< INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Unprofessional Painting, Unprofessional Teaching

Andrew Goodman

Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by… professionalization. (Harney & Moten 2013: 35-36)

When you work, you are necessarily in absolute solitude. You cannot have disciples, or be part of a school. The only work is moonlighting and is clandestine. (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 5)

What might it mean to profess to be unprofessional in one’s chosen field of practice? Can an unprofessional philosopher have anything to say, can an unprofessional (but exhibiting and possibly even successful) artist make an interesting artwork, and is it possible to teach art unprofessionally – to moonlight in one’s own job – rather than teach competently or incompetently?

If professionalism suggests a certain criticality, a display and mastery of a securely fenced field of expertise – a reflexivity that enforces such boundaries of knowledge and exclusion – then how might we conceive of what it is to be unprofessional, where this might be a continued encounter with the unknown, not as conquistador but in a spirit of adventurous collaboration. If professionalism denies the unprofessional a voice or space, perhaps unprofessionalism moves through and within as much as beyond the professional sphere as a minor force, seeking encounters with other forces (‘people…movements, ideas, events, entities’) (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 5) and the creativity that might arise out of the conversation between them: in this sense it is collective rather than subjective. If professionalism has tried and true authorial methods that can be copied, imitated and replayed (affirming the author), unprofessionalism in the same field of enquiry creates not models or methods but meta-models problems (affirming the event). If the professional works competently, the unprofessional studies ‘without an end’ (Harney & Moten 2013: 67).

Unprofessional painting

If, as Deleuze and Guattari demand, an unprofessional philosophy is an act of invention, creative rather than critical, meta-modeling rather than strategizing, how is it that painting, which already seems inherently inventive, might be thought of not as invention-critique or invention-knowledge or invention-control, but as a form of study? Could unprofessional painting could be thought of not as a mastery of skills but as a radicalization, preparing the painter to move beyond the known into a deeper engagement with a co-created field of experience, a teaching through encounter?

Paintings are perhaps always catastrophes – either caught in the middle of a disaster or in the middle of disasters about to happen. There are, even only on a pragmatic physical level, so many variable elements to juggle in each brushstroke that the chances of ever feeling in total control are slim: the difficult coordination of eye, hand, long brush handle and bristles of differing resistance, length and absorption; the viscosities of paints and mediums mixing together (and their interaction with ambient temperature and humidity); the grain and absorption of the surface; and the complexities of colour. Here colour in particular emphasizes or brings to the fore the enforced immanence and problematics of painting, with its completely independent (but complexly interacting) variables of hue, tone, saturation and colour temperature that each dab of paint contains, then to be multiplied or folded to the nth degree by this dab’s immediate relationship to the hue, tone, saturation and temperature of each other stroke of colour on the picture plane, vibrating intensely with those colours in its immediate neighborhood but also in conversation with both every other mark, and the ambient light in the studio or gallery.

Each new mark encounters everything already on the canvas and pulls towards marks yet to be made, the painting event an attractor around which these forces and potentials ‘coalesce’, though only in the sense that they are held in tension. Rather than working towards resolving a picture, problems are affirmed and multiplied - the brushes, paint, colours and canvas betray the ‘hand’ – both extending relationships and forging new contrasts or intervals (hue-hue, hue-saturation, tone-temperature and so on), effects emerge from potential, unresolvable differences. Each new colour reinvents the field of possibility – re-engages with an outside – restarts every ongoing conversation as it also introduces new factors. To negotiate this is to be implicated in a painting machine or perhaps a meshwork of painting machines: expressing some collective potential through the act of engaging repetitively with the same (now compounded) potential failures and collapses.

If this is a form of open learning or studying – a questioning, a speculative process (a reassembling without end) that is also pragmatic (a composing of problems) that is always an encounter with others (again ‘people…movements, ideas, events, entities’) – then perhaps it is a studying of how to become diagrammatic. It encourages a fluid negotiation of not only dilemmas that lie directly before the painter (what to do next: what colour, medium, brush, gesture), which are themselves mutably interconnected and interdependently problematic, but also a bringing to attention or intensification of this state of flux that moves it beyond the simply topological (oscillating around a single shared becoming) into a more complex field of contradictory becomings that always threatens to pull apart as much as come together.

And, no matter what the success of an individual painting, a painter - unless they resort to mere replication - can never claim to conquer or banish this diagrammatic nature of the painting act, since with each new canvas they are faced from the start with the same problems to be worked through. In this, painters are not only alone in their work – immanently confronting the catastrophic painting at hand – but each painting is an event composing itself alone, pragmatically recomposing skill sets and a questioning or problematics from the ground up: metamodeling or studying. Painting is collective work, in that it involves a conversation between all these component elements, but also singular as each canvas expresses a particular collective nexus of problems. The art of the painting is not contained within any one of these elements, but through encounters between them – the tension (art) that arises as a third position or ‘double capture,’ both between and outside individual factors, flowing ‘in another direction’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 5). It is transindividual, a collective individuation or co-composition, not (necessarily) between multiple artists – although this past and future echoes through every painting – but between all the entities and forces invested in the event, which reaches into an excess, teaching all these elements something about what more they can be or do in relation. [1]

To paint is to, at least at some stage in the process, be confronted by this tension of the diagrammatic, even if it is at this point that the professional (capital ‘P’) Painter knows how to wisely bypass such disaster, while the (small ‘p’) painter embraces the battle of wills between canvas, viscosity, colour, brush, eye, not in a naive belief in their ability to subordinate but with some knowledge that it is in the midst of this meta-chaos that something might coalesce. The question is how to remain an unprofessional, how to continue to paint through stumbling, stammering and false moves, through errors, mistakes and erasures that are all in themselves creative, but without romanticizing failure? How to keep this spirit alive without simply excusing clumsiness, bad painting (as unprofessional painting is not ‘bad’ painting any more than it is expert painting)? [2]

All this, I think, has nothing to do with the chosen genre of a painting, but everything to do with the style of inquiry. As such it never belongs to an established school nor establishes a school with all its implied false promises – it is practiced alone, in the singularity of the event. And, while this idea of painting may seem to imply a turn away from figuration towards abstract expressionism and some heroic struggle with the canvas and the necessary immanence of such approaches, I would argue that it might equally apply to photo-realism. For example, in a scene in an ABC video, artist Jeffery Smart [3] is shown painting a figure in an interior space. The painting surface is carefully gridded up and penciled in from detailed drawings and photographic reference material, and the artist is depicted spending several hours meticulously painting in a realistic figure with a tiny brush. At some point, despite the apparent completion of the work, he decides that the figure is in slightly the wrong position, and furiously scrubs it out and begins again, with the same quiet approach, then erases this effort and begins a third time. He does this seemingly without frustration or regret, as if accepting that even within such a tightly controlled process this is in fact the only method by which a painting might ever grow and reach a resolution. This, it seems to me, is a kind of unprofessionalism in that it embraces the continued problematization of the painting process, full of false starts, errors, re-workings and partial solutions. Smart, rather than professionally circumventing potential errors and encounters with problems (as he surely could have given his vast experience and level of compositional and painterly skill), utilizes the disruption of such encounters to propel the collective painting-event forward. [4] Here to paint is to always be beginning again, to confront the same problems and invent new, inadequate solutions – their inadequacy a future-feeling propelling the artist forwards into further conversations.

Unprofessional Teaching (of Painting)

How can you (can you?) teach a student all this, in a way that enables them to continue without exhaustion, without giving up, but also with the bravery to sit at this very uncomforting moment of impending artistic collapse?

Were any of my students to read this they would laugh, as far from being the ‘out there’ radical teacher who encourages experimentations like one of my colleagues (‘paint anything you like,’ ‘paint what you feel,’ ‘just play with the materials’), my classes are clearly organized, always have processes students are asked to follow and a careful limitation of resources and techniques. In my experience lack of structure tends to lead straight back into bad habits as students repeat what they already know and feel comfortable with.

I would suggest that it takes a technique – or a certain type of immanent structuring (a technicity, moving through and beyond and reinventing techniques) to move beyond Painting: Mondrian’s neo-plasticism perhaps, that distilled his painting world into simple rules. [5] On paper these rules sound too constricting, yet to stand before a room of his late paintings, is to experience an artist engaging in open conversation with the problems of painting. Seen in the flesh, paintings that in photographs might appear rigid and clean instead shimmer with uncertainties, subtle variations and the wonkiness of a cautious line drawn in awkward collaboration between rules, hand, eye, paint viscosity and grain. Each still-visible brush stroke has a tentativeness that seems alive with potential, as every dab of paint creates new tensions within the picture, as each off-centre rectangle of colour begins to unbalance the work, grids create new conflicts and connections rather than salve existing relations, uncertain, almost straight lines almost meet the edge before petering out, taking the work to the wobbly edge of a precipice. Rather than being still and complete, the paintings exhibit a meta-movement, still alive as they are with the tensions between colour, temperature, tone, line and plane that are less resolved than at a point of pre-collapse under torsion. Each work is a partial solution, a singular exploration of the problems Mondrian has set himself – they ‘work’ but only to a certain extent and they provide no answers, rather they complicate the rules and generate only continued and mounting questions: how does this shade of blue question the darker blue in the previous work and converse with the yellow in the next, how does the introduction of a grey field question the white background, and so on, how does all this complicate every other painting and future painting? And, then, just as a room full of these works at MoMA appears to begin to coalesce into an oeuvre, the placement of Mondrian’s last, unfinished work (Broadway Boogie-Woogie) shakes everything up, reinvents techniques to question the rules again, reopens every problem, turning lines into contrasting squares, tightly repacking the sparseness of previous canvases with saturated colour (but in fact they are all unfinished works, or workings-through of one unsolvable problem). His structuring is a technicity to lead him into encounters with trouble rather than one that limits through building fences around a safehouse.

My interest in how one might begin to teach painting in such a way is threefold:

Firstly, it seems of interest to me to explore the radical potential of what may seem an inherently ‘conservative’ or historically burdened and structured art form, rather than simply try to move painting students towards the expanded field, reinforcing a belief in a dichotomous relationship between conceptual or ‘process-based’ art and traditional art. (How can any art not be process based? It always involves a process of making, therefore ‘process’ as a certificate of authenticity loses its meaning). Rather, what we perhaps need to differentiate between are those processes that have become strategies – moving towards some pre- or overly structured concept of an outcome and those that remain diagrammatic – immanent and saturated with potential in the way I have described above to activate minor potentials of painting – while acknowledging that these positions are two ends of a pole with which all artistic endeavor engages.

Secondly, to consider whether it might be of interest to teach something at which one is not a professional. I’m often met with concern, even disdain, when I tell Painters that I teach painting. They try to reason with me, explaining that, as a non-Painter (by which they mean that the primary practice I am identified with is not painting – I don’t exhibit paintings, show at a respectable gallery, have a degree in painting, my shoes are not stained with the correct splatters of paint), I should not be allowed to teaching painting: I cant possibly produce professional Painters.

Thirdly, and most pragmatically, as someone given the responsibility to teach students to paint I want to interrogate my own attempts and mistakes in order to develop a series of techniques with which to experiment in the future, even though any suggestions must of course be reinvented in collaboration each time to be of any use.

Seven Questions or Tentative Propositions for an Unprofessional

Teaching Toybox

How to be Vague?

How to use description?

How to play?

How to collectivize?

How to learn more than you teach?

How to repeat but not imitate?

How to problematize?

Perhaps a radical pedagogy might be about learning rather than teaching: is it possible to teach as a form of study in itself, to not offer solutions but enable a collective working that turns towards inventing painting problems rather than providing solutions, to collectively describe rather than individually instruct, allowing story-telling to drive investigation as an ongoing story-telling running parallel to painting (a dynamic act of engagement through shared listening and imagining), to repeat tasks so that things that appeared settled are questioned again, to invent directions powerful in their vagueness (not a vagueness that is a lack of potential, but a vagueness that is indeterminate because it is too saturated with potential), to seek to be surprised rather than confirmed by the energies of the classroom?

How can any of this be produced without succumbing to burnout? Without either teacher or students simply becoming dispirited, confused and exhausted by constant change? How can we make the constantly challenging sustainable? Perhaps this is what the experience of the painter or artist can begin to explore, as they learn to juggle all those elements and foolishly embrace the catastrophe of a new painting, while being refreshed and invigorated by the challenge.

Undoubtedly all these approaches will ultimately fail if followed and become strategies encoding and controlling practices – which maybe is the point. If they ‘succeed’ then I will have become, despite my efforts, a professional Painting Teacher. At best they might begin to assemble into a tool or toybox of techniques, with the understanding that the most they can offer is the beginning of a way in to engagement or encounter with a game or problem that cannot be other than still in the process of being invented. Here such techniques are props in a game of painting, to be picked up so that one might “move into some new thinking and into a new set of relations, a new way of being together, thinking together. In the end, it’s the new way of being together and thinking together that is important, and not the tool, not the prop. Or, the prop is important only insofar as it allows you to enter; but once you’re there, it’s the relation and the activity that’s really what you want to emphasize”(Harney & Moten 2013: 106).

Notes

[1] I don’t mean to imply that painting occupies some privileged position in relation to a diagrammatic or machinic approach to artistic engagement. The same juggling of problems could of course be present in every performance (and within every step) of a dance whether improvised or tightly choreographed, or performance (and note) of an orchestra, whether adlibbed or scored, or within the carving or assemblage of a sculpture and within every hammer-blow-onto-chisel-onto-stone. But for me personally I more easily slip into an exploratory unprofessional mode of working with a brush in my hand than when constructing an installation, where I am more competent and I have to always remind myself not to fall into the trap of making things that I already know will work. Perhaps it is in part that one mode of working is always at the necessarily open ended beginning of a process, while the later mode is always burdened with the need to at least partially fulfill gallery obligations. Similarly in teaching painting I find it my own uncertainty in the process makes it easier to enable open inquiry than in drawing or sculpture where I perhaps posses more defined skills to impart.

[2] Even if the ‘bad’ painting as a movement – think Elizabeth Peyton in the 90’s – was initially a force against professionalism it has perhaps by now passed its use-by date and its self-conscious stylization is a very different thing to unprofessionalism.

[3] Smart was a well known and highly conservative, Australian realist painting of urban dystopias who was dismissive of both abstract and conceptual art.

[4] It is interesting, I think, to consider if and how such an approach bleeds into the final painting, since this is all most people would have a chance to interact with. How is its tonality different? Can we distinguish between the initial late Pollock canvases where experimentation and immanent disaster bubbles throughout the painting and, as critic Robert Hughes has claimed, the last works where Pollock is merely repeating himself, imitating his own practice to please an audience?

[5] Mondrian decreed that paintings should be entirely abstract compositions, have only straight lines running parallel to the picture plane, and utilize only black, white and primary colours. Mondrian himself bent and broke these rules at times, but was apparently highly scornful of other artists within De Stihl who also did so.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam and Elliot Ross Albert. London and New York: Continuum, 1987.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor Compositions: Wivenhoe/ New York and Port Watson, 2013.

> NEXT

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Deterritorializing Language - Shift, Mix, Trace and Express

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen,
Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University

As a young teacher, I had a memorable pedagogic experience when I witnessed a total shift of intensity in one of my students’ oral performance. At the time, I was a rather inexperienced teacher of Film Theory at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. My student was really in distress giving a short presentation of filmic montage to her co-students. After a few minutes I knew I had to do something to change the situation, and I interrupted her and encouraged her (in English) to continue in English. This intervention was done intuitively. A few minutes before class I had spoken shortly in Danish with her about a Summer University Course on Film Theory in Dallas, she had recently followed. She was really into film theory. For that reason, I didn’t quite understand why she was stammering and showing clear signs of being uncomfortable in front of the class. This radical but intuitive pedagogic move actually worked – to my own surprise. The student's tone of voice as well as her bodily posture totally changed the collective tonality of the room as she switched from Danish to English, and she gave a brilliant performance that convinced her fellow students of the relevance of the course. The experience of the physical room as well as the learning environment became energized, and this atmosphere actually continued throughout the semester. The tonality of the English language helped my student to access her knowledge of film theory that the Danish language did not grant her in the situation. This experience helped me to appreciate shifts and mixes in tonalities and moods as diagrammatic and transversal traces that permit learning environments to be activated and altered.

In the following break, I had a chance to speak to the student as well as to the other students. They agreed that the sudden shift of language had had quite an impact on the whole situation. But they also gave me a key to why this had actually worked. First, it was the astounding and almost provoking act of actually asking someone to speak English in front of her Danish classmates, which to the speaking student worked as a kind of rude awakening from her feeling of being awkward and made her escape her radical state of fear. Second, the students got a sudden experience of superiority (and I believe access) by listening to my bad pronunciation skills in English compared with hers (and theirs). The students were about fifteen years younger than me, and in the Danish Primary School the weighting of English language capabilities has changed since I was a pupil. The ability to orally express oneself in English had, during the intervening time, prevailed over the ability to read and write several languages (English, German, French, Latin, Norwegian and Swedish). My students had learned English from the age of 9 (while my year group was taught from the age of 11) and they had been taught in English from day one (and not as my year group primarily in Danish). The access to and amount of English films in TV (with Danish subtitles) had in the same fifteen years risen extensively in Denmark as well.

This shift from a literate or academic learning to an application-oriented type of learning has proliferated ever since. Computer games, the Internet and global news media – all accessible in real time – has surely strengthened the demand for English learning skills in Denmark. Today children are taught English concurrently with Danish in their first year of school. No wonder that tests in 2014 proved Danes best in mastering English in countries, in which English is not the native language. The shift in the media-use mentioned above has in the same period of time implied that knowledge of a variety of languages has been narrowed down to a mastery of primarily English. Children and teenagers are more interested in passing time in the company of audiovisual media forms than with books. Leisure time is used in gaming rather than in reading, and the skills for reading and writing (in whatever language) is fading. This is something that calls for a radical pedagogy in schools, universities and all further education. The challenge of this condition – according to the above mentioned experience – is not how to strengthen the classic academic literacy, but rather how to actually contact and use the skills that are already available in our students, due to their audiovisual training in various forms of media.

Kafka’s Minor Language

As it is well known, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari base their avocation for reading Kafka’s oeuvre as a minor literature upon his specific and deterritorializing use of the German language, being a writer with Jewish upbringing in Czechoslovakia:

Kafka does not opt for a reterritorialization through the Czech language. Nor toward a hypercultural usage of German with all sorts of oneiric or symbolic or mythic flights (even Hebrew-ifying ones), as was the case with the Prague School. Nor towards an oral, popular Yiddish. Instead, using the path that Yiddish opens up to him, he takes it in such a way as to convert it into a unique and solitary form of writing. Since Prague German is deterritorialized to several degrees, he will always take it farther, to a greater degree of intensity, but in the direction of a new sobriety, a new and unexpected modification, a pitiless rectification, a straightening of the head. Schizo politeness, a drunkenness caused by water. He will make the German language take flight on a line of escape. He will feed himself on abstinence; he will tear out of Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment that it has tried to hide; he will make it cry with an extremely sober and rigorous cry. He will pull from it the barking of the dog, the cough of the ape, and the bustling of the beetle. He will turn syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of his dried-up German. He will push it toward a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or by myth, that will be an absolute deterritorialization, even if it is slow, sticky, coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry. (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 23)

The ability to express oneself and to do it according to one’s own local or nomadic path in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is becoming more and more evident in a contemporary culture of minorities, fugitives and immigrants:

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us [...]. (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 19)

The key to understanding the strength of Kafka underlined in Deleuze and Guattari’s text is not to make words represent, denote or give meaning, but to be able to actually form language according to nomadic or minor experiences. A minor voice was recently raised and actually heard in Denmark with the publication of Palestinian born Yahya Hassan’s collection of poetry, entitled Yahya Hassan (2013). Although the style of Hassan is quite different from Kafka's, the poems in this collection enables him “to give a syntax to the cry” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 19). Yahya Hassan gave an important lesson to the Danish public that cannot be easily summed up. One remarkable intervention of Hassan’s was (in an extended poem) to use the Danish language in a minor fashion; that is incorrect, reductive and somehow impoverished. So, although its reciting potential was evident when performed orally by Hassan, the terminology used was intentionally ‘perkerdansk’, that is a Danish perforated by words and intonations from Middle Eastern languages. The designation ‘perkerdansk’ corresponds to the disparaging ‘pidgin’, but the fact is that immigrants today are using it as a positive term. As this poem was the last one in the collection of the otherwise equilibrist use of Danish written language, it deliberately functioned as a mirror to the Danish reader's prejudices.

