroom was ever going to be a place for really developing social skills if
the groups are always pre-planned, and realized how she had actually been
instrumental in forcing a negative template onto these girls who were, in fact,
ready and willing to move on. In addition, she felt that the pupils had been
invited to be the makers of artistic choice (offered the Mantle of the Expert)
by selecting the piece of text which drew them in, and so shed the identity
of pupils in a classroom ‘who were kept apart’. This notion of how she proffered alternative identity adoption as a learner, she felt, was worth exploring
further in her practice.
It is possible to see clearly that the nature of the ground being broken here
bears resemblance to the varying aspects of new materialism as explored by
Bolt (2014), who acknowledges that this has ‘validated a rethinking of the
relationship between humans and non-humans’ and that ‘the emergence of
new human–technological relationships have decentred the subject’ (Bolt,
2014: 3). In the instances discussed above, the humans involved both maintained and questioned their position as ‘sovereign human subject’ (Bolt,
2014: 3); for example, the racist boys maintained their sovereignty, and
others questioned it, such as the girls who grouped themselves according to
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sentence choices. Bolt draws on the work of Haraway (1991), who sees the
human subject in new materialism as one who ‘encompasses the human and
the non-human, the social and the physical, and the material and the immaterial’ (Bolt, 2014: 3). The Rolling Role clearly calls the students to be both
human and non-human, to engage the materiality of worlds and become with
them, at the same time as they are called by the school system to retain their
identity as learners.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has examined the work of Dorothy Heathcote as a pedagogue
of resistance. She introduced some models and principles which can and
have been developed from improvised learning and based on the intra-action
between people and objects. Having marked several new ways ahead for
people to consider and no doubt flattered by her following, she was aware
of the issue Hornbrook had raised about her ‘devoted’ and ‘unshamefacedly
messianic’ following (Hornbrook, 1998: 13). We recall her words in an
informal discussion at a conference: ‘You don’t need me—you need to go to
your classrooms and get on with your own lives.’ Above all, Heathcote was
keen to free teachers and students to make processes of educational drama
their own. We argue that her pedagogy of resistance went further than her
own pupils and herself as teacher in her classroom; this penetrated into the
profession itself.
Heathcote largely removed herself from pedagogical situations and
allowed various kinds of affectus to affect the student-teachers themselves.
This whole matter of being affected was key to her practice of resistance. This
does depend, however, as the student-teachers discovered, on highly skilled
teachers designing and critically directing the original frame.
In a very different climate today, drama educators are swimming against
the tide. Resistance is more challenging. Student-teachers must show that
they meet the standards, or they fail. Responsibility for initial teacher training
is moving towards schools, reducing the role of universities and so making
the influence of government control more direct.
However, when Heathcote’s Rolling Role and the student-owned electronic portfolios fused together, this time in a frame more owned by the
learners than the tutor, a whole variety of resistance-featured teaching and
learning discourses took place. This went beyond the usual restrictions of
the lesson plan and the student-teacher; it challenged mentors, curriculum
design, the pupils themselves. Heathcote’s focus on the learner rather than
teacher is acutely pertinent in the current context, as well as her classroom of
last century. At present, immediate concern lies with the disempowerment of
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the teachers and the erosion of their role. However, by shifting focus towards
empowering learners (in this case, either student-teachers or pupils) to be
both affected and affecting bodies, and including non-human platforms and
agents, pedagogies of resistance can emerge when critical engagement is
facilitated by student-teachers. Internet technology can play a releasing and
critical role, bridging isolation in schools by forging communication links
and developing materials of resistance for teachers and pupils as affecting and
affected bodies alike. At the same time, the internet can map, monitor and
evaluate it as an essential tool in the development of arts practice as research.
After Heathcote, we encourage drama teachers to facilitate critical communities online and to teach student criticality through very strategic intervention
into student-led creative processes.
NOTE
1. Dorothy Heathcote was not a mainstream teacher. She carried out all her work
visiting schools that carved out some days for her in which to run such projects.
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Chapter 4
Art, Resistance and Demonic Pedagogy
From Parasite Capitalism
to Excommunication
Charlie Blake and Jennie Stearns
This chapter may be considered a preface to and an exploration of how the
concept of the parasite, along with related concepts—such as that of the host,
the guest, the stranger, the invader, the alien, the demonic (or daemonic), and
the possessor and possessed—allows for new configurations of art as resistance in a pedagogical environment, an environment increasingly conditioned
and determined by the exigencies and machineries of neo-liberal capitalism.
Within this exploration, there is undoubtedly a covert affiliation to and/or tension with a number of strands emerging from recent tendencies in critical and
political thought, just as these tendencies are themselves responding to recent
transfigurations of epistemological and ontological paradigms across a number of disciplinary fields. On this transdisciplinary evolution, and particularly
in relation to the new materialism or materialisms that have of late come to
increasing prominence, one of the authors of this chapter has provided elsewhere a summary which colludes in a number of ways with the discussion
that follows (Blake and Haynes, 2014).
Suffice it to say in brief, however, that the notions of the pedagogy of the
possessed, along with the intrinsic ambiguity of the idea of parasitism—for
the latter both in terms of repression/oppression, on the one hand, and resis- AQ: In the
tance/emancipation on the other—coincide closely with a number of the sentence
concerns of new materialism as investigated in Hickey-Moody and Page’s “Moreover,
it is our conchapter in this volume. Moreover, it is our contention that emergent pedago- tention…”
gies will need to generate of advocacy and resistance across the spectrum of the meaning
the libidinal-material-ecosophical1 economies emerging in response to the of “generate
possibility of a post-Anthropocene world. The main terms of what follows of advocacy” is not
here—host and guest, possession, resistance, art, pedagogy itself—thus orbit clear. Please
the problematic term ‘parasite’—conceived as a spinning core of conceptual check if this
generation, adaptation and illumination. Thus, this chapter’s first section will should be
rephrased.
79
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define parasitism (and related concepts), following the work of Michel Serres
in particular, both as a positive and a negative activism, and then move on
via the anomaly of parasitism/symbiosis to the transitions of pedagogy from
that of the oppressed (as exemplified by the work of Paulo Freire, 1970) to
that of the possessed.
OUTSIDE/INSIDE—POWER AND PEDAGOGY
Half a century ago, Paolo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970),
argued from a broadly Marxist perspective for a pedagogically driven
decolonization of the colonized through praxis and opposed what he termed
a dialogics of cooperation to an antidialogics of acquisition, exploitation and
control. Obviously, since then, the nature and reach of colonization, global
capitalism, the state and the corporation, and communication networks have
changed dramatically. Indeed, the expressive arts that emerge from this mesh
are invariably seen now as inseparable from an infrastructure that has grown
around the machinery of government, trade, finance and law, like a parasitic
fungus. Parasitism in this understanding, however, is not given a purely
negative denotation, as is often the case in political rhetoric or prejudiced
and lackadaisical journalism. It is understood here, following the work of
Michel Serres (2007), as a primary condition for the very possibility of communication, education and creative expression in emergent material, semiotic
and libidinal economies. Serres’s revaluation of the concept, in other words,
allows for the parasite to be understood as a site of resistance to many current
dominant modes of capitalist existence.
Elsewhere, we have argued that the current configurations of neo-liberalism and the libidinal affinities its pervasive rhetoric has with certain strands
of paranoid thinking suggest that aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s diagramming in AntiOedipus (1983) of global capitalism’s future have
indeed come to pass (Stearns and Blake, 2013). Here, we further argue that
elements of current, ostensibly paranoiac thinking likewise indicate emergent
forms of subjectivity and resistance. The problem of critique (which has so
exercised political commentary that many have now dispensed with the use or
notion of critique altogether [Latour, 2004]) hinges on notions of outside and
inside that presuppose a position beyond or outside capitalism, a point from
which it can be judged and from which resistance, rebellion or revolution
can be initiated. This problem, we argue, needs to be radically reconfigured
according to what we describe as a demonic pedagogy through which that
which is inside yet radically other can be nurtured, through which this other,
this parasite, is not ejected or rejected, but rather embraced as a condition of
both positive existence and resistance.
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In this, we are working in a broadly similar, though distinct, trajectory to
that taken by Alex Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark in their
recent Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2014),
which points to developing ways of understanding the inside/outside problematic as necessitated by changes in media flow and control—new ways of
conceptualizing the divine, the ghost, the alien and the non-human—and, in
our case, the parasitic, the demonic and the stranger—within our midst as
agents of transition and resistance. Bearing in mind the various connotations
of the term ‘possession’ from political theory to the horror film, we here begin
to explore how, through a re-envisioning of concepts of hospitality, sacrifice
and the parasite, a pedagogy of the oppressed might evolve into a pedagogy
of the possessed.
THE MOBIUS OF MEDIA
In an episode of the BBC series Planet Earth (Fothergill, 2008), the writer,
producer, naturalist and narrator Sir David Attenborough describes how the
parasitical cordyceps fungus takes control of its anti-host’s body, compelling
it to climb higher and higher up an available stalk until finally killing it by
bursting from its head as a constellation of spores which thereby repeat the
cycle by infecting more ants. Like a number of similar accounts of so-called
‘zombie parasites’, Attenborough’s narration, delivered with his typical
sangfroid, characterizes this ‘bizarre’ phenomenon as ‘something out of
science fiction’. The parasitic fungus that has ‘infiltrated their bodies and
their minds’, leaving the ants directed by their ‘infected brain[s]’, by the
parasite within, by this seemingly alien and yet terrestrial invader, surely
‘seems extreme’, he tells us. And yet, in some important ways, the apparent
extremity of this image is only extreme to us as viewers, as consumers of
mass-produced visio-textual data streams, because it mirrors a cultural reality
that we prefer to avoid looking at more directly.
Maybe ‘prefer’ is too soft a term here. Indeed, maybe it is more accurate
to suggest that we are vigorously trained or instructed or even programmed
from an early age via media and educational systems not to look at what such
images encode too directly because they reveal the very process of instruction itself as a form of semiotic violence. Either that, or it is kind of semiotic
slavery or dataslavery, which we have been programmed to embrace even
as we view it with horror or disgust, or at very least, dismay. The parasite,
the invader, the alien, the demon, the uninvited guest, personify the process
for us so as to disguise the program beneath; in other words—to scatter its
components semiotically, to mask this program—these programs—and then
reconfigure them via a double encoding as entity and possession, or even as
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ideology. Moreover, as a necessary and defensive corollary, whether in a
piece of informative entertainment such as Attenborough’s documentary or,
in a radically different genre, John Carpenter’s metaphorically ‘prophetic’
horror fantasy The Thing (1982), for example, this diversionary process
adds a frisson of abjection, of horror, of fear, or at least of uncertainty, of
discomfort to the mix to make sure that we focus on the process rather than
the program itself.
This is, of course, both to simplify and to generalize the concept and
consequences of parasitism. And of course, parasitism may be described
and defined and taxonomized according to a variety of characteristics and
determinations, but there is, nonetheless, between these characteristics and
determinations, conceived as a pattern, a certain set of consistencies which
extend beyond the natural sciences in how we deploy the notion of the parasite and the parasitic. It is a pattern of characteristics and determinations that
merges nurture and violation, love and exploitation, in a unique manner. This
is the case, we argue, whether one deploys the term ‘parasite’ or ‘parasitic’
in its negative and desultory political or social connotation, or through the
more positive links with philosophical and creative noise, (dis)equilibrium
or psycho-social catalysis associated with writers such as Serres, or in its
more ambivalent use in relation to parasite capitalism in the work of Matteo
Pasquinelli (2008).
The problem, of course, with simply debating who or what is the ‘parasite’ (as so many political pundits, for example, do) without attention to the
concept’s intrinsic ambiguities is that doing so reinforces a paternalistic discourse that works to prevent and deny the contributions of the marginalized
(Stearns and Blake, 2013). Like sociologist Stephen Pfohl, whose Death at
the Parasite Café (1992) identifies parasites as those who, from positions of
privilege, ‘feed parasitically off the flesh of those whose material chances
they economically restrict and militaristically reduce’ (11), we take from
Serres (2007) the view that ‘parasite’ is a label often perhaps more logically
applied to the exploitative upper classes than to the exploited poor and working classes: ‘the crowd produces’ and ‘the master parasites’ (59). However,
like popular political pundits who toss around the insult ‘parasite’ without
acknowledging, much less reflecting on, the fact that their opponents do the
same, Pfohl (1992) gives inadequate attention to the metaphor’s positive
potential, including the ways in which the term as applied to the poor and the
dispossessed at the same time as to the rich and exploitative may facilitate a
new perspective on post-neo-liberal capitalism. In contrast to Pfohl (1992),
however, at this stage, we emphasize the inherent ambiguities of this metaphor so that we might reclaim it to advocate a different vision of the public
sphere. Serres (2007), after all, poses this counter-intuitive observation that
‘the master parasites’ as a foundational question: ‘One day we will have to
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understand why the strongest is the parasite, that is to say, the weakest—why
the one whose only function is to eat is the one who commands. And speaks.
We have just found the place of politics’ (26).
However, Serres’s (2007) point is not so much (as is Pfohl’s, 1992) that
power parasitizes the marginalized and the oppressed as it is the raising of
the question how it is that the word or image ‘parasite’ can simultaneously
signify both the lowest figure on the food chain (an ideologically driven metaphor if ever there were one) and those at the top who do nothing but consume.
This ambiguity—among others in an almost endless series of overlapping
ambiguities and contradictory associations—opens a space within which to
theorize the parasite as a figure useful in reconceptualizing minor players and
outsiders as productive forces in the systems and systematics of human relations and relationality. The Serresean parasite simultaneously problematizes
the question of who is using whom and transforms the system constituted by
the relationships between those involved, and this is its value as a transmitter of excommunicative potentiality and reconfiguration within the system of
communication in and on which it feeds.
There are various levels to this diagnosis. On the most quotidian, the
one associated with everyday social media, for example, one alternative to
arguing over who owes whom what, to quibbling over who is the biggest
mooching sponge, we would suggest, would be to embrace an ethics of
generosity and self-consciously perform the role of host. As Pfohl (1992)
asks, ‘Instead of feeding off the sacrifice of others, why (k)not periodically
suffer the mimetic shattering of our own parasitic identities? . . . Why (k)not
exchange this desire for the more dangerous impurities and indistinctive
co-minglings of a more generous mode of gift-exchange?’ (147). However,
whereas Pfohl positions this generosity in opposition to a parasitic economy
in which the privileged exploit the disempowered, we position it within.
Whereas others, such as Jean-Luc Nancy (2008) and critical art curators Post
Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick (2011), have focused on the parasite as a figure
of intrusion or of the possibility of ‘bring[ing] external or marginalized voices
into the institution’ (Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick, 2011, emphasis added),
we highlight the parasite’s potential to remind us that more often than not,
the so-called outsider and the marginalized are already inside the social body
they have supposedly invaded and that we thus might very well ask whether
the intruders have possessed the state/institution or has the state and its institutions taken possession of them?
Too many accounts of the parasite, even ones as critically nuanced as that
of Pfohl (1992) or of Pasquinelli (2008), ultimately fall back on the word’s
conventional use as a pejorative rather than giving adequate attention to
the metaphor’s positive potential (for instance, with his reliance on phrases
such as ‘the corporate parasite’ [14] or ‘the parasitic economy of advanced
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capitalism’ [27], Pasquinelli [2008] generally uses ‘parasite’ as a synonym for
economic exploitation, albeit of an indirect and systematic sort, even while
deploying a Serresean model of the parasite that he credits for being ‘more
a technical or neutral concept with no inherent political connotations’ [60]).
Moreover, as Carl Zimmer (2000) makes clear in his highly readable
and informative account of both the scientific and more generally cultural
specifics of parasitism, there are further taxonomies within parasitology that
need to be attended to, especially if we seek to extend this concept and its
expression to areas of human experience and activity such as art, pedagogy
and political resistance. To take just one example of the complex taxonomy
of parasitism—as Zimmer (2000) observes—the so-called zombie parasite so
dramatically portrayed in natural world documentaries and—via demonic or
alien possession—the genres of horror and science fiction is but one form of
parasite. Zimmer (2000) describes one extreme example—the Sacculina barnacle that enters certain crabs and establishes what looks like a root system
throughout the crab’s body, to the point that the crab’s nervous system exists
solely to serve the parasite. This act of possession is such that even though
the barnacle effectively castrates the crab by making it infertile and uses it
specifically as a vehicle for its own growth and reproduction, the crab will
be reprogrammed to nurture the brood of the parasite, which now occupies
the brood pouch where her own fertilized eggs would have otherwise been
(Zimmer, 2000, 81).
There are evident links here with Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick’s (2011)
use of the parasite as an invasive form of resistance in the art world and the
parallels they draw between three specific examples of parasitism and the
subversive and anti-institutional forms of art practice associated with figures
such as the artist Harvey. Among the three examples of the parasite as infectant and irritant they cite as exemplifying different strategies of guerrilla art,
one is the so called ‘tongue-eating louse’, Cymothoa exigua, a crustacean parasite that ‘latches onto a fish’s tongue, drains it of blood, and then effectively
replaces the host’s tongue with itself’ (Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick, 2011).
This parasite, they suggest, for instance, ‘offers a model for considering artists who mirror, redirect, or overtake the voice and authority of their hosts,
and who insert “static” into communications of which they would otherwise
not have access’ (Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick, 2011).
The point they emphasize here is the necessary ambiguity of such activities in an art world that has come to anticipate gestures of vandalism or art
terrorism as easily incorporated into the agenda of established art institutions.
There is an element of what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their progeny
call ‘disruptive innovation’ in this procedure, a form of subversive behaviour that, arguably, does little to destabilize the neo-liberal nexus of an art
world that thrives on such incursions (see for instance, Leger, 2013). It is an
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anomaly that Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick examine in some detail through
their examples and admit is a constant danger, in that if the subversive artist, as Stromberg and others since have done, plants his or her work illicitly
in galleries, but in due course this act of supposed art terrorism becomes an
aspect of the brand of the gallery, then the subversion has been itself subverted by the institution. Nonetheless, the creation of ‘static’ or ‘noise’, if
practised in a sustained manner, in the manner of the tongue-eating louse or
Sacculina barnacle, which actually replaces an organ of its host entirely and
radically alters its behaviour, can have interesting results, in that the ‘tongue’
of the institution—its discourse of self-promotion and artistic context—has
been simulated and distorted.
Thus, and referencing Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan on the voice, for
whom the voice of the individual is actually that of the ideological state apparatus or its psychoanalytical corollary, for example, Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick
(2011) note that the parasitic invasion can still unsettle the institutional body
itself: ‘Inhabiting the tongue makes clear to the host not only that its own voice
can be appropriated, but also that its authoritative communication is not objective nor indifferent, but rather constituted by ideological decisions by specific
actors.’ In this sense, the parasite effects a form of resistance similar to that
which Howard Caygill (2013) outlines in his On Resistance: A Philosophy of
Defiance, his celebration of the insurrectionary tendency over that of revolution per se in the age of neo-liberalism: ‘Insurrection is resistant but not constituent, opening spaces rather than constituting them and mobilizing a rhetoric
of action, even violent action, to inspire its uprisings. Perhaps it is now a more
salient term than revolution with its promise of completed action’ (n.p.).
So—in contrast to the revolutionary action of Marxism or mass infec- AQ: In the
tion of Neo-liberalism—both of which in their more disingenuous moments sentence
pretend to deterritorialize the bad oppression and then leave its subjects “So—in
contrast…”,
free—to effect a pure emancipation over a period of time or history—without please check
mentioning the inevitable re-territorialization to come—insurrection—resis- if “Neo-libtance—does not complete its movement. It deterritorializes just a bit—and eralism” can
then moves on. This, at least, is one notion of resistance as permanent rev- be changed
to “neo-libelation rather than revolution per se—as in Dada—as in Raoul Vaneigem’s eralism” for
quotidian revolutions—as in the purer aspects of punk in 1976—as in the consistency.
Metropolitan Indians of the Italian Autonomista movement who so influenced
that small strand of punk and so-called post-punk that emerged in the early
1980s—as in the tricksterism of the KLF in the latter days of rave culture in
the early 1990s. The zombie parasite, in this sense, is a more extreme form of
art or cultural practice, than that of insurrection per se, but it is nonetheless
an insurrection from within rather than a revolution or invasion from without.
Such extreme zombie parasitism as described by Zimmer (2000) and
deployed by Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick (2011), however, is of course
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but one aspect of this extraordinary relationship between invader/guest and
host, for the majority of parasites are content to allow their hosts to live and
function as they would otherwise. Indeed, for most parasites, the organic
and reproductive success of their hosts is a positive advantage. Similarly,
the parasite might well develop some form of symbiosis with the host that is
mutually beneficial, as is seen everywhere in the realms of organic life. And
here, once the analogy is extended to the human, the inhuman, the ahuman,
and what Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) describe as non-organic life,
we are caught in a play of ambivalence between the parasite as a destructive force and the parasite as the guest who entertains or adds some positive
quality or value or sense of value to the life of the host, between the vampiric
configurations of a brutal economism and the conceptual trickster or ghost in
the machine who can force us to think anew about art, resistance, and pedagogy. And this, of course, has everything to do with politics too. For as John
Brown noted in 1898 in Parasitic Wealth or Money Reform—A Manifesto
to the People of the United States and to the Workers of the World, and as
quoted by Zimmer (2000):
Nature is not without a parallel strongly suggestive of our social perversions of
justice, and the comparison is not without its lessons. The ichneumon fly is parasitic in the living bodies of caterpillars and the larvae of other insects. With cruel
cunning and ingenuity surpassed only by man, this depraved and unprincipled
insect perforates the struggling caterpillar, and deposits her eggs in the living,
writing body of her victim. (Zimmer, 2000, 1)
Thus, parallels begin to emerge between politics, economics, parasitology,
art and pedagogy that will inform our discussion of the possibly liberating force of parasitism via art and creative practice as a form of political
resistance.
For has not the goal of much conventional pedagogy—as well as of the
‘big curriculum’ that instructs us through everyday practices (Schubert, 2006)
or the ‘relational cultural practices’ that occur ‘both within and outside places
that are understood as being “educational” settings’ (Hickey-Moody, 2009,
273)—been a similar form of neurological control? Is this not one possible
lesson of the cordyceps? For although far less overtly dramatic to the human
eye, is this pedagogical apparatus of transmission not still an infiltration of
students’ bodies and minds that programs them to act and think as instructed
in a manner not dissimilar—in effect if not in style—to the genetic choreography of the cordyceps fungus?
Clearly, there are presumptions here that require clarification—presumptions about the relation between biologics and mechanics and pedagogics, for
example. The way to elicit these presumptions and lay them out, as it were, is
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via the distinctions argued in general by Deleuzeans between affect, affectio,
affection and affectus. Deleuze (1988) himself argues these distinctions in
some detail in his lecture on Spinoza, and it has been developed by a range of
thinkers as it applies to various aspects of the humanities and social sciences,
particularly distinctions made between image affects and affect feeling. For
our purposes, Hickey-Moody’s (2009) summary applies this complexity
to the specific issues of art and pedagogy with valuable economy. Here,
Hickey-Moody (2009) defines affect as ‘the concept of taking something on,
of changing in relation to an experience or encounter’ (273). Affectus, in this AQ: In the
sense, is the process of modulation or change whereby one thing materially sentence
“Affectus,
changes another, and as such is to be distinguished from affect, understood in in this…”
its more conventional psychological as feeling or emotion. From this perspec- please
tive, affectus is effectively pedagogy itself, understood as ‘a relational prac- consider
tice through which some kind of knowledge is produced’ (Hickey-Moody, changing
“psycho2009, 273).
logical as
The relation between affect and affectus as expressed through art practice, feeling” to
and as suggested by Hickey-Moody (2009), will form a central if largely “psychologiunstated strand through this chapter, but its positioning in relation to the cal sense as
feeling”
parasite is one that requires first a detour into older forms of pedagogical
theory and very recent attempts to bring media theory into a place where it
can deal more effectively with our contemporary medial realities in contrast
to the by now redundant notion of ‘new media’. The link here is between a
notion of oppression—understood politically or personally—and possession,
understood similarly, but with the added connotations of ownership, parasitism and demonology. To begin to trace out the ways in which these strands
form a pattern, we begin with the work of Freire (2005) on pedagogy and the
work of Serres (2007) on parasitism and noise.
TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF THE POSSESSED
How can we—unlike the many political commentators who uncritically use
the parasite metaphor to opposite ends—deploy the instability of this metaphor to investigate configurations of chaos and order, outsider and insider,
student and teacher? If such instability can facilitate what Deleuze (1989) has
called the ‘shock to thought’ (156) that derails habitual thought in creative
and constructive ways, then what emergent modes of expression and what
new contexts, new concepts and détournements might generate new forms
of critical illumination of the pedagogical imperative and its practice? The
disturbance that leads to thinking, to the production of new concepts, we
argue, is parasitical in the Serresean sense of the parasite as an interruption
that generates innovation and novelty.
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As Michalinos Zembylas (2002) has noted, Serres’s (1997) insistence
that education be a process of creation and invention in many respects
resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) vision of philosophy as a machine
for the creation of concepts, not only in his ‘vision of the “educated third”
[as] a nomad who is always becoming, moving across established categories’ (496) but also because ‘implicit in the notion of the “troubadour of
knowledge” is the belief in the potency of imagination and invention that
subverts fixed, steady knowledges (and curricula) and enacts his/her transitions across space and time without any teleological purposes. . . . In this
respect then, the “troubadour of knowledge” is an example of a “rhizomatic” knower’ (Zembylas, 2002, 498). Elsewhere, Serres (2007) says of the
‘excluded third’ that by ‘nature and function’ problematizes ‘two poles’,
whatever they may be: ‘We call it parasite’ (150). Hence, the parasite might
be said to be both the condition on which Serres’s (2007) ‘educated third’
depends—and this educated third might then be said to itself be an example
of the parasitic function.
Serres’s (2007) notion of the parasite as such interference, as what he
repeatedly calls ‘the third’—an ‘excluded middle’ (e.g., 110) that interrupts
the dualism of host and guest, making it impossible to determine which is
which—perhaps resembles, as Rosalyn Diprose (2002) notes, Emmanuel
Levinas’s (1969) concept of the ‘third party’:
AQ: In the
sentence
“Hence,
the parasite
might…”
please check
if “both” can
be deleted.
While I am obligated to welcome (and so remain open to) the other who contests
me, the other is in relation to a third party to whom she or he is responsible
and who treats me, alongside the other I face, as someone to be welcomed.
By rendering the one who is contested as also one who is welcomed, the third
party . . . tempers the ‘inequality’ of the relation to the other without either rendering the relation reversible or allaying responsibility. (207, note 9)
Diprose (2002) explicitly contrasts Levinas’s model of learning with
‘a Socratic model of the production of knowledge, where ethics is based
on epistemology (the more you understand, the more virtuous you are), and
genuine knowledge arises from within’ (134). For Levinas (1987), Diprose
(2002) explains, the Socratic model of autonomous thinking fails because
AQ: Please
check the
opening
and closing
quotes in
the quoted
text “In this
exercise
of…”
in this exercise of reason, of power, there is nothing disturbing, at least not in the
end. Hence, there is no teaching or learning, no production of new ideas, in such
a model. One’s mentor, student, companion, or rival is reduced to an intellectual
midwife . . . someone who merely helps brings to consciousness ‘the alreadyknown which has been uncovered or freely invented in oneself’. (135–6)
If for Diprose (2002), Levinas’s account of teaching and learning represents a corporeal response to that which ‘gets under our skin’ (a pedagogical
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dynamic that we ourselves characterize as parasitosis, but one that symptomizes, not a paranoid resistance to the other, but rather a welcoming of
the contagion that Deleuze and Guattari [1987, 232–309] associate with
multiplicities), then the tradition, dating back to Plato, of ‘privileging
spiritual love over sex’ is ‘anti-body, promoting a politics of immunization,
through egalitarian love and friendship, against the threat that the body
seems to pose to freedom and autonomy’ (78). Or, Diprose (2002) clarifies,
‘put another way, in the words of Levinas, the error of colonization is the
belief in a Platonic model of truth: that “the world of meanings precedes
language and culture, which express it; [and] is indifferent to the system of
signs that one can invent to make this world present to thought”’ (152–3).
In other words, any pedagogy rooted in such a Platonic model would be
limited by its inability to respond to the Other, to the new, to the third—to
what we might call the parasite. A Serresean pedagogy, as Maria Assad
(2001) has written, seeks ‘a luminous middle-ground where teacher and
pupil become one in and on their passage toward an instructed immanence
of knowledge’ (46).
Serres (2007) critiques a ‘prescribed curriculum content with pre-assigned
roles for teachers (who “teach”) and students (who “learn”)’ (Zembylas,
2002, 496) and thus even in a superficial sense might suggest a comparison to
Paulo Freire’s (2005) critique of what he labels the ‘banking’ concept of education and its polarized notions of the ‘teacher-student contradiction’ (72).
But if Freire (2005) faults the banking concept for assuming ‘a dichotomy
between human beings and the world’, one that imagines the mind as an
empty receptacle in which knowledge of ‘the world outside’ can be deposited
(75), Serres (2007) offers the parasite as a third possibility that undoes the
dualism between inside and outside altogether. As noise, for instance, ‘The
parasite is everywhere. Its voice expands, filling the space, wherever he is
and wherever he goes’ (Serres, 2007, 96). As bodily invader, the parasite is
in the most basic sense the outsider already inside—and sometimes, as in the
case of such parasites as the behaviour-changing and likely schizophreniacausing Toxoplasma gondii (a common parasite transmitted by cat faeces)
(McAuliffe, 2012), it renders any notion of ‘the mind’ unstable, indeed.
Noting a common tendency to regard the oppressed ‘as the pathology of
the healthy society’, Freire (2005) argues, ‘the truth is, however, that the
oppressed . . . are not people living “outside” society. They have always
been “inside”—inside the structure which made them “beings for others”.
The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but
to transform that structure so they can become “beings for themselves”’ (74).
Serres (2007) agrees that they have always been ‘inside’, but also suggests
that one way to transform the structure might be to recognize the ways in
which even true pests and pestilences might be beneficial.
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A pedagogy of the possessed would not seek the ‘philosophical autonomy’
that Diprose (2002) connects to the ‘economic rationalism [under which] the
teacher and the student are reduced to vehicles for the consumption and repetition of familiar ideas valued for the utility in allowing easy appropriation
of our world’ (136) but would, rather, represent an openness to the teaching
of the Other (an Other that, we would add, may include not only the inhuman
as well as the human, but also the inhuman ‘in the’ human):
This is a teaching because it breaks the ‘closed circle of totality’ . . . the imperialism and violence of self-knowledge that would limit the other through the
imposition of familiar ideas. . . . The other’s alterity is also a teaching, because
it opens me to think beyond myself and therefore beyond what I already know.