In line with these examples, it seems to me that we – the teachers – need to develop a language that is able to welcome and appreciate all modes of expression. Here I will focus on the audiovisual literacy that slowly supersedes the academic literacy. Books, libraries, the distinction of and ability to write in several genres is fading, as films, computer games, apps, social media and the distinction of and ability to produce in several of these audiovisual genres is growing. Many of my present students know by heart all the techniques of small video clips (mash-ups, gifs etc.), and they eagerly engage in interactive and so-called ‘social media’ forms, but they do not necessarily know how to take it further – how a thinking practice could develop from this. Henry Jenkins has written extensively on participatory, convergence and trans-media culture (Jenkins 2006), and he also has described the need for and the challenges of digital media learning (Jenkins 2006b).

I am not so worried as Jenkins about digital media learning as such, and I certainly believe that corporate industries of many types will find the new capacities rewarding. I am much more concerned with the ability to find and give expression and to think philosophically and creatively with this new literacy. For that end, I think it is about time to consider how to build and develop digital creative archives that might be used and reused for many purposes, first and foremost to produce more expressions, video-works and art, and secondly because digitized audiovisual archives might make us able to access archival information in new ways. The alphabetical way of ordering and administrating books should be supplemented with an indexing of images, forms, colours, movements, light and darkness, facial expressions and all kinds of different traces in digitized, audiovisual material. There is a fund of knowledge and creativity still to be explored in this material that has been archived according to linear history and the organization of the book. With an effort like this, students in courses aimed at audiovisual literacy could create new kinds of affective and creative traces in audiovisual archives that in digitized versions can in fact be considered ‘anarchives’. Wolfgang Ernst frames the anarchive as digital archives that are so to speak networked with databanks and indeed big data. They have an archival storage function as we know it, but on the other hand they have not, since “the digital an-archive is synonymous with an ever expanding and constantly renewed mass of information of which no representation at all can be made” (Laermans & Gielen 2007). [1]

In a panel discussion at Transmediale 12 “In/compatible” in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012, [2] the participants (including Ernst) discussed how the "diagrammatic, nonlinear and anachronistic returns" in anarchival material also carries creative potentials:

While conventional media historiography as symbolic organization of cultural time tends to privilege linear stories of the type “from abacus to computer”, let us instead diagrammatically imagine non-linearities and anachronistic re/turns. The so-called “digital” does not simply emerge after analogue, that is: signal recording media like the phonograph or wireless radio but has been there already: in telegraphy with dots and dashes, and above all, with alphabetic writing. (Arns, Ernst, Parikka & Zielinski 2012)

In the eagerness to make meaning and reproduce culture, the humanistic knowledge has focused on narration and analogue media in which the human component is right at hand. Ernst explains in an interview (Ernst 2012) how the linearity of the European history of the state underpins an anonymous and not easily accessible archive. This archive has been undermined by the Internet that nowadays invites us to access an infinite amount of data from all sorts of databases in the world. The historical roots of the anarchive (as identified by Ernst) are the European avant-gardes in the 20th. Century. The anarchive is subversive to the archive that is nevertheless preserved in a more loose form. Ernst refers to the new artists, the programmers, who are aware that we cannot escape the technical mathematical procedures. They either program software poetically or they use already developed software and change it. As an example he mentions George Legrady’s development of special algorithms that can connect, match and create new affinities between images in unusual ways to our linear ways of thinking (cf. his interactive installation, Pockets full of Memories, in 2001).

The machine and its procedures are, in other words, imbedded in the expressive event (and part of the anarchiving), not unlike the function of the letter K in Kafka’s minor literature. Deleuze and Guattari refer explicitly to this: “The letter K no longer designates a narrator or a character but an assemblage that becomes all the more machine-like, an agent that becomes all the more collective, because an individual is locked into it in his or her solitude” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18). The expressive quality of the Machine characterized by Deleuze and Guattari is a common denominator of the European avant-garde tradition, the anarchive and software art, and it is in the creative work with what is embedded in its machinic device, that we find the keys to a radical pedagogy today. In the already mentioned panel discussion from Transmediale 2012, one of the participants refers to how a recording of Bismarck’s voice was recently found and recovered in Germany. When it was played on the radio, the most significant impression was the noises and cracks in the material that made Bismarck’s voice and what he said almost inaudible. This impression is in the discussion concluded by this sentence: “The material glitch here is the message – signaling the media tempor(e)ality of non-historical voice memory” (Arns, Ernst, Parikka & Zielinski 2012).

To me this example stresses the importance of distinguishing between what is said, which is often referred to as the content, and the expression, which in this example should be distinguished as the voice and the signal. The noise of the recording becomes in this example the signaletic material, termed by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. [3] The signaletic material gives immediate access to a more-than-human experience (Manning 2013). In this example, the listener is bound to hear the signaletic material of the medium before the message, folded into it. In the case of the example above it brings to Bismarck’s voice the letter K – as in Kafka’s minor literature.

To my view, it is most important to consider humanistic learning and teaching in the field of our contemporary anarchives. The signaletic material of the machinic assemblage should be activated in diagrammatic and creative forms of montage within the anarchive, so that the idea of knowledge as reproduction that is haunting the classrooms today might be obstructed and even fade away.

Notes

[1] Cf. Alanna Thain for a wider, and rich analytic explanation of the anarchive in her “Anarchival Cinemas” (Thain 2010).

[2] The panel was entitled “Search for a Method” with Inke Arns, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski. It was conceived and moderated by Timothy Druckrey, on February 5, 2012. Cf. notes:

https://www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de/medientheorien/downloads/publikationen/transmedial12kurz.pdf

[3] Cf. my article “Signaletic, haptic and real-time material” (Thomsen 2012).

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Ernst, Wolfgang. “#169: Wolfgang Ernst”. Radio Web Macba. Online Radio Interview. 2012.

http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/wolfgang_ernst/capsula

Ernst, Wolfgang, Inke Arns, Jussi Parikka and Siegfried Zielinski and Timothy Druckrey. “Search for a Method.” Conference Panel Discussion. February 5, 2012.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2009. Report.

Laermans, Rudi & Pascal Gielen. “The archive of the digital an-archive”. Image & Narrative. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 17 (April 2007): n.p. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/digital_archive/laermans_gielen.htm

Manning, Erin. Always More Than One. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Thain, Alanna. “Anarchival Cinemas”. Inflexions 4 (November 2010): 48-68. http://www.inflexions.org/n4_thainhtml.html

Thomsen, Bodil Marie Stavning. “Signaletic, haptic and real-time material”.

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 4 (2012): 1-10.

http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/18148/22807

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Critical Passions Building Architectural Movements Toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 steps)

Pia Ednie-Brown
RMIT University

1. A Passionate Protest

Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. (Whitehead 1967: 2; my emphasis)

2. What are Radical Pedagogies?

Radical pedagogies are taken here to be experimental forms of learning that are engaged with an on-going and passionate protest against inert ideas. It is education of and for vitality – learning how to intensify ones capacity to live affirmatively, and with singularity of style. For any such pursuit, the degree to which pedagogical and research cultures can accommodate diversity and difference is critical – this is vital for keeping them alive and kicking. Cultures and ideas become inert when internal difference, specificity, and situated attention is stamped out of them, or stifled. When this happens, they have perhaps been smothered by what Brian Massumi refers to as “objective illusions,” which arise when there is “a conditioned failure to register the full singularity of the occasion… The new situation is erroneously experienced as being more similar to a class of other events than it is different in its own occurrence” (Massumi 2015: 97). This is somewhat like, say, arriving out of the lift onto level 6 of a building for the first time and making the mistake of thinking you are on level 4, where you have been before. They appear identical. Sometimes architects go out of their way to encourage objective illusions. A radical pedagogy would go out of its way to pull the difference out from under the blanket of apparent sameness and homogeneity.

3. The Question of Critique

The activity of critique can be important as part of a process of articulating the differences inherent to cultural/pedagogical assemblages, such that they can be recognized, acknowledged, and fed. Promoting critique as an important aspect of radical pedagogies is not without its risks, however. Commonly understood to occur from a position of distance from the subject under assessment, traditional critique can tend to have a whiff of ‘objective illusion’ about it, denying it’s own singularity in order to chalk up some staged authority. Furthermore, critique is largely assumed to function solely through words – via the medium of writing or in the verbal feedback of, say, a design jury or a panel of examiners. This essay takes 10 steps toward exploring how this is not the only way critique can do its job of fostering the recognition and articulation of difference, and that critique can work in favor of unsettling inert ideas when it operates through an aesthetically or affectively driven ecology of means.

4. Architecture’s Radical Pedagogies

The discipline of architecture has a long history of ‘radical pedagogies’, as mapped out and penned under the guidance of Beatriz Colomina’s Radical Pedagogies project, with exhibition and web site: http://radical-pedagogies.com This historical survey is an inspiring resource if thinking about alternatives to normative educational models, albeit also a tale of the brevity of many brave pedagogical experiments. They may have flickered to life and petered away in experimental expiration, but not before instigating some deep and enduring changes.

In more contemporary settings, a passionate protest against inert ideas is implicitly embedded in the tri-polar model that shaped the research culture of RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design, as championed by Leon van Schaik:

innovative communities of practice tend to thrive when at least three alternative and differentiated positions are actively operating as part of the constitution of that culture. (van Schaik 2013: 108)

The complexity of at-least-three-bodies-in-relation becomes even more dynamic and unpredictable when, inevitably, those bodies are neither distinct nor static in their definition. The School’s vibrant PhD program is dedicated to research that proceeds primarily through the ‘medium’ of creative activity. Rather than resting research laurels entirely on the more conventional primacy and authority of the text, or in the more pre-rationalized, pre-determined models of research methodology, this mode of research activity celebrates the emergent, the unanticipated and the singular. Practitioners from around the world, who are often very established architects, designers, and artists, probe the very particular nature of their design practice, and offer their careful articulations as knowledge about and for design process. Graduates of this program commonly report that their practices become energized through this process.

5. An Architectural Act

Fig. 1 The Design Hub, southeast corner. RMIT University,

Melbourne. Image Credit: Pia Ednie-Brown.

RMIT’s design research facility, The Design Hub (Fig. 1), was designed by Sean Godsell Architects and opened in 2012. The building is compositionally and sculpturally powerful and is a multi-award winning architectural project. Its spectacular presence, however, encompasses many a challenge to its inhabitants. It has a tendency to interfere with normal functioning: repetitively patterned wall surfaces produce distracting visual effects (that amplify the longer you stay with them), power points become difficult to access under heavy, unwieldy metal floor grills, the acoustics frequently render group communication difficult, and the list goes on. The repeated floor plates and formal insistence upon uncompromising repetition has led me, on more than one occasion, to become confused about which floor of the building I am indeed on; it is one strong example of an architecture that promotes the ‘objective illusion’ referred to earlier (step 2).

The monumental scale of its spaces and of its efforts of composition can be difficult to relax with. For instance, the primary exhibition space is often found to be daunting in scale and was described, during the opening speeches of a major exhibition, as “phenomenally scary” to negotiate as a curator. Litanies of inconvenience and intimidation sit within the affective impact of a relentlessly consistent formal composition. Overall, the building may be felt both positively, perhaps as inspiring, uplifting, and sublime, and negatively, perhaps as frustrating, diminishing, and oppressive. Anecdotally, responses vary across this spectrum, even from a single person. Clearly, there is something contestable at stake. It makes and stakes a position with such clarity that it renders obvious the fact that buildings don’t just sit there, inertly. They act. Their actions are what you might call ‘virtual movements’. The actuality of these virtual movements counter those inert ideas that a radical pedagogy passionately protests against. At one level, the Design Hub screams with passion. But if you move to another level, the scream sounds unnervingly identical (echoing with ‘objective illusion’).

6. Building Movements

6.1. Aiming to prompt an exploratory engagement with this architectural character, I assembled a workshop called Building Movements in 2013 with colleagues and PhD candidates. Jondi Keane, Lyndal Jones and myself led some discussions and performative exercises (Fig. 2), some of which drew on past Senselab events (such as ‘conceptual speed dating’).

Fig. 2 Building Movements workshop; exploring the pace of the courtyard stairs. Image Credit: Pia Ednie-Brown.

Fig. 3 Building Movements workshop schedule.

6.2. The momentum of this workshop moved into a group exhibition seven weeks later, consisting of works produced to act with or in response to the building. The invitation to exhibit set out the following challenges and questions:

What does it [The Design Hub] ask of us, what challenges does it raise, and what potential does it offer – with its sculptural presence, linear spatial momentum, minimalist interiors, relentless circular motifs, monumental spaces, rules and restrictions of use, its views and adjacencies, its community of inhabitants, amongst other things – ? If the building poses challenges and questions to its inhabitants, we can also challenge the building by posing questions of our own – entering into an active dialogue with this building-creature that matures as we develop ways to be with (and part of) it.

Fig. 4 Diagram of Building Movements exhibition works as placed across various floor levels of the Design Hub, RMIT University, 2013.

6.3. A series of installations, produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, were pressed up against the lift opening on four floors of the building. From inside the lift, when the door opened you were presented with a surprising spatial encounter that required negotiating (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5 The view from inside the lift as it opened onto two of the installations (Building Movements 1 and 2). Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

Following Arakawa and Gins’ notion of the ‘architectural procedure’ (Arakawa & Gins 2002), these works have been discussed in terms of a ‘tentativeness extending procedure’: each extended the threshold condition of the lift by attenuating the tentativeness often found in that experience of transitional movement and social awkwardness as one moves between one floor and another.

The process of designing and constructing these four installations was offered a narrative voice through a fifth project (Building Movements 5): a website designed by Olivia Pintos-Lopez (Fig. 6). All those involved were invited to upload notes, images, etc., from the process into a field of scrollable ‘windows’: http://www.collectivecommons.net. The process through which the installations came into being becomes palpable in spending time meandering from window to window, and scrolling through their diverse contents. The site was in part a documentation tool, but its contribution operates more in terms of asserting a counterpoint to any idea that the exhibition was only about the resulting installation entities.

Fig. 6 Screen shot from web site (Building Movements 5), designed by Olivia

Pintos-Lopez, 2013. http://www.collectivecommons.net

Fig. 7 Building Movements 1 installation pressed against lift opening. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.3.1. The first of these installations, Building Movements 1, was a perforated metal cube on wheels (Fig. 7), positioned tightly inside another cube. Materially a continuation of the lift space, it required pushing in order to make a space just big enough to squeeze around and out (Fig. 8). Poignantly, the layers of perforated metal produced a moiré pattern of larger circles, that appear at first to be created by light through the façade circles of the Design Hub (Fig. 9).

Fig. 8 Movement from lift through the Building Movements 1 installation. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Photography by Georgina Matherson.

Fig. 9 Circular moiré formations; Building Movements 1 installation – with the building façade circles visible behind. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Chris Cottrell.

6.3.2. Building Movements 2 presented lift travellers with a flight of stairs that led up to a space too short to stand up in, such that as you went up, you gradually crouched down (Fig. 10); and then down again into a miniaturized waiting room, set up with small chairs, a desk and visitors book, a small painting on the wall and a telephone (Fig. 11). While retaining a strong sense of the highly normative and familiar, this was somewhat like an Alice in Wonderland experience of changing scales of reference and being caught in the deep threshold of an alternative form of sense-making.

Fig. 10 Looking up from the lift to the compressed space at the top of the Building Movements 2 installation stairs. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

Fig. 11 The down flight and waiting room areas of the Building Movements 2 installation. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.3.3. Building Movements 3 (Fig. 12), welcomed the lift traveller into an inflatable room made of translucent plastic, with another layer of plastic circles bound to its surface. Like a soft version of the hard Hub, this space drew attention to the rigidity of the Hub’s volumetric architectonics, and to the otherwise less noticeable movements of air – it would inflate and deflate a little every time the lift opened onto it, and when people exited the inflatable through a slit in its side.

Fig. 12 The inflatable Building Movements 3 installation, entered from the lift. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

Fig. 13 Movie-still of movement from the lift through the Building Movements 4 installation. Designed and produced by Scott Andrew Elliott, Chris Cottrell, and Olivia Pintos-Lopez, with a group of architecture and interior design students, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.3.4. Building Movements 4 (Fig. 13), was an array of hanging videotape strips that formed a rectangular volume of the same shape and size as the lift interior, but rotated 90 degrees onto its side. On exiting the lift, one’s head becomes immersed in this volume of hanging strips, which would tend to get sucked up one’s nose and into the mouth when breathing. Like the inflatable, it produced another soft, airborne density that resonated with the building visually, this time with the hard grey metal mesh that relentlessly lines the building interior. If one felt at all oppressed by the building’s relentlessness, this installation resonated with that feeling via a sensed risk of suffocation.

6.4. A related opening up of the apparently inert was enacted in a different and powerful way through Adele Varcoe’s raucous and colorful Bikini Party performance (Fig. 14). This party of girls, colorfully dressed in bikinis and blow-ups, with loud music playing and beers in hand, travelled up and down the lifts, creating a contrast with, and thereby illuminating, the somber and serious tone of the building. The throb of music and the sounds of screaming girls travelling up and down the lift-shaft could be heard on all floors, literally pumping life into the building by giving it a racy heartbeat, while highlighting its otherwise muted vitality.

Fig. 14 Bikini Party performance installation, by Adele

Varcoe, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.5 James Carey’s Hub Detritus captured and exhibited footage of himself sweeping up dust and detritus on 3 floors of the building (Fig. 15) – each with its attitude of sameness and streamlined, modernist cleanliness. He used the material collected from each floor to produce ‘paintings’ on circular canvasses (Fig. 16). Each one reveals traces of different kinds of activities that had eventfully occurred on each level: the differences hidden under the assertively designed objective illusion of each floor, swept out from under the carpet (or, more precisely, from the recesses of the negative detailing).

Fig. 15 James Carey sweeping one of the floors of the Design Hub, collecting detritus,

2013. Image Credit: James Carey.

Fig. 16 Hub Detritus, level 7, 8 and 9, detritus on canvas, 2013. Image Credit:

Georgina Matherson.

6.6 Zuzana Kovar’s Transfer Pillows (Fig. 17) sat quietly, apparently as rather polite pillows offering relief from the hardness of the built-in benches. However, having being made with graphite paper these pillows would leave traces on those who touched them. This work aimed to explore the blurring of body and space that takes place at the level of matter. As a building that presents itself in a manner that emphasises form over and above material/matter, this piece offered a subtle counter-play.

Fig. 17 Transfer Pillows, Zuzana Kovar, 2013. Image Credit: Zuzana Kovar.

Fig. 18 Graphite Curtain, Nicholas Skepper, 2013. Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.7. Nicholas Skepper’s Graphite Curtain (Fig. 18) occupied a space between architectural drawing and architectural device. Rolls of 3.6m long graphite paper, generally used for transferring information from one piece of paper to another, were perforated by hand through a laborious process of repetitively puncturing the surface. These became ‘curtains’ when hung from the ceiling, blowing in the internal breeze, and shimmering in concert with the grey tones of the interior. The small, circular perforations worked with light in a manner that resonated with the grid of circular disks on the façade, albeit with a softness and irregularity not present in the building. By exploring the threshold between drawing and building, Skepper highlights the ideational nature of architecture: the way in which ideas are drawn out on paper and come to persist in multiple, physical forms.

6.8. Two pieces by myself and Jondi Keane also played with the circular motif of the building. The RHub (Fig. 19) was a pencil drawing on the concrete floor, where a circle template was used to produce a field of circles with varying diameter nestled against one another. This played off against the grid of façade circles hung at 90 degrees from the floor, but this time with considerable variation in diameter and without the gridded regularity.

Fig. 19 The RHub, Pia Ednie-Brown and Jondi Keane, 2013. Pencil on

concrete floor. Image Credit: Pia Ednie-Brown.

An enormous ‘huge mistakes’ eraser was hung from the ceiling with thick string, such that it could erase the circle drawing, but only within the circular limits allowed by the reach of the string. At the exhibition opening, a thick, circular smudge of graphite became smeared across the floor (Fig 20). The second piece, Space-Time Twister (Fig. 21), was a game derived from the popular party game, Twister. The standard grid of colored circles on the Twister game mat, upon which people twisted themselves, was loosened into an irregular distribution of these circles. The spin disk that determined the placements of players’ hands and feet on the circles was adapted into a clock, such that movements on the mat were constantly changing to the tune of the ticking of time (Fig. 22). Both these pieces aimed to play out, through performative means, tensions between variation and repetition, both spatially and temporally.

Fig. 20 The RHub, Pia Ednie-Brown and Jondi Keane, 2013. Circular smudges made

with hanging eraser, after opening of exhibition. Image Credit: Pia Ednie-Brown.

Fig. 21 and 22. Space-Time Twister, Pia Ednie-Brown and Jondi Keane, 2013.
Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

6.9. With a wry smile, I had a grid of paper doilies taped to the glass, in dialogue with the circular, translucent glass disks that constitute the building façade (Fig. 23). The simultaneous contrast and similarity between their frilly tweeness and the building’s minimalist aspirations bought a smile to many faces.

Fig. 23 Doilies, Doilies, Doilies, Pia Ednie-Brown, 2013.
Image Credit: Georgina Matherson.

7. The Choir of a Regulatory Compliance Regime

All these works enacted various kinds of engaged critique through attunements and willful mis-attunements with selected aspects of the building’s presence. But if all these works each enact a form of critique, it was not only the actions of their final, exhibited form that mattered. The very situated, material properties of this kind of critique integrally involves the process through which it took shape. Unexpected events in the process of producing Building Movements were just as revealing as the actions of the works themselves. For instance, a person from Godsell’s office tore down notices we had placed by the lifts, as we stood by with one of the building managers. This occurred without any discussion, but presumably was done because they weren’t hung on the specially designed regulation white circles made for signage in the building. Then, the installations positioned in front of the lifts led the elevator company to shut down that elevator – entirely – such that no-one could enter the works until two hours before the closing/opening event. Neither of these acts were of the building per se, but both resonated in different and telling ways with our experiences of it. These events were far more than just obstructive, they were instructive: they allowed us to understand the building as a set of interacting regimes of power that resonated with one another, becoming linked like the choir of a regulatory compliance regime – passionately singing a hymn about maintaining faith in an ordered, divinely regulated world.

8. The Plot Thickens

The Building Movements project began to shape a story about the Design Hub as a building that – compositionally, operationally, and pragmatically – embodies an architecture of bureaucracy and objective illusions; with its uncompromising application of (compositional) rules and regulations, and related machinic qualities. Those inhabiting such a regime (like so many of us inside the compliance driven demands of the bureaucratic-university-machine), need to devise inventive ways of negotiating its indifference to difference. One might spend some time imagining how well the Design Hub could become a character in a novel by Franz Kafka. Such a character might be some kind of bureaucrat but not be of the ‘nerdy’ kind – rather, it would be a supremely charismatic aesthete concerned with the implementation of a very particular vision, from which variation cannot be tolerated, nor can compromises to the exactitude of that vision. This character would always strive to remain unruffled, and display obsessively compulsive habitual refrains. Such behavior would be likely to give rise to a series of struggles to maintain control, with tension in the story arising through the problem of sustaining a stronghold – a hold that is ultimately as fragile as it is enforced. The plot could thicken with the accretion of conflicts, but the choir would keep singing with an apparently transcendent passion in the background. Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead character, Howard Roark, seems like another fitting alter ego.

9. Critique

Does this potential story and sense of an architectural character – developed out of our process of engagement through Building Movements – constitute a form of critique? Might this form of critique do what I suggested earlier in fostering the aims of a radical pedagogy, such as unsettling inert ideas? What does this imply about the ambiguous relationship between critique and criticism, and the role of the critic? In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari suggested that:

Criticism is completely useless. It is more important to connect to the virtual movement that is already real even though it is not yet in existence (conformists and bureaucrats are always stopping the movement at this or that point). (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 58)

Building Movements didn’t arise from establishing ‘critical distance’, or halting movements by critically putting things in their place. Rather, it operated through entering into, engaging with, and modulating the virtual movements of both a subject (The Design Hub), and the events arising through our engagement. The distance of the critic is here transformed into an unearthing of difference – fleshed out across an ecology of acts, materials, and words. Building Movements might be productively understood to have built its impetus through mounting a minor architectural critique. Erin Manning might refer to this as an ‘immanent critique’: “an act that only knows the conditions of its existence from within its own process, an act that refuses to judge from without” (Manning, forthcoming).

If criticism is ‘completely useless’, this may simply be because (paradoxically) it has become disconnected from the immanence of aesthetic yield:

aesthetic yield is the qualitative excess of an act lived purely for its own sake, as a value in itself, over and against any function the act might also fulfill. (Massumi 2014: 10)

This sounds, it must be said, to be exactly what Godsell architects appear to have focused on through emphasizing formal composition and de-emphasizing function, or use-value. This is both the power and the vulnerability of the building. It has such a persistence of forcefully measured composition that it can trigger, in my experience at least, moments of sublime transport – or of the truly ‘awesome’. However, as Madeline Gins might say, this potent architectural character simultaneously suffers from the ‘Being-Too-Damned-Sure-of-Oneself Syndrome’ (Gins, in Lambert 2011). It generates aesthetic yield in a way that tries to stay in control: not to be interfered with, inert and holding still with its distinctive, uncompromised clarity. To return to the Whitehead quote at the beginning of this essay, if the Design Hub is radical – which I would suggest it indeed is – it is because it ‘has been radically infected with inert ideas’, or perhaps more precisely, that it has been infected with an idea of architecture as inert.

10. Play

So, one might say that Building Movements came along to lend a critically situated hand, hand-in-hand with the ethos of a radical pedagogy. If Building Movements did, in itself, mount a passionate protest against inert (architectural) ideas, then it did so through the ambiguous trajectory of creative production. By playfully and creatively engaging with this architectural character we could get to know it in new ways, enabling us to simultaneously critique and, I think, develop an appreciation for it along the way. If affection developed, this was not despite its vulnerabilities but because – through the intuitive activity of play – we could enter into sympathy with them.

We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. (Bergson, in Massumi 2007: 40)

Notes

This essay is a development upon an earlier, considerably shorter version: Building Movements (in ten steps), Architectural Design Research Symposium, Smitheram J., Moloney, J & Twose, S (eds), Wellington, New Zealand, 2014. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/fad/research/architectural-research-through-design

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Gins, Madeline and Shusaku Arakawa. The Architectural Body. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Lambert, Leopold. “Architectures of Joy: A Conversation Between Two Puzzle Creatures [Part B].” (2011): n.p. http://thefunambulist.net/2011/11/09/interviews-architectures-of-joy-a-conversation-between-two-puzzle-creatures-part-b/

Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press, forthcoming.

Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Massumi, Brian. The Power at the End of the Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

van Schaik, Leon. “Differentiation in Vital Practice: An Analysis Using RMIT University of Technology and Design Interfaces With Architects.” In The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality. Eds. Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry, Andrew Burrow, Helen Castle. Architectural Design Profile No 221. London: Wiley, 2013. 106 – 113.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Diagramming Double Vision

Jorrit Groot, Toni Pape and Chrys Vilvang

How does one teach a text about movement, about a dance or a performance? How can one do justice to both the achievement of the author and the work that her text discusses?

It is easy to conceive of what should happen in a classroom following a model of communication, that is, in terms of the transmission of knowledge from an informed instructor to a student. The instructor tells the students what can be said and known about artist X or artwork Y; the student dutifully takes notes and, ideally, retains the information. This model of education certainly has its advantages: it allows for the scope of education to be measured in terms of the content transmitted; it also integrates much more easily with a reorganization of higher education according to a logic of exchange, in this case of knowledge and information. “You can download the slides on Blackboard [or Moodle, Canvas, etc.]”: the refrain of quick exchange in education. At the same time, knowledge and information in their exchangeable form are easily accessible on the internet, on Wikipedia for instance. What, then, is the singular project of higher education that stands out from a mass of knowledge traders?

In our opinion, teaching, particularly in the humanities, can stand out by pushing beyond the movements of exchange that characterize the information economy and generate movements of thought. In such a movement, it is not a stable piece of reliable information that moves from point A to point B. Rather, the movement is a transformation of the very things that can be known, it is a push towards the unknown. Pedagogy is radical when it doesn’t shy away from uncertainty and vagueness, not as ends in themselves but as conditions of a process of coming-to-know-differently.

If thought is a creative movement and, differently put, “philosophy is a doing,” then the way to teach research on movement may lie just there: in motion, in practice (Massumi 2010: 3). If in turn “every practice is a mode of thought,” there is no gap to bridge between (movement) practice and research (Manning & Massumi 2014: vii). Rather, the difference is between the qualities of various modes of thought. The challenge for any thinker is how to make different modes of thought resonate, how to think with another thinking.

T.P. In the fall of 2014, I taught a class on “Remix and Participatory Cultures.” The challenge I had set myself was to not only teach important examples of participatory and remix art as well as academic research on the topic, but to make the productivity of participation and remix felt in the classroom. What can happen in a classroom when it works as a remix? In the first to meetings of the seminar, I tried to create a collective movement of thought through techniques developed within the SenseLab. The first is conceptual speed dating, first proposed by Andrew Murphie (for a detailed description see Manning & Massumi 2014: 96-97). The second is a cut-up reading of a text, a technique I adopted from Ronald Rose-Antoinette. The latter exercise consists in cutting up one or, in this case, two related texts and distributing the passages of text among the students. The task is to find a beginning (not the beginning of the original text) and to create a movement of thought from there, that is, to read the passages in an order that makes sense for the group. This requires the students to deeply engage with the text or texts: You need to see how your passage begins and on what note it ends in order to make it connect. You need to listen for the openings in the passages that other people read. You have to adjust to the movement that is already under way: you passage reads differently depending on the moment you choose to insert it; other words come to stand out in light of what has gone before. In this way, the cut-up reading can create a field of attention that includes every student in the room.

After these two propositions, the students were invited (assigned) to propose their own remix exercises to make us engage with readings and artworks differently each week. In what follows, we would like to present one such in-class remix that was particularly interesting. Jorrit Groot and Chrys Vilvang proposed a walking exercise in response to a reading of Alanna Thain’s article “Anarchival Cinemas,” published in Inflexions in 2010. The article is in large part about headphone listening and the cinematic qualities it brings to everyday experience. Thain discusses the piece Spiral Jetty by the Other Theatre, based in Montreal, Canada. The piece is a collective performance produced by the audience itself: each of the twenty participants receives an MP3-player which plays instructions on how to move and act in the performance space. Thain provides this link to a video of the piece.

J.G. and C.V. In response to the article by Alanna Thain, we proposed a walking exercise. We pushed chairs and tables to the four walls of the classroom to create a large space for walking in the centre of the room. Then we assembled all the participants of the course outside the room and gave them a walking score on an instruction card (see Figs. 1-10). Each little card contained a very simple diagram indicating the trajectory and direction in which the participant should walk inside the rectangular room. Then one participant was sent into the room every thirty seconds or so to walk according to his or her diagram. So at first one person walks through the room alone; when the second participant thinks thirty seconds have passed, he or she enters the room. After another felt half-minute, a third person enters, etc. When all the participants are walking inside the room, the person who entered the room first lets thirty seconds pass, then leaves the room. All the participants will leave the room in the same order they entered it and following the same thirty-second relay. During the experiment we chose to play the piece “Sweet 16” by Cory Arcangel, which is a loop of the guitar intro to Guns ‘N’ Roses Sweet Child of Mine. The loop actually consists of two layered versions of the intro: one version consists of the first eight bars of the intro; the other version contains one note less. The continuous loop of these two layers creates a phasing effect that produces a variety of rhythmic and melodic effects over the duration of the piece. [1] The choice of the song compliments some of the principles of the experiment in its defamiliarization of a recognizable form, the building chaos of the audio growing as more participants enter the room. To add an element of distraction or dual vision in the space, a video was projected on the wall to mimic the way people navigating busy urban spaces are increasingly doing so while simultaneously checking their phones. In an attempt to capture the way diverted or split vision produces less attentive experience of space, the video was deliberately shot out of focus on a wide-angle lens, creating a large-scale blur of visual information. It was filmed on one of Amsterdam’s busiest pedestrian streets, an environment in which intersecting navigations of space are highly present. The video comprises the right half of the dual vision film presented in conjunction with this article, the left half is the documented in-class experience of the exercise.

The aim of the exercise was to make felt the constant shifts in an environment that we unconsciously adapt to as well as the many aspects of our surroundings that feed into experience without ever taking centre-stage. The wager was that all of this would come out as the participants attempt to quite simply continue their trajectory in an increasingly crowded room.

What comes into awareness as the room fills is that you have settled into a comfortable speed to the measure of Sweet 16. The new people in the space will inevitably force you out of that steady rhythm as your trajectories cross or run parallel. You begin to navigate the room more carefully, extending your attention around you to avoid collisions or awkward double takes on how to walk past one another. A participant told us afterwards that he “realized” he could change his walking speed to allow for the collective walking to go smoothly. Others became less rigorous in following the exact trajectory we had drawn for them; individual points across the room became more important as momentary landing sites. The exercise made participants rediscover all the major and minor ways in which we – usually unconsciously – tweak our movements to move through a complex, shifting world. We do this for instance when we move with on a sidewalk, practically dancing alongside one another. [2]

In this way, we attempted to move participants to think the transition from a conventional notion of the diagram, to the concept of the diagram as developed by Alanna Thain in her article. Usually, one would think of a diagram as a simplified representation of reality, such as the ones we had provided on the instruction cards. These cards are two-dimensional sketches which reduce a movement through three-dimensional space to a black line on white background. These diagrams assume the perspective of a disembodied overhead view familiar in topographic maps. Used as instructions however, they prepare the collective movement within the classroom space. Just like topographic maps, the instructions cards are abstract representations of the world that have a pragmatic impact in the world. [3] Representations act as formative forces. But instructions cards are not a collective movement yet. To think the complexity of the exercise or any collective movement on the sidewalk or elsewhere, we need to take into considerations all the other forces that factor into movement’s form-taking, including those arising as the experiment goes along. The relayed entrances of participants, the simultaneity of their walking, the sound of people’s gait even as they walk behind us, movements that register only in our peripheral vision and many more shifts in the milieu co-create whatever comes into existence. This is the diagram, “a topological transformation of an existing […] field, engaging both with possibility and also with virtual potential, a reserve of newness and difference” (Thain 2010: 53). You are doing the diagram before you are consciously thinking or representing it.

The diagram is the inseparability of body and milieu; in other words, we no longer have the relation of subject and object, but only a relation of forces, differential intensities and our propensity for assemblage that allows for an intensive experience of an actualization and of the virtual elements of an assemblage, the swarming mass not individuated but made visible in its multiple, heterogeneous compositions (cells, ant, memory, matter, movement, technology). (Thain 2010: 56)

As a concept, the diagram allows us to think everything that is at work in the world without passing through our consciousness. This is also a challenge to education which oftentimes follows the model of conscious, verbal communication. Through the exercise for “Diagramming Double Vision” we attempt to activate the unconscious and embodied modes of knowledge to enrich the experience of conventional classroom teaching.

Notes

[1] The piece can be accessed here: http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2006-005-sweet16

[2] For a description of a sidewalk dance compatible with this account, see Manning & Massumi 2014: 9-10.

[3] For a seminal consideration of the relation between maps and the mapped territory, see Bateson 1987.

Works Cited

Bateson, Gregory. “Form, Substance, and Difference.” In Steps To an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale/London: Jason Aronson, 1987. 455-471.

Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Massumi, Brian. “What Concepts Do: Preface to the Chinese Translation of A Thousand Plateaus.” Deleuze Studies 4.1 (2010): 1-15.

Thain, Alanna. “Anarchival Cinemas.” Inflexions 4 (2010): 48-68. http://inflexions.org/n4_Anarchival-Cinemas-by-Alanna-Thain.pdf

Walking

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Collective Expression A Radical Pragmatics

Brian Massumi
Department of Communication, University of Montreal

Now it is undeniably conceivable that a beginningless series of successive utterers should all do their work in a brief interval of time, and that so should an endless series of interpreters. Still, it is not likely to be denied that, in some cases, neither the series of utterers nor that of interpreters forms an infinite collection. When this is the case, there must be a sign without an utterer and a sign without an interpreter. ... Neither an utterer, nor even, perhaps, an interpreter is essential to a sign. … I am led to inquire whether there be not some ingredient of the utterer and some ingredient of the interpreter which not only are so essential, but are even more characteristic of signs than the utterer or interpreter themselves.

– C.S. Peirce (1998: 403-404)

A Technique

1. Choose a generative text.

2. Choose a minor concept weaving through the generative text.

3. Ask each person in the group to count off as a 1 or a 2.

4. Instruct the 1s that they are “posts.”

5. Instruct the 2s that they are “flows.”

6. Ask the posts to find a post: a spot in the room where they would like to have a conservation.

7. Ask the flows to pair up with a post.

8. Direct everyone to a page in the text where the minor concept occurs.

9. Ask the participants to discuss the function of the minor concept, staying as close as possible to the text, with detailed attention to how it is constructed.

10. Notify participants that when exactly five minutes are up they will hear a signal, and that when they hear the signal they must end their conversation immediately, even if they are in the middle of a word.

11. When the five-minute signal sounds, ask all flows to move to the next post in a clockwise direction.

12. Repeat 8-10 times.

13. Bring the group back together and discuss in plenary session what was discovered about the minor concept and the text.

This is “conceptual speed dating.” It is a technique that has been practiced at the SenseLab for ten years, and has been adapted by a number of its participants for classroom use. Its introduction at the SenseLab [1] was motivated by the disappointments of plenary discussions of assigned texts. Full-group discussions predispose participants to perform themselves – their own already-acquired knowledge or interpretive virtuosity – at the expense of truly exploratory thinking-together in the moment, for the collective movement forward into follow-up activities. Self-performance can quickly have the effect of silencing those whose practice is not primarily text-oriented or language-based, as is the case of the majority of SenseLab participants with backgrounds in dance and movement, materials-based creative processes, and media art. It also skews participation along gender lines and according to personality traits like shyness. The quality of the interaction tends to suffer as well from a conversational birth defect: the scourge of generality. It is difficult to keep a large group focused on the specificity of the text before it. In the absence of an effective anchoring in the singularity of the thinking process embodied in the text, the discussion quickly slips into comparison. Given the diversity of backgrounds, the comparative allusions inevitably reference texts or bodies of knowledge known only to a few of those present. In an attempt to overcome the divide, the discussion will invariably start to pivot on hinge words that seem at the same time to offer a common ground for understanding and to illuminate some aspect of the text at hand: “history,” “culture,” “nature,” “life,” “matter,” “space,” “time.” It could be just about anything, but “subject” and “object” always figure, bringing in tow a host of others. The problem is that the force of these terms actually differ substantially from discipline to discipline, and even from text to text within a discipline. The differences hover in the background, unspoken, their mute presence creating an illusion that speakers’ remarks are actually intersecting, when a little scratching below the surface reveals that they are passing each other in the ether-sea of generality like phantom ships on a low-budget cruise. Missed encounter. The unacknowledged mutual incomprehension appears as difference of opinion, and the missed encounter is experienced as debate. What is actually accomplished is an object lesson in why Deleuze always said that the greatest enemy of thought is conversation, understood as the exchange of individual ideas and opinions. In a word, communication. The aim of the technique of conceptual speed dating is to address the group-dynamics problems of the plenary discussion format, while disenabling the tendency to default to the communicational model of verbal performance and its general sea-sickness.

The conceptual speed dating technique assumes that the text under consideration is “generative”. By this is meant that no one reading can exhaust its potential for producing meaning. Each return to the text, even by the same reader, will crystallize new thoughts. One way of thinking about this generative capacity is to approach the key concepts of the text as nexuses composed of a number of conceptual lines entering into constellations of varying emphasis, certain of them rising into relief at what stand out as key passages. The particular force of these passages is synthetic, leaping out from the weave of the text as a joint effect of the contributory lines. The constellations dissolve, reform, and reconstellate around each other’s emphases as the text advances. What stands out at key passages, or in the same key passage that commends itself to attention in successive readings, moves and varies. The variation is related to many factors, not all of them internal to the text: the reader’s level of attention, how his or her understanding has been primed by the experience of the day, how knowledge and experience accumulated since the last reading informs the reading, and even (or, as we will see, especially) by modulations of attention and concern by the situation in which the reading or discussion is taking place. A generative text is constitutively open to its outside. It does not just transmit significations. It welcomes inflections. It is hospitable to new thought. This puts its meaning always in-the-making, making the meaning inexhaustible. A generative text is never done.