(Diprose, 2002, 136–7)
On the other hand, the negative possibilities of the parasite metaphor
should also serve as a warning not to idealize or romanticize this openness
to the other. As academics, we ourselves might be said to parasitically consume Others for personal and professional gain in the manner Pfohl (1992)
describes:
surrogate victims appear before the eyes/‘I’s of those (of us) who sacrifice them
as no-thing but objects for logical contemplation and mastery. The measured
skull of the prisoner, the opaque and racist image of the Arab, the nude female
figure pinned upon the wall—surrogate victims are (literally) sentenced to the
sphere of categorically dead matters. As objects, they are paradoxically dined
upon by ‘we’ whose gaze they fascinate. (139)
Or, as Diprose (2002) puts it:
The social imaginaries that have our bodies through habitual ways of being,
and that are called upon in perception in response to the matter at hand, already
memorialize the generosity of the privileged and forget and do not actively
perceive the giving of others. It is this selective blindness that, for example,
affords me the privilege of the position of respondent at an academic conference, that . . . extends to me the right to judge what I am responding to, without
acknowledging what it may have given me. (192)
Thus, we may all too easily be subsumed into a power play in which the
privileged voice bemoans its privilege at the same time as it exercises that
privilege as an open duplicity.
As a third term that destabilizes the host/guest binarism and, moreover, as
a reminder that it is not always possible to be sure who is using whom, the
parasite might be said to offer an opportunity to reconfigure a ubiquitous site
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of possession as a possibility of resistance to the systematics of domination.
The Serresean (2007) parasite makes ambiguous the inside/outside distinction and, more importantly, suggests the possibility of simultaneously being
host/guest/parasite—the very sort of multiplicity that defines the expressions
of parasitism as mutuality and creativity that we are suggesting. In other
words, an ethics of hospitality, in its intrinsic, aporetic ‘dispossession of
identity’ (McNulty, 2007, xix), might itself be said to be a rather different
form of possession, more akin to an inhuman or ahuman version of Aristotle’s
eudaemonia (which might be positive or negative or neutral—a dysdaemonia
or anadaemonia, in effect) than the form of vampirism with which it is more
commonly associated.
The question of whether a particular parasite should be regarded as invading alien or as self (as in the case of the common, but personality-altering,
schizophrenia-inducing Toxoplasma gondii) is not unlike the concepts of the
‘prosthetic body’ or ‘skin ego’ through which ‘the boundaries between the
body and its outside (the material world) are problematized and rendered
ambiguous’ (Tajiri, 2007, 42). The parasite is only an outsider or foreign
body if one perceives it as such. As Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick (2011) note,
quoting and elaborating on Nancy’s (2008) observation that ‘without “an element of the intruder in the stranger” or the parasite in the host, the intrusion is
without the necessary “strangeness” to be perceived as such. In other words,
an invitation or any allowance given to an intruding force would negate that
very intrusion’. For example, they ask, ‘When individuals ingest roundworms
to lose weight, . . . does this willing introduction of the parasite negate its
harmful potential? And, how does the act of voluntary bloodletting change
the patient’s relation to the leech, when that leech is put in service to medicine? What do the processes of regulation, invitation, and control, therefore,
render?’ (Post Brothers and Fitzpatrick, 2011).
In this sense, the parasite, both as an actual biological entity and as a rhetorical trope, undoes the logic of organization from outside that so frequently
defines the paranoia and hostility that attend the notion of parasitism in both
its biological and sociopolitical settings. At the same time, it operates from
the inside as a kind of cybernetic governor, orchestrating various feedback
mechanisms in the cause of its own survival which simultaneously recalibrate
the outlines and identity of the host, as well as the host’s orientation to the
idea of life or mechanism or that of the creation of concepts to reconfigure life
and mechanism and to adapt to changing conditions, whether technological or
ecological or economic. In this sense, parasitism is related to but subtly different to excommunication in the sense teased out by Galloway et al. (2014),
in that excommunication, like the gift, is a means of delimiting a community’s boundaries, but it also reveals those boundaries as a social construct
and points to their possible permeability, as Galloway et al. (2014) explain:
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excommunication is different from other forms of boundary management. It is
not quite banishment, which places an emphasis on the physical removal from
the topos of community. It is also not quite exile—a term with more modern
meanings—which implies the possibility of eventual return to the community
or the place from which one has been exiled. The excommunicated Christian
remains a Christian, but is barred from participation in Church ritual. His intermediary status is amplified by the public ritual of excommunication itself. (15)
Possession, especially parasitic possession, is neither intermediary nor
liminal, but instead is absolute in its colonization of boundaries and all that
lies around or within those boundaries, and, in its more extreme versions,
its twisting of topological variables to effect a far deeper transition in the
patterns of participant evolution and libidinal economics than the ‘human’
has thus far been able to systematize conceptually. Accordingly, exorcism or
excision of the parasite from the host is also a welcoming of the parasite into
the host as a kind of cybernetic messiah, a parasite messiah—in a populist
and pedagogical and eminently reproducible rather than an eschatological
sense—whose momentum both towards and against the future allows for a
resistance through creativity that harnesses rationality and affect at the same
time as it consumes them. It is an ejection and abjection which is also abduction for the future of our species, or whatever we create to replace ourselves
in the post-Anthropocene landscapes that are already being mapped out in
fiction and coding. We are ourselves both host and parasite, predator and
prey, possessor and possessed, and we consume ourselves as we consume
the future.
CONCLUSION
The parasite, through its ambiguity as both biological entity and as dissensual
and disjunctive metaphor, therefore, destabilizes not only the conventional
dichotomy between host and guest, predator and prey (Serres, 2007, 6–7),
but also the construction of ‘knowledge [as] a gift bestowed by those who
consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know
nothing’ (Freire, 2005, 72) that characterizes the oversimplified or overromanticized vision associated with the fundamentally monological form of
education that Freire critiques with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005).
At the same time, through this dissensual quality, it provides a means by
which figures and motifs of outsiderness (whether they be the poor and politically marginalized or students) become incorporated, parasitically, into our
libidinal economies as signs of excess and transgression, thereby allowing the
cruel reality of sacrifice back into the semiotic community in a form which
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is disguised rather than merely symbolic, and strategically violent rather
than merely hermeneutic, with all the potentially ethical complications that
this might imply. This emergent parasitical economy implies, in a real and
important sense, an understanding and use of the parasite as a destabilizing
instrument in the far more urgent and immediate polylogical pedagogy of the
post-human age, the pedagogy of the Possessed.
NOTE
1. The term ‘ecosophy’ here is used in the sense closer to that of Felix Guattari in
Three Ecologies than that of Arne Nauess and others in the deep ecology movement.
On this distinction, see Tinell, J. (2011). Traversing the ecological turn: Four components of Felix Guattari’s ecosophical perspective. Fibreculture Journal 18, 35–64.
Retrieved from http://fibreculturejournal.org/wp-content/pdfs/FCJ-121John%20Tinnell.pdf.
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Chapter 5
A Pedagogy of Possibilities
Drama as Reading Practice
Maggie Pitfield
In the shifting political landscape of education in England, the discipline of
English has been particularly prone to the policy interventions of successive
governments. Nevertheless, when pedagogy and critical learning connect
with the experiences that learners bring, the classroom can offer a site not
only of resistance, but of possibility (Giroux, 2003). Jones (2003) refers to
this as the ‘cultural connectedness’ (145) of the English classroom and suggests that it is threatened by officially sponsored discourses of ‘entitlement’,
a term which obfuscates ‘the predominance in the curriculum of a single type
of authorised knowledge’ (149) and the expectation that a teacher’s role is to
provide learners with ‘access’ to it.
In this chapter, my aim is to explore how the pedagogy and practice of
one teacher pays heed to cultural connectedness, unleashing the possibilities
and potentials for reading in the English lesson through ‘the entanglement
of matter and meaning’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, 50) during drama
activity. In this classroom, learners, learners and teacher, and texts materially
intra-act, demonstrating that effective teaching and learning always has an
affective dimension (Lovat, 2010; Mulcahy, 2012), with affect ‘used to refer
to intensities or energies that produce new affective and embodied connections’ (Mulcahy, 2012, 11).
The observations of and interview with this one teacher, Shona,1 an English
teacher in a culturally diverse, inner London boys’ secondary school, give an
account of the role that drama plays in her lessons and illustrate the integral
nature of drama to learners’ engagements with literary texts. Although the
term ‘literary text’ is value laden, I am employing it to describe at the most
basic level ‘the texts most widely read within secondary English classrooms’
(Yandell, 2014, 1). I am particularly focusing on learners’ exploration and
production of the re-creative text. At subject level the re-creative mode brings
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together the processes of reading and writing and at the level of the learner
links the role of critic with that of text creator (Knights and Thurgar-Dawson,
2008). The productive tension between critical and creative/affective engagement is mirrored in the interpretative position of the practice-led researcher
who must consider how the ‘materiality of a creative work impacts on both
the content and the reading of that content’ (Haseman and Mafe, 2009, 216),
and how this is represented, explained, defined or amplified through arts practice as research. Similar questions to do with reading and representation are
apparent in the context of Shona’s English lessons. Whereas the re-creative
text in English is usually produced in written form, it is my contention that in
the observed lessons, the dramatic representation stands as the text produced.
Therefore, the interaction between the source and re-creative texts is intertextual in nature, in that it draws on a ‘network of textual relations’ (Allen,
2011, 1) both within and outside the classroom and from beyond the written
mode. In new materialist terms, the texts are not treated ‘as preexisting entities, but as intra-action, as forces from which other texts come into existence’
(Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, 57). Thus, engaging learners in re-creative
activities in response to reading a literary text as a means of supporting them
to become active, self-aware readers is a key part of Shona’s practice as an
English teacher.
In constructing my analysis, I define and amplify (Haseman and Mafe,
2009) the practices of the classroom by means of a series of illustrative
vignettes which are typical of the teaching and learning behaviours on display
in Shona’s classroom. Her approach recognizes that drama is an embodied
and material practice ‘and that materiality of matter lies at the core of creative practice’ (Bolt, 2013, 5). As drama activity employs the full range
of representational and communicational modes, for example, metaphoric,
symbolic, semiotic, discursive, evaluative, that are involved in the production
of English (Medway, 2003/2004; Kress et al., 2005), it is useful to view the
data through a multimodal lens (Kress et al., 2005). Therefore, in addition to
my observations and interview, I draw on video recordings of the lessons,
considering the spatial arrangement of the classroom setting, the learner-tolearner and learner-to-teacher interactions, gesture, gaze, movement, and so
on, to interrogate and deepen my understanding of the practices that occur.
While the multimodal perspective of the analysis acknowledges ‘arts’ very
materiality’ (Bolt, 2013, 4), it does not deny the importance of inquiring into
the meaning of the language of the English lessons (Doecke, 2014). Neither does it make any special claim to researcher objectivity because as an
ex-English and Drama teacher of some 24 years and now a teacher-educator
in the field, I construct myself as both insider and outsider in this context.
This is a methodological approach not dissimilar to Swain’s (2006) description of the ‘semi-participant’ observer (201). In my case I am both participant
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AQ: The
meaning of
the sentence
“Thus,
engaging
learners in
re-creative
activities…”
is not clear.
Could this
be written
thus: “Thus,
for engaging
learners ...
to become
active,
self-aware
readers are
a key part
of Shona’s
practice as
an English
teacher”
or as
appropriate.
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and observer, implicated in the practice through my professional immersion
in the field of enquiry, and bringing my insider knowledge to bear. This is
how knowledge, ideas and resonances from the past legitimately interact with
research in the present to identify new theoretical positions and create new
knowledge (Nicholson, 2009; Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012). The new
materialist scholar, Barad (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012), calls into question the idea that researcher objectivity is achieved through distancing and
proposes that ‘Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be
responsive to the other’ (69) is both necessary and ethically sound. Therefore,
among the voices of the teacher and learners, my own can be heard, and my
engagement with both is duly noted.
Through this approach I want to understand how Shona’s use of drama
realizes the aims of re-creation in ‘promoting an exchange between critical
and creative practice’ (Knights and Thurgar-Dawson, 2008, 8) that is reciprocal, mutually enhancing, and enables learners’ critical engagement with
literary texts through this very particular kind of cultural production. From
my experiences of her lessons, I argue that the drama is of itself re-creative
and acts as the medium of composition, with the learners using the resources
of mind with body to make meaning through their acts of re-creation and in a
collaboration that is wider than that of one writer to one reader. It is this wider
collaboration which addresses some of the inadequacies of reader-response
theory in describing how texts are encountered, discussed and indeed read in
the English classroom (Yandell, 2014). The resulting dramatic text stands as
the creative, embodied composition that is in dialogue with the source text.
In one of the observed lessons, the learners experiment with dramatic
representation to explore a poem, and the other lesson focuses on an event
described in the Michael Morpurgo novel Warhorse (2007). Both demonstrate how Shona uses drama in ‘a direct material engagement’ (Dolphijn and
van der Tuin, 2012, 52), to encourage learners to position their re-created
dramatic text with the original. This engagement ‘is not just a matter of interference but of entanglement’ with the texts, serving to ‘open up and rework
the agential conditions of possibility’ (52) in the classroom. Learners’ creative and critical responses are viewed as neither distinct nor hierarchically
connected, although the formal curriculum tends to foreground the latter type
of response, but instead they exist in a symbiotic relationship. The lessons
also demonstrate the ways in which Shona translates into practice her stated
beliefs about the nature of English and the nature of drama in English. They
show how the interpretation of the learners is encapsulated in their often playful responses to the tasks they are set. This playfulness is entirely in keeping
with production through the re-creative mode in English, and demonstrates
how Shona is reaching out ‘after a more democratic, participative cultural
practice’ (Knights and Thurgar-Dawson, 2008, 33, drawing on Barthes).
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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLAY AND DRAMA
Shona, as an English teacher employing drama in her English lessons on a
regular basis, emphasizes the importance to her practice of the relationship
between play and drama, conceptualizing drama as a powerful extension
of play-based learning (Bolton, 1979). She returns to this theme a number
of times in her interview, variously identifying the purposes of play in
learning English as engagement, motivation and fun; an imaginative stimulus
(the what if-ing aspect of play); practice for action in different situations; and
practice for language use. In the way that she links commitment to the fiction
created and the ‘what if’ mental stance required in creating it, there are echoes
of Heathcote’s thoughts on ‘the implication of “if”’ (Johnson and O’Neill,
1991, 25) in drama practice and of O’Neill’s process drama methodology
(O’Neill, 1995; Taylor and Warner, 2006) in which learners are also ‘active
agents making theatre happen’ (Bolton, 1998, 231). Similarly, Byron (1986)
suggests that drama in the English classroom necessarily ‘suspends or modifies the “real” context and social network of the classroom in favour of an
“as if” context and network’ (125). To facilitate this, Shona’s planning and
classroom organization focus on the social and the interactive, indicating that
a social constructivist perspective on learning is integral to her pedagogical
approach. Thus, the activity in her classroom recognizes that our ‘making and
experience of art is always and necessarily culturally and socially mediated’
(Barrett and Bolt, 2013, 4). However, the embodied nature of the drama practices employed to explore texts ensures that in the meaning-making process,
‘art’s very materiality’ is not subsumed by the ‘the textual, the linguistic and
the discursive’ (Barrett and Bolt, 2013, 4). Shona describes the English classroom when learners are engaged in drama:
I think it’s noisier and less pretty to look at, it’s messy, there’s an awful lot of
laughing and general kind of ‘carry on’, which I quite like, to some extent,
although when I get tired sometimes I don’t. But yes, overall I quite like that
aspect of it. And then I think the connections that students make are much better.
Yeah, I suppose that’s what I think. There’s something about . . . so I think with
my Year 9s last year doing Richard III . . . well for one thing they loved it, but
also they talked a lot, and some of them were interviewed for the Creative Partnerships work and they talked a lot about how much better they understood it
because they played with it. (interview with Shona, 3 November 2011)
This is a perspective on learning that connects a certain anarchic ‘messiness’ in the atmosphere and conduct of the lesson with pupils’ playfulness
and their making of conceptual connections. Thus, embedded in Shona’s
comments is an understanding of the need to establish a classroom context
in which learners can identify themselves as agentive, cultural producers.
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In this sense, ‘agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, 54). The types of
conceptual connections that learners make and how these constitute learning in English are explored further in my account of the observed lessons.
Shona’s reference to Creative Partnerships,2 an intra-action between artists,
teachers and learners, is also relevant as her significant involvement in this
large-scale arts project is a source of professional pride and achievement.
Her commitment over several years to the project points to her genuine interest in working creatively in the classroom with young people and the implications of such an approach for her practice.
THE LEARNING CONTEXT
Shona’s creative approach is apparent in her use of drama to engage learners with literary texts in English, suggesting her understanding of works of
literature as ‘creative media that prompt affective responses’ and generate
knowledge production through ‘material changes . . . in the consciousness
of the body’ (Hickey-Moody, 2009, 274), and that ‘bodily activity’ is ‘intimately connected with both affect and intellect’ (Franks et al., 2014, 172).
That drama employed in this way is not perceived by the learners as special
or unusual but rather a normal part of what they do when reading poetry
and works of fiction in English lessons is highlighted when Shona sets up
the freeze frame3 activity in the lesson on poetry. A pupil asks, ‘is it drama
work?’, and Shona replies, ‘yes, it’s your drama work’. Her use of ‘your’ is
indicative of the responsibility for the learning that she shares with the class,
and suggests that she does not view agency as something that can be possessed but rather as ‘response-ability . . . the possibilities of mutual response’
(Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, 55) through enactment—in a literal sense
here, dramatic enactment. There is no ripple of surprise from learners, no
discernible change of atmosphere in terms of learners’ reactions or body language to suggest that this way of working is in any way atypical of Shona’s
English lessons. This is unlike the reactions of learners in English lessons
I observed at a different school, when teachers unused to utilizing drama as
a regular part of their practice sought to introduce a drama activity. Shona
is able to draw positively on both the classroom culture that she has established and reaffirmed over time and learners’ prior learning through drama,
for example, when she reminds them of how impressed she was with their
‘strong, sculptural, statue-like freeze frames’ in a previous lesson.
Nevertheless, the influence of the wider policy context is ever-present, and
Shona expresses concerns about the ephemeral nature of the drama work and
whether it can stand as evidence of learning in English or add any discernible
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value to the writing that learners produce. The complexity of the interaction
between social relations and subject knowledge in the classroom ensures that
it is no simple matter for the researcher to discern the extent of such external pressures on pedagogical beliefs and practices (Jewitt and Jones, 2008).
However, both of Shona’s lessons are planned to end with a brief writing
task, despite the fact that she has already planned for learners to engage with
an extended piece of creative writing at a later point, which will fold the
experience gained from their embodied composition into written composition. This suggests the tensions between spending a considerable amount of
lesson time on activities related to the drama work and the perceived need
for her learners to produce a tangible lesson-by-lesson record, if not of their
learning, then at least of the activities that have taken place.
As an experienced and confident teacher of English, she acknowledges the
potential of drama in terms of deep learning over time and of leaving this to
embed rather than insisting on an instant verbalization of what learners have
learnt:
I don’t think in drama-based lessons I always get them to the point at the end of
the lesson where we’ve really teased out that ‘what did we learn?’, but I think
sometimes that comes . . . it’s what they bring back to the next lesson from
having done all of that is sometimes most powerful. (interview with Shona,
3 November 2011)
Her use of drama suggests a concern for ‘the experience of the whole
person, of thinking, feeling “bodies in space” and how active experience
“settles in the body”’ (Franks et al., 2014, 177), and this is at odds with the
very strong need to log, record and account for, which, as Wrigley (2014)
warns, ‘can distort the curriculum’ (19):
How much time can we spend on the fun stuff and how full should the book be
of long pieces of writing? (interview with Shona, 3 November 2011)
This somewhat dismissive characterization of drama as ‘the fun stuff’,
when elsewhere in the interview Shona subjects the part that drama plays
in her English teaching to a much more in-depth analysis, highlights that
the relationship between classroom practices and imposed discourses on
schools, teachers and learners is not always a comfortable one. Detectable
here are echoes of the debate around what constitutes ‘rigour’ (Yandell, 2013,
10), particularly in the core subject of English, which is fed at policy level
by concerns about England’s ranking in the OECD PISA4 comparisons of
standards of literacy.5 Thus, teacher and learners cannot remain unaffected
by the constraints of policy, with such discourses often being instantiated in
classroom practice.
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However, it would be wrong to assume that the teacher, and indeed the
learners, are wholly without agency (Yandell, 2014), even though ‘Teachers
are under siege all over the world like they never have been in the past, and
schools are assaulted relentlessly by the powerful forces of neo-liberalism’
(Giroux, 2003, 7). Thus, for Shona a concern to justify the time spent on
drama in English is translated into a matter for professional inquiry about
the efficacy of drama as a way of reading a text and as a precursor to writing
about it:
And I think overall the writing on it [the text studied] is better too, they write
better about the things they’ve played with. And that was one of the things that
I tried to do a little bit last year myself, was trying to make connections between
writing and things that we’d done drama work, play-based work with, I suppose
satisfying myself that the outcomes on paper justified the time. And I think time
is a conflict. Even at key stage 3,6 I think time is an issue. (interview with Shona,
3 November 2011)
Embedded in this comment is a belief that dramatic play as part of textual
study and reading in the English classroom is linked to progress in writing.
This is a connection that has been thoroughly explored in research at primary
school level (Barrs and Cork, 2001; Cremin et al., 2006; Safford and Barrs,
2005), where in-role drama work has proved to be a powerful stimulus,
allowing children to adopt different voices in their writing (Barrs and Cork,
2001). Work in the creative arts, including that around literature texts, has led
to ‘improved attitudes to school literacy’ such that children ‘write with more
interest and commitment, because their creative arts experiences give them
something to think, talk and write about’ (Safford and Barrs, 2005, 192).
In addition, the findings of Cremin et al. (2006) demonstrate that the opportunity for ‘“seizing the moment” to write’ (288) as part of their drama work
around fiction texts has a positive impact on children’s writing development,
such that ‘imaginative engagement in the tense scenarios of drama appears to
help them form and transform experience and create, cultivate and effectively
communicate their own and others’ ideas in written text’ (289).
Another powerful discourse, that of assessment requirements, unsurprisingly finds its way into Shona’s classroom and is overtly referenced when she
reminds learners of the grading system for their profiles that will be reported to
parents/carers on academic review day. Significantly, though, her mention of
National Curriculum levels ‘which you’ll be familiar with’ is brief and almost
in passing before she spends time explaining the other aspects for which they
will receive credit. She focuses on ‘relationships with others, your group work,
your cooperation’ and ‘participation in lessons . . . so it’s not just about being
quiet and good, although that’s important too, but it’s also about, did you
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participate, did you come up with ideas, did you get involved?’ This discourse
runs alongside the formal ones to do with curriculum requirements and assessment, and contains more nuanced messages about what Shona believes is
important in the activities planned and how the learners might approach these:
Remember, my biggest rule with this type of work, if I don’t speak to your
group, you know you’re doing a brilliant job. If I come past and I’m just making
notes on you and I don’t actually have to speak to you, you know you’re already
doing a great job. (lesson observation)
I might ask you to, I might say stop and show me something, but what I’m
not having to do is say, what’s your job, what are you doing, I’m not having
to ask you lots of questions about the work because you’re actually getting on.
So when you see me come round your tables you need to pretty much ignore me,
you just get on with the work and let me listen in, assess and judge what you’re
doing. (lesson observation)
While she is reinforcing a view of the English classroom and the work that
takes place within it as rule-governed, the rules are to do with cooperation,
sharing, exchange and interaction. This is Shona’s pedagogy, but it is more
than that. By her explicit statement to ‘pretty much ignore me’, which at first
glance might appear simply to refer to operational issues, she is implicitly
communicating her belief that the learners must be allowed autonomy if they
are to have agency. In sharing with them a degree of responsibility for the
progress of the lesson as well as communicating the high value she is placing
on the collaborative process in learning about the text, she is destabilizing
her role as the affecting body (Hickey-Moody 2009). The time allocated to
the development of their drama—50 per cent of each lesson is taken up with
improvising, presenting and discussing—also communicates its importance
to their learning. There is no doubt, however, that Shona remains an influential presence as the listener, the assessor and the judge, but this is not the kind
of ‘authoritarianism in the classroom’ which ‘dehumanises and thus shuts
down the “magic” that is always present when individuals are active learners’
(hooks, 2003, 43). Indeed, there is still a powerful sense that knowledge is
co-constructed in this classroom through a dialogic intra-action of text, self,
group and teacher. Her practice, therefore, does not conform to a ‘banking
concept of education’ (Freire, 1993, 53), as she accepts that there must be a
partnership between teacher and learners to promote critical thinking, and she
has trust in their ‘creative power’ (56).
One indicator of the ‘learning community’ (hooks, 2003, 49) being forged
here, in which all, including the teacher, must have the opportunity to ‘behave
and feel like creative, expert, practising artists’ (Hulson, 2006, 12), is the way
in which the classroom setting is physically transformed into ‘a site of social
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semiotic activity’ (Yandell, 2008, 48). With just a few exceptions, learners
stand, move between desks, approach each other, gesture to each other, make
eye contact (or not), make physical contact, and so on, as Shona circulates the
room, occasionally engaging in dialogue with learners.
While she is not a totally unobtrusive presence in her work with different
groups, she does not dominate the space and her body language is relaxed.
She acts as both collaborator and the experienced other who provides ‘adult
guidance’ in the dynamic relationship between development and learning
which is characterized by Vygotsky’s metaphor of the ‘zone of proximal
development’ (Vygotsky, 1978, 1994). Shona’s ‘collaborative instructional
practice’ (Daniels, 2001, 55) acknowledges the ability of drama to ‘foster a
highly particular zone of proximal development’ enabling learners ‘to move
between their actual developmental levels whilst they are both participant and
audience’ (Hulson, 2006, 6–7), as well as reflecting the heuristic nature of the
re-creative mode in English.
THE ROLE OF PLAY IN THE
RE-CREATIVE DRAMA ACTIVITY
The physical adaptations to the classroom context, the movement of the
learners and their freedom to engage without constant teacher mediation
of their interactions with each other and with the text also signal that an
improvisational approach is integral to the process of making meaning. Play,
of the type that is regulated by and contextualized in the classroom setting
(Baker-Sennett et al., 1992), is an important aspect of this in the lesson on the
poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost (http://www.
poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621).
Shona begins by reading the poem aloud to the class, asking one pupil to
briefly explain what is happening in the poem, but her expectation is that
learners will go on to demonstrate their understanding of what they have
read through the re-creative drama activity. She delineates the form of their
dramatic representations by specifying that learners will use a combination
of freeze frame, mime and choral speaking or narration, and probes their
existing knowledge of these tools for making drama. Learners’ contributions
suggest familiarity with the techniques and also an understanding that the
‘language’ they will use to explore the poem reaches beyond speech.
Ricky (on freeze frame): ‘When the actors stop moving in a strong powerful
moment.’
Nathaniel (on mime): ‘Do the action in an emotional way. When you do an
action you do it in a way of using your whole body.’
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Jermaine (on chorus): ‘It’s like a group activity.’
Nathaniel (on chorus): ‘It’s like someone and someone else (indicating this by
placing his hands on one side of the desk then the other), it’s like everyone combining each other in action, speak, emotion and um emotion together to make
one kind of piece of language.’
Tom (on chorus): ‘It’s not just humans speaking, sometimes it can be like birds
and drums.’
Thus, the poem is to be experienced playfully, materially, emotionally and
collectively, and all these will combine as learners work towards understanding, interpretation and shared cultural production. The learners’ comments
indicate that ‘In thinking about domains of theatre and drama, the concept of
physicality, “bodiliness”’ (Franks et al., 2014, 172) is familiar to them and
that they are aware that ‘Literary affect’ might become ‘corporeal affect’
(Hickey-Moody, 2009, 275). Shona also draws on another preliminary activity during which learners have considered the differences between a real
horse and visual representations of horses in cartoon and CGI depictions. She
asks for an ‘expert’ opinion on the leg movements of a horse when running:
Elias: ‘the front ones go in and the back ones . . . the front ones go forward and
it sort of puts them in rhythm . . .’ (he demonstrates with his arms, and uses his
fists as hooves beating out the rhythm on the desk).
This focus on the movement of the horse brings about some playful
responses from learners. A group that includes Elias experiment, and he shows
the others some hip hop-style dance moves he might include. Erik kneels and
Elias sits on his back bouncing up and down until Shona approaches them
and encourages all four group members to begin galloping on the spot. Their
movements in response are uninhibited and for that reason are effective in
representing horses galloping. Encouraged, Elias demonstrates a shimmying movement of his head, arms and upper body to coincide with the line
‘He gives his harness bells a shake,’ and Shona joins in as if she is ‘a student
among students’ explicitly seeking to ‘serve the cause of [their] liberation’
(Freire, 1993, 56). This enjoyment in playing with the idea of a horse and its
movement, encouraged by Shona’s participation, is reminiscent of child play
with imitation featuring as part of the learners’ repertoire. There is clearly
pleasure, signalled by the laughter, in the uninhibited nature of the playing.
However, a more deliberate move towards choreographed movement takes
place as the learners work together to hone their presentation, which signals
the ‘change of gear’ that moves the playing towards its ‘dramatic art form’
(Bolton, 1979, 32). This is not easy to achieve (Franks, 1997), as it requires
collaboration, negotiation, attention to the poem and a collective desire to
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create an imaginatively expressed horse and rider which will elicit recognition from others. However, when they present to the class, it is clear from
their choreography and careful synchronization of words with movement that
their playing with the text has, over time and without further intervention
from Shona, acquired a discipline. The hip hop dance and the shimmy are
included in the presentation, and Elias is grinning at other learners, the audience, as he dances. They in turn are smiling and laughing back at him as if
in recognition of this shared cultural reference which has imposed itself on a
very different type of cultural artefact, the poem chosen by the teacher, in the
formal setting of the classroom.
To adapt terms coined by Gillham (1974) and used extensively by Bolton
(2010), the learners’ presentation is indicative of how ‘play for the pupil’
has become ‘play for the class’ and this ‘play for them’ is the ‘children’s
angle of connection’ (xvii). The ‘play for teacher’, has, however, involved
Shona carefully ‘weaving in the components of the art form’ (xvii), which
Hulson (2006) describes as the skill of the teacher to bind ‘the formal, the
expressive-interpretive and the productive strands’ (12) of learning into their
drama practice.
The activity leading to the group’s presentation also has echoes of
Bakhtinian ‘carnivalesque’ (Bakhtin, 1984), heightening learners’ awareness
of the materiality of their bodies in relation to the other bodies that make
up the classroom community, as ‘classrooms are clearly “bodied spaces”’
(Franks et al., 2014, 172). However, for ‘boys in their early adolescence,
physical contact between peers tends to be problematic and is often confined
to particular modes’ (Franks, 1997, 140), but this activity has enabled a
different physicality to emerge through the relationship of horse and rider.
Furthermore, the sharing of the experience evokes a sense of belonging, in
evidence in the communal laughter. By eschewing more conventional methods of studying a poem in English in favour of play and parody, Shona has
provided the opportunity for new connections to be made. Thus, the drama
activity and Shona’s earlier encouragement of learners’ playfulness with the
text have paved the way for imaginative engagement, what Hulson (2006)
refers to as the teacher’s ‘Imagination in conference with experience’ (12).
That the learners feel able to engage in this way says much about Shona’s
pedagogical approach, which holds with the idea that drama experience is at
once aesthetic, empathetic, reflective, entertaining (for others) and pleasurable (Heathcote, 1980). The multifaceted nature of the drama activity therefore makes it integral to her teaching of a literary text.