The openness of the generative text to its outside must not be reduced to a question of reception. The reader is not adding meaning to a finished text. S/he is entering the unfinishment of the text, and drawing from it a new determination. The text’s power of variation is as composed within as it is inflected from without. In the synthetic meaning-effect of a given constellation, the relevance of the contributory conceptual lines is graded. Many register less noticeably, some barely register at all. Many more do not register at all – yet are still positively contributory in virtue of how their avoidance affords other conceptual lines a chance to shine. These shaded conceptual lines are what we refer to, for the purposes of conceptual speed dating, as “minor” concepts.

It is crucial to the success of the conceptual speed dating technique that the concept chosen for the exercise be a minor concept. What rises into relief at a key passage stands out from the weave of the text in a way that can be misunderstood as detaching itself from the text to claim general validity. If a danger-word, like “nature” or “subject,” occurs in the passage or is even just implied by it, the risk is extreme that the discussion will cruise into general waters. When this happens, the minor concept assumes “major” status. Major concepts, those of the general, communication-ready kind, must be avoided at all costs if the technique is to work. It is always the case that a minor concept will also be present. This is one that a reader may well not have noticed. But once attention is drawn to it, it becomes palpable how integral it is to the passage, and that the passage could not have worked its effect without it. It is also always the case that the minor concept will recur, explicitly or implied, in other passages, making it an essential, if underappreciated, contributor to the warp and weave of the entire text. Analysis of the minor concept and its textual weave offers a singular angle of approach to the text as a whole, from which new thoughts are more apt to emerge. The process of working the minor increases the sensitivity of the text to its outside, and particularly to modulations owing to the particularities of the situation of the reading and discussion. This is because major concepts carry dead weight. They are laden with baggage that exerts an inertial resistance against effective variation. Minor concepts, once noticed, are self-levitating. Once the ballast of the general ideas is thrown overboard, minor concepts’ sensitivity to the outside, coupled with their intimateness to the compositional weave composing the text, makes them rise.

In the practice of the SenseLab, the most generative concepts are philosophical concepts. Approached as generative, even the abstractest, seemingly hermetic texts, rise and fly. Conceptual speed dating with philosophical texts is used by the SenseLab for the purpose of collectively “activating” minor concepts. The collectivity is key. The project of the SenseLab is to experiment with event-based modes of creative collaboration cutting across the established boundaries between disciplines, and between “theory” (language work) and “practice” (movement, materials or media-based work). For this to happen, the collaboration cannot be conceived of as a meeting-place of constituted methods, or even of individuals. The individuals involved, and whatever they bring to the event in terms of already-acquired knowledge, skills and approaches, must enter a space of relation whose complexion does not preexist the event, but emerges from the encounter – meaning that the “space” of the event is a space-time singular to it. The space-time of the event is not located at the point of intersection of individual actions. It is in the interstices between them. It is inhabited as the environment of the interaction, as well as emerging from it. It is a third, interstitial space, irreducible to the sum of individual inputs. “Collectivity,” in the SenseLab context, does not mean the aggregate of individual actions. It means what cannot be ascribed to individual actions, taken separately or in aggregate – but would not arise without them.

In conceptual speed dating, the focus on close reading of the text, together with a “minor” sensitivity to the situation, helps produce the conditions for the emergence of a space-time of active relation. Close reading is requisite. The question asked of the minor concept is how it helps make the text, and help it mean what it says, ever in excess of any settled meaning that might be ascribed to by a disciplinary reading. Approaching the text through the minor concept is a way of asking the text what it does, and how it does what it does, compositionally. If instead of starting with these minor questions, the discussion moves too quickly to comparison or critique, the potential for active relation is lost. Comparison begins by assuming a commonality between texts. This in turn assumes that there are certain overarching concepts that apply to both texts, and against which the adequacy of each text can be assessed. Comparison begins with the sameness of the conceptually already-given. Minor reading looks to the text’s potential differencing: its capacity to exceed the givenness of ideas – especially its own. Critique, for its part, begins by separating the reader from the text so that he or she may stand over and apart from it as judge. From the lofty height of judgment’s peak, the minoritarian texture of the text fades into a feature-poor, homogenized expanse. Only stand-out concepts, telescoped to the general level, remain in view. This kills the potential movement of the text’s thinking even before it begins. SenseLab reading groups take place under the sign of a priori sympathetic reading, as expressed in a famous quote by Bertrand Russell (literally – a large-scale printout of the quote is often hung in the room):

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. (Russell 1996: 47)

Directing participants toward a close, textural reading of how the text means helps disable the default positions of comparison and critique. It also helps lessen the silencing effect that might otherwise take hold due to differences in background, gender, and social ease, by literally putting everybody on the same page. When discussion is oriented toward the detail of what is in the text, and everyone has the text in front of them, the hump someone has to get over to make a contribution is significantly lowered. In close-reading practices, the first question is not “how does this compare to other ways of thinking with which I am more familiar but others may not be” or “how am I going to position myself in relation to this, given where I’m coming from.” The first question is: what page is that on? What concepts co-occur there? On what other pages do they reoccur, and do they re-co-occur in those passages in the same constellation, or do they go off on their own trajectories and just check with a congerie of others from time to time? If the latter, where are those other trajectories leading?

In not a few cases, they will turn out not to lead anywhere. A conceptual line of development has embedded itself in the text which the text was not willing or able to follow through on. This amounts to the discovery of a seed of thought planted in the text that did not fully germinate in it. These germinal thought-lines are not gratuitous. They are necessary contributors to the weave of the text. They are in a certain way affirmed by the text, even though they are not fully assumed by it. They are thought tendencies that the text needs – but that it needs not to follow in order to remain the text the author generally understood it to be. They are thought potential that the text has planted on its own soil, but that needs new soil to flourish. Minoritarian close reading seizes upon these seeds of thought potential. Where might it lead if one of those trajectories were assumed, were fully activated and followed through to their logical conclusion? They lead into new territories of thought, beyond the ken of the text’s author him- or herself. Exploring these tendencies is a way of remaining radically faithful to the letter of the text, avoiding the pitfalls of comparison and critique, without being boxed in by it. What occurs, rather than comparison or critique, is an immanent conversion of the text by way of its own thought tendencies. Gilles Deleuze’s books on other philosophers are prominent examples of this process of immanent conversion, taking the text where the author couldn’t take it, by excess of faithfulness to its texture. This can be seen, for instance, in Deleuze’s book on Bergson, where an episode in Bergson’s thought in which matter and memory (mind) lose their opposition to one another and place themselves on the same continuum as different degrees of the same variation. Deleuze seizes upon this moment as a germinal tendency, then takes that tendency to its logical conclusion, yielding a Bergson no one before had suspected, different from all other Bergsons, including Bergson’s Bergson, but no less Bergsonian for that – on the contrary, all the more so.

The technique of conceptual speed dating is designed to stage a collective encounter between a group of readers and a text, at the point where each side is outdoing itself: participants are brought out of their personal opinions, preestablished positions, and expert identities, at the same time as the text is made to outpace itself with its own tendencies. At that point, a power of thought that cannot be reduced to either the text or the readers as an aggregate of individuals is released as a vector: a creative vector in the direction of new thought. This can be achieved without the speed dating technique, for example through a sustained reading-group practice based on a dedication to “hypothetical sympathy,” safeguarded by a culture of that kind of reading, an ethos tended by all involved.

It is at the point of the text’s and the readers’ mutual outdoing that concepts are activated. In SenseLab practice, “activating” concepts means outdoing them in such a way that they fly off from their textual homes and migrate to other modes of activity whose primary medium is not language, thereby crossing the supposed theory/practice divide. The first time the technique was used at Dancing the Virtual (2005), one of the texts we read was William James’ “The World of Pure Experience” from Essays in Radical Empiricism. Rather than concentrating on a major concept such as “experience” or “consciousness,” the minor concept of “terminus” was chosen. This is a concept that to our knowledge had never been focused upon in the literature on James and radical empiricism as a full-fledged philosophical concept. In James’ text, the terminus is the end of a process, as it is present to the process in anticipation. In other words, it is an attractor pole that lies at the limit of a movement, but dynamizes it from within as that which the movement tends toward. Although it exerts a formative force on the process, operating immanently to it, the terminus does not actually exist for the process until it is reached and the process makes done with itself. The terminus is realized by the process and actually exists only as realized by that very movement toward it. The terminus is effectively created by the movement tending toward it, giving it a strange status of future-past. A James different from all other James, including his own, comes with seizing upon the terminus as a tendency. For this terminally reactivated James, the virtual – that which exerts a formative force without being actual – becomes key to the understanding of pragmatism (of which radical empiricism is the metaphysical correlate for James). Everything changes when pragmatism is seen to revolve around the formative force of the virtual, rather than the obligation of utility. Everything changes, but nothing so much as our sense of what “practice” means.

The speed dating with the concept of the terminus at Dancing the Virtual activated the notions of immanent formative force, tendential unfolding toward attractor poles, the ability of that tendency to actually create its own end, the future-pastness of that creativity, and the abstractness (virtuality) of the motor of the movement toward it. In the follow-up materials-based practice session, these seeded concepts were enacted: they recurred to the group in the form of embodied interactions. How does the terminus work in dance improvisation? How does it work in everyday perception? Small groups invented a number of variations on what happens when the concept of the terminus becomes immanently formative of embodied action. The small groups were then invited to bring the result of their experimentation back to the whole group. They were asked not to report on what had happened. No description from a distance. No conversation. No comparison or (self-) critique. They were asked instead to perform it anew, in a way adapted to the larger group: to reactivate it again. This ignited a series of re-enactments that continued, themselves becoming an formative force immanent to the three-day event’s trajectory. The terminus became the refrain of the event. Its serial actings-out in-formed the reading of the other texts the group read together. The terminus migrated from text to embodied action and back again, eventually spinning out from the event to take on a life of its own. The concept became a formative factor in the writing practice of a number of SenseLab participants (including myself), and the tendency toward it still regularly returns to in-form SenseLab activities foregrounding media other than language. A formative potential was planted that continues to grow and vary.

As this example shows, activating a concept does not just lead to new thoughts, but extends to new actions as well, and to the new perceptions that new actions allow to unfold. How to do things with words … How to make language and non-language-based activities enter in symbiosis, without one side lording it over the other. How to transduce a conceptual force incumbent in language into a full-body enactive potential that can act itself out. And vice versa. Once the transductive circuit is set going, the in-formative movement is two-way. It is just as possible to start with a making that privileges a material other than language and then go on to generate concept-formation follow-on effects as it is to start with textual concept work and move into its embodied acting-out. This two-way processual reciprocity lies at the heart of the SenseLab’s discourse/practice of research-creation (the Canadian term for art-based research).

The very experience of conceptual speed dating is a lesson in itself. The first five-minute exchange or two are often spent orienting to the conceptual problem, reading the initial passage that had been indicated looking for pointers, moving up and down from it to get a sense of the lay of the textual land. The change from one exchange to the next creates a cesura that raises the question of how to rebegin. One party may ask what had come of the other party’s last exchange. Or, buoyed by an unexpected realization, one of the parties may immediately set the agenda, with a sense of urgency to make further progress before the bell rings. The sounding of the signal to change partners always feels as though it has come at an inopportune time, either because it come before a good connection was made between the interlocutors, or for the opposite reason, because an intense connection was made but didn’t have time to reach the end of its arc. After a few changes of partner, the cesuras between the exchanges begin to feel less and less like interruptions. Strands of discussion hang in the air, not neutralized but pressing to continue, with different degrees of urgency. An odd sensation builds that the texture of the discussion’s continuity fills the intervals, vaguely but insistently felt as the co-pressing of lines of thought. In the cesura, they are intimately interwound. But over the threshold to the next exchange, it goes without saying that they will separate out, before re-interwinding. Each cesura is filled with the resonation of the many lines of thought, jostling each other, each vying to follow its own trajectory further, sometimes in a mutually reinforcing way, at other times in interference. Some will fall into the gap, failing to reemerge in the next exchange, fallen mute. Mute but not inert. They will have a mark, of some kind, somewhere, and it is never a foregone conclusion that they will not revive later, perhaps elsewhere. What does not flourish, nevertheless seeds itself.

Speaking personally, by the midway point of the exercise, what I say as I enter the next exchange ceases to feel as if it came from a separate decision made by me. What I say feels moved by the necessity of a particularly pressing strand that takes my tongue for a ride. The result often surprises me. I find myself saying things I hadn’t plan to say, or hadn't been able to say before. Sometimes I'm not even sure I agree with them. But rather than being alienating, that feeling intensifies the sensation of being in the discussion. Owning a thought personally and expressing an opinion has simply ceased to be what is at stake. What is at stake is a movement of thought passing through the exchanges and rolling with the intervals. The felt imperative is to be true not to oneself but to that movement: to help further its iterative unfolding, toward a terminus whose contours are unknown in their details, but whose presence is effective: compelling (another iteration) and orienting (giving a sense of direction). The vagueness of the terminus does not feel like an absence. It feels creative. Whatever series of exchanges lead further in its direction will have to construct the path it will follow toward it. By the end, I have the odd sensation of having had an experience full of thought, but without being able to say who it was who actually thought it up. Thinking of a particular point that arose, I often cannot remember if it was I who had that thought, or another who passed it on to me. I feel as though I have been in thought – rather than the thoughts having been in me. The plenary session following the final speed dating exchange is permeated by this feeling, giving each person’s utterance a flavour of indirect discourse – under conditions in which it is impossible to single out the author of the reported speech.

Who is speaking? Me, my interlocutors, the text itself? In this event, where did thought begin and end? The initial suggestion of the minor concept to be discussed is not really where the thinking began. “Life” – the life of thought, and living thinking – “begins only at the point where utterance crosses utterance” (Vološinov 1986: 145). In other words: in the cesuras between individual speakings. The thinking originated in the multiplicity of its speed-dated rebeginnings. The event generated its own effective origin, immanent to its occurrence. The initial suggestion was only the pretext for this immanent origin, which is one with the articulations of the event. This is what Simondon calls an “absolute origin” (Simondon 1969: 57). The initial gesture that gives the thought to come its pretext is but its jumping off point. The origination of thought is in the event-articulations where utterance crosses utterance, in serial interations interwinding. The origin is not a first time: it is time and again. It parses the event into separate episodes, rising in each cesura’s fall into silence. It inhabits the event, immanent to the event’s occurrence, the overall effect of which is not attributable to any one gesture or any one participant, or even to the sum total of the participants considered in their individual inputs. It all amounts to an eventful self-reporting of thought, indistinguishable from its multiply authored occurrence, arising from its distributed “absolute” origin.

A successful conceptual speed dating session will bear the same relation to a follow up session that each of its constituent exchanges bore to each other. What flourished and what self-seeded will co-inhabit the interval, and what presses forward from it will be conditioned by the nature of the initializing gesture that will be the jumping off point of the next event. If the initiating conditions for the next event are couched in movement rather than language, the lines of thought will press for whole-body enactment, activated and oriented by the same terminus, continuing the same tendency in a different materiality, the phonic movement of thought in language transduced into a full-spectrum embodied thinking in movement. The movement that arises from the next collective exercise will have been in-formed by the preceding movement of thought in language, as by an immanent formative force. A return to language further down the line will in-form language, reactivated and reoriented by movement. At that point, it is no longer possible to assign either language or movement as the origin to the unfolding. Thinking will have outdone itself. It will have tendentially spread.

This is the cross-practice equivalent of free indirect discourse. Thinking self-reports cross-wise. It “says” itself multiply, across words and movement (and images and sounds; and bodily gesture and verbalization). But through that multiplicity, it says itself of a single process of “absolutely” original articulation: a creative movement, single in its occurrence. For the SenseLab, this transductive relay, this singular cross-articulate expression of thought eventfully self-reporting, is what best characterizes what research-creation can do.

It is conceivable, Peirce was saying in the opening quote, that a beginningless series of successive utterers should all do their work in a brief interval of time, and that so should an endless series of interpreters. But it gets really interesting, he continues, when neither the series of utterers nor that of interpreters forms an infinite collection. When the set is finite there will be signs without utterers or interpreters. It is precisely at these points that expression asserts its autonomy. Thought (or what from the point of view of the theory of the signs necessary for its enactment Peirce names “semiosis”) will have become its own self-creative movement.

A Pragmatics

Peirce’s emphasis on finitude when talking about the self-propagating power of thought, apparently limitless in its autonomous cross-power to relay itself, seems paradoxical at first sight. But it makes perfect sense if you consider that if there were an infinite series of utterers and interpreters, there will always be an interpreter downstream of every utterer, and an utterer upstream of every interpreter. Expression still hinges on the individual, at each successive utterance. All along the beginningless and endless line, the movement of thought remains a dual affair between individual utterers and interpreters. Rather than opening expression, this in fact only closes it down all the more exhaustively by infinitizing the centrality the individual subject. Expression is endlessly imprisoned in the interiority of the speaking subject. If, on the other hand, the collection of utterers and interpreters is finite, then there are loose ends. There is a cut-off point where an utterer’s enunciation fails to find an interpreter and falls into the gaps–which is the same thing as an interpretation remaining in potential with no one yet to pass it down the line. Cesura. “If a sign has no interpreter, its interpretant is a ‘would be’, i.e. it is what would determine the interpreter if there was one” (Peirce 1998: 409). [2] A would-be determination of an interpreter: a potential expression. In-forming. The opening of expressive potential is predicated on the finitude of the collection of utterers. Expression is no longer a dual affair. It is opened to a “Thirdness,” and the third is potential. [3]

The idea of an endless series of utterers and interpreters infinitely displaces the notion of the origin. But an autonomy of expression does not come from the mere absence of the origin. It comes from the affirmation of an absolute origin, at loose ends. As the technique of speed dating makes palpable, this is where potential is to be found: in the gaps in expression and in the threads left hanging. The infinitization of the series of utterers and interpreters actually ends up de-potentializing expression. The farther along the infinite line, the harder it becomes to imagine that there could be anything new left to say or think, as the series reaches closer and closer to the ideal limit where every possible permutation has been exhausted. Even though this limit is ideal, in that it can never actually be reached, the very idea of this infinity of chatter is exhausting. Rather than buoying one with a sense of the richness of variation, it bludgeons one with the sinking feeling of the exhaustion of novelty. What Peirce is inoculating us against is mistaking the openness of thought for an ideal infinity of utterance, and confusing the origin of expression with the beginning of a series (rather than a seriating rebeginning). [4]

What is the “ingredient” of thought-expression that Peirce says comes to the fore when the collection of interlocutors is finite and the reality of signs without utterers or interpreters affirms itself? What can go without an utterer or an interpreter, functioning as “a sort of substitute for them” that fulfils “nearly the same, but more essential, function,” at the loose ends of thought-expression?

This essential ingredient, as regards the utterer, is what Peirce calls the “Object” of the sign that constitutes an utterance and enacts an expressive movement of thought through it. This is a peculiar notion of an object. The usual connotations of the word must be bracketed. Here, “object” is really just another word for the meaning or sense of the sign: what the sign “stands for.” This standing-for is not to be taken as a synonym for “represent.” It must be taken more strongly, as in “take the place of” and even “bear,” “carry,” or “endure.” For rather than being what the sign expresses, the sense/Object of the utterance is actually what goes “necessarily unexpressed in the sign.”