In another group, Sammy and Fariq create a horse and rider combination
that sees Sammy engaging in an animated set of horse movements. Unlike
in the previous example, these two are in a group that appears to find it difficult to arrive at a way of operating collectively, with all four members of the
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group communicating only sporadically. Their interactions are characterized
by a lack of whole group decision making. This is emphasized by the physical
distance between them, particularly Joel and Duane, who remain apart from
the other two. However, jointly deciding on the horse movements allows
them to briefly come together to play with and explore the idea of ‘horse’.
In any group pursuing drama work, there are likely to be inequalities in terms
of input, and the power relationships may adversely affect interactions and
the formation of ideas. Alternatively, the tensions may lead to creative acts,
and it is not a simple matter for the observer to discern whether the former
or the latter is occurring (Franks, 1997). However, Joel’s mockery of Sammy
does not seem to deter him, and he becomes increasingly goal directed,
repeatedly practising his choreography. Sammy adds further recognizable
movements to communicate ‘horse’, although his human facial expressions
add an anthropomorphic slant.
Sammy is keen to inform me, as I observe the group practising, that Fariq
is both horse and rider, his legs being the back legs of the horse and his torso,
arms and head the rider, while Sammy is the front legs, torso and head of the
horse. It is unclear as to whether this is his own or a jointly agreed representation of their horse/rider combination, but its shared embodiment is suggestive
of a pantomime horse as well as of horse and rider games in the school playground, perhaps played at a younger age but nevertheless a reference point.
It might also be influenced by the puppetry in the stage adaptation of Warhorse,
the novel that the learners have been studying. These are cultural references
for ‘horse’ that he can share with his peers. Sammy’s commitment to and the
pleasure he clearly gains from repeatedly practising his choreography indicate
his deep involvement in this ‘play for the pupil’ in which his ‘desire’ acts as
‘the force or drive towards expression and creativity’(Franks, 1997, 134). This
is somewhat different to his attitude in other English lessons where I have
observed his quiet disengagement from discussions and written work. Here,
even when Shona begins to call the class back to attention, he excitedly indicates to Fariq that he wants to practise their routine one more time.
In both of these vignettes the learners’ play is in alignment with the ‘play
for the teacher’ which has been determined by her pedagogical goals and
by the components of drama she has chosen for shaping and structuring the
presentations. The literary study is approached with recourse to the affective,
sensory and at times sensual nature of anthropomorphic tropes in literature,
and the idea of searching for the humanity in the (ultimately unknowable)
animal as a way of reflecting on the human condition. At the outset of the lesson, Shona has explained that learners will be working on ways to think like
an animal, trying to get inside its head, to consider what it is like to be one,
linking to their recent reading of Warhorse. To do so, she encourages them to
try out evoking a horse through physical embodiment, for as Eagleton (2003)
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suggests, ‘our bodies are materially geared to culture—because meaning,
symbolism, interpretation and the like are essential to what we are’ (159).
Having a body is ‘like having a language’ and ‘is a way of being in the midst
of a world’ (166). In the lesson on Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,
the activity that Shona has instigated draws on the cultural reference points
in the world of the young people, and it is largely through the body that these
learners discover and signify a horse. This, in embryonic form, seems to be
what Nathaniel is suggesting in his comments quoted above about the emotional nature of action, particularly collaborative action, and in his assertion
that a type of language is created by combining action, speech and emotion.
RE-CREATION AND RE-ENACTMENT
Within the constraints of the dramatic form specified by Shona, the playfully
re-creative relationship between the learners and the poem is demonstrated
in different ways by the various groups in the class. The group comprised
of Joel, Sammy, Fariq and Duane choose to adapt the narrative to satisfy
their own desire to compose and to create character, making the shadowy
owner of the woods an embodied presence, inventing dialogue for him and
resolving the journey of the horse and rider in a way that is absent from
the poem. Rather than viewing this sequence as a misinterpretation, Shona
acknowledges it as an act of remaking, a challenge to the notion of sole
authorship which is encouraged by the way in which she has actualized the
study of the poem through affect as well as intellect. Playing physically with
the text has engaged the learners with it, and has enabled re-reading and interpretation. This is demonstrated in both Joel’s drive to create context through
character and Sammy’s blurring of animal and human gestures in a way that
is entirely in keeping with the poem narrator’s anthropomorphic attribution
of particular thoughts to his horse.
However, in dealing with the different anthropomorphic approach of the
novel Warhorse, in which the horse is the central character providing the
voice of the narrator, Shona effects another way in to the drama work. She
focuses on an episode in which Joey, the horse, is trapped on his own in no
man’s land during a scene of trench warfare in World War I. Both sides raise
the white flag to allow one soldier from each army to rescue him. A flip of
a coin determines that the Welsh soldier will claim him. As her entry point
into this scene, Shona asks for an affective response and does not mention
re-enactment when she sets up the drama activity. Instead, she encourages
learners to engage with the emotions that Joey would be feeling in this situation and asks them to create a freeze frame to represent these emotions from
a list they generate.
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the phrase
“Shona
effects
another…”
please check
if “in to”
should be
changed to
“into”
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This move to a more symbolic still image representation—of emotions
rather than events—might suggest her concerns about the value of retelling simply to animate narrative (Byron, 1986). However, it is arguable that
retelling can ever merely replicate (Bruner, 1986). This is illustrated by the
response of Elias, Erik, Rudy and William. They immediately become very
engaged with the scene as depicted in the novel, settling into the physicality
of their roles. Erik folds a piece of paper with concentration, and holds it in
the air as a white flag. He sinks to his knees then all the way to the ground in
a very controlled manner, almost in slow motion, while holding the flag aloft
and staring at it. As he is sinking, he allows the paper to flutter downwards
in his hand. He immediately jumps upright and holds the flag high in the air
again. He is very precise in practising these positions.
Rudy also wants to raise a flag, and so takes a piece of paper from me.
He and Erik position themselves equidistant from Elias as Joey. The picture
created is of the different sides in the war, with Elias trapped in no man’s land
between them. Rudy and Erik hold their flags aloft, taking great care over
their positioning in terms of the exact distance between them and mirroring
the way in which they hold the flags. Shona calls the class to attention, and
they quickly practise the holding of their flags aloft one last time—the stretch
of their arms is very exaggerated as if indicating that the flag needs to be high
enough to be seen from a long distance away and the tension in their arms
and bodies suggests the importance they attach to the action. When they later
present the freeze frame to the class, William is positioned watching the scene
and apparently recording it in a notebook.
This exploration of a scene from the novel through drama activity suggests
the link between an affective and analytical response to literature in reaching
an understanding of the power of narrative. Indeed, for these learners there
is clearly something very powerful—symbolic rather than simply representational—in the act of holding the white flag aloft. The action, and the way in
which it is meticulously reproduced and then presented, shifts the perspective
from the horse (always present in the first person narrative of the novel) to the
two soldiers holding the flags. Bruner (1986) notes the reader’s psychological capacity to identify with the characters and relate them to characters we
‘carry unconsciously within us’ (4). Thus, when the other learners offer their
readings of the freeze frame during whole-class feedback on the presentation,
they imbue the characters with feelings and concerns that might be taken
from the novel but also from their wider knowledge, for example, by suggesting that William could be an eye witness and that he is saddened, scared and
wanting to get away from the anticipated violence.7
The compelling nature of the narrative that has so engaged Rudy and
Erik demonstrates that the text is not inert; it has materiality and agency
and ‘a relationship of co-responsibility’ (Bolt, 2013, 6) with the learners as
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cultural producers. The narrative not only enables them to interpret ‘the landscape of action’ but also brings them to an understanding of ‘the landscape
of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or
do not know, think, or feel’ (Bruner, 1986, 14). Thus, texts are only fully
realized in the moment of reading, and reading is therefore a dynamic act
(Bruner, 1986, referencing Iser). The learners’ ‘telling back’ (6) of the story
melds the act of reading with the act of improvising as they develop their
constantly shifting ‘virtual text’ (7). What emerges is a dynamic group reading rather than any one individual’s intra-action with the text. The ideas of the
different members of the group may jostle for dominance at different times
(Franks, 1997), but eventually they converge and cohere.
CONCLUSION
The pedagogical approach apparent in these lessons suggests that Shona
regards the classroom as an uncertain and dialogic space, in which art making
is a ‘socially and culturally mediated’(Barrett and Bolt, 2013, 4) act produced
not just as a result of the linguistic turn but through practices, which ‘engage
the matter of bodies’ (5). Here ‘the formal curriculum’ can encounter and
even negotiate with ‘the cultures of learners’ (Jones, 2003, 145), resisting
those aspects of policy which seek ‘to redefine “culture” itself’ and control ‘from above’ (145–6). Through drama, the learners in Shona’s English
lessons are able to draw on their own cultures in their engagements with
character, linguistic effects, and the use of literary tropes such as metaphor,
and in the case of the lessons I observed, anthropomorphism. These encounters ‘evoke zestful imaginative play’ (Bruner, 1986, 4) as the wellspring of
cultural production. Thus, drama is at the very heart of the learning that takes
place, and as such has a fundamental place in Shona’s understanding of the
epistemological scope of her subject. Her realization of this has emerged over
time through the praxis of her developing pedagogy. Although, she admits,
she did not fully appreciate the importance of dramatic practices during her
initial teacher education, what she has learnt since has subsequently become
embedded in her practice. As Neelands (1992) has suggested, it speaks to the
value system of the teacher who decides ‘to adopt drama into her repertoire
of teaching styles’ (9) as an integral part of the shared creative and cultural
resources of the classroom and as a way of enhancing language and literary
learning.
The drama activity in the observed lessons indicates Shona’s understanding
of the complexities of literary learning and of ‘the processes of reading and
entering a story’ (Bruner, 1986, 4), as there are multiple ways of reading
a literary text. Her methods are suggestive of Barad’s (Dolphijn and
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van der Tuin, 2012) notion of diffractive reading, whereby such readings
‘bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with’ (50). The act
of re-creation serves to stimulate the readers’ interpretative processes, but
through their imaginative responses to fiction, here externalized in the dramatic mode, the learners also have a means of expressing their rich emotional lives (Vygotsky, 1994). Dramatic activity lends an immediacy to the
imaginative experience of fictional texts and is well placed to meet those
aspects of the re-creative mode to do with ‘restoring and licensing sensuous
pleasure in engagement with text’ (Knights and Thurgar-Dawson, 2008, 71).
Pleasure and the role of desire in learners’ dramatic engagements with text
(Franks, 1997) are explicitly linked to the Vygotskian formulation of imagination in adolescence (Vygotsky, 1994). Franks (1997) suggests that drama
in schools, by legitimizing adolescent play, externalizes and gives embodied
form to inner desires which are dynamic, socially orientated and responsive
to context. In these circumstances, the dramatic activity is simultaneously
immersive and self-aware. The learners are emotionally engaged in the act
of fiction making and as audience to their own creation are also critically
engaged (Bolton, 2010) in a ‘respectful, detailed, ethical’ manner (Dolphijn
and van der Tuin, 2012, 50). Immersion and self-awareness are both necessary components of the re-creative activity in Shona’s lessons, and her practice encompasses the playful qualities of the learners’ dramatic responses,
utilizing these to pedagogical effect.
Thus, in playing with and re-creating the source text through intra-actions
between self and text, learners are able to create a physical palimpsest,
positioning themselves with the author in an authoritative way, as well as
authorizing (Jones, 2003) their own shared knowledge and interpretations.
The drama work encourages ‘critical awareness and engagement’ such that
the learner is ‘an active participant, not a passive consumer’ (hooks, 1994, 14),
and ensures that the reading of literary texts in this English classroom is an
act not of cultural transmission but of cultural production, as learners are able
to entangle their own experiences with those of the classroom to unlock the
possibilities of reading.
NOTES
1. Name changed to protect identity.
2. The Creative Partnerships programme was designed to bring creative workers
such as artists, architects and scientists into schools to work with teachers. It worked
with over 2,700 schools across England from 2002 to 2011, at which point Arts
Council England withdrew funding.
3. Also known as still image or tableau.
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4. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Programme for
International Student Assessment.
5. See the foreword to the Government White Paper, The Importance of Teaching,
November 2010.
6. Key stage 3 refers to 11- to 14-year-olds.
7. Protests in Tahir Square in the revolt against the government in Egypt were
being reported daily at this time.
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Chapter 6
‘Let me change it into my own style’
Cultural Domination and Material Acts of
Resistance Within an Inner City Dance Class
Camilla Stanger
A clear and pleasurable experience of ethnic identification is apparent in this
young woman’s expression of her relationship to Nigerian dance. Indeed, a
sense of belonging to and consciously performing a specific ethnic identity
was visible for many students attending Egypt’s inner-London college, the
context for this study. This college is located in an ethnically diverse area
of South East London and provides a number of academic and vocational
courses for young people between the ages 16 and 19. During the time this
research project took place (2009–2010), its student demographic comprised
a majority of young people who identified as Black, either of Caribbean or
African heritage. Teaching in this college over the course of three years,
I noticed a sense of pride and pleasure that many of the students took in displaying their particular ethnic heritage: from the clothes joyfully worn during
Diversity Week celebrations, to the classroom quarrels that would erupt over
which was the best team in the Confederation of African Football league, to
the snapshots of music and dance that were often played and performed in
the college leisure areas.
As Egypt’s words indicate, however, the relationship between ‘ethnicity’,
cultural practice and identity is complex: she suggests that the meanings of
cultural practices are multiple, to be taken up differently by different people
even within the same family; she also categorically asserts that Nigerian
dance is ‘something that was me’, with connotations of an ingrained ethnic
identity, while in her statement regarding ‘contemporary’ dance (to be elucidated later), she reveals how much she clearly values the opportunity to
‘be anything’. This idea, and rhetoric, of being ‘anything’ could be read in
terms of what Ringrose (2013) describes as a ‘neo-liberal ethos’ (3) within
a particular ‘theorisation of late modernity’ (3): an ethos in which the project of the individual is one of necessary reinvention ‘towards the goal of
113
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AQ: Please
check
the closing quote
inserted at
the end of
the sentence
“for Hall
(1996),
identity…”
AQ: In the
quoted text
in the sentence “Here,
the individual’s…”
please
check if
“bricollage”
should be
changed to
“bricolage”.
Camilla Stanger
marketability and consumption’ (4), through which the desirable subject is
marked by flexibility and capacity for (entrepreneurial) innovation. While
such an impetus is traceable in Egypt’s goals for herself as a young woman
striving towards Higher Education and employment in the twenty-first
century, I will be reading her desire to ‘be anything’ in a different sense:
namely, as a desire to draw upon the variety of cultural resources available
to her to enact a heterogeneous cultural identity (and corresponding agency)
that is unique to young people who occupy and create multicultural spaces
and practices.
The research question to which this chapter responds then is: how can
educators within ethnically diverse settings develop pedagogies that do not
oppress a young person’s need to be categorically ‘me’ (which Egypt associates with one particular ethnic heritage) but still grant them the creative
freedom to be ‘anything’—not the arguably unreachable ‘anything’ of the
‘neo-liberal ethos’, but the ‘anything’ of the multifaceted identity of multicultural youth?
In order to articulate the nature of this multifaceted identity, it is useful
to turn to the work of Stuart Hall (1996), who argues that the concept of
identity necessarily implies ‘the question of identification’ (10); for Hall
(1996), identity is never a fixed category to which one unequivocally and
‘naturally’ belongs, but is a process of construction, ‘a process never completed’ (10). Identification therefore leaves room for change, transformation
and, fundamentally, difference; it also leaves the (often much desired) room
for possibility—the possibility to ‘be anything’. In alignment with this, Hall
(Nelson et al., 1991) defines culture as a ‘set of practices, representations,
languages and customs’ (57), and it is with this understanding of the word
‘culture’ that the phrase ‘cultural identity’ will be employed in this chapter to
denote the idea of an ethnic identity as a process of participation. The term
‘cultural identity’ in this sense implies not a rooted homogeneity, but rather
the possibility for a fluid and moving heterogeneity.
Theorists such as Bhabha (1996), Cohen (1997), Hall (Woodward,
1997) and Dash (2010) have discussed this understanding of a fluid cultural identity in the context of our increasingly globalized world—one that
is both deconstructed and (re)constructed by processes of migration and
immigration. In this respect, heterogeneity within cultural identity will be,
if not more present, at least more visible in locations and subjects where
more than one set of cultural practices and norms collide and so inevitably
enter into some kind of dialogue. Indeed, Dash (2010) cites Gilroy in his
reference to the ‘travelling standpoint’ of diasporic (specifically Black)
subjects, a standpoint which produces a ‘cultural view predicated on the
notion of fusion and mobility’ (177). Here, the individual’s participation
in cultural practices in addition to those of their heritage culture leads to
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identification processes such as ‘hybridity, collage … bricollage, creolisation…’ (Dash, 2010, 43). Within this understanding of cultural identity,
young people such as Egypt can be in a position to identify as Nigerian if
they choose, but at the same time have room to explore being ‘anything’
else.
So what are the implications of this for how we should view the cultural
status and educational needs of young people, particularly those who participate in diasporic as well as dominant cultural practices, and live in culturally diverse areas? It is useful here to draw on Cohen’s (1997) citation of
Vertovec:
Aesthetic styles … and other cultural phenomena are more globalised, cosmopolitan and creolized or ‘hybrid’ than ever before. This is especially the case
among youth of transnational communities, whose initial socialization has
taken place within the cross-currents of more than one cultural field, and whose
ongoing forms of cultural expression and identity are often self-consciously
selected, syncretised and elaborated from more than one cultural heritage. (128,
my emphasis)
The young people1 to whom Vertovec refers can be viewed as cultural
producers—major players in generating hybridized, and therefore new, cultural practices. These young people are not just participants in culture, but
are ideally placed as transformers and creators of culture. This is facilitated
through their early encounters with a variety of cultural practices as inhabitants and ‘natives’ of culturally diverse geographical locations, and through
a consequent ability to move in the ‘in-between’ spaces (Bhabha, 1996, 54)
created by the collision and intermingling of ‘diasporic’ and ‘dominant’
cultural practices. It is also facilitated, more generally, through their use of
globalized forms of media communication and participation in teenage subcultures (McRobbie, 1991; Hickey-Moody, 2013). Such young people then
are potentially placed as cultural arbiters and creators, who can draw on a
variety of different resources and make use of a wealth of cultural capital.
The role that material cultures—especially arts practices—play in all this is
significant: as Hickey-Moody (2013) states within her exploration of youth,
arts and education, ‘young people live through art … the ways young people
make and consume art articulate their voice’ (1). If the ‘voice’ some young
people have to articulate is rooted in a heterogeneous and globalized cultural
identity, it will be the case that their arts practices can ‘become intelligible
[and powerful] as a form of global cultural citizenship’ (91). Ideally, then,
the design of pedagogic practice within schools acknowledges this multiple
and creative cultural agency, and the (often aesthetic) ways in which young
people tend to express it.
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AQ: In the
sentence
“One particular…”
please check
the opening quote
inserted
in “white
supremacy”
AQ: Please
provide the
missing
opening
quote for
the closing
quote at the
end of the
sentence
“I read her
experiences…”
Camilla Stanger
The reality of social life for many of these young people, however, does
not always indicate a state of empowerment regarding the contributions they
make and the cultural status they hold. In the wake of the August 2011 riots
across England, there emerged increasing rhetoric concerning the idea that
young people from economically deprived and largely minority ethnic areas2
did not have a ‘stake’ in society (Miliband, 2011). Furthermore, there is
extensive research indicating that the British education system and its distinctive culture disadvantages young people who do not identify as White British
and middle class (Mac an Ghaill, 1988; Gaine and George, 1999; Youdell,
2006; Archer et al., 2010). One particular proponent of this viewpoint is
David Gillborn (2005), who refers to a state of ‘white supremacy’ within
British society and its education system (485), namely, the institutionalization
of white (and I would add middle class) advantage through wide-reaching
structures such as assessment procedures and criteria, curriculum content
and ethnic diversity within teaching staff. In light of this body of research,
it would seem that the British education system may offer a largely homogenized version of knowledge and learning that does not cater for a heterogeneous creativity and cultural agency. With this in mind, it would be the task
of educators within this system to find opportunities to facilitate and support
the expression of such agency in the face of dominant, and potentially dominating, homogeneous discourses.
A pedagogy of resistance then, one that enables heterogeneous cultural
agency without oppressing minority cultural practices, is what this chapter
seeks to engage with. I explore this via the analysis of one young woman’s
learning experiences in her first year of an A Level Dance3 course at the college referred to earlier. I read her experiences in light of Paulo Freire’s (1993)
concepts of oppression, liberation and dialogics within the development of
a pedagogy of the oppressed’ (35). I read Freire’s (1993) terms ‘oppression
and the oppressed’ here in terms of a situation of cultural ‘white supremacy’
within British education, in which the diversity and fluidity of some students’
identities can go unacknowledged, or worse still, suppressed. I argue that
throughout the dance course, Egypt moved through an initial stage of (partial)
oppression—in which she was at times trapped by a homogenized and ‘white’
version of knowledge—to a stage of (partial) liberation, where this homogenization of culture was resisted, and her unique creative cultural agency was
drawn upon and freed. The pedagogic practices which led to such a pattern
will be analysed with reference to Paul Dash’s (2010) work on critical art
education for Black, inner-city students, and theorized in light of Rebecca
Coleman’s (2009) work on the relationship between girls’ bodies and images.
This discussion will be developed by ideas in the field of feminist new materialism regarding the material agency of the (raced) body, and nuanced by the
work of Sara Ahmed (2002). In this, I seek to articulate a dance pedagogy that
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AQ: The
word
“black” has
been predominantly
initially
uppercased,
while
the word
“white” has
been predominantly
initially
lowercased.
Please confirm whether
these words
could be
initially lowercased as
per style.
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117
can be seen as a material act of resistance against—and a space for transformation in the face of—a dominant (colonial) aesthetic discourse.
THE CASE STUDY
One student was interviewed for this study in July 2011. Egypt (a pseudonym of her choice) was 18 years old at the time of interviewing and studied
AS4 Dance in the academic year 2009–2010. She describes her ethnicity as
‘Black British African’. Her parents are Nigerian nationals and she was born
in the United Kingdom, and living in East London at the time she was studying
at college. There were two teachers on the A Level Dance course at this time:
myself and Etta. We describe our dance and ethnic backgrounds as follows:
Camilla: ‘I describe my ethnicity as White British. I trained mainly in classical
ballet with the Royal Academy of Dance and have more recently started
attending short courses in contemporary dance styles. I have also started to learn
techniques in street dance and West African dance styles.’
Etta: ‘I describe my ethnicity as White European. I trained primarily in forms
of contemporary dance, focusing on Release and Limone techniques at the
Laban institute of contemporary dance.’
The AS Dance course was structured into two halves. Up until Christmas,
the students studied a (brief) history of the key North American and European theatrical dance styles, which was delivered via theory and practice.
We spent 4–5 weeks on each style, moving in (a somewhat artificial and
implicitly colonial) chronological order: classical ballet, contemporary styles5
and (a shorter time spent on) North American jazz and tap. We studied two
existing dance works: Petipa and Ivanov’s (Nears, 2006)6 and Bourne’s
(Bourne, 2008)7 versions of Swan Lake (classical ballet and ballet–jazz fusion
styles, respectively). The students were also introduced to various choreographic techniques. After Christmas, the students continued having regular
technique classes in contemporary dance styles, but also started experimenting with their own choreographic practice. They each devised a 3-minute
piece of solo choreography in response to a stimulus question. They then
rehearsed and refined this piece in preparation for their practical assessment.
Our aims in designing the course were not only to increase the students’
enjoyment of and proficiency in dance studies but also to allow them to
access the highest marks possible in assessments. It became apparent after
working the parameters of the A Level Dance syllabus for two years that it,
to a certain extent, benefitted students whose experience was rooted in white,
‘Western’ theatrical dance traditions: this something that Egypt experienced
quite acutely, and painfully, during the first part of the course.
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Camilla Stanger
THE FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR:
A PEDAGOGY OF OPPRESSION
A key way Freire (1993) characterizes oppression is as the lack of freedom
and power to draw one’s own meaning from and bring one’s own meaning to
the world: a world that has already been defined by the oppressor. For Freire
(1993), the oppressed should be engaged in a ‘struggle to have meaning’ (26)
but also to ‘create meaning’ (50). Learners will therefore become oppressed
when they are disempowered within the process of meaning making that constitutes learning—especially in a context of cultural domination. Throughout
the first part of the course, Egypt experienced a lack of opportunity to bring
cultural meanings and interpretations to dance class because ‘dance’ had
already been, to a certain extent, defined and homogenized within the context of a white, ‘Western’ theatrical tradition—a tradition to which she had
not had much access. This can be seen as she discusses the gap between her
expectations and the reality of the course:
CS: ‘What were your expectations of A Level Dance? What did you think you
were going to be studying in it?’
E: ‘Um, I thought there would be African elements to it—but I just really
wanted to open my eyes to all types of dance ... I kind of got what I expected
to be honest.’
CS: ‘And what main styles did we learn in A Level Dance?’
E: ‘Oh God, we done ballet at the beginning, oh God [laughs] and I think our
main styles were ballet and contemporary. ... But I would really hate [the ballet
technique classes at the start of the year] because I thought other people in the
class would be thinking “What’s she doing in the class? She doesn’t know how
to do ballet!” Because if you’re going to be a really good dancer, you should,
not be able to do ballet, but be able to do the basics, right? And I just really
hated that lesson because I felt really, like, silly ... like, “did I really actually
pick dance—I think I should have picked something else”. ... I was kind of like,
embarrassed.’
Egypt came to the course expecting to study dance that she knew and that
made sense to her. In reality, her concepts of dance were not represented on
the curriculum in any recognizable form. Freire (1993) discusses the perils of
ignoring students’ ‘views of the world’ in designing educational programmes
for the oppressed (74–5), and Dash (2010) gives an example of just this in
what he calls the ‘Eurocentric model’ (64) of teaching art history. This entails
the chronological (and so neatly homogenized) presentation of artistic movements/styles, all ‘tethered’ to a Western ‘anchor point’ (Dash, 2010, 64), in
a way not dissimilar to the ‘history of dance’ these students received early
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in the course. This Eurocentric and homogenized presentation of dance was
antithetical to Egypt’s diasporic, urban and heterogeneous cultural identity on
every level. Indeed, it appears that at certain points, Egypt’s response to this
‘perspective on truth and reality’ (Dash, 2010, 71) was a sense of disenfranchisement as she identifies moments of embarrassment early on in the course
where she questioned her decision to study and even carry on dancing.
Egypt also exhibits a concerning perception that the course was still what
she ‘expected’ as an introduction to ‘all types of dance’, despite the fact that
it did not provide any direct study in the ‘African dance’ she had anticipated
she might learn. This comes as little surprise when we see her notion that she
had no knowledge of dance prior to the course, or that the knowledge she
already held was not of value:
CS: ‘What was your experience of dance before you started the A Level Dance
course?’
E: ‘It was nothing really, just little things I did with, like, secondary school,
I done stuff with contemporary but it wasn’t that technical. I came with no
proper dance experience at all really.’
CS: ‘What about your experience with African dance styles?’
E: ‘Oh. Well, when it comes to African I done it since primary school, in after
school classes, and I just done it whenever I could, like in the holidays and
sometimes by myself … oh and I done a performance in Hackney for Nigerian
independence. Yeah, it wasn’t really African as in whole African, but it was
Nigerian dance. … I did it with my family when it came to parties—but I also
always done it separately.’
Here I had to ask Egypt directly about her experience in African dance
styles before she realized this even counted as a valid answer. Freire (1993)
discusses the definitions and perceptions of knowledge within oppressed
communities, stating that [the oppressed] call themselves ignorant and say the
‘professor’ is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen. ...
Almost never do they realize that they, too, ‘know things’ they have learned
in their relations with the world’ (45). Egypt was faced with not only a curriculum but also teachers who represented and embodied dance practices that
are rooted within white western traditions; we can see how her perception
of what counts as dance knowledge and experience has become shaped and
somewhat bounded by this. In this respect, her ability to both ‘have meaning’
and ‘create meaning’ was certainly hindered.
This state of perceived ignorance was compounded by one of the main
teaching approaches taken in this first term, one that left little room for different forms of knowledge to be counted and new forms of knowledge to
emerge, and is similar to what Freire (1993) refers to as the ‘banking’ concept
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AQ: In the
sentence
“Almost
never…”
please
provide the
opening
quote corresponding to
the closing
quote after
“with the
world”.
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120
AQ: Please
check the
edits in the
sentence
“This has
also…”
Camilla Stanger
of education (53). This has also been articulated by Atkinson and Dash (2005)
in relation to art education in British schools: ‘A major emphasis is upon
the acquisition of skills. ... The teacher often demonstrates the skills to be
acquired and guides pupils as they attempt to achieve them’. In this traditional
approach, the teacher is considered to be ‘the subject supposed to know’ (xi).
In the context of dance teaching, this relates to the dance technique classes,
which rely heavily on teacher demonstration followed by student imitation.
It is these classes that Egypt expresses quite vivid memories of:
CS: ‘Were there any classes you remember doing and feeling that you weren’t
enjoying it?’
E: ‘Oh [laughs] I remember these evening classes we did on, like, a Monday,
these long lessons and we were doing ballet—we were doing technique, holding
onto the side of a chair. ... I, like, hated that lesson so badly. I felt so stupid, like
‘“I don’t know how to do this—this looks really silly on me”.’
CS: ‘Could you explain that more?’
E: ‘I felt really silly—I, like, hated it because I felt like, oh my gosh [my
movements look like] the worst thing ever. Ballet was kind of like—you had to
look—that was what I didn’t really like, that you had to look a certain way. ...
You’d have to be really skinny and have very straight posture, you have to um
be very elegant and very calm—I definitely didn’t fit ballet [laughs] ... at the
beginning of last year, I was trying to imitate [other students in the class who
had received prior ballet training] because they were the best dancers—so I was
always trying to dance to their way of moving, like to do ballet.’
It is clear that at this point in the year, she felt she should embody a balletic
model in order to be ‘good’, citing other students to whom she should aspire,
or even ‘imitate’. Indeed, Freire (1993) highlights a common desire of the
oppressed to seek power and success through ‘identification with the oppressor’ (28), and a metaphor he employs to articulate this is extremely apt for the
context of dance teaching: [the oppressor] imposes his own contours on the
vanquished, who internalize this shape and become ambiguous beings ‘housing another’ (119). Egypt felt ‘uncomfortable’ in her attempts to embody
the ‘shape’—the precise bodily configurations and movement styles—that
she had been shown as an ideal form. Furthermore, Egypt’s use of language
suggests a real sense of physical dissociation from these ‘contours’ when she
states ‘this looks really silly on me’ (emphasis mine).
This does not, however, lead her to question the symbolic value associated
with this bodily configuration, but rather leads to a sense of self-loathing
directed towards her body—taken in isolation, Egypt’s words do not explicitly
communicate feelings of negativity towards her own body, but they should be
taken against the backdrop of certain behaviours I remember her displaying
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in ballet technique classes, for example: looking at herself in the mirror and
groaning, or exclaiming in frustration, ‘Miss, I just don’t look right’; holding
and once even slapping herself on the behind, then referring to the fact that it
was too large, or ‘stuck out’ too much. Egypt’s experience of her body here
can be elucidated with reference to Coleman’s (2009) work on the relationship between girls’ bodies and the images they are confronted with daily
(with Coleman’s key examples being photographs, mirror images and images
circulated within and by mainstream media). Central to Coleman’s (2009)
findings here is that ‘bodies are becomings’ (48), namely, and in alignment
with the notions of diasporic identity discussed earlier, no body is fixed in
one material and semiotic state, but is rather always in a process of change
and development—in and through its relation to other bodies and, crucially
here, to images. As emerges clearly in Coleman’s (2009) research with young
women, ‘bodies and images are not independent, bounded beings but … are
constituted through, their transformative relationality’ (48–9). This analysis
certainly sheds light on Egypt’s experience of her body in ballet class.