The sense, Peirce explains, can only come from “a collateral source.” It is incumbent in the surrounding situation: the situation itself, not as it is represented in the mind of the utterer or the interpreter. It is precisely for the mind of the individual utterer or interpreter – the interiority of his or her thinking – that the Object functions as a more essential substitute. The idea that sense is sourced in the situation collateral to the sign brings thought out into the environment. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari speak of the work of art as “standing up” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 164). By this they mean that what it expresses has its own reality, independent of how the work was pictured in the mind of the artist and how it is received in the mind of its audience. What it expresses has the status of a “being of sensation” or a “block of sensation” to which the work gives standing in the world. Suzanne Langer uses the oxymoron “objective feeling” to get at much the same idea about the import of art (Langer 1953: 19-20). All signs “stand for” in the same way that a configuration of signs composing an artwork “stands up.” A sign’s sense/Object is a being of thought, a block of thinking: an objective contemplation given standing in the world through its utterance. [5]

A “block” of thinking is not a simple unity. It stands for many. Peirce takes the verb as the privileged example for understanding how signs stand, fully aware of the implications this choice has for our understanding of the nature of the sign-process that is thought-expression (“semiosis”). By privileging the verb, Peirce is asserting that semiosis must be approached on the model of the event. A verb, he says, does not designate particular things. It designates a set of “partial objects.” These are not in the first instance objects in the everyday sense. They are roles composing the event that the verb stands for. The verb “runs” designates a someone who embodies a running. The verb “gives” designates a someone who proffers, a someone who receives, and a something that passes between them. Both verbs are one word – but stand for more than one, for a some composing the action. Their object is unspecified. In the abstract, there are an infinite number of runners, and an infinite series of givers, giftees, and gifts. But neither verb is ever used in the abstract, in the sense of lacking a surrounding situation, whatever that situation may be. The sense of the utterance is never purely general. It is never the infinity of objects that might answer to it generally, in the abstract. The sense of the utterance is the suggestion that there will be someones or somethings in the situation embodying the roles that the event the verb stands for is wanting in order for the composition of its event to fulfil itself. Which ones are unspecified by the verb. The verb’s utterance kick-starts the process of thought-expression by substituting itself for them; it is in the verb’s inability to specify its own object that its sign-power resides: it leaves them to be determined by the situation. The sign points to their determination. It stands for what actions may come next that leads to their determination. The power of the sign is to determine a process of determination to take place that must move collaterally into the situation of the utterance, and supplement it with follow-on actions. Its power is pragmatic. Which is why the essay in which this discussion of Pierce’s is found is entitled, simply, “Pragmatism.”

A sign does not impress an abstract meaning on the mind. More fundamentally, it poses a question to the situation. Some: someone, something. But which one(s)? The sign points not to a thing, but to an event which it “directs us to seek.” The verb powers this collateral action of seeking (what Peirce terms “collateral observation”). The sign’s sense – its meaning, import, enunciative force – is none other than this powering of an expressive movement inviting a relay into collateral observation and an embodied movement of exploration supplementing the action of the verb. The Object of the sign is the “quaesitum” (“that which must be sought”). The quaesitum is the terminus of the expressive movement that orients the process powered by the sign. It is an attractor pole lying at the limit of the movement of sense-making – semiosis, the movement of thought-expression – but at the same time dynamizes it from within, as that toward which the movement tends. It exerts a formative force on the process, operating immanently to it. As immanent formative force of the movement of thought-expression, the quaesitum is the “requaesitum” (“essential ingredient”) of making-sense. This Object of the sign is necessarily unexpressed in the sign because it is realized through the unfolding of the process that the sign powers into motion. It is effectively created by the movement of thought actively tending toward it. It is all of this, the unfolding toward a realized fulfilment, that the sign “stands for”: for which it substitutes at the inception of the process that its own standing-for sets in motion. It is the insistence of quaesitum as the necessary ingredient to be sought for that the verb bears, that its process carries or endures. In short, the Object of the sign is unspecified in the abstract, in order to be determinable by process.

Seek – and you may not find. There may be no requisite runner present in the situation, or even anywhere in existence. [6] However, the verb still functions expressively. It “expresses” a process in the sense of “forcing out (as the juice of a fruit) by pressure” (Merriam-Webster). To pressurize the process of thought-expression, the sign doesn’t need an actual object. All that is requisite is a quaesitum, a that-which-must-be-sought juicy enough to whet the appetite: a ‘would-be’ terminus; an attractor taking upon itself, in the form of its being sought, the sign’s expressive force. Would-be: the Object of thought-expression points to the conditional. Conditional: of the order of potential. That, finally, is the essential ingredient. Potential – determined to be determined (to paraphrase another Peircean formulation [7]) by a process moving thought out, under the pressure of the situation.

When an actual thing is found to fulfil the role of the verb’s some/ones or some/things, the process still does not end. Termini are slippery things. The question “which?” just sets the stage for the follow-up question what else? What else was required for the required determination to be fulfilled? What more is there that would even more determinately determine the sense of the sign – for example by filling in details or filling out its background? Or by specifying how it plays its role in the event. In what manner is the what-else co-determining of what happens? Thus it is not simply a question of some/ones or some/things being actually present or not. It is also the way in which they are present, or would have been. Peirce insists that the Object of thought-expression as quaesitum is necessarily “singular, not general.” The Object, when there actually is one, is not just a this-here. It is this-here-in-this-way, along with all else that made it so – and would potentially have made it otherwise. What else? is not a controllable question. It is “impossible to complete our collateral observation.” Where does the seeking stop? Between every two would-be this-heres there potentially lies another. At the limit, “there is a continuum between them.” The Object, “though singular, may nevertheless be multiple, and may even be infinitely so.”

Is this not a contradiction? The whole discussion started with the problem that where there is an infinity of utterers and interpreters, the movement of expression comes to a halt, exhausted by the very thought of itself. Yet now we’ve what-elsed and in-what-mannered our way back to infinity. The difference is that this new infinity at which we have arrived is in no way a purely abstract or ideal infinity. It is infinite “in completed existence.” It is a potential infinity that is pragmatically inscribed in the situation. It is an effective infinity, because it does: it demands more seeking; it calls for and enables collateral action. [8] It is in no way general, but singularly ingredient to the situation. It is the more-than of the situation. It will never be exhausted, try as we might to seek it out. To avoid exhausting ourselves, at some point we will just have to call it quits. We have to deem our collateral observation sufficient to what is Objectively required by the situation for it to terminate itself, for all pragmatic intents and purposes, so that life may move on to a new situation and expression to a new iteration.

It is important to note that this effective infinity is on the side of the environmentality of the Object, not of the individuality of the subject. It is just as important to bear in mind that it overspills any dual relation, being a question of an always-another in between: a third. This thirdness interposes itself between the subjects involved, over-filling the gaps between their utterances. It is also what is left over and above the finitude of the individual subjects involved in the situation. It is what exceeds them, so that there must be a sign without an utterer or an interpreter – and, substituting for them, something essential for thought’s moving-out pragmatically into process. The something essential that may substitute for the individual subject of expression is all that is potentially sought for collaterally. It is the Object of expression that can never be fully expressed, but without which expression would have nowhere to go but into generality. It is the Object as incumbent in the texture of the situation, replete with would-bes: all that is potentially sought for collaterally. The all surrounding the some of the sign: the Object become environmental. The essential ingredient, the “Object,” is what Peirce calls the environmental “form of fact.” It is the all-around of the in-situation, as triangulated by potential.

Once again, Peirce models his pragmatic account of signs and the thought-expression on the verb. As the model verb, he chooses “expresses.” “Expresses” is a very special verb. At the same time as it expresses something, he says, it “expresses its expressing something.” It is self-reporting. But just as the oneness of a verb like “gives” envelops a some, a manyness of roles and potential objects, “expresses” envelops many a verb. In fact, it wraps itself up in all of them, and swaddles them all. For is not “expresses” of the nature of all verbs? Of all signs? Is “expresses” not the natural environment of signs? Do they not, each and every one, have an expressive dimension of self-reporting to them? Is it not through the pressure of the self-reporting of their standing-for that the form-of-fact of their situation comes Objectively to express itself through the would-bes and collateral action with which it pragmatically supplements the sign?

Looked at this way, the “partial objects” of the sign’s utterance are in form-of-fact partial subjects of the process of thought-expression powered by the sign. They collectively self-report through that process’s playing out. Peirce says that the utterer and interpreter are “inessential” because the pragmatic “fact” of the situation can substitute for them, in the form of the partial subjects collaterally pressured into, and clamouring, to self-report – and through their self-reporting, potentially bring the all of the situation to expression. Emphasis, again, on “potentially.” The Object is essentially speculative. As self-reporting, the factual form of its infinity is all but one with the Subject of expression, environmentally wrapped up in the situation processually swaddling the requisite would-be somes.

It is important to note that a slippage has occurred in the Peirce terms of this discussion. The analysis imperceptibly transitioned from a something more essential that can fulfil the role of the utterer (the Object) to the corresponding something more essential that can fulfil the role of the interpreter: what Peirce calls the interpretant. Technically, the Object is what in-forms the sign’s utterance and orients the movement of thought-expression it inaugurates. The Object is what the sign stands-for. The interpretant, for its part, is what the sign stands-toward: this same Object transformed by the action of the sign into a sought-for terminus. The transition occurs at the quaesitum, which is the Object as necessarily sought in the situation. The Object, as that which in-forms the sign and orients the movement of thought-expression it triggers, has the force of an imperative: it necessarily imposes itself on situation at the utterance of the sign. The interpretant is this same imperative turned into a conditional, a would-be: as what, necessarily sought, may be found. [9]

The Object and interpretant are strictly complementary. They reciprocally presuppose each other as indissociable aspects of the same process. [10] They relay other in the quaesitum, which is like a gear-shift mechanism or hinge between their respective modes. They overlap in the quaesitum, allowing for a smooth transition and imperceptible transformation from the mode of the imperative to the conditional. The Object prefigures the interpretant, and the interpretant reprises the Object. They are interwound as inseparable pulses the playing out of the same tendency to sense-making. It was by virtue of their reciprocal presupposition as indissociable aspects of the process of thought-expression’s playing out that the foregoing discussion was able to segue imperceptibly from the Object to the interpretant. Peirce insists on their logical difference and real distinction, as different aspects. But he also goes out of his way to specify that the interpretant – counter to virtually every secondary interpretation of it in the literature – does not have to be “a modification of consciousness.” After all, the would-bes of a situation are as much a part of its reality as the imperatives it harbours. The modification of the consciousness of an individual interpreter is not required. All that is required is “a sufficiently close analogue of a modification of consciousness.”

This means that the transition from the Object to the interpretant is not, as it is too often made out to be, a transition from the objective in the usual sense to the subjective as normally understood. Something else entirely is at stake: that “the minds of the utterer and the interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place.” This Peirce enigmatically names the Commind (commens). It “consists of that which is, and must be, well understood between the utterer and the interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfil its function” (Peirce 1998: 478; my emphasis). In light of Peirce’s statements that the utterer and interpreter are inessential, this definition needs to be amended to: the commind “consists of that which is, and must be, well understood between the utterer and the interpreter, should they be present, or at points where the process does not recede collaterally into the gaps or come to loose ends …” Elsewhere it is more vaguely understandable. Even where there is a well-understanding utterer and interpreter, the Commind is not just “what is forced upon the mind in perception, but includ[es] more than perception reveals.” This more-than can only be all the more so in the gaps of potential into which perception’s seek its would-be interpretants. So when Peirce says “between” the utterer and interpreter it has to be taken in the strongest sense, as involving the continuum potentially inhabiting the gaps in the situation into which the quaesitum recedes. This effectively extends the Commind well beyond what is “well understood” at the outset, into the processual more-than of the situation: to the partial objects that are also partial subjects. The Commind exceeds the individual subject of perception by nature. It shades into the more-than of the situation’s immanent all – where it is always and in any case “already virtually present” (Peirce 1998: 403). It fuses not only utterers and interpreters, should they be present; more-than that, it fuses the effective infinity of partial objects and partial subjects on the continuum of potential completed existence filling the situation. In the Commind, the Object of expression becomes all but one with a collective (commensal) Subject that is irreducibly environmental. It is this all-in-and-around of the situation that virtually thinks itself, always. In every case, it is essentially the situation’s virtual thinking of itself that self-reports through the process of semiosis.

To my knowledge, the Commind occurs in Peirce’s implausibly voluminous work exactly once. It is the minorest of all Peircean concepts, the one he left in tendency out of “despair of making my own broader conception understood” (Peirce 1998: 478). To follow through on its tendency is to produce a Peirce more Peircean than Peirce, and hopefully all the more faithful to Peirce for that (in the same way that Deleuze remained faithful to Bergson). This is not just a matter of exegesis of interest to the hermetic society of Peirce hounds. It has tremendous import for the theory of signs and expression, for all of semiotics and all that has come out of it. It turns the normative readings of Peirce that largely informed the construction of late-twentieth-century semiotics on their environmental heads by asserting the absolute necessity of a theory – and a practice – of collective expression. It also underlines the impossibility of representation as a foundational category for thought-expression. The same reasoning that led Peirce to the Commind requires that the interpretant (the sign’s fulfilled sense) “cannot correspond” to the Object (whose imperative in-forming powers the sense-making process). This is because, although they are reciprocally presupposing processual complements that cannot actually be dissociated, the object and the interpretant have different logical status and by virtue of that are really distinct. [11] The “defect of correspondence” is rooted in the “essential difference to their natures”: the fact that one is in the imperative that coincides with the triggering of the process by the sign (and is thus left in the past by its unfolding), while the other is in the “relatively future tense” of the conditional. [12] For both of these reasons – Commind and the essential defect of representational theories of the sign – speed dating with the ghost of Peirce is sure to be challengingly mind-bending, and is highly recommended.

A final note: it is arbitrary, if instructive, to use parts of speech, such as verbs, in order to model the process of expression, as was done earlier. But of course not every sign is linguistic. A gesture is a nonlinguistic sign. A gesture involves seeings, perhaps touchings, definitely kinesthetic feelings. The interpretant (Commind) “in all cases, includes feelings” along with “something that may vaguely be called ‘thought’.” Vaguely, because the process of thought-expression Objectively seeks its own would-be fulfilment, which it cannot clearly or distinctly know until it reaches its terminus. However, ninety-nine times out of a hundred (to quote James) the terminus is not reached, so that the process must continue virtually (1996: 69). Or, it will just have to call it quits in the interests of moving on to a next iteration, across a cesura filled with the resonation of many potential lines of thought jostling each other, vying for self-fulfilling what-elses, plying the continuum between the partial objects that collaterally self-report as partial subjects and whose infinite fusion composes the Commind. This pragmatic seeking-doing is a vaguely thinking-feeling, complexly determined to be determined environmentally, unfolding in the collective, commensal expression that constitutes “actual Experience” (Peirce 1998: 478; emphases in the original). Actual Experience: the virtual thinking-of-itself of the situation coming pragmatically to expression, self-reporting.

Actual experience is the creature of expression’s autonomy.

Radical Pedagogy

Conceptual speed dating is a pragmatic technique for staging the autonomy of collective expression within the particular situation of a given, finite group of utterers and interpreters. In the particular context of the SenseLab, it is a technique for would-be collaborators seeking to transduce their encounter with a generative text into improvisational follow-on explorations in other modes than textual, where linguistic expression moves into an intimacy of thinking-feeling with other-sense activity.

The individuals involved in this practice themselves carry collaterals: their moods, habits, technical and social skills, acquired knowledge, any number of things. In fact, an effective infinity of things. These are also partial objects of the thought-expression that occurs, incumbent in their own way in the situation. Whether or not they are sought, whether or not there is a group determination to determine them, they belong to the form-of-fact of the situation and in-form its potential. Whether sought or not, they self-report, in the manner in which the strategies an individual deploys in order to negotiate the enabling constraints of the exercise, in particular the time-limit, and how as a function of those strategies they inflect the collective movement of thought-expression. Sought or not, this range of partial objects of expression are partial subjects of enunciation, by virtue of their inflecting the self-reporting of the situation’s all. Although they are usually considered factors “internal” to a speaking subject, the technique of speed dating activates them on the same basis as other situational factors that would normally be categorized as “external.” In short, speed dating activates what is normally taken as the personal characteristics of the individual participants as a subset of the environmental factors in play. This is done in order to express thought, in the sense used earlier of forcing thought out, like the juice from a fruit, so that it lubricates the situation where it collectively moves, in all of its dimensions, involving all of its collaterals operating on the same speculatively pragmatic plane: a kind of ‘flat ontology’” of expression in actual experience.

It is a peculiarity of SenseLab not to seek these “internal” factors as such. This is a general principle of SenseLab activities, in all their forms-of-fact and phases. To seek these factors would be to impress them into the individual: bring them out from their potential environmentality and limit them to the individual subjectivity of the utterer/interpeter. This would be to personalize expression again, at the expense of the infinity of potentiality that the movement of thought-expression is capable of mobilizing if it is pressurized pragmatically in Peirce’s speculative sense, through the thirdness of free indirect discourse. At the limit, it is the process of free indirect discourse that is the autonomous Subject of expression all but one with the environmental Object of thought extending into potential (Commind). To personalize this process is to diminish the environmental force of the sign-power of semiosis, whose determination to be determined can only be unleashed if the autonomy of that expression is valued, cared for situationally, and tended to transsituationally with technique. The personal is an interiorizing limitation of that autonomy. Vološinov made the point that expression is in any case only ever personal secondarily. The interiority of the individual speaking subject is the result of signs being “inwardly impelled” by specific techniques of power (Vološinov 1986: 153). In this, he prefigures Foucault’s conviction that the interiorization and personalization of the individual subject is the product of certain historically specific strategies of power. To the extent to which we speak in the first person, rather than the unspecified third person of free indirect discourse, we express not our subjective freedom, but the history of the subjection of expression.

It is a key proposition of the SenseLab that the intensest expression is impersonal and collective in the environmental sense glossed in this essay, where “collective” ceases to be a synonym for a collection of individuals to become the sign-function pointing to the effective potential in the situation that exceeds both the individuals in the group and their aggregate number – but cannot come to expression without them, through their finitude. “Collective” in this sense is the quaesitum: that which must be sought in any event of expression if it is to fulfil its Object (in such a way that it pragmatically becomes all but one with the commensal Subject of expression).

Radical pedagogy, for the SenseLab, consists in recognizing this quaesitum as the requaesitum it is: as the essential ingredient for expression to raise itself to its most fully potentialized plane, in a thinking-feeling of the intensest sort. It is the SenseLab’s proposition that a radical pedagogy is a collective-seeking that honours the autonomy of expression and tends to its intense impersonality, experimenting with very precise speculative-pragmatic techniques for staging it and caring for its process. This is what sets a radical pedagogy apart from mere learning, and the way the modes of learning dominant in our institutions misconstrue the Object of thought-expression for an object of knowledge to be acquired by an individual subject (impelled by the many limiting powers of subjection structuring contemporary institutions of learning). Radical pedagogy operates in the gaps in knowledge. Its process moves thought-expression collaterally into the unknowns of the situation, where its effectively infinite potential self-reports.

A radical pedagogy:

1. Proceeds rigorously through technique.

2. Uses the technique to jump start an event of expression.

3. Strategizes the jump-starting of the event in such a way as to take up a finite collection of utterers and interpreters in a collective movement of thought.

4. Collateralizes expression so as to bring the situation of the event to singular expression.

5. Brings the situation to singular expression in a way that gives complete existence to the situation’s real potential as potential, objectively infinite.

6. Is attentive to the manner in which every expression also expresses its own expression, building on that to double the objectively infinite potential of the situation with an expression-of-expression that enables the event to reference its own process, so to correct, perfect, and vary its own technique.

7. Leaves loose ends, releasing and remaindering potential in a way that it self-forwards across the gaps to a next event in a different mode of practice, relaying the expressive event into situations and techniques beyond itself.

8. Takes this outdoing of itself to be its content, in dogged resistance to any notion of knowledge in terms of a content separable from the event of its own expressive self-production.

9. Transduces rather than transmits.

Notes

[1] By Andrew Murphie, during the first international research-creation event the SenseLab hosted, Dancing the Virtual (2005).

[2] All citations in this essay that are not otherwise referenced are from pages 403-411 of this work.

[3] Semiosis involves a “tri-relative influence” that is “not in any way resolvable into actions between pairs” (Peirce 1998: 411).

[4] The subtext here will be clear to readers old enough to remember the general academic discourse of the 1980s and much of the 1990s. The idea of an endless series of utterers and interpreters gained prominence with the poststructuralist concept of intertextuality. Postmodernism took on board the logical consequences of this concept, in its ironic affirmation of the sinking feeling of the exhaustion of novelty, accompanied by the refrain of the impossibility of creativity. A compensatory discourse of appropriation and remix emerged. But it was not enough to save the strands of poststructuralism embracing intertextuality and its digital culture equivalent, hypertextuality, from postmodern’s carrying it to its logical conclusion.

[5] Since artworks are compositions of signs, this means that their objective feeling envelops thought: that they are thinking-feelings presenting with the feeling standing out. Conversely, all signs composing what we call thinking as opposed to feeling, envelop feelings, with the thinking standing for.