In this context, Egypt was surrounded and confronted by a number of
images of bodies: that of the (ballet-trained) teacher, those of other (ballettrained) girls in the class, those of the professional dancers on the ballet
DVDs she had been shown—and then the mirror image of her own body,
schooled primarily in Nigerian dance styles. In the context of—and in interaction with—these images, Egypt’s body, as viscerally experienced by her,
‘becomes’ something uncomfortable, something inadequate, something not
‘right’. This is because Egypt’s dancing body here is ‘known, understood and
experienced through images’ (Coleman, 2009, 19) of an idealized body—an
ideal defined by the corporeal aesthetics of classical ballet. Through these
specific corporeal aesthetics, Egypt’s bottom in particular takes on a negative
significance—it becomes not a muscle group to employ in the achievement
of a dance movement nor a contour to employ in the achievement of a dance
aesthetic, but rather something that just ‘sticks out too much’. Ultimately, this
leads to a sense of Egypt—her body, or this particular image of it—being ‘out
of place’, a phrase she uses elsewhere to describe her feelings in this class.
This is reminiscent of Ahmed’s (2002) vivid discussion of the construction
(and deconstruction) of the Black female body via the normative white male
gaze, taking the commodification and objectification of Sarah Baartman8
(specifically her bottom) as an example. Ahmed (2001) explains a process
through which this body becomes not only a collection of body parts to be
gazed upon, but a ‘grotesque and monstrous’ (53) body, rooted in a notion
of its ‘excessive sexuality’ (53), in contrast to the ‘purity’ (52) of the white,
female ideal. Ahmed (2002) goes on to discuss the resulting ways in which
Black bodies can become ejected from white-dominated spaces: spaces that
are shaped and legitimated by the white gaze, and images of whiteness,
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Camilla Stanger
through which Black bodies become objects of fear, desire and disgust.
Egypt’s emerging feelings of disgust at her own body and subsequent feelings of displacement within the ballet class can certainly be understood in
these terms.
The ways in which Egypt talks about her body here—as the site in which
she experienced these processes of cultural oppression—are significant. In
order to further theorize this, it is useful to turn to the ideas of feminist new
materialism, as articulated by Van der Tuin (2011) and Bolt (2013). Both
theorists explain how a recent ‘material turn’ (Van der Tuin, 2011, 1) in academia has seen the welcoming of analytical frameworks that place the material (and lived) reality of the body as a central concern when exploring the
operation of social and political processes. Van der Tuin (2011) critiques the
conceptualization of this turn as a movement opposed to the linguistic turn,
and reviews a number of texts in this field that grapple with ways that matter and human semiotics inter(and intra)act to produce bodies and meanings.
Bolt’s (2013) text is one of these, and in it the author takes up this discussion to boldly assert that ‘at the core of the material turn, is a concern with
agential matter’ (3), that is, matter that is not passively and inertly marked
into definition by human discourse, but matter that inter-acts with and indeed
shapes social and political modes of understanding. In this, subjectivity is
both corporeal and constructed linguistically, and so the ‘I’ is to be conceived
of ‘as a material-semiotic actor’ (Bolt, 2013, 3). This useful phrase can be
traced back to the work of Haraway (1988) in her seeking of a feminist epistemology—one that theorizes ‘how meanings and bodies get made, not in
order to deny meanings or bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies
that have a chance for life’ (580). This effort to deny neither the discursive
(‘meanings’) nor the material (‘bodies’) leaves spaces in-between—spaces in
which we are able to understand Egypt’s experiences in this dance studio, in
alignment with Coleman’s (2009) ideas about the ‘enfolding’ of images and
bodies. The material reality of the bodies surrounding Egypt in this class,
with their specific contours and comportments produced through a particular
cultural aesthetic, acted upon Egypt’s (image of her) own body, producing its
meaning as inadequate (‘I didn’t fit … I should have picked something else’),
and also limiting its physical capacities (‘I don’t know how to do this’). In
this context, each body was both ‘structuring and structured’, each body here
was a ‘material-semiotic actor’ in so far as, it was simultaneously an ‘object
of knowledge’ but also ‘an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of
bodily production’, producing itself and other bodies around it as ‘right’ or
‘not right’ through its corporeality (Haraway, 1988, 589–95).
In these respects, the earlier notion of ‘cultural identity’ as determined by
one’s participation in a ‘set of practices, representations, languages and customs’ (Hall in Nelson et al., 1991, 57) needs to make room for the physical,
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material body’s role within this process: not only the ways in which the body
becomes (actually and physically) marked by its cultural practices, but the
ways in which cultural practices (and therefore subjectivities) are produced
in and of the materiality and agency of bodies. Through Egypt’s interviews,
we can see this interaction between her participation in cultural practices
and the material reality of her body: in how her understanding of ballet as a
cultural practice (‘you’d have to be very skinny and have very straight posture’), her sense of cultural alienation (‘this looks silly on me’) and a final
sense of cultural inferiority and shame (slapping herself on the behind) are
all experienced through her own and others’ bodies. Indeed, Hames-Garcia
(2008), also writing in the field of new materialism, discusses the need to
reconfigure the ways in which we understand the impact of racial identity
on an individual: he proposes that ‘race’ should not be merely dismissed as
an abstract linguistic classification arising from colonial discourse, but that
it could be understood as ‘something complexly arising out of interactions of
biology and culture’ (313). This understanding leaves room for ‘the materialeconomic’, ‘social and psychological’ and ‘physical’ reality of race (HamesGarcia, 2008, 321) and therefore the ways in which it is lived. Indeed,
understanding how ‘race’ is actually, corporeally lived is of key concern to a
number of Black feminists (Ahmed, 2002; hooks, 2004). As Ahmed (2002)
makes clear in her discussion of the racialization of bodies, to deny the lived
reality of ‘race’ in light of it being a historical and discursive construct, would
be to deny processes of racism that many experience. In alignment with these
concerns, it is clear to see how Egypt viscerally lived (and suffered) her racial
identity as a young Black woman in the context of the classical ballet class.
So how can these feminist new materialist understandings make way for
the concepts of cultural domination and resistance, key to the pedagogic
practices analysed in this article? Hames-Garcia’s (2008) work certainly
takes up the ways in which the material reality of bodies both produces and is
produced by historical power struggles—specifically ones concerning ‘race’.
To elucidate this further, it is useful to turn to the words of Barad (2008), who
discusses ‘the body’s historicity, in which its very materiality plays an active
role in the workings of power’ (128). Barad (2008) draws on the work of
Foucault to assert that ‘crucial to understanding the workings of power is an
understanding of the nature of power in the fullness of its materiality’ (128).
For Barad (2008), this ‘fullness’ can only be grasped through attendance to
the ‘host of material-discursive forces’ that ‘materialize’ (128) subjectivities
in certain power-imbued ways. Indeed, we have seen here how the material
reality of Egypt’s racial identity, experienced in the context of a curriculum
marked by ‘white supremacy’ (Gillborn, 2005), led to feelings of alienation
and disempowerment, despite her desire to transcend a fixed racial identity
and have the freedom and power to become ‘anything’.
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WORKING TOWARDS A SOLUTION
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“There was
certainly…”
Freire (1993) states that ‘when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer’ (59). There was certainly a sense that early in the year,
Egypt was unable to use her cultural faculties and even appeared to forget
she possessed them at certain points. We can also see that she suffered—
especially in her experience of her body (through a particular image of it) as
a burden of sorts, anchoring her into the position of ‘out of place’ in the ballet
class, and thus thwarting of her desire to become ‘anything’. So, what could a
pedagogical solution be? There is clearly a need for some explicit deconstructive work here in relation to the curriculum, in alignment with an anti-racist
approach to education (May, 1999). However, the following conversation
with Egypt is interesting in this respect:
CS: ‘Do you wish we hadn’t done all those ballet technique classes?’
E: ‘Oh no no no no. I’m glad we learned ballet because it helped, like, it all
helped—it helped with your posture and with making different movements look
structured and elegant. I’ve never wished we didn’t do it, I’m glad we did it—
it’s good that we learned about different things. As I know about African, and
I know about contemporary now and I know about ballet.’
Here, Egypt proudly articulates her dance knowledge as something that is
varied and diverse. She does not seem to subscribe to Freire’s (1993) idea that
she may be falsely ‘housing another’, but has, to extend the metaphor, made
room for this bodily configuration within her repertoire and bodily capacities.
So, a method of deconstruction needs to be found that doesn’t homogenize
racism into a ‘white-black dichotomy’ (May, 1999, 2), with cultural practices
being situated in one of two camps: practices to be dismantled and practices
to be valued. It would not do to prevent students from ethnic minorities from
learning and drawing on ‘white’ dance practices as sources of cultural capital
within the composition of their heterogeneous cultural identities.
The need for more varied cultural representation within this dance curriculum is also clear, in alignment with a multicultural approach to education
(Dash, 2010). However, critics of this approach have highlighted its potential
for a superficial and homogenized treatment of cultures and a somewhat
token approach, which does little to address and dismantle power inequalities
(Dash, 2010). Indeed, Egypt expresses major dissatisfaction with the fact that
she and another student performed a piece of (in her words) ‘commercial’
Nigerian dance at a college performance:
‘I thought—ok, yeah, I got my little piece ... but I really wanted to do a big,
proper, fast-paced African thing, and for it to be a proper little story of different
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types of dancing and the dance we done was so commercial, I wasn’t really
happy with it. I really wanted to do a big … thing, taking lots of different elements, so everyone would be like, wow.’
I interpret Egypt’s frustration here as directed not only towards the token
role a Nigerian dance style played in the show, but also towards the lack of
heterogeneity within it. So, for a pedagogical response that does not homogenize culture and ignore the students’ multiple cultural agency and creativity,
I turn to Freire’s (1993) ideas for a liberating pedagogy through dialogics.
THE SECOND HALF OF THE YEAR: A
PEDAGOGY OF LIBERATION
When asked whether there was a turning point within the year, a point at which
she started to enjoy classes more and feel more confident, Egypt quite emphatically stated: ‘I loved my solo ... I think that was the point where—that was the
turning point.’ So what was it about this part of the year that felt so different?
I argue that the answer lies ultimately in the more centralized role of the students’ embodied creative agency and autonomy within the learning process.
Freire (1993) cites Fromm in suggesting that the oppressed ‘must realise AQ: Please
that they are fighting for ... ‘freedom to create and to construct, to wonder provide the
and to venture’ (96). In the process of choreographing, the students selected missing
a stimulus task and were encouraged to find a unique way to respond to it. quote mark
in the senEgypt selected the poem ‘Lady of the Lake’ by Sir Walter Scott, which she tence “Freire
was free to use as a narrative, thematic or stylistic stimulus for her own cho- (1993) cites
reography; other than this, the assessment criteria were quite abstract, so she Fromm ...”
really had (a framed) space within which to generate ideas and make them
material. The students spent three months exploring their stimulus material
in a variety of ways, playing with movement ideas they had collected in class
(and elsewhere) and developing them to articulate their new ideas; this lead
to the careful construction of a three-minute piece which they then painstakingly rehearsed for a performance. In this process, they interacted with their
teacher/s and other students, seeking both critiques and creative collaborations, but were clearly the owners of their work. This is evident in the way
Egypt talks about the choreographic process:
E: ‘Ooh, I loved my solo—it really meant a lot to me. I made something. I really
made the choreography—I was like, oh my God. ... You were helping me with
it, but you weren’t doing it for me ... we had to think about it for ourselves. And
that’s what I liked. I enjoyed it when it came to the end of the year—I kind of
didn’t want to stop—I wanted to do it again and again.’
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Camilla Stanger
Egypt’s sense of pride and enjoyment is clear, and it seems to stem from
the fact that she became autonomous and productive as a learner. Freire
(1993) explains that within and through a liberating education, ‘students-ofthe-teacher’ become ‘students-teachers’ (61), and in this second part of the
year the students were not receiving learning from authoritative sources, but
were generating their own learning through the choreographic process. As a
teacher/facilitator in this context I often felt as if I was going on journeys of
discovery with the students (at times carried by them!) rather than delivering
and setting the terms of knowledge. This was largely because the students
were experimenting with ‘established’ movement ideas in ways that were so
fresh and unique, that they began to develop their own dance styles.
The style in which someone choreographs can be interpreted as a material language, and Freire (1993) states that ‘it is in speaking their word that
people, by naming the world, transform it’ (69). In their choreography,
these students started to develop their ‘voice’ (a material one) and a way of
articulating their ideas through a movement style, not a style that had been
imposed upon them—‘a situation where some name on behalf of others’—but
a style developed as ‘an act of creation’ (70). Freire (1993) rejects the notion
that a person can truly ‘name’ the world in the absence of other voices, and
proposes the centrality of dialogue: ‘dialogue is an encounter among women
and men who name the world ... dialogue imposes itself as the way by which
[people] achieve significance as human beings’ (69). And he asks, ‘How can
I dialogue if I regard myself a case apart from others ... how can I dialogue
if I am closed to the contribution of others?’ (71). It is in this respect that
Egypt was finally able to draw upon and express her heterogeneous and fluid
cultural identities and agency. She was not taking on the rather homogenized
‘shape’ of the dominant culture nor presenting a homogenized, ‘commercial’ version of her ‘heritage culture’; rather, through various encounters
and exchanges with different dance practices, she was able, in a dialogue of
sorts, to exercise her creative cultural agency by generating hybridized dance
forms. In this respect, she was able to ‘transform’ the world as it had previously existed. Indeed, Bhabha (1996) cites Bakhtin’s opinion that ‘hybrids
have been ... profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with
potential for new world views, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the
world in words’ (58).
It is crucial at this point to refer to Egypt’s own descriptions and analyses
of her choreography to elucidate this idea:
CS: ‘What about the dance style that you used. Could you describe, or what
could you say your dance style was?’
E: ‘Well, it was weird because sometimes I’d do, like, a ballet move—I’d try
and do, like, a very balletic movement but, it was weird because I just think
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I like, used a normal way of thinking, just a normal pedestrian way of moving,
of being—being normal. Natural movement ...’
CS: ‘Did you bring any of your experience of Nigerian dance into that do you
think?’
E: ‘Oh no, I don’t think I brought any of that into it at that point because the
choreography in itself was quite soft so I had to bring a different type of strong
feeling—like a contemporary kind of strong and with African it would have
been too—powerful—too—seen as aggressive rather than strong and yeah,
I didn’t really bring those movements in… . When you do African dance you
have to put every single emotion into it and that’s why I really enjoy doing
African dance, but with contemporary, the reason why I love that as well is
because of the emotion you can put in it. … I like to express myself in my movements and that’s why I like contemporary.’
CS: ‘So did you leave your African dance styles behind?’
E: ‘Oh no, but because we started doing lots of other different dance styles
I started thinking like … let me incorporate what I know, let me add to it, change
it, manipulate it into my own style.’
Dash (2010) articulates an understanding of ‘the discourse of diasporic
style’. He describes this primarily as an ‘aesthetic sense [which] is oblivious
to firm categories and traverses divisions normally regarded as separate and
discrete’ (176). This approach to creativity and aesthetic expression is visible
in how Egypt describes her work. She resists defining her style in a singular
and homogenized way and instead refers to combinations and manipulations
of style. She discusses the way she transformed balletic movements, made
them ‘weird’, by employing the ‘natural movement’ of pedestrian actions.
In this she disrupts and then redefines the dominant cultural form which had
previously made her feel so ‘silly’: instead of the style ‘looking silly on’ her,
she seems to have taken the style within and onto her body and re-embodied it
in a way that suits her artistic purpose, in a movement from oppression to liberation. Returning to Coleman’s (2009) work, we can observe the second side
of the reciprocal and transformative relationship between images and bodies:
as well as Egypt’s body ‘becoming’ inadequate through the corporeal images
and aesthetics of classical ballet, Egypt is also able to develop a new corporeal
aesthetic—a new dance style, and thus a new (moving) ‘image’—through the
cultural mechanics of her own body. Egypt’s words suggest she also developed
her ‘heritage’ cultural practice to suit her artistic purpose: she feels she has
found a style, ‘contemporary’ which facilitates an expressivity which is similar
to, yet appears ‘softer’ than, her ‘African’ style. This can be seen as an example of what Freire (1993) refers to as ‘cultural synthesis’, where the ‘world
views’ of the oppressed and oppressor ‘enrich’ and ‘support’ each other (162).
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Indeed, in supporting the students in their development of choreographic
style, the tables had turned: within this dialogue and creative exchange,
it often became my turn to learn dance movements devised by another—
someone of a different age, cultural background and body. During the times
I worked with Egypt on her choreography, I remember noticing these differences: in our bodily comportment (with me tending to hold my spine quite
straight, in comparison to Egypt’s more fluid use of her lower back); in the
locations of strength and flexibility in our bodies (e.g. the strength of Egypt’s
thigh muscles in comparison to the strength of my calf muscles); in our movement dynamics and rhythms (with my movement intentions having more of
an upward trajectory on the beat and Egypt’s tending to have more of a downward trajectory, often on the syncopated ‘off-beat’). These particular ways in
which our moving bodies differed can be read in terms of the dance styles
in which we had most experience (classical ballet and Nigerian dance styles,
respectively) and the ways they had marked our bodies. It was a fun, exciting
but extremely challenging experience for me to learn Egypt’s dance movements and style. I also sensed that it a joyful and empowering experience
for her to teach me her work—to help her teacher perfect movements that
she (through the unique interaction of her body, her ideas about the piece’s
meaning and her embodied knowledge of different cultural dance practices)
was the authority on.
Again here, we can turn to the ideas of new materialism in seeing how
through the body (and material acts of creation), social and political processes can emerge and also, importantly, be challenged. Indeed, Bolt (2013)
discusses how, within a ‘materialist aesthetic … the “I” as an articulation of
a material-semiotic actor, situates the aesthetic as a relationship “between”—
between … the material and immaterial, the physical and social’ (6). It is with
this understanding of aesthetic practices—especially those such as dance that
so visibly take place through the body—that we can understand Egypt’s choreographic practice thus: as a physical, corporeal act of resistance against the
oppressive, Eurocentric discourse that structured and dominated her earlier
experiences of learning dance. To draw again on the work of Ahmed (2002),
through her innovative choreography and the confidence of her dancing body,
Egypt had carved a new space within this white space: she had pushed at the
boundaries of this space to open up a (quite literal) stage on which her body
was no longer an object of disgust, or felt as ‘out of place’, but instead thrived
and belonged.
However, it would be a mistake here to see this process as a simple and
harmonious cultural exchange, or view Egypt’s creation of her own dance
style here as a simple, unqualified act of agency—particularly in light of the
need she felt to ‘soften’ her ‘African’ style in the concern that it might be
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‘seen as aggressive rather than strong’. It would seem that Egypt’s sense of
the (white) institutional context for her choreographic process remained and
perhaps even limited her choreographic agency here; furthermore, it is clear
in Egypt’s discussions that she develops and retains an ambivalent view of
the (balletic) corporeal aesthetic that filtered her body as inadequate earlier
in the year, even after the transformative choreographic process had finished.
To find a more complex way to understand the pedagogic process here, it is
helpful to turn again to Coleman’s (2009) notion of bodily ‘becoming’, this
time in relation to her critique of the concept of ‘agency’:
According to a model of structure/agency, the specificities of … girls’ bodies
are understood as the result of either [their] active agency or of their enforced
passivity against social and cultural structure. Understanding the becoming of
girls’ bodies … instead, sees the social and cultural as folded into the specificity
of the girls’ bodies. (138)
Coleman’s (2009) analysis here provides a model for understanding the
complex interaction between the dominant (white) aesthetic of the curriculum
and Egypt’s dancing and choreographing body: not as a simple act of domiAQ: The
nation by or resistance against ‘white supremacy’, but neither in terms of a meaning of
simple cultural exchange or ‘synthesis’ as Freire (1993) suggests. Through the sentence
the lens provided by Coleman (2009), Egypt’s choreographic process and “Coleman’s
output occur through an ‘enfolding’ of social and cultural discourses (and (2009) conceptual…”
so aesthetics) with her material, moving body, in a way that resists a simple is not clear.
sense of antagonism or harmony between the white curriculum and her Please
heterogeneous cultural identity. Coleman’s (2009) conceptual framework consider
instead allows us to see the spaces that are left for transformation here: of rephrasing
the text.
not only the cultural discourses and aesthetics that shaped the initial processes
of teaching and learning, but also for the transformation (the ‘becoming’) of
Egypt’s body itself—into that of a confident dancer, an applauded choreographer, a producer of the new.
Again this leads us to the notion of a heterogeneous diasporic style. The transformation of Egypt’s body (and its meaning) in this way was not through a
straightforward assimilation of the domination dance aesthetic, nor through a
presentation of a homogenized and token version of ‘commercial’ Nigerian
dance, but instead through a more complex and hybrid ‘voice’ made material
through dance: one consistent with her position within a community of urban
and globalized youth. In fact, the closest Egypt ever gets to a singular definition
of her work is in using the phrase ‘my style’, a singular style, that is, paradoxically characterized by its heterogeneity. Indeed, Dash (2010) calls for ‘educators
[in progressive pedagogies] to look beyond … hegemonic practices and take
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cognisance of grounded aesthetics generated by “ordinary” people who appropriate, adapt and invent new stylistic and expressive forms in asserting their
subjectivity’ (177). It is only through an appreciation and facilitation of Egypt’s
‘diasporic styles’ that she was finally in a position to assert herself within the
classroom. It is also interesting to note that the two areas in which Egypt (and
a number of other students within this ethnically diverse class) received almost
full marks in the exam were originality and development of style.
CONCLUSION
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“Through
this, the
Egypt…”
Through her experiences of choreography, this student was able to ‘name
the world’, ‘transform it’ and therefore claim ownership of it, specifically
through the employment of a creative, fluid and essentially heterogeneous
and very material cultural agency, ‘rooted’ in her diasporic identity and
corresponding capacities of her body. Through this, Egypt drew not only
enjoyment, but strength:
This course really made me see that I love dance. ... It can make you feel so
high. ... But it can also, like, make you feel like uncomfortable and out of place.
But if you do really love something, then you want to better yourself in it.
Egypt shows the resolve to carry on in the face of the difficulties and
oppression she faced throughout the course (particularly at the start). This
seems to stem from the way her experiences later in the year ultimately
legitimized and gave her a renewed pride in her (heterogeneous and fluid)
‘self’ and allowed her body to ‘become’ that of a successful choreographer:
in this, she was able to glimpse the possibility of being ‘anything’. Processes
similar to Egypt’s choreographic one can enable young people to produce
work which resists the simplistic discourse of antagonism between dominant
and minority cultural practices; in this, young people like Egypt can be in a
position to draw on a wealth of cultural practices in order to assert their fluid,
urban subjectivity.
However, the question remains for practitioners: how to draw on the more
liberating pedagogic processes which characterized the second part of the
dance course throughout an entire curriculum. Within learning tasks that do
not require young people to produce a ‘piece of art’ (such as a dance solo),
how can a practitioner best facilitate a young person’s unique, heterogeneous,
and undeniably material cultural agency? An answer can begin to be found in
seeking opportunities for forms of dialogue, encounter and creation in every
learning experience.
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NOTES
1. This argument is by no means only applicable to young people from minority
ethnic backgrounds, although such young people will be the focus of this chapter, as
their experiences of this cultural ‘intermingling’ may be more acute.
2. For elucidation on the relationship between socio-economic ‘access and power’
and ethnic group, see May 1999, 4.
3. Advanced Level is a UK post-compulsory qualification, generally taken
between the ages of 16 and 18. Students generally take between 3 and 4 discrete
A Levels which serve as key entrance qualifications to UK universities.
4. Advanced Level qualifications are divided into two years: AS (year 1) and
A2 (year 2).
5. The phrase ‘contemporary dance styles’ is employed throughout this chapter.
It refers to a fusion of contemporary dance techniques which the students learnt,
drawn from the following: Laban, Graham, Cunningham and Release/Limone techniques. In broad terms, these techniques can be located within a North American
and European theatrical dance tradition, one which ultimately has part of its roots
in classical ballet. However, there are aspects of these styles which resist the bodily
configurations of this balletic tradition.
6. The students studied a recording of The Kirov Ballet’s production of Maurius
Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s Swan Lake. This was a version by Konstantin Sergeyev,
filmed at The Kirov Theatre, Leningrad, in 1990.
7. The students studied a recording of Adventures in Motion Pictures’ production
of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, filmed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, in 1996.
8. Ahmed (2002) discusses the treatment of Sarah Baartman, a woman from the
Eastern Cape of South Africa who was ‘exhibited’ around Europe in the 1800s and
was famed for her what were perceived to be unusually large buttocks and genitalia.
She was nicknamed ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and Ahmed (2002), among others, discusses the ways she was objectified and dehumanized by the white patriarchal society
that ‘displayed’ her.
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Chapter 7
From Art Appreciation
to Pedagogies of Dissent
Critical Pedagogy and
Equality in the Gallery
Esther Sayers
This chapter explores the pedagogy of the gallery, specifically the pedagogy
of a youth learning programme for 15- to 23-year-olds, Raw Canvas, at
Tate Modern from 1999 to 2011 where young people were empowered to
engage with and form their own opinions about contemporary art and culture.
The programme aimed to disrupt the dominant discourse of the institution
and create opportunities for new ideas about art to emerge. This programme
was underpinned by critical pedagogic theory and emancipatory ideologies. Through the exploration in this chapter I use critical pedagogic theory,
notions of equality and conceptualization of new materialism to determine
how the arts and pedagogy provide opportunities to resist dominant conservative attitudes to discourse and the mechanisms by which cultural value is
ascribed.
This research comes from my period of employment at Tate Modern,
where I was an artist educator and a programme curator working in partnership with peer-leaders from 1999 to 2011.1 Tate is a family of four art
galleries housing the United Kingdom’s collection of British art from 1,500
and also international modern art. It is a group of galleries linked together
within a single organization. From 2000 to 2012, Tate’s priorities were to
create a more stable financial position, to enhance the collection of artworks
and to represent a greater number of international artists (Tate, 2011). Tate is
funded in part by the UK government, trusts, foundations and private donations along with successful income generation from retail and leisure, shops
and restaurants.
Since its inception as a gallery for modern and contemporary art in 2000,
and to this day, Tate Modern’s learning and interpretation strategies have
been inclusive, enabling multiple voices to be heard talking about art (Walsh,
2008; Jacobs, 2000). Therefore, the pedagogical approach adopted by this
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specific gallery has been learner centred and embracive. The traditional
approach of appreciation where young people are taught to accept what they
are served up in cultural organizations is not enough. Rather than engaging
new audiences, as is the intention, such an approach is more likely to turn
visitors away (discussed in Kockel, 2000; Moersch, 2007; Graham, 2010).
This pedagogy of mere appreciation has been challenged in recent years, and
gallery educators have looked and are looking for new ways to pedagogically
engage new audiences with the very materiality of modern and contemporary
art. This engagement therefore aims to be discursive and enable multiple but
also dissenting voices to emerge.
CONTEXT
Pedagogy in the Gallery
From my two decades of experience as an educator in a variety of contexts,
I have found that learning in art galleries is unlike other educational situations. Schools, colleges and universities are bound by curricula, course outlines and assessments. The art gallery setting does not produce qualifications,
and therefore attainment is not measured in this way. It is the art that determines the subject matter for learning and the funding agendas that determine
who learns and how. These factors impact the mode, aims and content of the
teaching and learning that takes place. In addition, educators do not usually
know who they are going to be working with in advance, and learners are
not all at the same level of attainment when they arrive. As a result, educators must be flexible and equipped to teach beginners and experts together.
The goal of the learning is to provide catalysts for conversations in which
learners share ideas, tackle assumptions and form opinions. ‘Education’ in
the gallery is therefore aimed at building confidence, so that learners can
unlock their own ideas about art. Learning or attainment in this context is not
measured by the institution or by the government; instead, a programme’s
success is measured by its popularity and the participant feedback, often gathered informally and conversationally during or after an event. Participants are
usually seeking self-fulfilment and personal growth rather than qualifications
(Falk and Dierking, 2000; Freire, 1970; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000a, b).
As a result, the usual language used to describe educational activity is inadequate for this context. Words like ‘teacher’, ‘learner’, ‘education’, ‘student’,
‘study’ and ‘teaching’ usually speak of activity in the formal education
sector, schools, further education colleges and universities. Fundamentally
different to the gallery in a number of important ways, this sector is bound
by curricula set by government through the National Curriculum or by exam
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boards. Outcomes must be decided in advance and written into schemes of
work or syllabi, and all activities lead in some way to an assessment where
the progress of the student is measured. A context constrained by assessment,
creates a particular relationality between teachers and students. Although
inspiring examples of alternative knowledge relations do exist where educators subvert overriding ideologies (Fletcher, 2011; Rancière, 1991; hooks,
1994), predominantly, the system is designed to construct stereotypical relations between teachers and students in which teachers ‘know’ and students
‘learn’ from them.
These conservative hermeneutic approaches are where fixed meanings
are reproduced by experts on behalf of learners (Hirsch, 1965). However,
the gallery pedagogies that I explore come from a moderate hermeneutic
approach where meaning is negotiated with learners (Gadamer, 1960) and
enables situations in which young people form their own ideas about art and
therefore resist the above conservative attitudes to learning in which young
people are filled with knowledge by an expert teacher (Freire, 1970). I have
written previously about the tensions that exist at Tate where both of these
hermeneutic approaches are employed and the ideological challenges that
can occur because of such tension (Sayers, 2011), and that to understand
such learner-centred approaches, pedagogy needs to be constructed from the
perspective of the gallery educator but also that of the learner/s.
Funding agreements often drive pedagogy in the gallery context, and the
curriculum is controlled by the agenda set by them. However, it is education
curators, artists and gallery educators who decide what to do: what to teach
and how to teach it. It is the programme curator who dictates the parameters,
such as whom the project or event is for, how many, how often and how much
it will cost. While there is a lot of autonomy in how the aims of such agreements are interpreted by the programme curator, the activities are governed
by the underlying value system of the gallery. At Tate Modern, this can be
characterized as a progressive approach to learning that sits alongside a traditional, conservationist backdrop to the Tate Collection (Walsh, 2008). I will
return to these themes throughout this chapter, as I explore the ways in which
the constraints of the inclusion agenda attempt to construct a curriculum for
gallery educators. Many choose to resist this by creating pedagogies for the
gallery that enable dissent rather than using education as a tool by which a
consensus of opinion is sought (Rancière, 2010).