[6] There are of course many uses of language – the vast majority, in fact – where there is no assumption of the physical presence of the Object of expression. The ability of language to function in situations where the Object as it might figure in the immediate situation is absent is, as is so often pointed out, what gives language its vast powers of expression. Peirce’s point is that when this is case, there is still seeking – but one that remains in the register of potential. The follow-on actions are performed virtually. It is in order to make this point that Peirce emphasizes that a thought is sign for another thought (“every thought beyond immediate perception is a sign;” Peirce 1998: 402). Everything that applies to situations assuming the possible presence of the object applies to the virtual situations of thought operating directly in its natural environment of potential. Even the seemingly contextless examples of analytic philosophers and logicians, like the infamous cat on the mat, are not entirely without an appeal to a situation (is the cat on the mat because it wants to exit the door, or is it just taking a nap?). But more importantly than this abstract context (in the sense of being without pragmatic stakes) is the context of the enunciation. A discussion of an abstract cat on a mat is a concrete demonstration belonging to a genre of language (philosophy) that carries institutional weight. The stakes of the enunciation itself are all the more weighty the more distant the Object of expression. These stakes include the assertion or imposition of the genre of expression to which the utterance signs its participation, the institutional associated with that genre, the informal factors associated with the particularities of the situation of the enunciation, and the way in which all of these factors position the speaker and give authority or performative efficacy to his or her utterance. The dimension of “self-reporting” (discussed below) that is an element of every utterance becomes all the more pronounced here, to the point that under certain circumstances it becomes the equivalent of the self-presentation that the technique of speed dating attempts to side-step, even if that gesture is not explicitly performed. That is why it is crucial for practices like the SenseLab’s to create open situations of unspecified potential that support collateral action without directing it advance, and that foreground the collectivity of expression, while avoiding general statements.

[7] “Potential means indeterminate yet capable of determination. … The vague always tends to become determinate, simply because its vagueness does not determine it to be vague. … It is not determinately nothing” (Peirce 1998: 323-324).

[8] The distinction being made here between a general or purely abstract infinity (what Peirce calls a “hypothetical infinite collection”) and and an effective infinity pragmatically inscribed in a situation (thus having what Peirce calls an infinity having “completed existence”) corresponds to Whitehead’s distinction between “pure potential” and “real potential” (Whitehead 1978: 65-66). Real potential is “indetermination, rendered determinate in the real concrescence … it is a conditioned indeterminacy” (Whitehead 1978, 23). The demand that real potential makes for a process of thought-expression seeking to determine it is what Whitehead calls the “proposition” (1978: 184-207).

[9] The Object is singular. The interpretant, on the other hand, is “either general or intimately connected with generals.” A general would-be is a possibility. The transformation from imperative to conditional is associated with a transformation of potential into possibility. This linking of potential to the imperative – the requaesitum – and the idea that possibility is produced, derived from the imperative movement of potential, is a significant shift in the way we normally think of these categories, with even more significant implications for how we conceive of freedom. In terms of the earlier discussion of generality in this essay, it is when possibility is disconnected from its derivation in potential that the plane of the general seems to take on independence from situation and process, and assert its claims to abstract self-sufficiency. The lesson is not that generality is not useful or is not produced; it is, rather, that generality is always produced as a phase-shift of singularity.

[10] As is the case with Peirce’s triadic categories of Firstness/Secondness/Thirdness, and icon/index/symbol which are similarly mutually participating processual complements that cannot be dissociated from each other.

[11] A real distinction, as employed by Deleuze, is a distinction that is “essential or qualitative” but non-numerical (cannot be parsed out as belonging to different substantially different things) (Deleuze 1994: 40). Peirce’s triadic categories are similarly real distinctions.

[12] See also their difference as regards singularity and generality discussed in note 9.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994.

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998.

Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1996.

Simondon, Gilbert. Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier-Montagne, 1969.

Vološinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Pédagogie Radicale, ou chemins de traverse de l'expérimentation individuelle et collective à l'événement esthétique

Louise Boisclair
Département de communication, Université de Montréal

Intro

« Pédagogie radicale » est un syntagme aussi percutant qu’inspirant. Je l’approche par divers chemins de traverse, car il échappe à une destination précise. Comment la pédagogie peut-elle être radicale ? Et dans quel sens entendre « radical » ? Dans le sens de mesure extrême ou d’extraction d’une racine, qu’elle soit concrète ou abstraite ? Ces derniers mois, l’expression s’est nourrie d’activités du SenseLab auxquelles j’ai participé. Certaines pistes de réponse ont émergé de ma fréquentation des groupes de lecture de Deleuze et de Guattari, entre autres, de la recherche-création collective Into the Midst assortie d’une résidence à la Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) en 2012 [1] et de l’installation ludique After Lygia Clark lors d’une rencontre au SenseLab en 2014.

En jonglant avec l’expression et en la laissant bouturer avec ces deux activités, la question s’est reformulée : Comment les dimensions projectives de l’agencement des énonciations participent-elles à créer un événement esthétique?

La quadrature expérientielle

Cette question s’inspire de la lecture en groupe de Cartographies schizoanalytiques de Guattari, dont j’associe le passage suivant à la démarche d’articulation du SenseLab: « Le seuil constitutif d’un agencement d’énonciation ne sera franchi que lorsqu’une telle articulation aura effectivement lieu. » (Guattari 1989: 91). Lors d’un groupe de lecture, les participants lisent et commentent divers passages du livre. Chaque énonciation individuelle participe au franchissement d’un seuil grâce à l’articulation verbale. Et l’ensemble de ces énonciations individuelles constituera un agencement d’énonciations collectif de divers vecteurs projectifs (Guattari 1989: 83, Fig.4). Ainsi, le partage de cet écrit me familiarise davantage avec les concepts guattariens que ma lecture individuelle. Parmi ceux-ci, je pense à la quadrature des territoires existentiels, des univers incorporels, des flux stratifiés et des phyla machiniques abstraits.

Pour cet article, retenons simplement que cette quadrature cartographie des entités non discursives qui correspondent aux territoires de l’existence, aux univers de connaissance ; elle cartographie également des entités discursives qui s’apparentent à la circulation de divers niveaux de flux et aux souches d’une espèce ou d’un embranchement. Ajoutons que cette cartographie fluctue en tout temps, elle est dynamique. Son mouvement de déterritorialisation et de reterritorialisation est incessant. Des innombrables fluctuations se dégagent des tensions, des affects subjectifs et des effets machiniques qui excèdent ou traversent l’individuel et nourrissent le collectif. Pour les besoins de l’analyse, il importe de distinguer les dimensions projectives, tout en réaffirmant l’agencement de leurs énonciations (Guattari 1989: 10, 13, 27-34, 44). En effet, à l’origine d’une projection se trouve un énonciateur humain ou non-humain qui participe à un agencement collectif.

Cette brève immersion conceptuelle permet d’explorer les dimensions projectives multiples auxquelles renvoie la question lancée ci-dessus. La projection est une notion polyvalente et polymorphe qui englobe des manifestations corporelles, matérielles et virtuelles, humaines et non-humaines. Avant le surgissement des manifestations, de même que processus renvoie à procès, projection renvoie à projet. La projection, dans le sens de se lancer dans un projet, interpelle les participants à contribuer au processus événementiel qui contribue à la mise en œuvre et joue un rôle essentiel dans l’expérience esthétique. Elle emprunte divers chemins de traverse qui creusent leurs sillons chemin faisant. Englobant la quadrature des entités présentées ci-dessus, le devenir du projet croise diverses manifestations projetées.

Dès lors d’autres questions surgissent. Comment créer les conditions propices à un projet ? Éventuellement propices à sa réalisation mais avant tout propices à sa projection et au déroulement de son processus. Comment projeter des manifestations sensibles à travers un ensemble de dispositifs ?

Des pistes additionnelles de réponse émergent de la recherche-création collective animée par Erin Manning et Brian Massumi, Into the Midst, en 2012 (Manning 2013). Le projet est alimenté par des ateliers diversifiés dont des discussions en groupe sur des notions qui résonnent avec le dôme de la SAT. Lorsque la résidence réunit à Montréal les 26 participants internationaux, le premier exercice proposé par Erin Manning consiste à crocheter un grand filet. Concrètement, cet exercice collectif consiste à assembler des fils crochetés par les participants. Dans l’abstrait, avec le recul, cet exercice favorise le tissage des mailles d’intercession de diverses activités corporelles, sonores, culinaires, photographiques et vidéogaphiques, sans oublier la couleur rouge qui sert de vecteur. Dans un esprit de « pédagogie radicale », le groupe projette le devenir du projet. La plupart des activités s’effectuent en petit groupe par affinités, comme la discussion par Skype les mois précédents, les exercices de mouvement, les enregistrements dans le parc, etc. Le 22 octobre, pour l’événement public, les participants et les visiteurs se rencontrent autour d’un immense filet dans le dôme en improvisant une chorégraphie de mouvements associés aux projections audiovisuelles.

Avec la boîte noire After Lygia Clark, en novembre 2014, j’expérimente une création du SenseLab sans avoir participé à son devenir. La projection se manifeste dans la confrontation ludique et affective du corps. Pour accéder au lieu de rencontre, chaque participant-e doit traverser une centaine de ballons dans l’espace sombre exigu d’une boîte peinte en noir. Chaque corps en ressort avec un visage coloré et un sourire contagieux. Cette fois, l’agencement événementiel se compose de l’énonciation du dispositif (un espace clos rempli d’obstacles) croisée à la co-énonciation de chaque participant-e qui se module, non pas à travers le langage verbal mais à travers celui du corps. Comment la projection « donnée » (l’immersion) en tension avec la projection « donnante » (l’interaction physique) alimentent-elles l’événement esthétique ? Le jeu de forces et d’affects mobilise directement la proprioception, la kinesthésie et le mouvement. Dans le croisement des forces plastiques, sensorimotrices, attentionnelles et imaginaires, les dimensions projectives participent aux affects subjectifs et aux effets machiniques de l’événement esthétique.

Après la sortie de la boîte noire

En somme, ces trois activités, la mise en commun des groups de lecture, la recherche-création Into the Midst et l’expérimentation de la boîte noire After Lygia Clark exemplifient certaines dimensions pédagogiques radicales incarnées par le SenseLab, dont Erin Manning et Brian Massumi résument le rôle ainsi :

Its job is to generate outside prolongations of its activity that ripple into distant pools of potential. Ripple-effect: one idea becomes a seed for organization, which becomes a proposition for a concept, which becomes a problem for art, for politics, for philosophy, that may, if the conditions are ripe, resolve itself into the triggering of an event of collective experimentation and creative expression (Manning & Massumi 2014: 151).

Ces effets d’ondulation d’une idée à un problème, d’une organisation à un projet sont portés par l’agencement des énonciations verbales, corporelles et techniques. Le choc des idées, leur métabolisation dans le mouvement et la confrontation d’interfaces matérielles ou d’intercesseurs abstraits complexifient le projet et ses projections durant tout le processus. Des tensions entre projet rêvé, projection machinique et projection actualisée résulte un événement esthétique en constant déroulement.

Au-delà du dôme de projection à habiter et du mur de ballons à traverser, les dimensions projectives de la recherche-création collective au SenseLab participent à la radicalisation de la pédagogie. En mode préparatoire, la projection (le lancer en avant, le jet des conditions) d’un Événement propulse à tâtons les étapes de son devenir. On avance un pas au-delà de celui qu’on vient d’effectuer, parfois en trébuchant, à la recherche constante d’équilibre à partir des déséquilibres novateurs. En mode réalisation, le dispositif technoartistique projette et croise images, sons et mouvements dans une chorégraphie multiforme comme avec Into the Midst. En mode expérimentation de la boîte noire par exemple, le corps s’immerse dans des dimensions inhabituelles qui favorisent les conditions d’une rencontre créative.

Le déploiement d’un processus relève de l’engagement de tout un chacun, sur un mode à la fois individuel et collectif. En jouant le rôle d’une sorte de colle, l’affect intensifie les effets et permet de pétrir les couches déterritorialisées de la quadrature des entités en processus collectif. Guattari appellent ces mouvements « transistance » :

Cette double capacité des traits intensifs de singulariser et de transversaliser l’existence, de leur conférer, d’une part, une persistance locale et, d’autre part, une consistance transversaliste – une transistance – ne peut être pleinement saisie par les modes rationnels de connaissance discursive : elle n’est donnée qu’à travers une appréhension de l’ordre de l’affect, une saisie transférentielle globale (Guattari 1989: 13).

De toutes sortes de manières, la pédagogie radicale favorise le devenir de l’événement esthétique. Dans la dimension immersive, le projet imagine des déploiements inusités qui deviennent encore plus inusités dans leur actualisation. Dans le dynamisme de ses vecteurs projectifs, le projet croise des chemins de traverse entre univers incorporels, territoires existentiels, flux et embranchements, du local au global.

Notes

[1] Récits de pratiques sur Into the Midst, ARCHÉE:

Décembre 2013: http://archee.qc.ca/archives/sommaire_2013_12.php

Février 2014: http://archee.qc.ca/archives/sommaire_2014_02.php

Avril 2014: http://archee.qc.ca/archives/sommaire_2014_04

Bibliographie

Boisclair, Louise. « Fragments archéologiques ». Archée, décembre 2013

http://archee.qc.ca/ar.php?page=article&no=446

Guattari, Félix. Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Galilée, 1989.

Manning, Erin. 2013. « Dancing the constraints ». Archée, décembre,

http://archee.qc.ca/ar.php?page=article&no=445

Manning, Erin et Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act. Passages in the Ecology of

Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Eight Very Vary(s) Towards a Program of Mistakes-on-Purpose

Jondi Keane
School of Communication and Creative Arts,
Deakin University, Melbourne

In 2007, I spent eight weeks in Residency at the Architectural Body Research Foundation (Houston Street, NY, NY) with Arakawa and Madeline Gins. In addition to discussing current projects, meeting researcher practitioners and students who would come by the office or talking to people on the phone who had just written or done something of interest, reviewing texts and discussing pressing ideas, Madeline had started work on an Encyclopaedia of Mistakes prompted by the Mistakes on Purpose Procedure. Every afternoon we would spend three hours or more at the end of the day working on the spectrum and placement of mistakes on the spectrum, lists of mistakes and refinement of what the role of mistakes might be across the organism-person-surround and the potential for perceptual knowing. As the work is an unfinished 31 page manuscript, I will not cite it directly but rather speak about it and the thinking process that went into the many many versions and amendments that we produced in February and March of 2007.

During one afternoon discussion, Arakawa, always within earshot of the ongoing work, joined the conversation. We wondered about the “organism that does not want to person” – this is the mistake of remaining an organism that persons. Arakawa commented that Biotopological spitting and Bioscleave landing site in biotolopogy will seem super abstract. Every foundation is 99% mistakes but some part is not a mistake at all. Madeline replied that all the positions on the spectrum are permeating each other. Do we need to indicate ages as well? Madeline was particularly interested at the time in a notion of “selfing” and what this would entail. We discussed the possibility that the organism and person are perhaps too soon interspersed, or already sprinkled with person, even in the womb. We decided tentatively that managing separation and separateness is a skill. Madeline thought that feeling might be “selfing” in a certain way. Arakawa questioned what “certain” meant in this instance. The suggestion was entertained that although feeling brings “selfing,” Madeline stressed that it is possible to drown in one’s own sensorium.

The following texts are variations to Madeline and Arakawa’s request to produce an editor’s introduction. The shifts and changes to each version are not just an indicative of a writing process but of coming to terms, literally, with the radical tentativeness that the terminological junction raises. Writing that chases the tail of its co-emergent meaning is very much like the tremblant jewellery of the 19th century in which each jewel is hinged allowing each stone and link many more degrees of freedom, creating a dancing and trembling of light that is kinetically linked to the wearers movements. In this way the process of learning is, or needs to be under constant adjustment.

The notion of the world as a continuity of differences in movement in which smooth space affords degrees of freedom is, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994), the production of continual movement and change. This mode of engagement consists in a becoming-minor and a radical deterritorialization and affective intensification (1987: 106) that opens language, politicizes utterance and action and emphasizes the collective value of everything. To intensify the becoming-minor of pedagogy is to embrace continuous variation and implement, whenever possible, a process of the very vary.

Very Vary 1. Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes Possible Subtitles: Natural History of Mistakes / How not to die by mistake(s) / Mistakedom / DIY Mistakes / How-to mistake(s) / DIY: Adjusting everything

Much of our time is spent changing know-how into how-to. The encyclopaedia is a way to explore the implications of key actions in Arakawa and Gins’ work such as cleaving, forming blank, tentativeness, apportioning, approximating, indirectness and non-ironic irony which are some of the basic feeling-thinking activities that constitute procedural architecture. One of the objectives of their project is to transform an “organism that persons” into an “architectural body” – a organism-person-surround able to re-enter all the connections, habits, activities and systems that evolutionary, historical, cultural and idiosyncratic forces have set in place (set in stone/packed in ice). One of the obstacles to the deregulation of the identity boundaries of “organisms that person” is the persistent tendency to locate a phenomenon within a context of philosophy and science. The encyclopaedia of Mistakes represents an ongoing attempt to go back to a more basic and smaller phenomenon located in a barer sensation or sensing (the experience of a sensation), which Arakawa and Gins call “sited awareness” using “landing sites” and “landing site configurations”.

Whereas the production of an encyclopaedia or a history is vital, this work (termed multiply) must be used as a heuristic tool, a sequence of constraints for perceptual learning and a bodily prompt. For example, the mistakes set out herein form the basis of cleaving idea-things so that critical resemblances may emerge within perceiving. In this way the types of operations and the speed of biotopology may be rethought and re-felt. The initiation, direction and management of change are at stake – literally how a person may configure perception and action across an increasing number of sites within and across the organism-person-surround. Noting and correlating what the ability to reconfigure biotopology would be, and how it is built from the guidance of action rather than a condition to which the “organism that persons” adheres increases the modes by which actualization may occur.

The mistakes articulated and connected in this mistake-ridden encyclopaedia constitute a first step to the literal building connections that would allow persons perceptual access to the sensations of relational qualities or to that which cannot be touched. In this way an “organism that persons” (Gins & Arakawa 2002: 1-4) may perceive something that is still unformed, de-stratified, potential, virtual or blank. An encyclopaedia of mistakes should lead to the an ability to enact procedures such as the Mistakes on Purpose Procedure in which a mistake is built in order to find out the mistakes one is liable or likely to make and thereby focus attention and effort into the maintaining of difference (different-ness) so as not to smooth out the sensations of perception into a whole or unified totality. A Mistakedom (sites where mistakes happen) comprised of as many historical and probable mistakes and mapped with encyclopaedic rigour gives organisms that person access to a form of re-entry; a practice, if you will, that emphasizes what is different in each recursion and therefore what is potentially added to landing site configurations. Words alone will not achieve movement through the environment necessary to increase connectivity or atmospheric intricateness, but the Encyclopaedia of Mistakes does provide an anticipatory framework, which exposes bias and preference at molecular, cellular, organic, environmental, global and galactic scales. Becoming procedurally architectural (both joined and distinct from the environment) requires that we begin to engage with operations that have been sequestered in larger time scales and larger flows of mass-energy – we must become directly indirect, we must become eccentric, we must go head over heels even without moving, we must say one and think two.

The way a mistake is represented in relation to know-how significantly decreases its effectiveness for learning how-to. Rather than suggesting that mistakes identify the inherent flaw in each step, position, action or perception, the encyclopaedia embraces the impossibility of any thing realizing its multiple potentials and uses the surplus produced when humans engage with the impossible to affect biotopological possibilities. Impossibility, infinity or, in fact, any image of things larger or smaller than our ability to comprehend events on that scale, increases an awareness of landings sites that could not be increased in

any other way. When organism-persons are primed for actions in response to conditions that do not yet exist (think of the effect of stories such as The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, One Thousand and One Nights, Remembrance of Things Past, Finnegan’s Wake, the Maximus Poems, A Thousand Plateaus, Helen Keller or Arakawa), they pre-adapt, exadapt or adapt in advance and in doing so, begin to actualize the imaginary, impossible the things that are one reaction step away from the actual (adjacent possible). Mistakes are a fruitful field for exadaptations and, since they are responses, solutions or questions that are mismatched to a current state or condition, they represent untapped potential.

Very Vary 2.

Much of our time is spent changing know-how into how-to. One of the objectives of Arakawa and Gins’ project is to transform an “organism that persons” into an “architectural body” – a organism-person-surround able to re-enter all the connections, habits, activities and systems that evolutionary, historical, cultural and idiosyncratic forces have set in place (set in stone/packed in ice). One of the obstacles to the deregulation of the identity boundaries of “organisms that person” is the persistent tendency to locate a phenomenon within a context of philosophy and science. The encyclopaedia of Mistakes represents an ongoing attempt to go back to a more basic and smaller phenomenon located in a barer sensation or sensing (the experience of a sensation), which Arakawa and Gins call “sited awareness” using “landing sites” and “landing site configurations”.