Youth Programme Pedagogy
Contemporary pedagogical approaches have been developed over the past
40 years in the United Kingdom, during which time there has been a shift in
the way in which gallery professionals think about relations with the audience
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(Charman, 2009). In the past, attitudes to learning in the museum were more
about information-based transmission models in which the public would be
filled with facts about an object. In recent years, there has been a shift of recognition towards the background and personal cultural history of the public
as a vital part of the way in which they encounter works of art. These ideas
fit within the social constructivist framework where learners drive their own
learning process as discussed in Claxton (1999), Falk and Dierking (2000),
Hein (1998) and Hooper-Greenhill (2007). New materialism provides a useful counterpoint here in the fact that it argues for the agency matter, in this
case the art object, and, rather than silencing matter as social constructivist
theories might, it enables new configurations within which the material and
the discursive combine (Barrett and Bolt, 2013; Haraway, 1991).
The shift in recognition of what the public bring to their interpretation/
enjoyment of an art work is permanently contested. The shift towards the
audience’s reading of the work as socially and ideologically constituted is
particularly pertinent to gallery youth programmes because in this context
learning is voluntary, open ended, learner centred and loosely structured.
It could be described as ‘informal’ learning, although in using that term
I would stress that ‘informal’ here relates to the nature of the learning and
to the environment in which it takes place and does not simply describe the
context as discussed in Hohenstein and King (2007). New pedagogies have
been developed that are not didactic but conversational, peer-led and social.
The peer-to-peer approach means that language that is familiar to young
people is used and workshop activities are delivered informally. For example,
one activity can flow into the next, the tasks are not separated and targets are
not explained at the start but rather emerge through the process; young people
enjoy the open-ended feeling that apparently ‘random’ activities provide.
Such learner-centred and dialogic approaches have been attractive to new
audiences as can be seen by the popularity of programmes like Raw Canvas
whose audience grew from 500 young people a year to 10,000 per annum
over a five-year period.
As the audiences’ role in meaning making evolved at the gallery, a number
of pedagogical issues emerged from Raw Canvas activities. The most striking
is the rejection of strategies that are strictly about the object and that could
be associated with a didactic, canonical approach (Bal and Bryson, 2001).
Instead, pedagogy of relations ‘between’ participants and ‘around’ art objects
is emphasized (Rancière, 1991). This relational pedagogic approach is more
in keeping with current trends in art practice in which the role of participant
is transformed from viewer to collaborator (Graham in O’Neil and Wilson,
2010). By attending to the relations between participants and the art object,
during workshops, the facilitators’ task is complex as looking at and talking about art is a social process where ideas are formed through interactions
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between people, and new meanings emerge in the intra-actions between
participants, educators and artworks. This conceptualization of relations follows Barad’s notion in which the ‘intra-action conceptualizes that it is the
action between (and not in-between)’ (Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012, 14). The art
work must remain in this exchange of ideas; some youth progs are entirely
about relations, not about matter, and this is problematic. One aspect of this
pedagogic approach is to build meaning around an art work by harnessing
the ideas of the group; conversely, yet equally important, is the decision to
stand back and say nothing at times, allowing the relations between the art
and the people to operate independently (such strategies are discussed by
Moersch, 2007; Charman and Ross, 2006). The resulting negotiation regarding the interpretation and value of the art in question can take a material
form through the fact that meaning is constructed and it then materializes
through discourse. Bringing a new materialist framework to this exchange
enables relations between art work and viewer to be more productive. By not
mediating the work through constructivist scaffolding, the art has the power
of affect. I understand from Barad (2007) the notion that the art work is not
agential; it does not have its own individual agency. Barad’s reworking of the
notion of agency is useful here and in particular her assertion that ‘Agency is
not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements’ (Barad interviewed in Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012, 54). In not ascribing the specific
ownership of agency to art object or viewer, it is possible to articulate a coconstructed meaning where artists and audiences work together in relational
ontologies, each having ‘response-ability’ to the other (Barad, 2012, 55).
This meaning making is as much a product of those doing the looking as it
is a reaction to the art, and as such the materialization emerges through what
Braidotti (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012) refers to as the ‘complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power’ (21).
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PARTICIPATION
The aforementioned social relations are characteristic of the participatory
nature of recent gallery youth programmes and informed the thinking that
led to Young Tate and Raw Canvas where participants discover their own
areas of interest in art, and these personal points of interest are developed
into events and activities. This creates an inclusive pedagogy where, rather
than providing activities that are for young people, the events programme
is designed and delivered with young people (Freire, 1970). Therefore, the
peer-leader must learn about the artistic and cultural interests of the young
people that they are working with (Eglinton, 2008) resulting in peer-leaders
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and participants working together to construct an understanding rather than
the ‘experts’ enlightening the ‘other’.
This is in keeping with notions of new materialism (Braidotti, 1994)
and the importance Barad (2012) places on the action between. The critical
pedagogies and hermeneutic theory that I have used to explore gallery education pedagogy, where the actual relation between participants and educators
can be interrogated, find form in the conceptualization of new materialism
through which the relation between participant and art work can be better
understood. Barad’s (2012) intra-action provides us with a model by which
we can examine the process of creating locally produced meanings from
artworks in the gallery. Merizow (1991) talks about the role of the educator
in the learner’s transformation, and Clements (2011) talks about the educator
as mediator:
The reduction of learner dependency on the teacher is a prerequisite for student
self-determination and underpins creative participation and radical cultural
activism which thereby enables transformation. (27)
And Clements (2011) asserts that
The focus within participatory creative education is on inclusion and developing
a sense of community which then becomes the ideal forum for decision-making,
debate and identity construction. Here the educator is the mediator (rather than
the determinant) of participants cultural needs and their creativity, facilitating
individual and collective potential which can then be explored in a non-authoritarian manner. (27)
Such mediation is critiqued in new materialist thought. Barad (2012) refers
to ‘agential entanglements’ (56) where the human and non-human subjects
are not seen as pre-existing entities but as intra-actions. Following Haraway’s
(2003) ideas, the learner subjectivity cannot be constructed in advance and
rather than mediating, which risks Othering the audience, connections and
contingencies should be sought. As Haraway (2003) asserts, ‘there are no
pre-constituted subjects and objects’ (6); ‘beings consitute each other and
themselves … [they] do not preexist their relatings’ (6). By examining the
engagement with art and with each other through Barad’s (2012) intra-action,
the notion of inclusion takes on a new form, one in which inclusivity can be
seen as a process, an action between people, rather than something that happens to individuals. Here, a shift in pedagogy is possible, from the desire to
include the Other to an acknowledgement of the pre-existing relatings and
subjectivity of all beings. This creates the possibility of culture happening
with people rather than to them.
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Key features of successful pedagogic approaches in the gallery are as
follows: the extent to which young people gain ownership of the programmes
that they attend and are given the support needed to realize their ambitions.
Along with the freedom to make decisions comes knowledge about the
structure of the organization where they learn about how to deal with the
constraints and compromises associated with working in a national gallery.
As Clements (2011) describes, the educator is mediator, in this instance,
between the young person and his or her cultural experience. This describes
a dialogic relation where the learning that takes place is negotiated, and the
educator strives to make the engagement authentic and meaningful for the
learner. But in order to achieve this, there must be opportunities for young
people to express negative as well as positive opinions. By rejecting cultural inclusion strategies that seek to mediate and instead seek opportunities
to connect and collaborate, we open up the possibilities of young people
becoming ‘the products of their relating’ (Haraway, 2003, 7). So then they
are developing skills as discerning consumers of culture, ‘cultural omnivores’
as Peterson (1992) describes. In enabling young people to form their own
opinions about art, educators are attempting to challenge the existing hierarchies that control who can be heard speaking about art (Jacobs, 2000; Biesta,
2010). For this kind of learning to be authentic, it must NOT be focused
around achieving a consensus of ideas about art works. Instead, opportunity
for debate and disagreement must be created (Rancière, 2010; Mouffe, 2013)
where young people are supported and encouraged to form their own opinions or to disagree with the authoritative voice of the gallery or the educator
(Charman and Ross, 2006).
ENGAGEMENT
New Audiences
That cultural organizations are now valuing the personal responses of their
visitors and striving to make the gallery experience meaningful to all marks
a significant departure from previous attitudes to cultural learning. However,
regardless of this shift, contemporary youth programmes do experience difficulties in engaging new audiences. This may stem from a historical construction where during the mid-nineteenth century, museums and galleries were
newly constructed as social places in which
The working class—provided they dressed nicely and curbed any tendency
towards unseemly conduct—might be exposed to the improving influence of the
middle classes. (Bennett, 1995, 28)
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This hope of improvement through cultural inclusion still underpins cultural institutions, and government and funding bodies, where galleries and
museums are encouraged, supported and financed to engage new audiences
from ‘hard to reach’ groups, who do not normally engage with such types
of cultural activities, and encourage greater diversity in attendance. Because
even though museums have been ‘open’ for 150 years, recent research suggests that they are still predominantly attended by the ‘highly educated’ middle class and the elite (Bennett et al., 2009; DCMS, 2007). For governments
this participation in culture is connected to the desire for people to engage in
civic life. Chris Smith, MP, UK Secretary of State for Culture (1997–2001),
connected the arts with notions of a civilized society,
because [the arts] lead us, sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly, sometimes
imperceptibly, to self-knowledge, they also inevitably help both to shape and
to characterise a society. The arts are a civilising influence. (Smith, 1999 in
Wallinger and Warnoc, 2000, 14)
The view that the arts make ‘better’ people is a popular one and one
that has been widely critiqued (Selwood et al., 1994; Bennett et al., 2009;
Bourdieu, 1984). There is much interest in self-improvement through the
arts, but this is fundamentally different when the focus is to improve others.
This constructs learning subjects who lack the necessary cultural attributes
to engage with contemporary art on their own (Biesta, 2010). The private
funding received by cultural organizations is a form of modern day philanthropy, and the public funds are a benevolent gesture intended to include
those who rarely participate in gallery activities. Attendance by certain
‘targeted’ individuals is essential to the funding agreements with government and private benefactors; it is therefore prized by the museum. The
selection of these people is normally done by their demographic information and targets those who do not tend to visit the gallery independently.
The encouragement for some groups to become involved, rather than being
embracive, can be restrictive because newcomers must learn to abide by
institutional rules and codes of conduct. As such, it is often the learner who
is asked to develop as a result of this experience, while the museum remains
largely unchanged (Walsh, 2008). Despite considerable effort to welcome
a diversity of young people, the emerging pedagogy is often ambivalent
towards the new audience as they are simultaneously welcomed and controlled (Sayers, 2011).
In Foucaultian (1991) terms, ‘the instruments of government’ (48) in
the nineteenth century were aimed at bringing about acceptable norms
of conduct, not by corporal punishment but by manipulating behaviour
through specifically built environments. In The Birth of the Museum (1995),
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Bennett describes museums as the kind of regulatory environment that
Foucault (1973) talks about. In relation to pedagogy, the museum function could be described as a cultural governor of the populace that relies
on attracting people from all walks of life. Introducing new audiences to
the museum environment creates a problem: Do you teach the newcomers
how to behave ‘correctly’ or does the institution adjust its idea of appropriate conduct? The multitude of activities within galleries have insisted on
correct behaviours being observed, while others have attempted to influence cultural change within the institution so that notions of ‘appropriate
conduct’ are adjusted. As a result, the institution can become pedagogically divergent by occupying elitist and populist positions simultaneously
and therefore creating tension and ambivalence in the way that the gallery
approaches the audience. The space of resistance between high and popular culture has enabled opportunities for remodelling existing ideologies,
where the purpose and potential of the gallery is renegotiated by participants with facilitators.
Young People With Art
Engaging young audiences is considered to be an effective way to achieve
cultural inclusion (Harland and Kinder, 1999). The conventional approach
(pre-1985) to working with young people in a gallery was to provide specially designed activities, events and services, designed, that is, by adult specialist staff. Increasingly, organizations in the cultural sector have introduced
planning and delivery processes that involve consulting with young people
from the outset. The role of the staff in this approach is to facilitate the
process whereby young people can voice their opinions and take charge of
their own learning. Consultation, peer leadership and participation in planning and delivery have superseded traditional approaches in which gallery
staff creates events for young people (Horlock, 2000). However, effective
strategies to engage young people in art are ones where meaning is negotiated, in a moderate hermeneutical sense (Gallagher, 1992; Hooper-Greenhill,
2000a, b). This directly challenges the dominant ideology of the gallery as
‘expert’ and empowers visitors to formulate meaning based on their own life
experiences rather than the traditions of art. This pedagogical approach is
predicated by a number of projects including Young Tate, Liverpool; Room
13; WACTAC, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Tim Rollins and KOS,
South Bronx, New York, USA. Raw Canvas is indebted to these groundbreaking initiatives.
The above-mentioned Young Tate programme originated from Tate
Liverpool in 1994 where, from the gallery’s inception in 1988, new
approaches towards the audience had been trialled:
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The inclusion of voices other than the authoritative voice of the museum was
one of a series of projects in which we opened up the Gallery and its collections
to critical debate. (Jackson in Horlock, 2000, 24)
Jackson, who was Head of Education at Tate Liverpool at the time, cites
the 1988 Surrealism display as a good indicator of the importance of the visitor to the gallery:
In 1936 Roland Penrose invited the public to exhibit their own ‘surreal’ objects;
Tate Gallery Liverpool repeated this invitation, advertising in the local press
and in the Gallery. Every surreal object was accepted—from young children’s
to international artists’ submissions—and the results were displayed in the galleries and celebrated at a private view attended by participants, their friends and
families. (Jackson in Horlock, 2000, 24)
What is significant with this approach to exhibition making is that the invitation to contribute went out in the local press, therefore addressing a local
and potentially non-art audience, as the larger national galleries rarely used
local media for advertising at the time. To accept all of the work and display
it in the hallowed halls of the gallery was unusual, as this space was usually
reserved for professional and highly reputed artists.
Tate Liverpool pioneered a model in which education and exhibition curators worked together, collaboratively, in project teams akin to the ‘ecological
museum structure’ described by Jung (2010, 2011). Jung (2011) draws on
Rancière (2010) when she presents an alternative to the traditional hierarchical model of museum structure in which the director sits at the top and passes
directives down to exhibition curators who then pass them to the education
team. This illustrates the relatively low status of education in relation to
curatorial and conservation activities. The low status of public engagement
means that it has been unusual for galleries to ask for the public to contribute
to the art on display. By inviting a contribution from the audience, the gallery refuses the usual hierarchy in which artist and public are separated. This
creates a number of ethical issues to be negotiated by programme curators
about the ownership of the work. Jung’s (2011) proposal is a less hierarchical model in which dialogue and exchange characterize the relations between
gallery departments. Jung’s (2011) discussion is an attempt to refuse the hierarchical models that already exist in some museums and to reimagine some
non-hierarchical structures through which learning and the public voice can
be brought to the centre of the organizations’ activities:
By failing to embrace diverse perspectives, museums may limit their potential
audiences, creating an intellectual hierarchy between them and their audience.
(Jung, 2010)
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Tate Liverpool used a collaborative approach to programming again in
the 1990s. Such collaboration is particularly interesting when considered in
relation to discourses of new materialism (Bolt, 2013). Bolt (2013) describes
the modernist notion of ‘truth to materials’ (4) that exists between and separates from the two dominant strands of Western philosophical discourse. She
urges an acknowledgement of ‘the material facts of artistic practice’ (5).
The collaborative artwork produced at Tate Liverpool has the potential to
refuse the usual museum hierarchy and seek to create new intellectual material. Meskimmon (2003) talks about the recovery of the most eccentric and
marginal meanings in even the most canonical work. The fact that feminist
aesthetics has always operated resourcefully in the margins and across disciplines makes new materialism ideally configured to accept the refusal of
dominant discourses in constructing pedagogies that enable new publics to
engage creatively with modern and contemporary art (Hickey-Moody, 2014).
Such engagement often takes material forms, in the following example
through the creation of interpretative labels for the work:
The Gallery also attempted to show that modern art has many readings; using
the ‘Modern British Sculpture’ display, young people were encouraged to
research issues around ‘primitivism’ and the representation of women in
twentieth-century art, and presented their findings in extended labels placed
adjacent to selected sculptures. (Jackson in Horlock, 2000, 24)
This pedagogical approach draws from ideas discussed by philosophical
theorists such as Barthes (1977), Derrida (1987) and Spivak (1976), in which
meaning is not fixed, for example, Derrida’s ideas about the frame in The Truth
in Painting (1987) in which he famously asserts that ‘there is nothing outside
of the text’ and Barthes’s Death of the Author (1977) in which he asserts that
an image or text doesn’t possess an essential meaning, and ‘to give a text an
Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing’ (147). Although the artist/author has an intention, it is the
reader or viewer who creates a proliferation of meanings around the work.
The reader who reads the text brings to it other voices and reads into it textual
material which transforms this area of meaning far beyond the author’s intention (Olsen, 1990), or as Spivak (1976) asserts, the text belongs to language
and not to the sovereign and generating author. Therefore, what the viewer
brings to the work will play a significant role in any readings that are made.
It therefore follows that if you introduce more people to art with a range of different backgrounds, then you will get a plurality of readings. Hall (1980) elaborates on the theoretical context of audience studies, rejecting a linear model
for the transmission of meaning from author to audience and posits the idea of
two parallel processes working simultaneously, encoding and decoding:
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The moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole are determinate
moments. (129)
This idea of plurality is an important precept for group work, in which
participants are discussing meaning in art works. Different interpretations
are made and with them an acknowledgement of different viewpoints; it is
up to the facilitator to summarize by repeating the range of views back to the
group. And in order to establish a pool of possibilities that are relevant to all
the interpretative agents, a peer-to-peer approach to discussion is particularly valuable. These ideas were important cornerstones in the pedagogical
approaches that I developed with Raw Canvas from 1999 to 2011.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE
PROBLEM WITH INCLUSION
The theoretical framework of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; DuncanAndrade and Mowell, 2008; Darder et al., 2009) underpins Raw Canvas and
other projects that are negotiated by participants with facilitators and enables
an understanding of the barriers that disable some young people from participating in culture. Educators must engage critically with the impact of an
unequal society on young people from disenfranchised groups. Strategies that
acknowledge the subjectivity of the learner contribute to positive outcomes
where participants are empowered; conversely, those requiring participants to
develop new cultural tastes can be reductive (Sayers, 2014). In talking about
the pedagogies employed by youth programmes, I keep coming back to the
difficulty of a pervading ideology of inclusion where the ‘Other’ is welcomed
in but are expected to change/learn in order to appreciate the new culture that
is on offer to them once inside the museum. I have termed this ‘ambivalence’
(Sayers, 2011, 420). Rancière (1991) makes a forceful intervention into this
aforementioned ambivalence through the axiom of the equality of intelligence
(Bingham and Biesta, 2010). Rancière (2010) distinguishes between the
two aims of ‘inclusion’ and ‘equality’; he sees them as oppositional and not
complementary. This opposition begins to explicate the tensions that I have
experienced in my role as educator and programme curator where the dual
purpose of the job has been to create learning programmes for young people
and to build new audiences. This drive for inclusion has led to the creation of
an inconsistent pedagogical approach that was, at times, in opposition to the
aims of equality on which the programme was founded.
Rancière’s (2010) ideas resonate strongly with the aims of Raw Canvas;
however, he illustrates a fundamental pitfall for pedagogies that attempt to be
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inclusive in that we should start with equality rather than aim towards it. With
all good intentions, youth programmes at Tate were grounded on an idea of
‘equality’ where ‘young people can be heard speaking about art’ (Raw Canvas,
2001, marketing material): an aim which makes the visitor’s own experience,
prior knowledge or schema into a contingent part of his or her learning. In this
view, everyone’s opinion is equal: ‘your opinion goes here’ (Raw Canvas publicity, 2003). This was effective in terms of group management and open discussion where equality between contributors was foregrounded, and focusing
on the potential for young people to have an equal relationship with the gallery
was an effective way to encourage a new audience to get involved. Once Raw
Canvas became more integrated into Tate as a whole, young people’s ideas
and methods did begin to affect the activity and public programmes that were
offered by the Tate. However, deep-seated knowledge hierarchies and powerful ideas remained unchanged. For example, Raw Canvas created a skate park
in response to Futurism (an avant-garde art movement and major exhibition
at the time). Although this was hugely successful in terms of attracting new
audiences to the gallery, it was not seen to be core programming as the idea
had not come from an established artist. To create collaborative opportunities
like those at Tate Gallery Liverpool, curators have to go against the dominant
ideology of the gallery which values conservation, display and scholarship
around the cultural products of established artists. To provide space for young
people’s cultural ideas is to resist the dominant ideology and to enable new
cultural materializations to take place, and as Meskimmon (2011) asserts, art
cannot ‘oblige us to act’ (8) but it does have the power to effect change:
By materializing concepts and meanings beyond the limits of narrow individualism, art enables us to encounter difference, imagine change that has yet to come,
and make possible the new. (Meskimmon, 2011, 8)
The reception of the skate park raised significant questions for me about
who and what Tate was for. Was the opportunity, the equality of intelligence,
offered to young people in creating the skate park ideological rather than
practical? If so, it failed to achieve its emancipatory aims, as it did not afford
greater power to young people in relation to the institution. In order to address
this problem of inclusion, I needed to develop a critical pedagogy for working with new audiences. I considered that a critical pedagogic approach could
empower young learners because of the emphasis on preparing the educator
to teach by heightening their critical perceptions of the world and the inherent
inequalities that are often taken for granted or left unseen by the educational
establishment (Darder et al., 2009; Dewey, 1938). I wondered: What is the
purpose of learning programmes at the gallery when the aim is to encourage
participation from communities who are not traditional gallery users?
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Youth programme curators in galleries have much in common with
Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s (2008) definition of critical thinkers who
believe ‘that any genuine pedagogical practice demands a commitment
to social transformation in solidarity with subordinated and marginalised
groups’ (23). For example, youth curators do not create activities for young
people but instead work very closely with participants to devise programmes
that are inclusive and that represent the views and ideas of the young people
at whom they are aimed. This creates opportunities for learning with not
delivering information to learners as described by Freire (1970). In this
respect, peer-led work is similar to critical pedagogy because facilitators and
participants are committed to the concept of ‘praxis’ where teacher and student are learning and teaching together.
Learner-led pedagogies aim to emancipate the learner and the teacher,
freeing them from the inequality and restrictions that many have encountered
enabling them to achieve what Rancière (1991) describes as an ‘equality of
intelligences’ (87). Youth programmes in contemporary art galleries encourage young cultural consumers to critique the dominant cultural establishment,
the ‘sensible’ in Rancière’s (2010) notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’
(12). They do this as members of the young people’s advisory group and
through the events that they organize which draw artists from street culture
into the rarefied space of the gallery. At advisory group meetings, there is
an ongoing critique of the hegemonic processes at work in the gallery. Artists and curators who work with young people gently rock the status quo
and seek out counter-hegemonic alternatives to gallery programming. Luis
Moll (2000) refers to ‘funds of knowledge’ that ‘draw from the knowledge
that students bring with them to school, knowledge that is often not in their
textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family, cultural traditions, youth
culture and the media’ (Duncan-Adrade and Morrell, 2008, 9).
Pedagogies that seek to establish productive relations between teacher and
student encounter specific problems in the territory of a collection-based gallery or museum. There exist some contentious ideas in relation to conservative attitudes towards cultural objects that are conserved in houses of high
culture. Hein (1991) takes the radical step of stating that ‘constructing meaning is learning; there is no other kind’ (1). This idea seems straightforward
in contemporary gallery education, but it has two major implications for how
we think about learning. Traditional, conservative conceptions of learning
posit the idea that ‘meaning’ exists outside of the learner; an object or art
work is thought to contain its own unique ‘truth’ (Hirsch, 1965). In order to
understand the intended meaning, the learner is expected to break out of their
historical situation in order to objectively connect with the ‘truth’ about the
work. Hein’s (1991) view radically opposes such an idea and any suggestion that a learner can be given meaning rather than making it for himself or
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herself. In his conception, the assertion that the learner constructs meaning
in order to learn is key.
These two concepts can then enable young people to bring their stories to the
table, to take an active role and be valued as part of the discussion. The fixed
nature of the gallery where pre-selected objects of cultural value are put on
display for the public causes a problem for teaching and learning conceived in
this way as the gallery and the art it contains are used as a resource for learning about art rather than as the subject in its own right. Hein (1991) supports
this construction by asserting that knowledge is active and is created by the
learner, therefore, opposing traditional views of learning. Hooper-Greenhill
(2007) also asserts that ‘learning always involves the use of what is known
already, and this prior knowledge is used to make sense of new knowledge
and to interpret new experiences’ (35). This then results in the pedagogy of
youth programmes being in conflict with the pedagogy of display.
In the past, and in some places still, a gallery had an authoritative voice,
one that represented the institution, offering a single reading of a work or
exhibition (Jacobs, 2000). This has been termed the ‘transmission model’
(Hooper-Greenhill, 2000a, 141). Pedagogically the methodology of the Raw
Canvas programme contrasts with the transmission of culture model, as it is
learner centred. This approach can be said to be in tune with current developments where galleries have opened up interpretation to other voices and offer
plural readings. This stems from the philosophy that meaning is unstable and
that the viewer is capable of handling several, often unresolved, propositions
(Bal and Bryson, 2001). Voices from other fields of knowledge, in addition
to art history, feature in text, audio and multimedia interpretation. A learnercentred approach builds on this, placing the learner at the centre of an endeavour to understand a work of art through a range of approaches. Young people
learn the tools to acquire and process information and knowledge (Hein,
1998; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000a, b; Falk and Dierking, 2000).
To prepare them for the peer-led process, young people have to engage
with different kinds of knowledge. Artist educators introduce them to art
historical knowledge initially accessed through Tate resources and research
facilities, but alternative points of view are also researched, some of which
may be at odds with Tate’s view. These are often critical of the art museum,
describing it as a commodifier of culture, a gatekeeper reflecting narrow
values. It is important that young people come to know the critical landscapes
that help to define the role of the museum.
Meszaros (2006) provocatively discusses the tension between knowledge
about the object and strategies for interpretation in her keynote address, Now
THAT is evidence: tracking down the evil ‘whatever’ interpretation. She
argues that moderate hermeneutic thinking leads us to ‘a persistent paradox:
we can only see and find what we already recognise and know’ and that this
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paradox leads to an abundance of personal meaning making and a lack of
received or cultural knowledge (Meszaros, 2006, 12). However, I disagree
and assert that successful pedagogic practices are those that start with personal meaning making, and go on to enable people to become critical, which
leads to empowerment where young people take action in the world. This
is aligned with Rancière’s (1991) argument for ‘the capacity of anybody’
rather than Meszaros’s ‘whatever interpretation’ (Ruitenberg, 2011, 220).
Although this is not an easy task, the conviction that each intelligence is
equal opens the door for new knowledge to materialize and for learning to
be acknowledged as embodied by the individual and not given to them by
the institution. In this way, we seek alternatives to reductive forms of cultural
inclusion.
The Raw Canvas programme attempted to do this by enabling young people
to plan events for their peers. The focus was the creation of an event by young
people, and to do this they have to be taught to take an alternative stance in
relation to the ‘normal’ models of display and consumption of culture, to try
something different. In relation to critical pedagogy, this turns around the
conservative and more common model of interpretation where young people
learn from their elders and take on existing ideas. Youth programme activities
link with young people’s own cultural interests as a way to recontextualize
the work on display in the gallery and to encourage young people to experience the space. The importance of establishing a link between art and youth
culture has implications for the pedagogy that is adopted. The knowledge that
is produced about art needs to be open and negotiable so that the development
of the programme can be steered by young advisors. Young people sometimes perceive traditional education to be restrictive. This is often when they
feel that they are following a course of learning in which the teacher holds
the knowledge, it is delivered in a predetermined way or they are expected to
respond to it in ways that feel alien to them. When developing programmes
for young people, it is important that they are offered experiences that take
them beyond the target-driven parameters of attainment—where some have
felt alienated.
Formal education, in its more traditional didactic form, teaches young
people to accede to the authority of experts. This conditioning is counterproductive when attempting to empower young people to make decisions and
formulate their own opinions. The aim of peer-led pedagogies is to disrupt
the hierarchies between teacher and pupil, the ‘expert’ and the ‘learner’ and
create a self-supporting learning community with a ‘shared history of learning’ (Wenger, 1998, 87) in which the group engage in a shared endeavour and
form a community which can increase the confidence and engagement of all
those in the group. Such an approach provides young people with the skills
they need to take part in debate and to get their opinions heard.
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Many young people have not been taught the critical skills required to take
part in such debates. Although ‘consulting young people’ is a popular mantra
in contemporary educational and cultural circles, the skills to take part in
consultation are rarely developed (DCMS, 2003). As a result, some young
people are comfortable to speak their minds, while others have to learn and
develop the ability to see the world critically and to share their views.
Foucault (1973) talks about social control as conducted through regulating
environments that are the development of an alternative to corporeal systems
of control involving physical confinement and restraint. The Frankfurt School
focused on issues of how the subject is constituted and ‘how the spheres of
culture and everyday life represented a new terrain of domination’ (Giroux,
2001, 11). Youth Programme Curators challenge existing hegemonic structures through the programmes they construct, the methods they adopt and the
outcomes that young people and artists produce in the form of events.
In the gallery, learning activities employ pedagogic strategies which
attempt to maintain equality between education curator, artist and peerleader: the curator knows little about urban youth culture, and the young
people know little about modern and contemporary art; working with artists enables a sharing of knowledge in order to create successful events and
activities. In contemporary Britain, it goes without saying that public art galleries continually strive to engage the broadest number of people in looking at
art. Since the establishment of CEMA (The Committee for Encouragement of
Music and the Arts), in 1940 they have tried to be inclusive to everyone (Art
Council papers, 1939–1945). The slogan ‘arts for all’ sets out a mandate for
change as a means to break down the exclusivity that has surrounded many
arts and cultural venues. For many reasons, museums and in particular their
learning departments have taken on the view held by the education sector that
if more people were included in culture, then society would become more
equal. In this view, inclusion is a predetermined end point through which, it
is hoped, equality can be achieved.
Bingham and Biesta (2010) explore the distinction between ‘equality’ and
‘inclusion’ in Rancière’s ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster’ (1991). Inclusion exists
as an institutional and governmental ideal and is seen as ‘the’ core value of
democratic society. Conversely, striving for ‘equality’ is not about searching
for an end result but is about establishing an equal starting point:
[inclusion], in a sense, knows where it wants to go, [equality] only knows where
it wants to start. (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, 73) (my parentheses)
The emancipatory aims of the Raw Canvas programme are connected to
‘inclusion’—to recruit and engage a diverse group of young people. The
strategies that govern the approach to the learning and personal development
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of participants strive to create ‘equality’ between group leaders and young
people so that the young people can learn in accordance with their own
agenda. The two aims are interconnected but they are also in conflict. Consequently, there are tensions between the aims of the programme and the
pedagogical approaches that I have described:
Inclusion is not only the main point and purpose of democracy, it is also one of
its main problems. (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, 74)
There are some significant similarities between the governance of the gallery within the cultural sector and structures that exist in government within
democratic society. In its drive to include the public in the shaping of programmes, the gallery shares the democratic will to include the demos in the
ruling of society (or the gallery itself) and ‘the insertion of those outside of
the democratic order into democracy’ (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, 82). In this
respect, the notion of ‘deliberative democracy or decision making by discussion among free and equal individuals’ (Elster, 1998, 1; Bingham and Biesta,
2010, 76) is an important consideration.