The initiation, direction and management of change are at stake – literally how a person may configure perception and action across an increasing number of sites within and across the organism-person-surround. Noting and correlating what the ability to reconfigure biotopology would be, and how it is built from the guidance of action rather than a condition to which the “organism that persons” adheres increases the modes by which actualization may occur. The mistakes articulated and connected in this mistake-ridden encyclopaedia constitute a first step to the literal building connections that would allow persons perceptual access to the sensations of relational qualities or to that which cannot be touched. In this way an “organism that persons” may perceive something that is still unformed, destratified, potential, virtual or blank. An encyclopaedia of mistakes should lead to the ability to enact procedures such as the Mistakes on Purpose Procedure in which a mistake is built in order to find out the mistakes one is liable or likely to make and thereby focus attention and effort into the maintaining of difference (different-ness) so as not to smooth out the sensations of perception into a whole or unified totality.

The way a mistake is represented in relation to know-how significantly decreases its effectiveness for learning how-to. Rather than suggesting that mistake identify the inherent flaw in each step, position, action or perception, the encyclopaedia embraces the impossibility of any thing realizing its multiple potentials and uses the surplus produced when humans engage with the impossible to affect biotopological possibilities. Impossibility, infinity or, in fact, any image of things larger or smaller than our ability to comprehend events on that scale, increases an awareness of landings sites that could not be increased in any other way. When organism-persons are primed for actions in response to conditions that do not yet exist (think of the effect of stories such as The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, One Thousand and One Nights, Remembrance of Things Past, Finnegan’s Wake, the Maximus Poems, A Thousand Plateaus, Helen Keller or Arakawa), they pre-adapt, exaptation or adapt in advance and, in doing so, begin to actualize the imaginary, impossible things that are one reaction step away from the actual (adjacent possible). Mistakes are a fruitful field for exaptation and, since they are responses, solutions or questions that are mismatched to a current state or condition, they represent untapped potential.

Very Vary 3.

To learn from one’s mistakes is very different than learning how to make mistakes. To utter the first statement one would have to comply with a historical notion of perfection and excellence in which our reality is expressed through tragedy and the tragic. To utter the latter phrase one would operate on the supposition that we are “world-forming inhabitants,” co-selecting and coordinating what will come to pass. Such a non-dualistic position (existential ontology) leaves open the possibility to re-enter the patterns that constitute evolutionary history, and by doing so, make or take the opportunity to explore and develop the adjacent possible – all species of events that are exist as potential, yet unrealized possibilities. In evolutionary terms, the way in which one possibility over another is actualized within a set of conditions – initiating change – may be described as pre-adaptive or exaptation. This Encyclopaedia of Mistake(s) proposes that communal action must be taken and taken again, to turn know-how into ethical how-to. A person’s “take” on something signals, in a vague way, an active engagement or re-entry into more passive states of “being” a certain way or “having” a certain skill (taking care vs. being careful; in the French language “prendre conscience”, to take awareness, vs. the English language vernacular of being aware or having awareness of x or y). Knowledge is something one has while learning is something that one does.

Rather than position the human as inherently mistaken, the Encyclopaedia supposes that post-humans have learned the value of making mistakes count. The human species’ initial mistake might be to ritualize the tendency to separate perceptual learning from our symbolizing capacity. The connection between language as primer and prompt initiate change in the body by making the body begin an activity, a regime, the taking of a direction, before one has turned oneself to the task. In this way an Encyclopaedia of Mistake(s) lends itself to the practice of embodied cognition, in which the biological basis of change is connected to the capacity to detect unanticipated conditions of potential, nextness, openness and otherness. A practice cannot proceed without the possibility, compiled here as a practical encyclopaedia, to experience the configurations within and across the organism-person-surround that make the adjacent possible possible.

Mistakes provide a home for the uncertainty and inaccuracy of identity. A mistake is often nothing more than surplus desire. A person only makes mistakes with an idea in mind. The faux pas never described the dangerous step on a tightrope or a rock climb; it is confined to the categorical mistake of social convention, where a wrong step impacts upon the virtuality of human networks. Identity and its attendant trappings mar the future because it constrains the realm of possibility in highly formal and systematic ways. It is the mistake of any encyclopaedia to propose that its contents are comprehensive and equally a mistake for its contents to be expressed apprehensively. However, if comprehension and apprehension are changed from conditions of states to qualities of comprehensiveness and apprehensiveness, a productive tentativeness emerges to erode the fixedness of identity opening the floodgates so that many excluded relations surge in.

Very Vary 4.

Consistent with Arakawa and Gins’ prior published work, their discursive research is devised to operate in close relation to their built works in an effort to make the familiar top-down conceptual processing pass through the bottom-up perceptual processing and vice versa. The cleaving that occurs as a result of re-familiarizing oneself with what an organism-person is already capable opens the number of surfaces and sites to awareness. The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes, to the extent that it present findings and stimulates research, provides an alternative configuration of information sufficient for becoming architecturally procedural – that is to say, a re-coupling the world that has been pulled apart by tendencies of dualistic thought. If the objective of Arakawa and Gins’ project is to enable an organism that persons to become an organism–person–surround (architectural body) then the Encyclopaedia of Mistakes operates as a set of discursive sequences that would enable a person to make “mistakes on purpose” (see “Mistakes on Purpose Procedure” in Gins & Arakawa 2006: 196). It is, in the strictest sense of the word a kinetic discourse whose aim is to prompt (cause) to move.

Mobility and the prompts to be moved cannot, in and of themselves, change our automatic functions into sufficiently architectural modes of sensing. The Encyclopaedia of Mistakes may also be considered a reference guide or a how-to source that will contribute to person’s capacity to: a) increase sites of awareness that mistakes make perceivable, b) explore the relational qualities of that which we cannot touch, and c) anticipate how forms may emerge from all that is co-possible or virtual (unformed, de-stratified or blank). The evolution and cultural history of the human has been directed by consequences of our ways of forming “forming blank.” The present study of mistakes asks the question: “how can we choose co-possibility – more than one possibility at a time?” “Saying one and thinking two” is not a paradoxical quandary for the mind, it is an embodied disposition that challenges the organism’s commitment to closure and the rigidity of identity boundaries. To expose preference at every scale of perception and action – from the cellular to the planetary – the organism-person becomes, pre-adapts (or exaptation) to conditions that do not yet have a yet.

Very Vary 5. Natural History of Mistakes

Cleaving is the process through which the biosphere is constantly joining and separating to form a living Bioscleave. Keeping track of all scales of action and all the operations involved in cleaving is not possible. Since every part of cleaving has a different reality, something else—a set of tools and heuristic approaches—must be introduced in order to observe the way cleaving is regulated and constrained. The Reversible Destiny Project is an interactive communal registry and one of the first attempts to catalogue and compile the use of “landing sites,” a note-taking process that makes our biotopological condition perceptible. [Biotopology emphasizes interconnectedness by dissolving boundary conditions across discrete forms of life into a life-supporting event-fabric]. The compilation of all of which we become aware, increases our capacity to render distinctions tentative (nature and culture, organism and environment, thought and feeling) and challenges the organism-person’s commitment to closure.

Procedural architecture, as the process by which noting becomes the way questions can be formulated as environmental objects, presents tendencies and preferences that arise in the learning process. But, where might procedural architecture lead? If “the ‘organism that persons’ is the first step on the path to the architectural body,” (Gins & Arakawa 202: 2) then mistakes (mis-takes) and mis-matchings of body to the environment are as important as successful recognition and anticipation of affordances and functions. Part of the Reversible Destiny Project and the process by which architectures might be inverted and assembled would include an ability to make mistakes-on-purpose [Mistake on Purpose Procedure: “the building of mistakes in order to find out the mistakes one is liable and likely to make.”] At one point an Encyclopaedia of mistakes was being compiled, but alas there was not time for Arakawa and Gins to complete it.

Architectural procedures, as tools that aid the guidance of actions, can be developed to identify the myriad ways we habitually burrow into exigency (automaticity) and redirect or parlay automaticity towards new aims. Arakawa and Gins’ approach to the problem of reversibility involves the production and exploration of innumerable degrees of freedom that may result in omni-directionality. Ultimately freedom and constraint are useful only to the extent that they are used by an organism-person to pre-adapt or adapt-in-advance to the selective pressures of future conditions. Whether a mistake is big or small is not the main concern; to construct is the most important thing.

Very Vary 6. Introduction to The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes /

Cleaving is the process through which the biosphere is constantly joining and separating to form a living Bioscleave. Keeping track of all scales of action and all the operations involved in cleaving is not possible. Since every part of cleaving has a different reality, something else, a set of tools and heuristic approaches, must be introduced in order to observe the way cleaving is regulated and constrained. The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes / Natural History of Mistakes is an interactive communal registry and one of the first attempts to catalogue and compile the use of “landing sites” or neutral note-taking that make our biotopological condition perceptible. [Biotopology emphasizes interconnectedness by dissolving boundary conditions across discrete forms of life into a life-supporting event-fabric]. The Encyclopaedia increases our capacity to render distinctions (nature and culture, organism and environment, thought and feeling) tentative and thereby may anticipate our own automaticity, that is to say, the myriad ways we habitually burrow into exigency. Extending the site of person is difficult and painful for it requires challenging the organism-person’s commitment to closure.

Where might The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes lead? If “The organism that persons is the first step on the path to the architectural body,” then the Encyclopaedia is the first step to the Mistake on Purpose Procedure: the building of mistakes in order to find out the mistakes one is liable and likely to make. Tools that aid the anticipatory guidance of actions are crucial to daily research and reversible destiny. Reversibility or omni-directionality requires that innumerable degrees of freedom become part of lived-experience. Used in tandem with procedural architecture, the Encyclopedia describes situations that can be used to prime an organism-person to pre-adapt or adapt-in-advance the selective pressures of future conditions. Big or small mistakes are not the main concern; we must put all our mistakes together. To construct is the most important thing.

Very Vary 7. Introduction to The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes /

Cleaving is the process through which the biosphere is constantly joining and separating to form a living Bioscleave. Keeping track of all scales of action and all the operations involved in cleaving is not possible. Since every part of cleaving has a different reality, something else, a set of tools and heuristic approaches, must be introduced in order to observe the way cleaving is regulated and constrained. The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes is an interactive communal registry and one of the first attempts to catalogue and compile the use of “landing sites” (neutral note-taking) that make our biotopological condition perceptible. [Biotopology emphasizes interconnectedness by dissolving boundary conditions across discrete forms of life into a life-supporting event-fabric]. The Encyclopaedia increases our capacity to render distinctions (nature and culture, organism and environment, thought and feeling) tentative, challenging the organism-person’s commitment to closure.

Where might The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes lead? If “The organism that persons is the first step on the path to the architectural body,” then the Encyclopaedia of Mistakes is the first step to the Mistake on Purpose Procedure: “the building of mistakes in order to find out the mistakes one is liable and likely to make.” Tools that aid the guidance of actions (such as procedural architecture) enable us to anticipate our own automaticity, that is to say, become aware of the myriad ways we habitually burrow into exigency. Arakawa and Gins’ approach to the problem of reversibility involves producing and maintaining innumerable degrees of freedom towards becoming omnidirectional (an architectural body). Used in tandem with procedural architecture, the Encyclopedia presents tendencies and preference that arise in the learning process, which can be used to prime an organism-person to pre-adapt or adapt-in-advance the selective pressures of future conditions. Whether a mistake is big or small is not the main concern. To construct is the most important thing.

Very Vary 8.

Introduction to The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes /

Natural History of Mistakes

How-To Mistake /

DIY: Adjusting Everything

Cleaving is the process through which the biosphere is constantly joining and separating to form a living Bioscleave. Keeping track of all scales of action and all the operations involved in cleaving is not possible. Since every part of cleaving has a different reality, something else, a set of tools and heuristic approaches, must be introduced in order to observe the way cleaving is regulated and constrained. The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes is an interactive communal registry and one of the first attempts to catalogue and compile the use of “landing sites,” a neutral note taking process that makes our biotopological condition perceptible. [Biotopology emphasizes interconnectedness by dissolving boundary conditions across discrete forms of life into a life-supporting event-fabric]. An Encyclopaedia compiled for this purpose, increases our capacity to render distinctions tentative (nature and culture, organism and environment, thought and feeling) and challenges the organism-person’s commitment to closure.

Used in tandem with procedural architecture, The Mistake-ridden Encyclopaedia of Mistakes presents tendencies and preferences that arise as a person adjusts to a mistake, even in the midst of making the mistake. Beyond the remedial, where might an Encyclopaedia of Mistakes lead? If “the ‘organism that persons’ is the first step on the path to the architectural body,” then The Encyclopaedia of Mistakes is the first step to making mistakes on purpose. [Mistake on Purpose Procedure: “the building of mistakes in order to find out the mistakes one is liable and likely to make.”] Tools that aid the guidance of actions can be developed to effectively anticipate the myriad ways we habitually burrow into exigency. Arakawa and Gins’ approach the problem of breaking out of automaticity and moving towards reversibility by producing and exploring innumerable degrees of freedom associated with omni-directionality. Ultimately, freedom and constraint are useful only to the extent that they help an organism-person pre-adapt or adapt-in-advance of the selective pressures of future conditions. Whether a mistake is big or small is not the main concern; increasing the capacity to construct is the most important thing.

(Below - Front page as of 2008 including those who had agreed to be editors on the project)

ads

Works Cited

Gins, Madeline and Arakawa. Architectural Body. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Gins, Madeline and Arakawa. Making Dying Illegal. Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century. New York: Roof Books, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

A Small Emergent Sadness - Some Thoughts and Sentiments Around Teaching - Learning - Thinking - Living

Mayra Morales

Dear ,

So many planes of voices spin around in relation to how I felt in Mexico teaching last summer. A small sadness emerged every time the students would state things like “in the end everyone perceives differently and it's up to a person to decide what's good or bad, but then there's things that are definitely bad that need to be avoided like a lack of family or like illness or like nudity and of course violence, except when it is justified.” These words are not exact but they are an approximation of what’s left circulating around the thinking-feeling environment. Also these kinds of statements are found sometimes in the street, in café conversations at the neighbouring table or around the corner. These kinds of statements reveal to me in their interior an attachment to perception in the subject-person, and definitely a preconceived notion of the world cut apart into good and bad. A lot of the students were open and fantastic, don't get me wrong, as a matter of fact a majority was ready to create thought that was challenging and productive for a life to come! But some of them — and for some reason those some were the ones that hit me stronger — some of them are very convinced of a world out there with pre-established rules and values and even convinced that knowledge is something static and that as such it belongs to “them.” Mostly, I was puzzled by how convinced they seemed to be about knowing things that for me are highly problematic: “There needs to be parameters for knowing what's ugly so we know what to like;” “art and expressions (cultural expressions) need to be meaningful (representationally);” “in the end, cultural expressions don't really matter because it's all about how to make a living and getting a job that pays for a good life; ” “feelings are defined and happiness is opposed to sadness and happiness goes hand in hand with beauty and smiles;” “we're socially autistic because we prefer technology over talking with each other” (this one already assuming the autistic spectrum as a lack of relation); “art expresses (pure and profound) feelings and always has something to say.”

I listened carefully to the compositions of these kinds of statements, trying to figure out alongside Nietzsche where these ideas come from and what their implications are for how we move or don’t move in the world. I kept thinking things like: “How to move within the spaces of those rigid statements without formulating other rigidities?”; “How glad I am that there are complex places in the world where language is much more careful with how it moves with the movements of what happens instead of trying to pinpoint them, limiting them in their expressivity, and therefore even limiting life forms.”

One thing that pinched me a lot was that some students were a bit uncomfortable with some artistic expressions that were shown in class, especially for example Lygia Clark. Some of them would come and complain at the end of the class saying that for them “there are some expressions that are called art that shouldn't be shown in class,” apparently these expressions for them “are horrible because they have bodies twirling around and it is not a proper way for the bodies of people to behave!” This made me think: “What century is this?” Then I read that professor Peter Pál Pelbart from Brazil was accused of showing “immoral and undisciplined material in his class” and I thought: “It is not only my perception, there's a kind of rigidity with regard to life expressions going around!”

My sadness, I guess, is related to how these statements are not only statements but are also engaged with how people live and relate with each other and with the world. They reveal what gets discarded for not gathering enough parameters to be within the range of the acceptable. And also how these ideas in the small scale of a 70 student classroom emerge from a larger scale. I kept thinking: “We have a lot of work to do! Urgently!”

I had a student from last year who came this year because she enjoyed the class and she wanted to take it again. Then there was this guy in the class who said such amazing things that I almost jumped up and said: “Hey, let’s work together!” But sometimes I get discouraged when I think we can simply jump up and work together because the student-teacher barrier built itself from the bricks of the same rigidities I’m trying to explore here. There were of course also some amazingly brilliant thinkers! Something kept reminding me that I should focus on those students and that I shouldn't get saddened by some, according to me, problematic statements. It also reminded me that I needed to consider how learning takes time and that what these students today assert, perhaps tomorrow will start to move differently, shifted by some small gestures that will have emerged during or around class or even somewhere else where learning also happens. Despite this, for some reason I still felt unprepared for the challenge of those rigidities. On the other hand I felt thankful for having the opportunity to explore other ways of thinking-doing-expressing and composing. Sometimes I also felt a bit angry that there are so many pockets in the world that don't take the time to explore the movements within movements of what gets thought/taught and circulated and felt as sad rigidities.

Oh well. I wanted to share that because for some reason it has been taking a lot of space in my mind. That and also in my dreams, spending so much time with nice conversations with my father. I just keep dreaming that he’s there all chatty and healthy and we are just there spending time together. This has also taken a lot of the thinking processes into notions of pain and health and how these notions are

closely related to my sadness around rigidity formation processes. I wonder how rigid thoughts carry us in the way we relate with illness for example, can there be other ways, can illness have other values for instance? Other than “Oh illness - argh - get away from that!” And jumping right away into qualifying it as bad for you. Again the slicing of the world in two halves of good and bad. There must be a more movable way to relate with these kind of issues-sentiments, an else-way! How else?

In other realms but still related within the emergent feeling, I joined a movement class, now as a student. By the second week I just couldn't cope with the so many “don't do it like that, that’s wrong, not like this, look at me, like this,” linked with my body feeling so much pain for having to move in a certain manner and having to reach the standards of a “good” mover who “reaches and shows.” This resonated with my question of why we want to achieve “good” (health) and what is that in the end and if we don't get there, is it because we did something “wrong?” Then when we played with some improvisation structures and some flocking exercises, that stayed with me a lot, together with notions of inevitable rhythms and moving collectively. There! I thought. There are the techniques for finding the openings for moving those rigidities! Perhaps. Now how do I tell that to my sadness?

I also had a great time in Mexico after the teaching month was over. I took time for eating, walking, talking with family, driving the road, spending time at the beach and with the grapevine. However, during those resting moments, some questions were raised around my own learning processes: “So what are your questions?;” “What method are you using?; ” “Do you know what you'll be writing about?;” “What do you guys do in the research group?” At some point I felt as if knowledge was this thing that you put in a box and deliver with assembling instructions to build “your own” shelf from a prefabricated mold. These questions came back during my dreams and started putting me under some pressure. I dreamt one day with the SenseLab. In the dream we were exploring a very important question. When I woke up I was almost laughing because our important question was: How to open a door?

Coming back to Montreal has been nice this time. Last week was the week to re-start the engines—as I love calling them now—of the rhythms for coming alive. I've exchanged some conversations and laughter with some colleagues and friends. Some emails with others and some planning as well. So it all feels as though it’s moving. I'm trying to find a studio so as to keep exploring in movement many ways to open rigid formations and also to see if these explorations could happen in a group at least once a week because I really miss that as an ongoing part of a thinking practice, especially to keep investigating how, how to move rigidities and open toward other modes of life?

This term I will be working with our ongoing “it is not a performance” explorations. I don't know exactly where that's going but it is happening and full of force in a very gentle way. Although these explorations do not need to be part of my research, for sure they are related to that sadness and to an attempt to move with what’s moving in ways that try to bifurcate from rigid formations toward uncontainable expressivity. I'm also very excited to find ways to keep moving with our partners, with the Movements of Thought and Knots of Thought sessions. Full of ideas and energy, but mostly full of calm for respecting the processes that are already spinning while bringing into question our own comfort zones which sometimes tend themselves toward their own rigid calcifications.