However, Rancière (2010) would argue that this notion of ‘democracy and
inclusion is actually about the creation of a particular police order and of the
insertion of those outside of this order into the order’ (Bingham and Biesta,
2010, 82). Rancière’s (2010) notion of ‘police’ in relation to democracy is
the idea of police equated with the ‘law’; law here means all those unwritten laws that define ‘modes of being, doing, making, and communicating’
(Rancière, 2010, 89). Rancière’s (2010) concern is that democracy conceived
in this way becomes about numbers—those who are included and those who
are not—and that this kind of democratization is about extending the existing
democratic order. He reveals the limitations of this approach to democracy
and urges us to adopt a less quantitative view of inclusion and instead to look
to reconfigure the ‘distribution of the sensible’ in order to achieve equality
(Rancière, 2010). ‘Rancière’s (2010) insistence on equality is precisely not
a plea for inclusion if, that is, we think of inclusion as the insertion into an
existing police order’ (Bingham and Biesta, 2010, 84). Rancière’s understanding of democracy is essentially a disruptive process where those with
no voice acquire one.
CONCLUSION
This chapter throws light on the depth of work that youth programme curators and young people engage in as they continually rethink and reshape
the cultural offer in order to engage new audiences in meaningful ways.
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The exploration of issues in this chapter is not intended to detract from the
wealth of fabulous projects run at Tate and at other galleries. By conceptualizing learning in galleries in terms of critical pedagogic thought and new
materialism, I seek to identify new strategies for engaging with new audiences around modern and contemporary art that are creative and productive
for those individuals. This therefore requires careful thought about the situation of the learner and the outcomes of the learning to enable new narratives
of both to emerge.
The context of youth programmes in art galleries requires pedagogical
approaches that enable all the authority to speak and create conditions for
empowering learners through participation. Pedagogies that emerge as a
result of moderate hermeneutic practices are intrinsically dialogic and have
the potential to be inclusive to all; however, there are significant pedagogical
complexities in running new programmes for new audiences in an ideologically laden institution. Critical pedagogy requires that educators learn with
participants, and as I have highlighted, this can lead to complex relations and
tensions.
The issues that arise when engaging young people with art mean that care
must be taken to avoid the construction of an ‘other’ through philanthropic
gestures. To establish an approach in which an equality of intelligences can
be achieved, learners must be empowered to construct their own identities as
educational subjects. Following discourses of new materialism (Bolt, 2013;
Braidotti, 1994; Barad, 2012), we can see that collaborative learning outcomes refuse many of the usual knowledge hierarchies and offer the potential
to create new, locally negotiated intellectual material. For such outcomes
to be achieved, it is important to enable debate because art is a contentious
subject.
Pedagogies need to leave room for discussion and argument to take
place, allowing for a range of ideas to be expressed, not just those that are
in agreement with each other. Rancière’s ideas about ‘dissensus’ are useful
here (Rancière, 2010) as they give us a framework in which disagreement is
profitable. These ideas are extremely useful in the context of cultural learning where there is a marked difference between ‘community’ and ‘publics’ AQ: In
the senin which the former suggests harmony and the latter allows for individuals. tence “The
What needs to be encouraged is a dissensual space within which publics cultural
‘come together’ around issues, which are debated. This is close to Mouffe’s space…”
(2013) ideas about ‘agonism’ in which she demarcates the importance for please check
if “value
disagreement in public relations. The cultural space is a place where repre- cultural
sentational practices or ‘ways of seeing’ can be challenged in order to open value”
up new or modified ways of seeing: not for the purpose of conversion but to should be
open up potentials and to question how and by whom value cultural value is changed to
“cultural
ascribed.
value”
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In recent years, in London and in certain parts of the United Kingdom,
there has been a significant increase in the number of young people who
come from racial and cultural backgrounds that are not reflected in the public institutions of the dominant culture. This predicates an urgent need to
re-examine ‘culture’: what it means and for whom. Many people who work
in museums and galleries are committed to opening the doors to everyone,
but if programmes are to be for all, then pedagogies need to reflect the
diversity of starting points and enable the dominant culture to be altered by
its new audiences. Methods of display, public performance and participation are being re-conceptualized by artists and arts organizations across the
United Kingdom; how the arts and therefore arts education will evolve
remains to be seen.
NOTE
1. I started working at Tate Modern as an artist—a gallery educator (1999–2003).
In 2002, I became Curator for Youth Programmes (2002–2011). I also took the role
of Curator for School Programmes (2003–2005).
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Chapter 8
Ethnocinema and Video-as-Resistance
Anne Harris
Visual cultures have come to dominate at least the expression of other intersecting1 cultures globally, including ethnic, gendered, racialized and geographical. In research contexts, Hughes (2012) and others continue to grapple
with standards in sociological enquiry, and video- and film-based research
presents the most robust challenge to these standards in recent times (Colman 2014). Hughes (2012) reminds us rightly that ‘Both Elias and Bourdieu,
most interestingly, struggled against the sociological habits of their time’
(xxix) to consider the kinds of ‘concerns that underpinned both authors’
analysis, albeit via reframed and reimagined theoretical objects embedded
in the minutiae of human social life’ (xxix). I follow Hughes (2012) in this
chapter to consider the ways in which visual and digital cultures have been
on the rapid ascendant over the past ten years, and what their relationship to
culture may be.
Young people and others now experience life at the nexus of several
‘competing sites of cultural production’ (Levinson and Holland, 1996, 26,
in Dimitriadis and Weis, 2008, 82), and video and digital self-representation
is certainly one important stream in this nexus. Video-based research can be
considered cultural resistance (in problematizing or rejecting static definitions of culture itself) and scholarly cultural resistance (an act of protest
against the mainstream culture of academic knowledge production—what it
is, how it happens and who gets to do it), but can also be considered a culture
OF resistance by those who see the intersubjectivity and intersectionality of
this tool.
Video alone is not a method or a methodology, as it can and is being
used in countless ways in the doing of research. Yet it is a tool, and in this
chapter I will argue that it is still most powerfully a tool of resistance, yet
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“Videobased
research…”
153
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one that is rapidly moving towards hegemonized notions of what ‘counts’
as interdisciplinary research. This chapter makes a case for retaining the
resistant power of video as a democratizing research tool, seen in a range
of uses from digital research such as vlogging (Boler et al., 2014) to technology and youth studies (Dimitriadis and Weis, 2008), to ethnocinema
(Harris, 2013, 2014a). The uses of video are rapidly proliferating, and here
by using the single method of ethnocinema as a particularly transparent
video-based research methodology, its culturally and politically resistant
capacities can be disentangled from its materiality (Stewart, 2007) and from
the related field of film theory (Colman, 2014). Like researchers and artists
since time immemorial, video methods help us make sense of our lives by
making a record of our ‘ordinary attention to things’ (Stewart, 2007, 36).
The big data information-based cultures we now attempt to make sense of
are increasingly screen-captured by visuality, by static and moving images,
and in ethnocinema a jointly materialized movie. Like those everyday people in Stewart’s (2007) landscape, many of us are growing accustomed to
taping every move we make (and usually posting it online without editorial
pause). These everyday actions, and the affects that cling to and accompany
them, and the digital residue that remains, are profoundly affective cultures
of scholarly research. Ethnocinema is one video-based research method
that offers an alternative to this accelerating visual research cultures, and
like Hongisto’s (2012) concern for the ‘transitional moments between the
interviewer and the interviewee in testimonial video’ (in Barret and Bolt,
10), for ethnocinematographers these ‘materialities of experience’ (10) are
embedded in its collaborative nature. At times this collaboration is between
what used to be called viewer versus maker, consumer versus producer,
but which now is always already both at once. That is, in visual cultures
we are never far from a consideration of audience, because that audience
is always at least ourselves. This reflexive and culturally situated nature of
arts practice as research, pedagogies and creativity have been intersectionally informing research as resistance for some time, as I will explore in the
next section.
MATERIALIST CREATIVITY, NEW AND OLD
Creativity pioneer Morris Stein (1953) claimed that the level and adaptability
of creativity was enhanced or suppressed by each cultural group’s ability
to tolerate and incorporate the ambiguity of individuality, original thought
and expression. The relationship between culture and creativity overall
has increasingly been the focus of much interdisciplinary and intersectoral
research (see e.g., Glaveanu, 2014). Stein (1953), Gardner (1993) and others
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(Kaufman and Sternberg, 2010; Craft et al., 2007) also famously remind us
that creativity is socially defined, and culturally contextualized. This is true AQ: The
also with scholarly research and evolving notions of validity, as concern meaning of
“as concern
emergent methods like ethnocinema.
Creativity and resistant ‘making’ cultures include the broad (and ever- emergent
methods
expanding) fields of visual methodologies, visual cultures and digital like ethnoethnographies, all of which offer new forms of cultural and knowledge cinema” is
production. In all such emerging methodologies, co-participants work not clear.
more or less together to problematize notions of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural dif- Could this
be reworded
ference’, but are not limited to traditional definitions of it. As research is thus: “as far
changing, so too are definitions of culture, its hybridization, its flows and as emergent
social functions. For example, British ‘cautious anthropologist’ Shawn methods
Sobers (2008) explores both methodological and cultural border-crossings, like ethnocinema are
in his film-based ethnographies of slave histories, masculinities, illness and concerned”.
embodiment.2
Collaborative arts practice as research methods like ethnocinema suggest
that as notions of culture are changing so too must research and pedagogical
practices. As Hickey-Moody (2009) has theorized word, sound and movement as ‘posthuman pedagogy’ (279), here I claim the becomings-video
of ethnocinema as similarly potent post-human and creative pedagogy. For
ethnocinematic co-creators, ‘posthuman pedagogy thus facilitates moments
of contact with an Other’ (279) in both embodied and virtual contexts, in
corporeal and digital educational entanglements. As global mobilities muddy
the waters of articulable cultural values and subjectivities, emerging research
methods present an urgent imperative to engage more ‘real world’ practices
and epistemological frameworks for cultural and discursive transgression.
This chapter addresses the im/possibilities and implications of moving
beyond ‘cultural’ identities and practices in visually representative research,
for researchers who approach collaborative work as informed by thought that
is ‘patchy and material’ (Stewart 2007, 5).
New materialism challenges the centrality of the human and human agency
in ‘new configurations [in which] the material and the discursive mingle and
mangle’ (Bolt, 2013, 3). This mingling and mangling can be discursively
manipulating in representational and post-representational ways in videobased research. From aesthetics to the agency of the filmic form itself, video
and their online circulability are extending the possibilities for visual contexts
and discourses.
Ethnocinema and ethnovideo refocus on ‘the materiality of film’ in which
‘moments of affection come to replace the recognizable testimonial moment AQ: Please
with a material experience of affection’ (Bolt, 2013, 10). That is, it is not check the
primarily concerned with more traditional testimonial aspects of narra- edits in
tive or ethnographic film, but is rather focused on the making process and “That is, it is
not…”
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AQ: The
sentence
“Ascendant
neo-liberalism…” is
very long.
Please check
if you would
like to
rephrase this
as shorter
sentences.
Anne Harris
intersubjectivity between human co-creators and the emergent characteristics
of the film itself. As Bolt (2013) has argued, ‘Film-making is an intense
relationship between a myriad of human and non human actants—lights,
cameras, editing machines, actors, editors, film-makers and directors’ (5), and
ethnocinema multiplies this relationship by the multiple makers involved in
its creation, from idea through filmic tools to production.
Ethnocinema fuses techniques and theoretical perspectives from its ethnographic film origins with participatory and collaborative research methods,
and invites researchers and co-participants to creatively come together to
resist its more traditional anthropological disciplinary and methodological
origins. Ascendant neo-liberalism in both pedagogical and research contexts
marks them as sites of the enactment and politics of identity construction
(Bhabha, 1994), in which the work of dismantling notions of authenticity/fallacy, hybridity/purity and a media-driven fictive unity, the ‘volatile logic of
iterability’ (Butler, 1993, 105) in the ways we think and learn about, research
and teach culture, identity, and materiality, in embodied and virtual practices
and spaces is more urgent than ever.
Ethnocinema’s discursive trajectory incorporates anthropological and
critical theoretical discourses that extend mediascapes by articulating how
‘private or state interests’ (Appadurai, 1996, 35) become conflated and
increasingly ‘fuzzy’ in global visual cultures and virtual scapes. The ideas
and practices that underpin ethnocinematic research may produce different
mediascapes that suggest both new processes and products, and serve different social functions. If ethnoscapes, as Hickey-Moody (2013) argues, are
co-constitutive of the groups that they come to represent, ethnomethodologies
such as ethnocinema offer ways of perforating the skin of such intersecting
‘scapes’ in multiple ways, using multiple methods. One such difference is the
way in which ethnoscapes (as explored through ethnocinema) are shifting,
globally mobile, and newly material sites—as they remain fixed and circulatory pedagogical and performative products, processes and ‘rogue intensities’
(Stewart, 2007). The proliferation of ethnomethodologies like ethnocinema
represents research and subjective hybridities that offer new aesthetic, critical
and affective lenses to those using visual methods and exploring visual cultures. The next section will address some forms of video-based methods and
their resistant potential, highlighting the multiple ways in which ethnocinema
in particular achieves this aim.
VIDEO-BASED METHODS
Before offering a more nuanced discussion of ethnocinema (and ethnovideo),
first it may be helpful to briefly define other ways of using or incorporating
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film and video in scholarly research including non-ethnographic documentary
(Nichols, 2010), video ethnography (Pink, 2012; 2007) and visual sociology
(Banks, 2007; Harper, 2012), and how they approach the role of video in
research differently.
VIDEO-BASED RESEARCH
Bill Nichols (2010) has stressed what he believes are the differences between
ethnographic film and non-ethnographic documentary, namely, that ‘all these
[ethnographic] efforts tended to categorize individuals in ways that minimized individuality and maximized typicality’ (226). These days the lines
between individual and collective, culture and strategic assemblage are blurrier than this neat definition, and therefore the possibilities for video-based
research have similarly blurred and widened. The flexibility of video refers to
both its uses as well as its options in theorizing, writing up and disseminating.
The speed with which video methods are proliferating and evolving attests to
its value in this digital culture as an effective tool for researchers in almost
every discipline—not only as method, but as methodology (Spencer, 2011;
Pickering, 2008).
Film- and video-based research, however, differs from those who
are increasingly using video only to data capture (with no attention to
aesthetics) or to disseminate (Goldman, 2007). The use of visual methods
in more emergent areas such as the study of aesthetics in creative methods,
applied video and hypermedia, micro-video-based science and medical
research, digital ‘making’ cultures, and interactive online video-based
research all represent the ever-expanding ways in which video is being used
to contribute to and to lead research project design. Interdisciplinarily too,
it is proliferating: areas like cultural geography which range from the uses
of videotaping landscapes to interactive mapping to cultural sociological
cartography of communities, and corporeal cartographies of the body, are
increasingly common. Throw into this methodological mix a proliferation
of video-infused methods such as social media, vlogging, YouTube, Instagram, Google Sketchup, Scantech and Skratchit. Some of the most exciting
video research is only beginning to emerge within immersive 4D simulation
technology in medical and education research areas. The methods associated with such disciplines and discourses are equally varied, including, for
example, virtual visual methods like video games (Fielding et al., 2008),
applied video research in developmental psychology (Shwalb et al., 2005),
creative social science research using video (McIntosh, 2010; Heath et al.,
2010) and visual ethnographies including ethnocinema (Harris, 2014a),
to name just a few. Exciting yes, but just as rapidly hegemonizing as it is
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AQ: Please
check if the
text “These
days the
lines …”
reads okay
as given.
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proliferating, and if video’s shape-shifting role for critical theory or resistance research is to be retained, greater reflection is required as this chapter
seeks to do.
VIDEO ETHNOGRAPHY
Ethnographic film and video too is proliferating as the means of production becomes increasingly accessible. This accessibility itself presents new
challenges, as Pink (2012) and other visual ethnographers have made clear
over the last ten years, the need for limiting the research focus and question
in order to avoid large video data sets that can quickly become unwieldy
(Goldman, 2007). As video’s strength is its ability to provide multiple layers
of data about subjects and their environments at the same time, it is crucial for
researchers to clearly identify which aspects and features of the captured data
are most relevant to the research project and its analysis. While video data is
still most often (but not solely) used for qualitative social science research, its
strength can be to newly reinforce the core qualitative tenet of foregrounding
the perspectives and lived experiences of the participants. Video researchers’
success in good design and analysis depends upon specificity in relation to
these multiple perspectives, especially when integrating self-generated video
data as part of the approach. That is, in both design and writing up, video
researchers must be absolutely clear about the audiences, uses and analytical approaches through which the data is gathered, interpreted and disseminated. This will avoid the kinds of instrumental video uses from which early
video-based research suffered—and still does at times (think researchers who
simply use a static camera to do what audio recording used to do, a gross
underutilization of video). Innovative design can enhance video as a tool for
establishing new protocols and research relationships, beyond simply new
methods that replicate in digital form familiar traditional approaches. For
nearly forty years now,
there have been ongoing debates about the definition, methodology and audience of ethnographic films, and how the subgenre of ethnocinema may or may
not fit in … as it might (or might not) be distinct from more traditional ethnographic documentary. (Harris, 2011, 336–7)
Visual ethnography today is many things. It is not the visual anthropology even of post-World War II (Guindi, 2004), which sought to examine
social systems through visual methods, most innovatively, through video as
ethnographic documentary. It was a big shift which in its own way democratized the methods of video-based research from big documentary teams3 and
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sentence
“It was a
big shift…”
please check
if “verite”
can be written with an
accent as
“vérité”.
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restaging of seminal culturally stereotyping events and rituals to the kind of
cinema verite that Rouch (Rouch and Feld, 2003) became known for. Yet, it
has continued to evolve at an accelerating rate since then. As I have detailed
elsewhere, this evolving ethnographic video research is characterized by a
range of multiplicities, not only by intercultural ones,
characterized by multiplicity … [in which Rouch’s] shared anthropology is dialogic … suggesting a new kind of fieldwork that might entail staying at home in
the field. This deconstruction of traditional ethnographic documentary includes
the emergent discipline of intercultural cinema, which recognizes ‘the disintegration of master narratives and a growing conceptualization of knowledge as
partial and contested’. (Marks, 2000, 2)
AQ: In the
sentence
“Such troublings of…”,
please
provide the
missing
quote mark.
AQ: Please
check the
placement
of the closing quote in
the sentence
“This deconstruction…”
Such troublings of master narratives challenge traditional ethnography
to expand its scope to include not only diverse perspectives but more collaborative endeavours that resist knowledge-construction solely for Western
audiences’ (Harris, 2011, 338). These changes in visual ethnographies resist
more than this—they resist singular stories that make truth-claims of master
narratives, not just interculturally but in troubling singularity itself. Indeed,
James Clifford (1988) has argued that ‘all ethnographic representations
are partial truths’ (Clifford in Harris 2011, 340). MacDougall (1998) too AQ: Please
has cautioned against ‘imagining an ethnographic documentary that can be check the
in the
considered “truth”’ and asserts, ‘the representation of anything is by defini- edits
sentence
tion the creation of something different’ (MacDougall, 1998, 48, in Harris, “MacDou2011, 336).
gall (1998)
The same has been argued about video representation and visual cultures too…”
more generally (see Gubrium and Harper, 2013, 1986). Indeed, definitions of
culture and by culture can themselves be included in this ‘something different’ by the nature of its generalizing function: Contemporary ‘visual interventions’ (Pink, 2007) are a hybrid offshoot of collaborative image-making and
digital approaches to participatory action research. Visual interventions may
include photography, film or digital media. Collaborative methods of participatory film-making and photography … [and] In practical terms, participa- AQ: Please
tory visual researchers should be critically aware of the multiple facets and check the
edits in “In
uses of photos, maps and film as documentary evidence; as a prompt for elic- practical
iting responses; and as a form of material culture, as a source of power, and terms, paras social capital (Banks, 2007). … Banks writes: ‘European and American ticipatory…”
society has constructed photography—and in due course, videotape—as a
transparent medium, one that unequivocally renders a visual truth’ (Banks,
2001, 42). ‘It is not merely a neutral document or record of things that took
place before the camera, but a representation of those things, persons, and
events intended to explain society and its processes’ (Banks, 2007, 12–13)
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(in Gubrium and Harper, 2013, 1986). This range of interpretations, forms
and functions of video ethnography is characterized by its resistant potential,
and stands in some distinction from the more mainstream and growing field
of visual sociology.
VISUAL SOCIOLOGY
Banks (2007) and Harper (2012) in sociology are advancing discussions of
the theoretical tensions between visual, embodied and digital cultures and
their implications for creative, activist and more traditional forms of research.
Reflecting this, the role of video (like other digital methods and methodologies) is rapidly and significantly changing, and this section addresses some
clear theoretical trajectories affecting video-as-research, but also the inchoate
theoretical innovations present in current scholarship.
As Banks (2007) has stressed, effective and robust video-based research
approaches represent different ways of meaning making, ‘which can be
reconstructed and analyzed with different qualitative methods that allow the
research to develop (more or less generalizable) models, typologies, theories as ways of describing and explaining social (or psychological) issues’
(Banks, 2007, xi) and which will allow video data to be used in limitless
ways. Using video as method has no limiting implications for the methodological approach to the research design, nor any inherent aesthetic imperatives. Indeed, it is well suited to a range of sociological analytic approaches
(Knoblauch and Schnettler, 2009). More importantly, video in social science
research is adaptable, and speaks back to discursive cultures in the academy:
through form, function and the nature of participation (Haw and Hadfield,
2011). For social scientists, the blurring of ‘raw’ versus ‘edited’, ‘primary’
versus ‘secondary’ and the potential for video-centralized research is an
opportunity that requires unpacking. Haw and Hadfield (2011) acknowledge
the ‘ambiguous status of video within the research community’ (29) as well
as ‘what constitutes an appropriate analytical process’ (29), in which ‘the
researcher recognises the extent to which it is technically, theoretically and
culturally laden, in contrast to data that are collected and handled with little
recognition of these influence’, and importantly they ask, ‘Is video then
affected by these influences in ways that distinguish it from other forms of
data?’ (29). Like Stewart (2007), Haw and Hadfield (2011) wonder about the
affective dimension of what claims space as research, in a scholarly landscape
that still mostly suffers the epistemological emaciation of unidirectional collaboration in research work. For methods like ethnocinema, decentralizing
the nexus of research work is core to the co-constitutive nature of the video
collaboration.
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ETHNOCINEMA
In recent times, scholars have highlighted the exciting potential in new and
emerging social science methods and methodologies (Banks, 2005; Spencer,
2011), including performative and digital ones. The power of visual methods (including video) is increasingly well known (McIntosh, 2010), yet its
impact on critical research, and more broadly its implications for a conceptual
paradigm shift regarding research approaches and dissemination, is yet to be
deeply understood.
Ethnocinema can be a radically collaborative or participant-led method
in which digital technologies facilitate links, in some cases, with others like
participants across the globe in ‘home’ countries or communities, but also
other diasporic locations.4 Ethnocinema draws from a range of sociocultural
theorists including Appadurai (1996, 2004), Massumi (2002, 2011), cultural
materialists like Anderson (2006), postcolonial visual ethnographers such as
Rouch and Feld (2003) and Minh-ha (2011), and post-humanists (Appiah,
2010), and takes a diverse approach to thinking about creative methods and
culture as neither defined nor bounded by geography. Therefore, intersubjectively, culture comes to include or be considered as communities of practice,
rather than ethnically or geographically defined. Such emergent ‘cultures’ are
informed by what Anderson (2006) has articulated as imagined communities
that increasingly replace nation-state, corporate and other anachronistic cohesion principles.
Yet ethnography remains persistently linked to colonial and anthropologized notions of subaltern and dominant subjectivities and discourses
for those who see ethnography as a mono-directional and representational
endeavour. Today, ethnography—and visual ethnographies in particular—
are freed from these origins (see Pink, 2007, 2012). Ethnocinema and other
arts practice as research approaches have the power to transcend traditional
political strategies and can also address the multiple subjectivities of race,
gender, sexuality and religion that play so deep a role in the contemporary
call to action. As co-creators in arts practice as research, researchers and
their participants discover, perform and document new knowledge products
and pedagogies in collaboration not only with one another, but with the
materiality of video and digital tools themselves. Through the self-curation
entanglement of ethnocinematographers, cultural producers are indistin- AQ: In the
guishable from consumers and distributors. Thus, ethnocinema demands sentence
that audiences become an additional iteration of sense making. Importantly “Such digital…” please
for ethnocinema, Appadurai’s (1996) notion of the imaginary and its field of check if
five scapes provides a conceptual geography in which the playing out of eth- “constitute”
nicity, performativity and identity coincide in powerful ways. Such digital should be
intersubjective performance and its role in the maintenance of collective and changed to
“constitutes”
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individual memory is troubled between the works of Appadurai (2004) and
Anderson (2006), and the nexus of these ideologies is present in both posthuman (Appiah, 2010) and post-nation-state perspectives, and constitute
‘posthuman pedagogies: met-subjective material forces of change’ (HickeyMoody, 2009, 274).
Appadurai (1996, 2004) articulates a social imaginary that is generated by
a collective imagination process, a tool for creating and accessing publics in
which diasporic citizens can come together in new kinds of communities.
Through circulable video-enhanced social media (Appadurai’s mediascapes)
and other online technologies, ethnocinematic co-participants are keenly conversant in cosmopolitan conversations with their counterparts in all reaches of
the globe, radically dismantling traditional processes of scholarly knowledgeconstruction and dissemination. Ethnocinema problematizes simplistic narratives of culture and identity as constructed in the west for marginalized others,
in which notions of embodiment/virtuality remain binarized, and culture/cosmopolitanism move beyond diversity into a functional notion of ‘semblance’
(Massumi 2011). His attention to creative relationality holds more possibilities than aesthetics or outcomes, including as a critical lens. However, Butler
(1993) and others have criticized Massumi’s (2002) distance from attention
to the body, but for Massumi (2002), interactive ‘making seeming being’
(2002, 64) is intrinsically affective and as such is an exchange that invites
the Other in each of us to engage with the centre and margin simultaneously.
In order to address any contemporary notion of ethnomethodology as a resistant term to traditional sociology (Garfinkel, 1967), in the way that Rouch
and Feld’s (2003) visual ethnography is resistant to anthropology, I will first
briefly address social constructivism as opposed to situational co-constitutive
research activity.
ETHNOCINEMA AND ETHNOMETHODOLOGY
Garfinkel (1967) originally articulated ethnomethodology in almost antisociological terms, and in some respects it still remains defined in contrast
to sociology. I don’t see it this way. Rouncefield and Tolmie (2011) make a
correlation between ethnomethodology and social constructionism, but draw
heavily on science and technology. They characterize it as an ‘interpretive
sociology’ (211) and agree that it is less concerned with meanings than the
situationally oriented nature of the work.
Ethnomethodology remains an enigma: for Giddens (1993) and other
historical materialists, ethnomethodology ‘is readily construed as a study of
social praxis’ (Lynch, 1993, 31), and despite some disappointments with the
approach (such as the ways in which it has ‘sometimes been argued that the
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approach is “conservative” because ethnomethodologists rarely talk about
power or coercion’ [31]), it promotes an ‘avowedly “radical” agenda’ (31).
Yet in the end, ‘The most serious problem that Habermas, Giddens, Bourdieu,
and others find with ethnomethodology is that it disavows structural determinism’ (Lynch, 1993, 31).
Despite its pivotal role in widening sociological and anthropological
approaches to sociocultural research, ethnomethodology remains sidelined
and controversial, still widely regarded as ‘primarily a theoretical position
that fails to answer to the need to provide a strong basis for confronting a
larger set of structures’ (Lynch, 1993, 32). Whether it is primarily concerned
with social structures or social relations remains contentious, but for the
purposes of this chapter, ethnomethodology does offer some possibilities
for extending traditional sociological expectations of video. ‘Habermas,
Giddens, and Bourdieu each take ethnomethodology seriously, but each
tries to transcend its limitations by retaining elements of rationalism, objectivism, and foundationalism’ (31), and in the end ethnomethodology does
remain informed by both phenomenology and the ‘linguistic turn’ due to its
inextricability from linguistic representation, and language, so that in ethnomethodological terms, the social order or intersubjectivity is co-created
or co-constitutive, even in film-making—so there is never any ‘subject’ and
‘researcher’, but rather a set of co-creators who make sense of one another
and their experiences in the exchange between them, including—centrally—
the use of language.
Ethnomethodology is based on both indexicality and reflexivity. Indexicality is the constructed nature of all knowledge, that it is situational and contingent, even precarious we might say, and like language, it is contextual. This
is crucial to research, which still exists in a positivist academic structure in
which ‘truth-claims’ are taken for granted and ‘expert knowledge’ is still narrowly (and usually Westernly) defined. ‘For ethnomethodologists, to describe
a situation is at the same time to create it’ (Marshall, 1998, n.p.). It questions
the ways in which we constitute the world, and the problematic nature of
meaning. However, as previously asserted, it is strongly tied to linguistic
and conversation analysis, and in this way ethnocinema is somewhat of a
mismatch with ethnomethodology, due to its primary visual representational
focus (for more on this see Pink, 2012, 2007).
Yet, we return again to the need to unpack the notion of culture in evolving ways for our moment, a need to ask whether indeed it can usefully be
defined at all any more, and whether it is useful for us—as researchers—to
even seek to define it with any sense of authority from the 1 per cent of higher
education and public intellectualism. Dimitriadis and Weis (2008) claim that
‘the role of ethnography as a tool for understanding and acting upon our
contemporary global moment needs rethinking in very fundamental ways’
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(82), a point acknowledged within anthropology for some time. Their urge to
‘deterritorialize’ ethnography is tied to a deconstruction of ‘the idea of culture
as a neatly bounded and discrete entity [which] has been called inextricably
into question by a host of contemporary social, cultural, technological, and
material imperatives’ (82).
If we accept a static definition of culture (which Dimitriadis and Weis
(2008) would encourage us not to do), we might consider Lubart’s (1999)
claims, as stated at the start of this chapter, that ‘culture encourages creativity
in some situations and for some topics but discourages it for others’ (342).
Even without ascribing a static set of definitions to ‘culture’, Lubart’s (1999)
observation is compelling that ‘given the divergent conceptions that different
cultures may have for the same term, it is interesting, however, that creativity
is generally viewed as a positive construct’ (340).
Ethnovideo/ethnocinema can be considered an ethnomethodology, but
one which is not used to define sociocultural groups (social order), rather
to highlight the ‘ambivalent negotiations’ (Bhabha, 2001), between/across
‘cultures’ and ‘identities’. It signals a shift from static to mobile notions of
culture, and reflects changing enquiry at the heart of ethnographic research,
including ‘What if the work of documenting cultures becomes the work
of documenting movement’ (Harris, 2014a). As such, it uses performative
‘communities of sentiment’ (Appadurai, 1996), or other theoretical lenses
(see Figure 8.1).5
Figure 8.1 Adiba. Still image from ‘Sailing into Uni’. 2013
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ETHNOCINEMA AS CULTURAL RESISTANCE
‘Cultures of resistance’ in general are on the rise; we see as much through
global resistance movements like Occupy, Arab Spring, Femen, and other
decentralizing assemblages that seek to dismantle the structures of the
1 per cent. Contemporary cultures of resistance define themselves in contrast
to neo-liberal, capitalist consumer cultures that pervade the contemporary
global mainstream. They are alternately characterized as ‘DIY cultures’,
global youth and activist movements, and ‘slow’ (embodied) versus consumerist civic engagements and citizen enactments. They are characterized by
hybridity and welcome other formations and practices of networking, hacking
and collectivizing—whether digital or corporeal (Boler et al., 2014; HickeyMoody, 2013; Massumi, 2011).
Ethnocinema resists identity fixity (Hall’s ‘fictive unity’, 2000; Bhabha,
2001) by remaining more focused in the local and intersubjective, rather
than the translocal (there is no ‘real me’ in video, only the ‘me’ in relation to
‘you’). But ethnocinema equally resists cultural fixity—‘Culture as a necessary impossibility’ (Bhabha, 1994)—through its resistance to ethnographic
assemblages based on culture, or ethnic practices or identities. In other words,
ethnocinema does not seek to represent any kind of generalizable truth of an
ethnic or cultural whole, based on an investigation and visual representation of that whole or its constituent parts. That is, ethnocinema seeks only
to investigate and comment upon cultures of belonging, based on individual
definitions of such in a collaborative, intersubjective relationship with self
and co-researcher. For this reason, while it is ethnographic, neither the
ethnographic nor the video-based aspects of the method make truth-claims;
ethnocinematic films are less ‘self-as-culture’ representative, and more ‘selfin-culture’ as contextualized identities-in-motion.
Ethnocinematic research resists epistemological fixity, notions of ‘truth’
versus ‘fiction’, and favours multiple subjectivities. These expressions of ethnographic resistance are not new: perhaps most famously, Trinh T Minh-ha
(2011) and Jean Rouch (Rouch and Feld, 2003) redefined video-based
ethnography in the 1960s, but others have continued to do so since then.
Ethnocinema additionally directly draws from and extends the notions of
ethnoscapes and mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996) and in turn their ability to
inform accelerating global flows, flows that are cultural but simultaneously
resist fixed notions of culture.
Rouch’s (Rouch and Feld, 2003) notion of ethno-fictions highlighted the
value and possibility of co-constructed partial truths in working cinematically
in ethnographic contexts. Collaboration and participatory methods became
irrevocably part of the anthropological new moment through his approach
(Rouch and Feld, 2003), and his total rejection of ethnographic truth through
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collaborative creative work is at the core of ethnocinema, specifically the first
two process steps of:
Form a small group or pair with whom to work
Brainstorm what cultural concerns/practices will be addressed in this
collaboration.
Minh-ha (2011) extended the notion of ethno-fictions further through her
attention to subaltern subjectivities, and by using film as cultural resistance
in scholarship. Her training as a composer and her activist/scholarly commitment to aesthetically focused political works set in the anthropological
paradigm enact an arts practice as research scholarship of resistance to previous eras of ethnographic film. Her postcolonial and practice-based approach
to her work strongly influences these aspects of ethnocinema in the following
two steps of an ethnocinematic project development:
Choose what topic the project will address
Who is your audience?
The process of selecting the focus of the film in a given project depends not
just on the culture/s identified within the team, but its intersection with affect,
conceptual frames and social context. For Minh-ha (2011), these considerations come together in the work’s conversation with the audience. Unlike
some contemporary ‘making’ cultures who claim the irrelevance of audience
(the making is defined as a critical reflexive process without consideration
of product), ethnocinema (drawing from Minh-ha, 2011) sees audience as an
integral part of the dialogue of film-making. For Minh-ha (2011), the audience was always both the subaltern producer/consumer and the hegemonic
mainstream consumer (scholarly, popular and critical were always still
defined as western and white). The films are made and distributed as an act of
speaking back to hegemonic notions of knowledge creation and subjectivity.
Appadurai (1996) and his focus on global flows facilitated (and in some
cases precipitated) by intersecting ethnoscapes and mediascapes offers a new
way to think about the value of collaborative practice-led approaches like
ethnocinema. By requiring researchers and co-participants not only to work
together, but to co-research one another, ethnocinema creates new social
imaginaries through participation, and extends cultural enquiry beyond the
static ‘who we are’ landscape into a ‘where are we situated, where are moving
to/from’ more open horizon. These new horizons are limited only by a DIY
ethic, in which knowledge (and product) creation no longer remains in the
hands of the few, but rather through guerrilla production and circulation techniques are available to all. These new social imaginaries (visually represented
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but interculturally enacted, even post-production) are inherently resistant, in
their ability to provide experiential social commentary and critique for both
the co-makers and the audience who consumes them (more frequently one
and the same). This aspect of the ethnocinema approach is characterized by
SharING roles—all participate in filming/filmed with simple technology
(a DIY ethic)
The ‘how to’ (or method) part of this methodology therefore sits in resistance to method-cultures which still largely demand validity as tethered to
large data sets and objective distance (ironically, video-based research does
produce sometimes unmanageably large data sets, but of a type still not satisfying to the quantitative research paradigm). For ethnocinematographers,
nothing could be further from the methodological truth. An important part
of the conceptual contribution of ethnocinema is enacted through its doing.
Mitchell (2011) and others have articulated the potential of collaborative
video to ‘help equalize power relations’ (170) and encourage a ‘reassessment
of the nature of self in relation to social context’ (91). Mitchell (2011) notes
too the materiality of both still and moving visual images and their evocative
nature in research relationships (especially interviews and self-reflection).
Ethnocinematic research design too is always materially oriented: it cannot
be abstract once moving images of self and others populate previously empty
space. It is context specific and generated by the co-researchers and their
question.
CONCLUSION
As I have claimed here, video alone is not a method or a methodology, as it
can and is being used in countless ways in the doing of research. It retains
a unique type of resistant possibility, and the power of that possibility is
appearing online and in research contexts in a multitude of ways. Yet its AQ: In the
compatibility with an increasingly ‘big data’ research culture makes video sentence
“Ethnovulnerable to abuse and assimilation, and there are signs that it is moving cinema
rapidly towards more hegemonized notions of what ‘counts’ as research as a particularly…”
interdisciplinarily.
In this chapter, I have articulated the resistant agency of ethnocinema, and please check
if “returned
contextualized it within other video-based research approaches and method- to” should
ologies. Ethnocinema as a particularly transparent video-based collaborative be changed
research methodology is ripe for culturally and methodologically resistant to “return
applications, enabling an important critical disentanglement from its neo- to” or as
appropriate
liberal material life as ‘research product’, and returned to a more innovative, for clarity.
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and certainly more useful, subversive research praxis. Yet importantly, videobased research like ethnocinema can be resistant both creatively, culturally
and representationally as what Massumi (2002) has called ‘making seeming
being’ (64), the technologies that create the ‘regime of the visibility of seeming being’ (65). Through the co-constitutive act of video-based research,
an arts practice as research-based pedagogy of making between human and
non-human co-makers problematizes static definitions of culture and identity
itself. Ethnocinema and ethnovideo offer potent possibilities for an emergent
scholarly cultural resistance (acts of protest against the mainstream cultures
of academic/expert knowledge production), but can also be considered cultures of resistance in the intersubjectivity and intersectionality of this tool.
NOTES
1. Intersectionality refers to the study of the ways in which individuals, collectivities, institutions and discourses can only be understood through the intersecting set
of sociocultural oppressions and discriminations that remain inextricable at both the
macro- and micro-levels. While there is no one theoretical or epistemological framework for addressing intersectionality in research, it is widely associated with the
pivotal essay by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989), and has had renewed attention through
contemporary challenges to solidarity in social movements.
2. For examples of Sobers’ work, see http://www.shawnsobers.com/films/.
3. Robert Flaherty, one of the founding fathers of ethnographic documentary film,
has come under contemporary scrutiny and criticism for his alleged staging of the
early film Nanook of the North (1921), which he claimed documented the lived experiences of the Inuit in the Arctic north pole, but which was later found to have been
largely staged by Flaherty and his local collaborators.
4. For more on this, see the Creative Research Hub, http://www.creativeresearchhub.com.
5. For two examples of these emergent refocusing of ethnographic concerns, see
the short film clips: LINK #1: Nyadol, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIqwNA8AE4. LINK #2: Adiba, http://www.creativeresearchhub.com/#!sailing-into-uni-filmclips/ct99, see Figure 8.1.
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Chapter 9
Manifesto
The Rhizomatics of Practice as Research
Anna Hickey-Moody
Practice as research is a phrase I use to refer to an entwining of contemporary
creative practice and academic research landscapes. The phrase is typically
employed as a differentiation of terms such as practice-led research and
practice-based research (Haseman, 2007: 147). Bolt and Barrett (2007) characterize a particular iteration of practice as research as an approach which
draws on ‘multiple fields and pieces together multiple practices in order to
provide solutions to concrete and conceptual problems’ (12). Focusing and
extending this definition, I use the term practice as research to refer to practical invention and evaluation, via processes that draw on ‘multiple fields’ and
which piece ‘together multiple practices’ (Bolt and Barrett, 2007: 12), across
academic and contemporary arts contexts. My practice as research is philosophically informed making, and thinking about making, which unfolds with
a focus on invention and evaluation. In order to explicate this perspective,
I adopt a materialist lens.
As noted in the introduction to this collection, increasing value is being
placed on matter and creative methodologies in social sciences and humanities (van der Tuin, 2011; Coleman and Ringrose, 2013). New materialism
(Barrett and Bolt, 2013) and Deleuzian informed methodologies (Coleman
and Ringrose, 2013; Springgay et al., 2008) are starting to be valued for
offering curious, affective, enfleshed, vital approaches to research (MacLure,
2013). New materialism, or what Sara Ahmed (2008) has perceptively called
white feminist materialism, is clearly not free from political and cultural
issues pertaining to the history of black feminism and materialist thought.
However, new materialism does advance a very useful framework for thinking about the agency of matter in the materiality of making. New materialism
calls for research inquiry via practice, via materiality—it calls for embodied,
affective, relational understandings of research process. Such contemporary
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feminist materialism abandons the idea of matter as inert and subject to
predicable forces. It posits matter as always partially indeterminate and as
constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways (Barad, 2007). A materialist ontology recognizes the interconnections of all phenomena (human and
non-human, actual and virtual).
Coleman (2008) and Lury and Wakeford’s (2012) work on ‘inventive
methods’ is also now starting to be mobilized (see Coleman, 2014) to explore
the agency of matter and advance vitalist frameworks for empirical research.
Inventive methods are a performance of materialist ontology, although an
ontology largely informed by science and technology studies. In this chapter,
I strengthen the nascent connection between new materialist feminism and
inventive methods with a focus on ontology and creative practice as research.
Drawing primarily on the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari (1985,
1987), this chapter engages with recent work from the Arts Practice and
Learning PhD Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London, in relation
to frames of possibility opened up by Lury and Wakeford’s (2012) suggestion
that inventive methods extend and remake the ‘happening of the social’ (2).
To develop new approaches to materialist research through experimental methodologies for empiricism, I investigate the rhizomatics of practice
as research. This builds on the suggestion of Springgay et al. (2008) that
‘three ways of understanding experience—theoria, praxis, and poiesis—are
folded together and form rhizomatic ways of experiencing the world’ (xxiv).
The rhizomatics of practice as research is experimental and materialist
because it values responsiveness to context and recognizes agency in the
material world, which matters because it means research is always acknowledged as a process of making and value is placed on the research process
as well as the product. As Gardner (2015, this volume) states, materialist
In the
research methods, which, after Deleuze and Guattari he calls historicalsentence
“With arts stratigraphic methods, emphasize ‘the significance of lines that move between
practices…” planes of coexistence according to an ontology of historical creativity—a
please check
fluid combination of intensive emergence and the universal-contingent’
if “engagements with (this volume: n.p.). Therefore, processes of investigation, whether statistical
chance, acci- surveys or creative practices, shape the worlds they map through their methdent, error, ods. With arts practices, engagements with chance, accident, error, can enable
can” should
material agency to shape work in ways that are explicit. This is of interest
be changed
to “engage- when thinking about the happening of the social as a process of invention and
ments with exchange between the non-human and the human. Social worlds and research
chance,
processes are contingent, and this contingency needs to be acknowledged as
accident and
a form of non-human agency.
error can”
While Lury and Wakeford (2012) are interested in inventive methods
or as appropriate for
that respond to ‘problems’, I suggest that by taking a more ontologically
clarity.
focused, and postcolonially aware approach to why and how inventive
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methods matter, we might further shift and enmesh distinctions between
what it means to ‘do’ research and to ‘make’ through contemporary practices or arts-based processes. As Lury and Wakeford (2012) demonstrate, art
and social science are more entwined than UK-based Research Assessment
Exercises (RAEs) and our current Research Excellence Framework (REF)1
might have us believe. I suggest a feminist materialist reading of Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1985, 1987) rhizome as an inventive materialist research methodology. In developing rhizomatic frameworks for practice as research, we can
develop reflexive, intra-active, postcolonial themes through writing our subjectivities into our work in varying ways, employing different textual forms
to create space for changing reader-writer-maker-consumer-watcher-watched
relationships, and writing in the different spatialities and temporalities which
fold-in to constitute practice as research.
MOVING SIDEWAYS: IMAGING AND GROWING METHODS
Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, the rhizome
is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions,
and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after
which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987: 21)
Outlined in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987),
Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is a method of conceptual arrangement and a
method of practice, a methodology, that is ‘anti-genealogy’ (21) and uproots
ideals of linearity, singularity and hierarchy. As a framework for practice as
research and practice-based PhD projects, rhizomatics, and inventive methods as a performance of rhizomatics, offer an engaging ontological frame for
thinking through practice as research. In many respects, all practice-based
projects are rhizomes (or ‘plateaus’) that explore space, time, territories, locations, points of stasis and lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and
destratification.
A plateau is ‘any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to extend or form a rhizome’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 22). A plateau forms an accordion-like
compression of spaces, times, experiences, memories, [that are] sclerotic
and intra-active (Barad, 2007) collections of being, in which movement and
disciplinary change occur. Materialist and (intra) disciplinary changes and
developments are movements of deterritorialization and destratification,
becomings, both of which can be collective and progressive or singular and
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static. The work of practice-based PhD students, such as Clare Stanhope and
Amba Sayal-Bennett, discussed in this chapter, destratifies existing boundaries in knowledge through bringing together sets of practices and bodies
of academic knowledge not usually aligned. For example, Sayal-Bennett’s
work reads video art through the philosophy of Karen Barad as a methodology for developing drawings and projecting drawings in three dimensions.
This performance of diffraction as a methodology ‘is not a self-referential
glance back at oneself … [rather, it is a method] drawing on optical phenomenon for … inspiration in developing certain aspects of … methodological
approach … diffraction does not concern homologies but attends to specific
material entanglements’ (Barad, 2007: 88).
Movements and entanglements of diffraction and swarms of deterritorialization occur largely through lines of flight, an a-signifying rupture: ‘The
function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which “one” leaves the
territory. It is the operation of the line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:
508). Movements of destratification, becomings, are material, conceptual,
corporeal transformations undertaken through the movement of incorporeal
powers.
Change, chance, dissent and disagreement are core parts of the ecology
of rhizomatics: ‘Outside the strata, or in absence of the strata, we no longer
have forms or substances. We are disarticulated; we no longer even seem to
be sustained by rhythms’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 503), but the act of
leaving the strata—a-signifying rupture or deterritorialization—eventually
folds back into a larger body, and as Barad (2007) reminds us, ‘Existence is
not an individual affair … time and space, like matter and meaning, come
into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby
making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation
and renewal’ (v). The iterative reconfiguration to which Barad (2007) refers
suggests that practice as research, and inventive, practical ways of remaking subjects in and through research, are of value in the social sciences and
humanities because they change subjects. Practice as research remakes/
remaps/reconfigures how a given subject is constituted. It reinvents subjects,
and spaces, as Sullivan (2008) asserts, ‘When artistic practice is used within
the context of inquiry, there is an investment in the potential that insight may
emerge as a reflexive action sparked by a creative impulse that can help to see
things in a critically different way’ (242).
As an ethos for practice as research, a folding back of the ‘map’, or creative practice, into tree knowledge or hierarchical, academic practice, I think
through the concept of the rhizome which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) establish through using the example of two types of books; each of the two types
of book has a different structure and intent, distinguishing what they call a
‘root-book’, or a ‘classical’ book, from a rhizome, which they suggest is the
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‘second figure of the book’ and a ‘radical system’ (5). Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) outline this radical rhizomic system as a multiplicity that aborts the
concept of unity, as having multiple roots which ‘shatter the linear unity of
the word’ (16) and as including the ‘best and the worst: potato and couch
grass’ (7).
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) begins by outlining the concept of a rhizome with a sketch, Sylvano Bussoti’s Piano piece
for David Tudor 4 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3) (Figure 9.1). The typically
contained, autonomous musical lines are connected by crazy scribble. The
overall feeling of the score is erratic connection, divergence, and the disruption of regular patterns. The frenetic scribbles of the music notes have
impacted on the bars on which they are scrawled: some of the usually rulerstraight lines of the musical score have taken on wild diagonals, cutting up,
down, across and behind the unorthodox musical notes. This score gives
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome a visual form, and it is as if, through
disrupting the exterior, by performing irregularity, the rhizomic notes have
altered the foundational structure of the music. It is an enactment that was
required when the ‘system used to express a particular practice fails to provide the sufficient means required to carry out the demands of this practice’
(Palmer, 2013: 189).
More importantly, the function of this musical text has also changed, and
here we have the purpose of the rhizome: it is an intra-action. Rhizomatics
is a method of conceptual and practical arrangement that initiates change.
Making a rhizome is about generating questions, pulling things apart to see
Figure 9.1
1987, 3).
Sylvano Bussoti’s Piano piece for David Tudor 4. (Deleuze and Guattari,
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AQ: Please
check the
text “I have
worked
with, and
assembled a
...” in terms
of clarity.
Anna Hickey-Moody
how they work and putting them together again in a different way to see what
else they can produce, what different purposes they might serve. Rhizomatics
is a remaking of the social through paying attention to happenings, and making new happenings: reinventing, with a focus on functionality, on how and
why things operate. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that we
‘never ask what a book means ... we will not look for anything to understand
in it. We will ask what it functions with’ (4, my emphasis). Through developing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome into an inventive
materialist method of textual construction for practice as research, I have
worked with, and assembled a series of lines of development for making a
text that invites readers to ask what the text ‘functions with’ (4) and enabling
happenings to ask questions (Figure 9.2).
AQ: Please
note that the
“Figure 12”
has been
renumbered
as “Figure
9.2” and the
subsequent
citations
has been
changed
accordingly.
Figure 9.2 Touch me- Series of lines for making a text. 2014.
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In adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome as a
research ethos for practice as research, I construct my pedagogical practices
and my own body movement and visual art practices, as entangled with
dominant discourses of contemporary creative practices, dance performance
and academic research, and through these entanglements, I attempt to uproot
some of the presumptions upon which these discourses are based. I offer my
praxis as self-reflexive, continually questioning the assumptions on which the
disciplines that frame it are based.
THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF THE RHIZOME:
SIGNPOSTS FOR MAKING SPACES
For those unfamiliar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1985, 1987),
the six principles around which they structure their discussion of the rhizome
are connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography
and decalcomania. These qualities reflect a broader concern with the disruption of totalizing discourses; ‘the rhizome is an acentred, nonhierarchical,
nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory
or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 21). The six principles are ‘approximate characteristics’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7), different articulations of similar concepts,
themes and an analytic of practice concerned with what something ‘functions
with’ rather than specific points of definition and modes of diffraction. This
thematic focus on modes of operation has a relationship with the thought of
Karen Barad (2007), who also emphasizes the relationship between form and
feeling: ‘Significantly, the agential nature of the iterative reconfigurings of
spacetimematter relations makes clear the need for an ethics of responsibility
not only for what we know, how we know, and what we do but, in part, for
what exists’ (243, my emphasis). Through making new mixtures and moving between things, practice as research changes what exists; it changes
disciplines.
For example, practice as research in the field of art education remakes both
what art education is and how it works. Clare Stanhope (2011), a current
Arts and Learning PhD student, delivers a materialist critique of life drawing
through changing what it is life drawing practices ‘function with’. Rather
than drawing a completely nude (and thus, objectified) woman, Stanhope
(2014) maps women’s skins with glue as a way of making maps of live bodies (Figure 9.3). Shedding the glue skin, the woman’s body is imprinted in
dry glue rather than objectified by this process of visually reproducing her
body. Rather than ‘functioning with’ the naked female body, and the objectification of the naked female form, this method of ‘life drawing’ functions
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Figure 9.3
Anna Hickey-Moody
Clare Stanhope. Glue skin. 2014.
with visceral imprints of live women’s skins, which Stanhope (2014) refers
to as feminist skins. Other methods for ‘life drawing’ which function with
non-objectifying methods that Stanhope has developed include drawing
maps of day-to-day routes walked and stitching the patterns of daily routes
and glue skins into paper. The former visually draws life day by day and the
latter maps feminist skin; both methods function with the vernacular lived
experience of a woman’s body and day-to-day life. They intra-act between
traditions of masculinist practice and contemporary feminist practices. Here,
art practice teaches feminism and critiques masculinist histories of Arts education—practice as research is remaking art education.
Re-presenting and understanding practice as research and inventive methods, and creating spaces for different reader–writer relationships, is a form of
rhizomatic thinking that creates a site of convergence between my involvement with inclusive movement practices, the work of Restless Dance Theatre,
my visual arts practices and my students’ contemporary creative practices
through a range of textual technologies (Morgan et al., 1997) such as images,
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practices and theoretical analysis. My development of rhizomatic texts
facilitates the inclusion of a range of practices and methods. After the work
of Felicity Colman (2014) and Alice Fox and Hannah Macpherson (2015),
I grow this emergent manifesto on the rhizomatics of practice as research
through considering each of the six principles of rhizome and considering
some ways they reinvent research for my students and my own practice as
research.
LOVE YOUR OTHERS: CONNECTION AND HETEROGENEITY
Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is
very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987: 7)
AQ: The
meaning of
the sentence
“Where as
a method
…” is not
clear. Please
consider
rephrasing.
A rhizome makes connections between a diverse range of material. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that this principle is an exploration in decentring the written word. A rhizomic method makes connections
between a diverse range of material in abstract, non-linear ways, and in so
doing, highlights some limitations of written representation, or tree-knowledge. Language is contrasted to ‘a method of the rhizome type … [which
can] analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other
registers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8).
Taking linguistics as an example of ‘tree-knowledge’, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that even ‘when linguistics claims to confine itself to what
is explicit and to make no presuppositions about language, it [linguistics] is
still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and
types of social power’ (7). Part of what the arts practice PhD aims to do is
decentre language and ideas of art as object by valuing the process of practice
and documenting processes, enmeshing it into final written and visually/sonically read arts-based assessment pieces. The folding back in of the rhizome
on to the map is core to the programme design and evaluation.
AQ: In
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop their criticism of dominant methods of the senthought through suggesting that linguistics ‘[is] not abstract enough ... [it does] tence “The
not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and semiotic
pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, chains…”
please check
to a whole micropolitics of the social field’ (7). Where as a method of the whether the
rhizome type ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, quote after
organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and the phrase
social struggles’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7). The semiotic chains I con- “work of
dancers”
nect through my movement practice are between the work of dancers’, some could be
of whom identify as impaired or having an intellectual disability, the times deleted.
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AQ: Please
check the
citation
change to
“Figure 9.4”
Anna Hickey-Moody
and spaces in which the work is created, and the different subjects and experiences the dance texts connect.
Figure 9.4 was taken during a movement workshop held recently at the
Centre for the Arts and Learning (CAL), Goldsmiths University of London,
that brought together, and created, a community of movement practitioners
with diverse bodies, histories and movement practices. While the image is not
dynamic, the diverse natures of the bodies moving in the workshop are clear
from the image, and the premise of moving together—principles of connection and heterogeneity—are embodied in the image. We are clearly a group,
though we are heterogeneous. Barthes (1977) positions the photograph as a
captor of space, a compression of reality into a line (or surface) of representation. For Barthes, the image is not the reality, but its perfect analogon, and
it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the
photograph. Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image:
the photographic message is a surfacing of an event, an opening out into one
line of a moment in time.
Photographs form an integral component of this chapter, and the contents
of the images are a core part of the overall argument developed, namely, that
forms of practice can rupture and remake semiotic systems, and this remaking
AQ: Please
note that
both “Centre
for the Arts
and Learning” and
“Centre for
Arts and
Learning”
are used in
the book.
Please check
if one has
to be made
consistent.
Figure 9.4. Beyond Technique Dance Workshop, The Centre for the Arts and Learning
(CAL), Goldsmiths University of London. 2014.
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allows us to know the social differently. And, perhaps more importantly,
reinvent the social. In some instances, such as visually representing my student’s work, reappropriating an image and re-employing it in a context that
is different from that in which it was developed literally ruptures the power
structures that were originally activated through the image’s creation. In other
instances, my written responses to a visual image highlight the political or
social comments I am making in my theoretical argument. This conscious
inclusion of images sits in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) criticism
of linguistic models, as being ‘not abstract enough … they do not reach the
abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic
contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole
micropolitics of a social field’ (7).
The images reflect the type of research process that informs the development of my students’ dissertations, and my work as a practitioner, in the
respect that they visually synthesize practical and theoretical examples.
Through including the above pictures of dancers and our workshop venue,
I am illustrating my concern to acknowledge that practice as research and
inventive methods are always, even if unconsciously, based on, and inspired
by, collective experiences. The complementary relationship between picture
and word that I work to develop is modelled in part on Rodney Sappington’s essay Cracked open by the senses (1994). Sappington (1994) writes
autobiographically about growing up in Texas, and his essay is interleaved
with photographs of the landscape in which he grew up. Sappington invites
his readers to build relationships between environment, experience and his
construction of identity through his combination of words and photographs.
Through pictures, I invite my readers to build their own relationships between
contemporary creative practices as research and open up the knowledge contained in the written word.
My employment of the principle of heterogeneity takes the first step
in ‘decentering [language] … onto other dimensions and other registers’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8), as images engage my reader visually with
senses of other times, places, bodies, textures, that my words cannot offer. The
employment of creative practices as a core component of my students’ dissertations is intended to highlight, and bridge, the range of literacies their dissertations embody. My consideration of visual literacies also offers a crucial point
of access to Stanhope (2014) and, later in this chapter, Sayal Bennett’s (2014)
work, highlighting the assumptions contained within the words ‘practice as
research’ as to what research is, and how it might be undertaken or made.
Through referring to art practice as research, the act of making is framed
by, and interpolates, a history of understanding knowledge production as an
activity located in the ‘brain’ and hence the ‘body’ constitutes what the brain
is not: irrational, and unknowing. Yet, as advocates of practice as research
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know, the brain does not function in isolation from a human body, and a
person’s consciousness certainly cannot be located in their brain. The act
of making itself re-machines the world in which the making occurs. Ingold
(2013: 21) suggests that we
think of making … as a process of growth … to place the maker from the outset
as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what
he has to work with, and in the process of making he (sic) ‘joins forces’ with
them, bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesising and distilling,
in anticipation of what might emerge. (21)
My development of the principle of connection and heterogeneity involves
rupturing the power structures that support academic work through introducing rhizomatic text with images juxtaposed against the written word, and
re-presenting the ethos of creating and making as a core part of building
research-based texts:
Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit and to make no
presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying
particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7)
AQ: Please
check the
edits in
“This chapter draws…”
This chapter draws together the strands of my own, and others’ contemporary creative practices as research, to place the creative texts in theoretical
and methodological contexts.
MULTIPLICITY
‘When a multiplicity … changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature
as well, undergoes a metamorphosis’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21). The
concept outlined through this principle is that of challenging singularities
through building intra-active relationships between subjects on a range of
levels, and in so doing, developing, adopting new perspectives and reinventing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that methods of identifying
relationships between subjects should be contextually aware and responsive,
and they offer the example of the connection between puppet strings and a
puppeteer. This connection illustrates their argument that following contextually specific connections between subjects aborts the idea of singularity: ‘as
a rhizome or multiplicity, [puppet strings] are tied not to the supposed will of
an artist or puppet but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another
puppet in other dimensions connected to the first’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
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1987: 8). They further suggest that ‘a multiplicity has neither subject nor
object’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8), but rather, that multiplicities are
‘defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other
multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9). As Blake and Stearns (2015:
this volume) remind us, ‘We are ourselves both host and parasite, predator
and prey, possessor and possessed, and we consume ourselves as we consume
the future.’ We change in nature through connections with the outside, the
future, and the people yet to come, who reposition us differently at times,
over and over again. Collective processes produce different outcomes as they
develop. The possible kinds of combination increase as a multiplicity grows
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8) and, in so doing, a multiplicity transforms
and makes new connections. The puppet becomes the puppet strings, and
becomes the nerve fibres of the puppeteer, as broadening focal points lead to
change, development and reinvention.
Practice as research is concerned with these multiplicities, with humanobject-space-sound multiplicities, with making relations between people and
things. I employ the principle of multiplicity by way of paying attention to the
multiplicities that make up subjectivity, my psychological processes, and the
impact these processes have upon my work. In so doing, I also acknowledge
the contribution made by others to my writing. We are all, already ‘dividuals’
of a community. Creative ideas reflect different working philosophies; the
movement methodology I practise takes the body of the dancer as a primary
choreographic source, rather than positioning bodies as vessels that can fulfil
a pre-inscribed ideal of dance aesthetic. As a collation of material gathered
from keeping a journal of rehearsals and academic research, my movementbased research (Hickey-Moody, 2006, 2009, 2015) can be seen as quite
literally embodying the idea that multiplicities transform those who are part
of them, changing both those who constitute the swarm and the objects the
swarm encompasses in its swarming.
My development of the principle of multiplicity (Hickey-Moody, 2009)
offers readers an opportunity to engage with my own creative processes, the
locations and events that have influenced them: ‘The line of flight marks the
reality of a finite number of dimensions. … The ideal for a book would be to
lay everything out … on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical
determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987: 9).
The dimensions I inhabit in undertaking practice as research are multiple
and varied, and the point at issue for me here is to create an avenue through
which I can go on to illustrate different forces of power that shaped research
and create spaces between theoretical research, embodiment, creative practices and academic contexts. I cannot transpose all the politics of my research
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process on to a page. However, my reading of the principle of multiplicity is
intended to voice the presence of politics, the politics of intimate spaces, the
politics of formal spaces, bodily politics, politics of praxis and the politics of
ideas. The matter of different materialities comes to make matter differently.
My employment of the principle of multiplicity has been reworked with a
broader focus in the ways I have arranged text and images in this chapter.
My method of arrangement is a reworking of the first three principles of the
rhizome: connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity, as acknowledgements
of the intra-actions between text and reader that are effected through images.
ASIGNIFYING RUPTURE
‘A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again
on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because
they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and time again after most of
it has been destroyed’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9).
Asignifying rupture breaks off development in one direction and starts up
new development in another. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) go on to specify
that the lines of development to which they refer must always tie back into
one another, and must include the ‘good and the bad’ (9). This principle
speaks to ideas of cross-fertilization through re-appropriation, a changing of
purpose when breaking off and starting anew. Deleuze and Guattari make
an example of the relationship between viruses and DNA hosts as a method
of reproduction that is based around a kind of invasion, or rupture, in which
the initial purpose of biological matter is re-appropriated (see also Blake
and Stearns, 2015: this volume). Asignifying rupture works in structuring a
rhizome:
every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified,
territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc. as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9)
Asignifying rupture is a ‘line of deterritorialization’, ‘a veritable becoming’
that merges ‘the good and the bad’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10). These
breakaway lines tie back into the body of the rhizome: ‘There is a rupture in
the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the
line of flight is always part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to
one another’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9). Asignifying rupture embraces
multiplicities and opens up to change: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your
territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it
becomes an abstract machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 11).
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Asignifying ruptures are a core part of all practice as research methods,
certainly my own. In my book Unimaginable Bodies (2009), asignifying
ruptures open up medical discourses which construct bodies with intellectual
disability, and posit performance texts as sites which position bodies with
intellectual disability as the authors of their identities, opposed to academic
texts that position people with intellectual disabilities as research subjects.
Through adopting rhizome as my research ethos, I create space in which the
materiality of bodies can be reconsidered alongside medical constructions of
bodies, knowledges and the relationships between them. Asignifying ruptures
fold together, or mix, different discourses and different conceptual and physical ‘spaces’. These include cultural and physical spaces, the metaphorical
idea of ‘creative space’ and the rupturing of conceptual spaces.
For example, spaces created by rehearsal and performance venues are of
key importance when rehearsing and performing a piece of dance-theatre.
Factors such as wheelchair accessibility, adequate space, flooring, mirrored
walls and ballet bars all determine what a space ‘speaks of’ and what it holds
silent. Perhaps more importantly, what a space speaks of is also a determining factor in the kind of work that happens in a space. Bourdieu’s (1992)
notion of the ‘field’ is, of course, useful when thinking about the social rules
embedded in spaces. Bourdieu (1992: 9) suggests: ‘we may think of a field as
a space within which an effect of field is exercised, so that what happens to
any object that traverses this space cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic
properties of the object in question. The limits of the field are situated at the
point where the effects of the field cease’. While ‘the intrinsic qualities of
the object in question’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 9) are not quite as easily definable
as this quotation suggests they might be, and indeed, are made through the
processes via which they are defined, the concept of the effects of a field is
useful when looking at the production of difference within space as work, and
the construction of capital as an effect of a field.
Dance spaces that are not wheelchair accessible, or which are framed
by ballet bars and gymnasium equipment, suggest what dance ‘should be’,
and in so doing, delineate what dance ‘should not be’. Integrated dance as
a practice ruptures these assumptions and folds them back into dance practice. Rehearsal venues tend to range from community halls and churches to
professional ‘dance spaces’, depending on space availability and rehearsal
requirements. The closer a performance piece comes to completion, the more
physical space is required in which to rehearse it, as the performance text
gradually increases in size as it is composed. This increase in claiming public
space speaks to notions of building social capital, as visibility and performativity are literally accorded more space and dollar value.
A fabulous example of re-appropriating the cultural significance of space as
constituting work can be found in a project undertaken in Western Australia
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titled Exile. Facilitated by DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in
the Arts, Australia), Exile was a site-specific work that developed and performed in a Gothic mansion once known as the Fremantle Asylum.2 Glen
Hayden, the project’s director, speaks about the power of re-appropriating
cultural space through performance:
A nice thing about this performance being so site-specific is that, just by the very
nature of the environment and the fact that it is a promenade show, there are
points where we imagine that the audience will actually experience the feeling
of incarceration and scrutiny. So I guess the gaze goes both ways, and that’s
always an interesting area for artists and audiences to explore. (Van Sanden,
2001: 13)
The functions of spaces are continuously re-territorialized through integrated dance performances.
RUPTURING CONCEPTUAL SPACES
Rupturing conceptual spaces in which material bodies are perceived as unrelated is also a key aspect of practice as research and inventive methods, and
is a driving force in my movement work. Irving Goffman’s (1961) analysis
of the medical model and mental hospitalization illustrates my argument that
medical models create a space in which specific understandings of corporeality as devalued and decentred are constructed. In parallel to these practices,
in my writing, and my movement practice, I work to create a space in which
the body is central, the site at which identity is located. Medical discourses
and medicalized readings of bodies create spaces in which a direct correlation exists between materiality, visibility and economies of production. In
Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates
(1961), Goffman offers an interesting discussion of work practices as defined
in accordance to a public/private, or visible/invisible distinction, and locates
this distinction as a method of attributing differing monetary values to work
practices. Goffman suggests:
Among tasks requiring the performer to meet the public, two kinds may be
distinguished, one where the public consists of a sequence of individuals, and
another where it consists of a sequence of audiences, a dentist performs the first
kind of task, a comedian the second. (284)
Individuals are the publics accorded to experts and, alternatively, audiences
are the publics accorded to service providers, such as entertainers. Skills and
social value are attributed very differently in the first and second forms of
identification. Of particular interest for me is the way, in the broader text,
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Goffman (1961) has chosen to categorize the State as embodied by his construction of the individual as ‘expert’. The expert embodies the ideals of the
State in his or her practices. Described here as ‘the server’, Goffman (1961)
outlines the particular qualities that define the expert [dancer/academic/Artist]: ‘the server’s work has to do with a rational competence, and behind this
a belief in rationalism, empiricism, and mechanism, in contrast to the more
self-referential processes that plague people’ (287). While Goffman (1961) is
attempting to critique the lack of space for the mediation of embodied experience within the institutional apparatuses of the medical model, and medical
codings of bodies, he does so within a very confined theoretical space. The
above quotation elucidating the qualities of the ‘expert’, the medical ‘server’
or psychiatrist, constructs an ideal that is useful and very true yet, perhaps
unwittingly, quite disembodied.
Goffman (1961) writes the body as third person, in an esoteric manner that
disconnects bodies and selves. This style of writing ultimately reinforces, or
reconstructs, theoretical spaces created by medical models of the body:
The first issue is that the body is, as psychoanalysts say, highly cathected in
our society; persons place great value on its appearance and functioning and
tend to identify themselves with it. Individuals are uneasy about giving their
bodies up to the rational-empirical ministrations of others, and hence need their
‘confidence’ in the server continuously shored up by bedside assurances. This
problem must not be overstressed, however, not because persons are ceasing
to identify with their bodies but because of what we are slowly learning about
how much they identify with non-corporeal things, such as wrist watches and
cars, seeing in a threat to these ‘good objects’ a threat to self. (Goffman, 1961:
297–8, my emphasis)
We are our bodies. We can only pretend not to identify in some ways with
them. Goffman’s (1961) point about identity as a process of identification in
which people create semiotic regimes of self is useful when considered in
light of the fact that such regimes are always created by a body whose identity
is in question. The static nature of Goffman’s (1961) understanding of ‘self’,
and his description of the ensuing processes of identification, is grounded in
Cartesianism:
The client will find it difficult to treat his body, and have it treated, impersonally,
and to overlook the fact that he cannot use it in the usual fashion while it is being
repaired. (Goffman, 1961: 303)
The kinds of space that the medical model creates is one in which bodies
are not necessarily viewed as the site of a person. Where exactly the person
is assumed to be is not elucidated, but the above quote leaves me with the
impression that the person might be hovering above the body, watching
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bodily repairs with anxious scrutiny. Discussing epidemiology, Goffman
also describes spaces as having the potential to be pathogenic (300) and, perhaps the pathology of the medical model is that of the body, which Goffman
describes as being the object of a service, rather than a site of embodied subjectivity and a cultural text:
Whatever the patient’s social circumstances, whatever the particular character
of his ‘disorder’, he can in this setting [psychiatric institution] be treated as
someone whose problem can be approached, if not dealt with, by applying a
single technical-psychiatric view. That one patient differs from another in sex,
age, race, grouping, marital status, religion, or social class is merely an item to
be taken into consideration, to be corrected for, as it were, so that general psychiatric theory can be applied and universal themes detected behind the superficialities of outward differences in social life. (306, emphasis added)
This medicalized coding of bodies, and the critique of ‘expert knowledges’, are core to my inclusive movement practice, which is by definition
always collective and is always about materially and expressively challenging
dominant codings of bodies. More than this, though, practice as research,
and inventive methods as a form of practice as research, challenge expert/
layperson binaries. Invention requires openness, awareness, receptiveness.
Practice as research requires perception of, and engagement with, matters,
states of affairs, materialities, accidents as agents. The expertise required here
is a level of receptivity. Attention. Responsiveness. Invention and practice as
research are not about performing mastery, a skill which is suggested by dominant cultural constructions of the expert. Rather, invention and practice as
research are about engaged responsiveness and ongoing ethical assessment.
Foucault (1980) suggests that the State as a political body can be conceived of as ‘an extremely complex system of relations’ (62) that cannot be
attributed to a particular person, but only to methods of practice and knowing. Goffman (1961) locates State power and ways of knowing within the
practices of the ‘expert’ within medical institutions and their broader social
context, mirroring and inverting his construction of public and private space,
through isolating medical practices as a means of rupturing the self as located
within the body:
AQ: Please
clarify as to
what ‘their’
refer to in
the sentence
‘Here the
person is ...’
In discussing the medical model in a general hospital, it was suggested that life
conditions within the hospital could be divided into an inner and outer sphere:
the inner sphere contains the injured area of the organism under conditions of
medically indicated control that are highly responsive to the state of injury; the
outer sphere provides, in a rougher way, housing for the inner sphere. (313)
Here the person is split into the injured body, and the ‘whole’ yet disembodied person, an incorporeal autonomous self, who is perceived as constructing
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their existence around the administration of medical practices and as somehow outside their corporeality. Inclusive movement practices remake bodily
knowledges: bodies that might be constructed as divided, broken, in need of
repair, can be remade or written over through making performance texts that
bring bodies together and imprint different kinds of bodies in space in ways
that attach different affects to bodies.
Bodies, ultimately the instruments that write dance, are living testimonies
to the fact that all texts are a composition of different times. A scar, the colour
of an eye, a person’s walk are, among other things, signifiers of different
temporalities. Histories are primarily embodied, and the histories of people
with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities (as I have said, community
with whom much of my dance work has been concerned), are often solely
embodied, their physicality constituting the only sites where their stories are
recorded. Movement texts created by people with intellectual disability are
therefore uniquely representative of their histories, and are in themselves, like
all texts, compositions of different times:
Because dances have no existence except through the body/bodies which produce and reproduce them, they can be considered as texts written of and through
precisely inscribed bodies. (Dempster, 1988: 37)
The concept of bodies as collections of temporalities brings a depth and
duration to the work of doing practice as research. The knowledges mobilized by such practices include memories, senses, imaginings. There are few
language-based texts written by people with intellectual disabilities in which
their histories and identities are theorized and, as such, embodied memory
needs to be valued and mobilized. Practice as research is a core strategy
through which such histories can be employed. Cultural histories of people
with intellectual disabilities are lived out through social attitudes, lifestyle
options (or lack of) and methods of mainstream representation, all of which
fold into bodies to create signifiers of a history. Hence, the histories and identities of individuals with intellectual disability are specific aspects of these
individuals’ embodiment. Points of a body that tell a particular story—prostheses, shunts, scars, tattoos, piercings, stretch marks and corporeal brandings
of various forms, create different intensities, lines of latitude and longitude
along which to read and feel life stories.
My concern with temporality is manifest, then, on a number of levels, that
of the embodiment of temporality, and also that of the different times that
constitute rehearsing and performing dance-theatre:
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters,
and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to
overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987: 3)
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AQ: Please
validate
the comma
introduced
before the
phrase “and
aesthetics
and sensations” in the
sentence
‘Diffraction
across media
...’.
Anna Hickey-Moody
I perceive practice as research as an accordion-like compression of a range
of different writing times, making times, presenting times, moments of journal writing, discussion and analysis.
I suggest my doctoral students work to create a text that embodies Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1987) suggestion that a book is a folding of time and space
back onto itself, because I am hesitant to believe Peter Brook (1990) when
he suggests that ‘as you read a book, it is already moving out of date. It is
… an exercise frozen on the page’ (157). While this comment can be seen as
having a literal truth, Brook fails to acknowledge his reader, and the reader’s
subjectivity as the activating agent reading the text. Creating a text is largely
about creating what will be a site of convergence for an author’s creative
processes and those of the reader.
‘There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into
a line of flight, but the line of flight is always part of the rhizome. These lines
always tie back to one another’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9). Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) describe asignifying rupture as ‘a line of deterritorialization
down which [a rhizome] constantly flees’ (9). Deterritorialization is ‘a veritable becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10). A current Arts and Learning PhD student, Amba Sayal-Bennett, who I introduced briefly above, works
with accident, or asignifying rupture, as a methodological principle (Figures
9.5 and 9.6). A visual and installation artist, Sayal-Bennett collects accidents
that occur during her very structured processes of making. She allows the
accidents agency in her processes of making and folds these back onto the
highly structured tracing of her futuristic work, which critiques domestic
life and hospital spaces, mapping interior designs for impossible futures as a
performance of this critique. Sayal-Bennett’s diffractive methodology begins
with 3D sculptures, which are assembled alongside futuristic sketches. These
sketches are also projected back into space as a flattening and extension of the
initial flat sketch image, and the projection contrasts the textures and dimensions of the sculptures made from found industrial and domestic objects.
The projection also has a sonic scape; the projector hums as its fan works
to cool its interior light. Accidents occurring during the process of making
are left as part of the work. Diffraction across media makes flat projections
in space, makes atypical built works, and aesthetics and sensations intra-act
across visual media.
POSITIONING: CARTOGRAPHY AND DECALCOMANIA
‘A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a
stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987: 12). Genetic axis and deep structure are ‘infinitely reproducible
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Figure 9.5 Amba Sayal-Bennett, In The Background of Carlo Collodi, 2014.
principles of tracing’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12), and a tracing is a text
concerned with the logic of reproduction, as opposed to the creative mapping
of the rhizome. As with the first two principles, the fifth and sixth principles
are listed together, and the concept they explain is that of making a map and
a tracing and then putting the tracing back on the map. A map is a rhizome:
‘A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always
comes back “to the same”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). The rhizomic
map has to do with experimentation, whereas the tracing always involves an
alleged ‘competence’: ‘what distinguishes a map from a tracing is that it [the
map] is entirely orientated toward an experimentation in contact with the real’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12).
Decalcomania is a term used to describe transference by tracing, usually
from prepared paper onto another surface, such as china or glass. In using
this word, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe an action of reproduction
and repetition, in the sense that to trace is to copy another person’s work.
A tracing is a text that is concerned with the logic of reproduction, rather than
with creative production. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) go on to say that in
order to make a rhizome, a person should make a tracing and a map, and that
the tracing should always be put back on the map. Through combining the
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Figure 9.6 Amba Sayal-Bennett, Narcopolis, 2014
tracing, or the conventional text, with the map, or rhizomic text, differences
between the two are highlighted. The point of making a rhizome is to end up
in the middle of these two poles of difference:
It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map.
This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. … A rhizome has no beginning
or end; it is always in the middle, between things, intermezzo. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 13–14)
My pedagogy for the PhD programme employs the principle of cartography and decalcomania to enmesh (and emphasize intra-actions of) theory
and practice. The various textualities that constitute my students’ work must
always tie into broader theoretical arguments, each complementing the other,
as they position the tracing (theoretical landscapes) back on the map (practice base consisting of visual, performed and written creative developments).
In offering readers a range of different positions within their work, my
student’ roles as the writers of their rhizomatic texts are brought into focus.
They write themselves into the text as the body who is accountable, who is
desiring readership, who seeks an audience, who has constructed the performative and analytic texts. In writing accountably, my students highlight the
differences that occur between tracing and mapping. I argue that rhizomatics
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is about making visible the politics of textual construction, through combining textualities and through discussing the process of textual construction as a
way of inviting readers to ask what the text they are reading ‘functions with’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4).
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: ON
THE ETHICS OF INVENTION
Inventive research methods materially and conceptually perform Deleuze
AQ: In the
and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome, creating a text that is a site sentence
of praxis, a text that explores a range of different spaces, times, territories, “As a manilocations, points of stasis and lines of flight. In my PhD pedagogies, and in festo…”
this chapter, I have developed Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the please check
if “temporirhizome to employ a range of textual technologies (Morgan et al., 1997) ality” should
that have been pioneered by feminist researchers over the past decade. As a be changed
manifesto for paying attention to the eclectic ethics of invention, this chapter to “tempois ‘a moment of problematic linguistic temporiality which occupies a pocket rality” in the
quoted text.
of time’ (Palmer, 2013: 189) but in so doing constitutes a folding together of
multiple pasts and opens up little futures.
Like inventive, or ‘live’ (Back and Puwar, 2013) methods, the rhizome
belongs to smooth space, twisting between points of definition, forming collections, or multiplicities, and oscillating between the arboreous logic of the
tree that inhabits striated space and the logic of the ever-changing multiplicity
that inhabits nomad, or smooth, space. Bodies, ultimately the instruments that
do practice as research, are living testimonies to the fact that all texts are a
composition of different times.
This chapter draws together the lines of the rhizome as an ethics of invention and engagement that necessarily requires an agentive understanding of
matter. Across practices, and knowledges, we can inform and change happenings of the social through observing and remaking, through showing works
that make observers think otherwise. Ethicism and eclecticism are hallmarks
of responsive and inventive engagements with practice as research. I invite
you to experiment with practice as research as an ethical form of invention,
and embodied social critique advanced through aesthetics.
NOTES
1. ‘The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new system for assessing
the quality of research in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). It replaced the
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
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The primary purpose of the REF is to produce assessment outcomes for each
submission made by institutions. The REF is a process of expert review. HEIs are
invited to make submissions in 36 units of assessment. Submissions are assessed by
an “expert” sub-panel for each unit of assessment, working under the guidance of four
main panels. Sub-panels apply a set of generic assessment criteria and level’ (REF,
2014: scare quotes my own).
2. The Fremantle Arts Centre was known as the Fremantle Asylum from 1864 to
1909.
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Notes on Contributors
Anna Hickey-Moody
AQ: Please
note that
in ‘Notes
on Contributors’
designations
and subject
names are
initial lowercased and
the article
added as per
house style.
Anna is the head of the PhD in Arts and Learning at the Goldsmiths Centre
for the Arts and Learning (CAL), where she leads the research collaborations
of an interdisciplinary team of practitioners and researchers. Anna has developed a philosophically informed, cultural studies approach to youth arts as a
subcultural form of humanities education. Through developing a concept of
little public spheres, her recent book ‘Youth, Arts and Education’ theorizes AQ: Please
note that
young people’s creative practices as a form of civic participation. Her 2009 for all titles
book ‘Unimaginable Bodies’ creates a Spinozist concept of an open body, both ‘roman’
an assemblage of affects made through collaborative arts practice that breaks and ‘roman
apart dominant medical and social codings of young people with disabilities. within
quotes’
Anna also researches and publishes on masculinity. She is interested in the formatting
politics and aesthetics of masculinity read as embodied critique of institu- have been
tionalized patterns of hegemony. Her 2006 book ‘Masculinity Beyond the provided
Metropolis’ is a global ethnographic study of the lives of young men in ‘out in the MS.
We have
of the way’ or hard to reach places. The book considers ways the everyday changed all
lives of these boys are mediated by global scapes of media production and roman to
consumption, economic globalization, generational change, and spatial and italics for
temporal configurations of subjectivity. Anna has edited a number of col- titles. Could
you suggest
lected works—recently she published an anthology on pedagogy, media and if we can
affect called ‘Disability Matters’ which explores how ideas and experiences also change
of disability come to matter across assemblages of media, through vectors of the ‘roman
within
affect and experiences of pedagogy.
quotes’ to
‘italics’ or
we can leave
as is.
211
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Notes on Contributors
Tara Page
Tara Page, PhD, is a senior lecturer and head of the internationally renowned
MA Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practices (MAAT) at Goldsmiths
University of London (UK) where she researches the entanglements of
practice, pedagogy and the phenomenological and ontological constructions
of place and belonging, including the ways in which practice with theory
can enable social and educational change: Place, Pedagogy and Practice:
A New Materialism (forthcoming), A Shared Place of Discovery and
Creativity: Practices of Contemporary Art and Design Pedagogy (2012,
iJADE). Tara worked in community arts and primary, secondary and higher
education in Canada and Australia and continues her socially engaged practice as an artist researcher teacher—Places and Ways (2013, Performance/
Event), Statement Field (2009, Film)—and is the Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) Curator of Social Practices (see website). Tara was the co-editor
of The International Journal of Art and Design Education (iJADE) for
five years and served on The Publications Board for the National Society
for Education through Art and Design (NSEAD) for four years. Tara has
presented at international conferences and published articles, chapters and
a book on contemporary arts practice and pedagogy including Teaching
Through Contemporary Art (2008 with Adams, Worwood, Atkinson, Dash
and Herne. Tate Publishing), Finding your way: The purpose and relevance
of writing for artist researcher teacher practices (2012 with Areses Huertas,
Frimet, Johnston & McGeer. Journal of Writing in Creative Practices) and
Emerging: The impact of the Artist Teacher MA on students’ pedagogical and artistic practices (2011 with Adams & Hyde, European Journal of
Teacher Education).
Aislinn O’Donnell
Aislinn O’Donnell received her PhD in philosophy from the University of
Warwick and currently lectures in philosophy of education in Mary Immaculate College (MIC-University of Limerick). She is also an associate fellow
with GradCAM. O’Donnell has taught philosophy in a number of universities
including UCD and the University of Dundee. O’Donnell aims to democratize philosophy and expand our conception of the ‘Academy’, and the role of
the Academy in society. With support from MIC, she has been teaching philosophy classes, developing collaborative research practice and writing with
people in a range of informal settings, including closed institutions. Instead
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Notes on Contributors
of treating people as research subjects, these spaces become research sites
offering opportunities for co-enquiry. This approach is influenced by contemporary art practice and research. She has presented and responded at events
related to art practice such as Terminal Convention (2010), Re-gathering on
the Grounds of Art (2008), Ethics: Politics of Resistance in the Contemporary World (2009), 2020 Visions: Imagining the Art & Design College of
the Future (2007), Liminality (2011), Truth, Lies and Videotape (2009). She
has been invited speaker and presented at a range of conferences on topics
relating to education and prisons and has written and spoken about the work
of philosophers such as Deleuze, Spinoza, Bergson, Arendt, Foucault, Oury
and Irigaray. Recent and forthcoming articles include ‘Beyond Sexuality:
Of Love, Failure and Revolutions’ (2011), ‘Thinking-in-concert’ (2013),
‘Unpredictability and the pedagogical encounter’ (2013), ‘Shame is revolutionary’ (2013).
Colin Gardner
Working at the intersection of film-philosophy, Deleuze studies and interdisciplinary media theory, Colin Gardner received his PhD in cinema studies
at UCLA before becoming Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative
Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches
in the Departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature,
and the History of Art and Architecture. His most recent book is Beckett,
Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
a critical study of Samuel Beckett’s experimental work for film and television
and its connection to Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of the image in Cinema 1 and
Cinema 2. Excerpts have appeared in Deleuze Studies Journal (2012) and
Continuum Books’ Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (2009). He is currently
co-editing two anthologies with Professor Patricia MacCormack (Anglia
Ruskin University): Deleuze and the Animal (Edinburgh University Press)
and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Publishing). Gardner has also published two books in Manchester University Press’s ‘British Film Makers’
series: a critical study of the blacklisted American film director, Joseph
Losey (2004), and a monograph on the Czech-born, British film-maker and
critic, Karel Reisz (2006). Most recently, Gardner has expanded his research
into the area of Media Geography, including a chapter on Tomas Gutierrez
Alea’s seminal Cuban film, Memories of Underdevelopment in James Craine,
Giorgio Curti and Stuart Aitken’s collection, The Fight to Stay Put: Social
Lessons Through Media Imaginings of Urban Transformation and Change
(Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013).
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Notes on Contributors
Amanda Kipling
Amanda has been the Drama Postgraduate Certificate of Education course
leader at Goldsmiths since 2008. She is a voice and speech specialist, and
her areas of interest include drama as play, drama as healing, and peer mentoring-critical learning using electronic portfolios and video: ‘The Play is the
Thing’ (2010, Drama to Inspire, edited collection, Trentham Books). In 2011
Amanda led on the Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) videoconferencing
event that featured Drama Education pioneer Dorothy Heathcote. Amanda
contributes to the Education, Culture and Society undergraduate degree and
was the Senior Tutor and is currently the Disability Officer for the Educational Studies Department at Goldsmiths.
Charlie Blake
Charlie Blake is currently a visiting lecturer in film at the University of
Brighton, musician and performer in the Manchester-based Babyslave Continuum (Valentine Records) and an executive editor of Angelaki: Journal of
the Theoretical Humanities. He has co-edited studies on Sadism, Masochism
and the Philosophical Muse, and on Animality and Transhumanism, and
published recently on Georges Bataille and Divine Dissipation, David
Cronenberg and the neo-Baroque, Parasite Capitalism and Pornotheology.
He is currently working on studies of Immanence and Materialism, Sonic
Spectralities, the Politics of Apiasophy and Deleuze and Affect.
Jennie Stearns
Jennie Stearns is an associate professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett
College. Her research interests include nineteenth-century US literature,
gift theory, African American literature, and the connections between
literary texts and their economic contexts: ‘Now I Ain’t Sayin’ She a
Gold Digger’: Wal-Mart Shoppers, Welfare Queens, and Other Gendered
Stereotypes of Poor Women in the Big Curriculum of Consumption (2011,
Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies), Resistance on Aisle Three?:
Exploring the Big Curriculum of Consumption and the (Im)Possibility
of Resistance in John Updike’s ‘A&P’ (2011 in Curriculum Inquiry with
Sandlin and Burdick). A recent president of the Georgia and Carolinas
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Notes on Contributors
215
College English Association, she currently serves on the editorial board of
its journal, Notes on Teaching English. Her most recent publications have
appeared in Curriculum Inquiry, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, and Cultural Formations.
Maggie Pitfield
Maggie Pitfield is a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London and
is the head of the MA in Children’s Literature in the Department of Educational Studies. Maggie’s research interests include: flexible learning models
in ITE: the experiences of student-teachers and the role of the school mentor
and the perspectives of student-teachers pursuing different routes into English
teaching: Routes into English Teaching: beginning teachers’ reflections on
college-based and school-based Initial Teacher Education programmes (2012
with Jane Coles in Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education),
Teachers’ experiences of mentoring on a flexible initial teacher education programme: implications for partnership development (2009 with Liz Morrison
in Journal for Education in Teaching), How Student-teachers Approach the
Teaching of Reading: At the Interface Between Personal History, Theory and
Practice (2010 with Vicky Obied in Changing English: Studies in Culture
and Education).
Maggie was the deputy head of the Department of Educational Studies for
four years and contributes to the English PGCE, MA ECL and MA Writer
Teacher programmes. Prior to joining the Department of Educational Studies
in 2002, she taught Drama and English, and latterly Media Studies, in London
secondary schools, a career spanning some 24 years and was a member of the
BBC English Education Consultative Group.
AQ: In the
sentence
“Maggie’s
research
interests…”
please check
the use of
colons and
amend for
clarity.
Camilla Stanger
Camilla has taught English and Dance in post-16 inner-London colleges
since 2007, and having completed an MA at Goldsmiths University of
London, she is now studying for her PhD in the area of dance, movement
and feminist theory. She has presented papers at the IOE, Brunel University and Goldsmiths College, and published on the Gender and Education
Association website, and in 2013 was the winner of the SAGE BERA
Practitioner of the Year Award 2013 for research-based practice in an
under-18 setting.
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Notes on Contributors
Esther Sayers
Esther Sayers is a lecturer in art education at Goldsmiths College and King’s
College, London, as well as a researcher for cultural organizations. She was
Curator for Young People’s Programmes at Tate Modern from 2002 to 2011.
Esther’s professional experience began as an artist leading workshops in
schools, youth clubs and galleries. She has been a gallery educator at Tate
Liverpool, Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery, lecturer at Loughborough
and Staffordshire Universities and Education Assistant at Camden Arts
Centre from 1998 to 2000. As an artist, Esther Sayers works predominantly
with materials that are transitory in their physical structure: ice, glass, sand
and those that rely on light or translucency to leave a trace of their form.
Participation has been central to her approach in recent years, and she has
designed educational experiences that question existing ideologies in educational settings, particularly those that exist around inclusion initiatives. Publications include 2013 An ‘Equality of Intelligences’: Exploring the Barriers to
Engagement with Modern and Contemporary Art in Peer-to-Peer Workshops
at Tate Modern iJADE (in print); 2012 Gifted by Nature for Seeing Through,
published online at tate.org.uk; 2012 Public participation as a tool for
museums to take a meaningful place in the city, Mobile Studio, A Display for
a Display exhibition catalogue; 2011 Investigating the impact of contrasting
paradigms of knowledge on emancipatory programmes for young people,
iJADE Volume 30, Issue 3, start page 409; 21 October 2011. Pedagogic and
artworks included in: Atkinson, D. (2011), Pedagogies against the State,
Sense publishers, Chapter 3 Subjectivities and school art education; 2000
Make Magazine, April/May 2000; 1999 Nexus: Palpable Signs (vol. 6); 1997
Nexus: Engendering the City (vol. 1); Iris Women’s Photography Project
(Scarlet Press, 1997).
Anne Harris
Anne Harris, PhD, is a senior lecturer in education at Monash University
(Melbourne, Australia) and researches at the intersection of cultural, sexual
and gender diversities, including the ways in which creativity, the arts and
digital media can be used for social and educational change. She is currently
an Australian Research Council ‘Discovery Early Career Research Award’
(DECRA) Fellow 2014–2016 researching the commodification of creativity, and she was a funded Australian Postgraduate Award scholar (2007–
2010). As a playwright, Anne’s work has been presented (in New York) at
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The Public Theatre, Primary Stages, New York Theatre Workshop, Soho
Rep, Dixon Place, New Dramatists; Perishable Theatre (Rhode Island);
Cleveland Public Theatre (Ohio); The Playwrights’ Centre (Minnesota); and
in Australia by Playworks (Sydney); Vitalstatistix and Adelaide Festival
Centre (Adelaide); Red Dust Theatre (Alice Springs); JUTE Theatre (Cairns);
Darwin Theatre Company and Browns Mart (Darwin); and at the Arts Centre,
Melbourne. Anne is currently co-editor of the journal Australasian Review of
African Studies, associate editor of the journals Curriculum and Pedagogy AQ: Please
and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and on the editorial board check if
of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Gender and Education (ed Yvette Tay- Curriculum
and Pedalor, UK), and the Sense Publishers book series Teaching Writing (ed Patricia gogy can be
Leavy, USA). Anne has published over 50 articles and 6 books on the arts changed to
and creativity, culture and diversity, including Creativity, Religion and Youth “the Journal
Cultures (forthcoming, Routledge, 2015); Video as Method (forthcoming, of Curriculum and
Oxford University Press, 2015); The Creative Turn: Toward a New Aes- Pedagogy”
thetic Imaginary (Sense, 2014); Queer Teachers, Identity and Performativity
(co-ed, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Critical Plays: Embodied Research for
Social Change (Sense, 2014); South Sudanese Diaspora in Australia and
New Zealand: Reconciling the Past with the Present (co-editor, Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2013); and Ethnocinema: Intercultural Arts Education
(Springer, 2012).
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