Sometimes the sadness flips into a fear of demands or rigid expectations within the teaching-learning processes. But I guess if I keep some engine rhythms warm enough, things will start shaping (hopefully not rigidly) porously and powerfully to tend to the urgency that my sadness calls for.

A last note. I now realize that in this letter, the notion of rigidity is not opposed to what moves. What moves repeats its own movement paths and in its repetition it tends toward agglomeration of hardening incrustations. What this sadness feels is the temporalities that stay put in those rigidities. The question then would be: How to find the momentum to keep those rigidities in place only as long as they need to be. This morning I heard two kids talking joyfully to each other in minus 30 degrees: “Do you know that cold doesn’t really exist?” one said. “Oh yes, I know, cold is only a transfer of heat, isn’t it?”, the other kid said in a most flowingly open tone. Hopefully in that transfer, there goes my sadness for now.

Most sincerely yours,

m:m

5.
We are in a Social Emergency. Now What?

Kenneth Bailey & Lori Lobenstine (Design Studio for Social Intervention)

279-284

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

if the earth is the pedagogy…

Ronald Rose-Antoinette
Université Paris VIII

if the Earth is the pedagogy,

if theory happens with-in the land, and knowing with-in time,

if there is nothing to be known, to be studied,

to be practiced outside of what is lived, immanently,

if the decolonization of the soul is tantamount to the liberation of our senses,

and intuition a window on our growth, then pedagogy is in the feeling.

(Quick) Notes on the Future and Style of Pedagogy

My immediate problem is to inquire into the texture and the force of a radical pedagogy. The progress, speed and rhythms of this text are informed by this immediacy.

Let me start with a series of questions. Under what conditions is a radical pedagogy exercised? What values does it entail? What manners of existence, what modes of thought are implicit to its establishment (instauration)? What are the ideas, the perspectives, the style and quality of lives that are vectorized through its textures? What does it say? What does it want? And above all: what does it give? It might be a bit premature to say this right away, but my notes have no vocation to be evolutionary nor historically historic, so I will tell you anyway: it turns out that a radical pedagogy, in order to express its radicality, is inseparable from a critique and a symptomatology of values, especially of its own images and knots. “Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. The creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness” (Deleuze 2006: 87). A critical pedagogy devotes itself to that paradoxical gesture: dwelling in destruction of the saddest passions and in fecund creation (enjoyment) at the same time.

I don’t want to gravitate for too long around the enemy. Institutionalized pedagogy—there it is—has created the false image that knowledge is something that needs to be produced as well as consumed. It rests upon the postulate that there is only value in what can be actually prehended, grasped, or sensuously perceived. Institutionalized pedagogy now tends to coincide with the mandates of neoliberalism: the making of valuable lives, the ordering of the sensible, the exploitation of what it sanctions as useful. As such, it wants to dispense with that which precisely exceeds its own terms: the inactuality of experience. It then goes on to hypostasize the forms of life that are most obedient to its ordering. Uselessness, notwithstanding its indelible importance, is the horror of the neo-normal university. And I don’t think it should come as a shock when I say that the notion of value, as something that can be distributed, possessed by or taken away from anyone—and that has the capacity to fluctuate (more or less)—permeates the organs of our capital times. There is no getting away from the fact that in 'virtue' of our humanity we are continuously subjected to evaluation, to a depreciation or an appreciation of 'our' value. But I ask: should we not transfigurate that virtue, and become less and less perceptible, less and less voluminous to the epidermis of the calculators of depth?

Channeling Nietzsche’s “Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values,” Peter Pál Pelbart reminds us that:

A value, by definition, always results from an evaluation, that’s why the expression ‘estimation of value,’ or ‘appreciation of value’ is capable of defetishizing the idea of value in itself and returning it to the operation of evaluation which is the origin of value. After all, man is the evaluator animal par excellence, the being that measures, that fixes prices, that imagines equivalencies, that establishes hierarchies, that privileges such and such element in comparison with some other, attributing to it a superior weight, or making from it a measurement. (Pelbart 2013: 56)

The pedagogy that I am calling for bears little resemblance to the disciplinary models of education. We cannot but deplore the way that typical forms of education perpetuate the stratification of life, the way they grow in our minds the belief that our goal (if we learn well, if we conform to the institution’s definition of intelligence) [1] is to define who we are and what we’re doing in accordance with a limited series of roles; and that our destiny is indeed to be responsible for something. Sinking into this nihilist vision of existence it is to premeditate, once again, the assassination of its creative impetus.

However, a pedagogy whose keynote is the metamorphosis of reality, instead of being subjected to the demands for definition, instead of being subjected to the highest principles as well as to the oldest values; a pedagogy using the hammer in order to contract (or grasp) new habits, new perceptions, new ways of relating to the world in short, is infinitely more intuitive, more sympathetic and joyful than what the universalist universities administrate. Its radicality runs through dance, literature, cinema, poetry, photography, it runs through the practices and the philosophies which are generated within a world of beliefs, a world that isn’t just believed, but that in fact believes in us no matter what.

She learned to trust herself, her family and her community. She learned the sheer joy of discovery. She learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple. She learned both from the land and with the land. She learned what it felt like to be recognized, seen and appreciated by her community. She comes to know maple sugar with the support of her family and Elders. She comes to know maple sugar in the context of love. (Simpson 2014: 7)

“How does movement let knowing happen?” a dear friend of mine once asked. This is one of the driving questions for me. Because it defies the fallacious idea that knowing presupposes what is to be known, that knowing presupposes its subject. Because it articulates, in its own way, that knowing happens in movement, that knowing happens in time. Because it aspires to discovery.

What else do we need? An image of knowledge as implicit in time and movement, avenging their pre-humanity and rhythmic consistency, as a fundamental stratum of life itself, integrating both chance and necessity into its fabric. Without the wilderness of knowledge risking its very possibility a radical pedagogy has no flesh.

What else can we say? That our most sumptuous works are yet to be made? That the art of our existence is in fact before us?

(By asking what else? we envision a differential and anarchic element in the textures of life. By asking what else? we wonder what forms, what modes, what qualities a life could take.) “The truly important order is the order of quality which the educational procedure should assume” (Whitehead 1967: 29). Quality of living, quality in wondering.

The function of a radical pedagogy is to promote the arts of existence, in a way that accounts for its futurity or incompleteness, minus the neoliberal pandemonium of self-surpassing. Take the survivalist, competitive, post-apocalyptic subject out of the picture. The pedagogy I am proposing and composing here is compatible with an immanent critique of the survivalist economies that we (the student, the worker, the unemployed) are continuously asked to embrace and a pragmatism that gestures in the direction of life’s form-taking (prise).

How do we bring the world to (more) existence? How do we bring it to life, again? One cannot answer these questions without style. Style is the procedure employed in order to re-invigorate existence, to re-launch it again and over again.

There are no imperatives, no obligations that could dictate the form of a radical pedagogy. There is nothing that one must know. There are no objects, no finished entities or complete theories that are to be covered. Truths are always half-truths—betrayed by their own processualities. A thought always crashes in the middle of its flight. (We need to take Bruno Latour’s thematization of the quasi very seriously).

I am drawing the attention to a pedagogy radically different from that which is typically designed and promoted as an arena of consumption. Given our rejection of the disciplinary forms of education, the construction of any such pedagogy can only but remain prototypical. Let us not be captivated by the erection of a model that has the propensity to be co-opted and reproduced. In the meantime, let us not sanctify 'our' practice as one in exception to the others. For a pedagogical machine, coextensive with the earth, is propositional to the core.

As already suggested, the aim is to liquidate the set of possibilities, events, values, so rigid, that one can no longer breathe. As to the technical, pragmatic question how?, it is the function of an ecological environment to rise to the challenge and do all in its power to proliferate the answers. “Something must be exhausted, as Deleuze sensed in The Exhausted, so that a different game may be conceivable…” (Pelbart 2013: 46).

I say, the emphasis must always be on freedom. Now freedom is the way through which new truths are prompted, again, and over again. The creation of truths defies the typical, the norm, it frees ourselves from the impasse of the finite and of the infinite as its eternal corollary. At the core, a radical pedagogy values the surroundings of an actual occasion, inclusive of its own indefiniteness. I am speaking of a freedom that allows for the establishment (instauration) of new values, of different qualities of life, a freedom considerate enough of the minor, of the elusive, of the ephemeral. Do not forget: “Events become and perish. In their becoming they are immediate and then vanish into the past. They are gone; they have perished; they are no more and have passed into not-being” (Whitehead 1967: 237). We do not know the eternal. Nonetheless, we do need to know how to free ourselves from the seductiveness of the grand. Things, ideas, beings, events emerge and perish, and there is absolutely no reason to denigrate our responsibility before them. (We have enough students, enough workers who have responded to the calling to be responsible for, to be indebted). A responsibility before—or sollicitude for—the very ephemerality of an “occasion of experience” (Whitehead) is an important feature of an ethics of relation. The romance of such ethics rests on the belief that it is an absolute necessity to care for the relation, to attune to the passages in the experience. We do not know the eternal: it is sufficient, I believe, to sublimate our passion for what becomes and perishes, for the body transitioning, for the world thresholding. The exercise of freedom, within this paradigm, is tantamount to the exercise of concern, of care. Freedom is the sense through which we know, in the feeling, that there is something else in co-presence of our actual existence.

From emergence to perishing, an event goes through intense transformation. How do we dramatize this process? How do we value the creativity and the sympathy of the eternal return? How do we value becoming over sameness, variation over monotony? How do we value trans-apparition over tedious phenomenality? How do we engage a world replete with processes? How do we believe in it?

The notion of truth as dynamic, processual, is all that is needed. We have suffered much from people who consider truth to be static, who find ways to dissociate repetition from difference, to expel movement and trans-formative forces—forces that, after all, sustain our empirical domain—from phenomenal existence. And yet, truth, to the extent that it is necessarily processual and transformational, carries an anarchic element that challenges its systematic tendencies. “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our formulas. (…) So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation—mutation towards a definite goal, it may be—but still mutation” (James 1907: 147). Given this “process of mutation” how do believe in the “experienceable reality” of the world?

Can we imagine a pedagogy from the perspective of the Earth (from its own point of view)? I do need to plead the case because so much has been done to take as a universal truth that sensation, perception, even thought begin with-in our bodies. But we need to dominate this belief in order to operate the inflexion of thought, and start to imagine different modes of co-composition: where life and death, speed and scale of perception are of paramount importance. Love, laughter, affect, passions of joy and sadness are all in the world; they pre-exist, so to speak, the phenomenological self as the locus of their donation. To me, the objection that feeling is of the essence of a subject is a complete heresy. Bodies are transducers of vitalities—and of necessities—that do not begin and end with a phenomenological subject. The notion of transduction, stolen from Simondon, doubles in language the way through which movement happens through or with us, but never by or for us. My claim belongs to the belief that the locating of thought, of feeling, of perception, of sensation in the personal makes it difficult to experience surprise, novelty, to simply enjoy our lives differently. I belong to a people who sees no beauty, no hope, no joy in a world of essential certitudes. Against the image of an ontic world which fetishizes sameness, identity, instantaneity, I and my fellow dancers, want to announce the advent of an earthly desire; we want to announce the violation of the possessive predicates.

And more importantly, the world itself emerges transformed: the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea presupposing a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes yielding novel and unexpected entities, the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth (de Landa 2002: 6)

Something doing as something undoes.

An earthly pedagogy prehending things not from the outside (in a phenomenological fashion), but from the inside. What does that mean? To posit one’s self as the transcendental observer of a situation’s unfolding is one thing, to inhabit the perspective of the event is another one. We may begin by asking: how do we experience the event from its own point of view? I mean, when we really try to explore the vastitude and the complexity of an ecology (sensuously and non-sensuously perceived), when we risk ourselves at the creation of that zone of indiscernibility between self and other, between host and hosted, when we attempt at this queering of the world worlding (beyond its mere imitation), we not only look at it differently, we build it at a scale that looks beyond its essential or given existence. It goes without saying that in entering a world no longer concerned with the preservation of its essence, the primary question becomes: how a thing can become something else? What is at stake is no longer what is, but how to make what needs to be made. What is at stake is the transformational trajectory of everything that exists, both actually and virtually—really. Put differently, the art of a radical pedagogy, in my opinion, is concerned with the amplification or individuation of those worlds whose mode of existence is still in the minor, in the speculative, pending further existence. It amounts to an existential pluralism that seeks to explore the surplus-value (valeur ajoutée) infusing each actuality with more than its reified existence.

Do not underestimate the irreducibility of existence to one mode, not even to its measurable, extensive qualities. Having said that I want to emphasize that the reality of surplus, as I introduce it here, cannot be identified to or supplemented with the idea that one is always expected to do more, to produce more capital to survive, it cannot be subsumed within the mandate of biocapitalism, nor can it be mediated by any teleological apparatus. More (from us, from others, from life): we know too well the pernicious implications of such neoliberal imperative, as it prioritizes only what a body (the demos) can possibly do—capitalizing on its use-value. No wonder that we find ourselves more and more surrounded by so-called professionals or experts as part of the state’s weaponry, ready to respond to the disasters to come. In short: ‘Be good at what you’re doing.’ But now, good isn’t enough. Be better, be stronger, but not so nice, make yourself even more valuable, for your value exactly depends on this: your ability to react, to be used—timely. Whitehead writes: “Some of the major disasters have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology” (Whitehead 1929:12). So “good” they were bad, leaving us with nothing but an aftertaste of bitterness. Disregarding the potentiality, or the indefinite value conditioning and empowering one’s existence, late biocapitalism has in fact privileged normative and repressive theories of surplus (a limiting of one’s capacity, a defining of one’s affective body). I need to claim that in my account surplus is incommensurable. It designates affect, relation, a vivacity that exceeds mere existence—this or that. Non-volitional surplus, that which isn’t (and perhaps will never) be articulated, is worth the experimentation, worth our attention. Of course, existence can’t be disentangled from its emergent materiality. A thing is still a thing… plus its neguentropic dimension, its life to come, its potential existence. Always in a vital company.

This superfluous dimension of an occasional reality, its associated milieu (milieu associé) as Gilbert Simondon refers to in some of his writings [2], has value for any singularity, any individual, collective or event capable of affecting and being affected, looking, in fact, to individuate, to amplify its capacity to affect and be affected. It is unconceivable to think and to act the political outside of this affective milieu.

A radical pedagogy begins and ends in research-creation you might say. Now, research-creation is in no way some sort of prerogative of the human. Not only forms of life in excess of the human feel, they do also think. Thinking-feeling is the very cornerstone of art: working at the limit of what a body can do. It must be forever forgotten that pedagogy is a human affair. The thought itself devitalizes the field of experimentation. In no part of pedagogy, especially in an environmental, eventful pedagogy, can someone do without creativity, sympathy or animality.

It takes a lot of creativity, of thought activity to give birth to the world we live in.

Faster

I lay it down as a principle that in widening the ecology of perception you inevitably encounter modes of existence that are far more minute, fragile and ephemeral than what our habitual modes of thought and perception have the tendency to filter in. I have no hesitation whatsoever in subscribing to Alfred N. Whitehead’s cautionary (yet very gentle) remarks against what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This fallacy, he says, “consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored as long as we restrict thought to these categories” (Whitehead 1979: 7-8). A school, a classroom, an environment for creative learning that does not incorporate some degree of abstraction in its architecture has in fact no reason to be attended by a creative mind. I mean: how can you not live this abstraction? How can you not assume the indeterminacy of time?

(Faster. Earlier.)

Your method is useless unless you disseminate interest, curiosity, pleasure, unless you value (anexactly, and yet rigorously) the unmeasurable, the rhythms that pressure beyond the threshold of sense-perception. The view here expressed, that the virtual force of perception is as important as that which it consciously prehends, is one any adventurous mind shall endeavour to demonstrate, to film, to sing, to write, to paint. In other words, the radical edict in radical pedagogy provides a prism for thinking the event of perception in the midst of its relationality, in the midst of its non-sensuous prehensions.

The ways are the pedagogies…

sand

How is thought itself possible? [3]

snow

What time do you belong to? [4]

Notes

[1] In fact, the type of intelligence that institutionalized education advocates, within a context of an ongoing colonization, is radically different from what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a thinker of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ancestry, has characterized as a relational, pre-objective and anti-predicative process. In her view, intelligence precedes and exceeds the academic context. It pushes against the limits of colonialist, supremacist forms of education which tend to systematize and generalize experience. (And it must be stressed that a radical pedagogy cannot be circumscribed within a post-colonial theoretical framework. States of colonialism are real and ongoing. There is no “post” that resists the truth of occupied lands, bodies and memories.) Nishnaabeg intelligence cannot be indexed to an intellectual pursuit. It is woven within the land, within its flows, matters and infinite modes of existence. Intelligence amounts to a growing matrix of techniques designed by events or occasions that include the human but are irreducible to it. Also: “Nishnaabeg intelligence is for everyone, not just students, teachers and researchers. It’s not just pedagogy; it’s how to live life.” (Simpson 2014: 18) Simpson, through storytelling, poetry, theory, reminds us that there is intelligence in the technicities of life itself, before its distribution and ordering. A livable intelligence is pragmatically engaged with the earth, the land, its ways; it’s a line of flight. If we let ourselves inspired by Nishnaabeg intelligence, by what it does, by what it aspires to, we might be able to create the conditions for a truly creative and ecological pedagogy.

[2] I need to quote Simondon at length in order to demonstrate the political implications of this abstract reality associated to the individual: “Nous voudrions montrer qu’il faut opérer un retournement dans la recherche du principe d’individuation, en considérant comme primordiale l’opération d’individuation à partir de laquelle l’individu vient à exister et dont il reflète le déroulement, le régime, et enfin les modalités, dans ses caractères. L’individu serait alors saisi comme une réalité relative, une certaine phase de l’être qui suppose comme elle une réalité préindividuelle, et qui, même après l’individuation n’existe pas toute seule, car l’individuation n’épuise pas d’un seul coup les potentiels de la réalité préindividuelle, et d’autre part, ce que l’individuation fait apparaître n’est pas seulement l’individu mais le couple individu-milieu. (…) L’individuation est ainsi considérée comme seule ontogénétique, en tant qu’opération de l’être complet. L’individuation doit alors être considérée comme résolution partielle et relative qui se manifeste dans un système recélant des potentiels et renfermant une certaine incompatibilité par rapport à lui-même, incompatibilité faite de forces, de tensions aussi bien que d’impossibilité d’une interaction entre termes extrêmes des dimensions” (Simondon 1989: 12).

[3] Image credit: Ronald Rose-Antoinette.

[4] Image credit: Ronald Rose-Antoinette.

Works Cited

de Landa, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlison, New York: Columbia, 2006.

James, William. Pragmatism. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1907.

Pelbart, Peter Pál. Cartography of Exhaustion-Nihilism Inside Out. Trans. John Laudenberger, Sao Paulo and Helsinki: n-1 publications, 2013.

Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation”. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 3.3 (2014): 1-25.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1979.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Function of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

La méthode de dramatisation et la question « Qui ? » -
Variations en marge de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie.
SenseLab, printemps 2014

Érik Bordeleau
Senselab, Montréal

0. À l’origine de la constitution de ce dossier de lecture informel et indiscipliné – une entrée en étude, au sens fort que les auteurs de The Undercommons (Autonomedia, 2013) donne à ce mot – se trouve une question, qui a émergée au fil de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (1962) tenue au SenseLab au printemps 2014 : que signifie « pour nous », qu’est-ce qui est en jeu dans la méthode de dramatisation ? En essayant d’y répondre, nous avons été rapidement confrontés à une autre question, plus simple et proprement essentielle, autour de laquelle s’articule l’interprétation proposée par Deleuze de la méthode de dramatisation nietzschéenne: l’importance en tout point déterminante de la question « Qui ? » dans la tentative d’élaboration d’une image de la pensée qui se détourne du clair et distinct de la représentation au profit des processus ontogénétiques d’individuation.

Cette question personnalisante n’est pas allée sans susciter une certaine surprise, voire un léger malaise chez plusieurs d’entre nous. Ne sommes-nous pas en effet portés à tourner notre attention vers l’indétermination et le potentiel qui résident dans la bienheureuse immanence d’une vie ? N’y a-t-il pas un danger de régression humaniste, une tendance à la discrimination et à l’exclusion contraire à notre approche inclusive et écosophique des arts d’exister qui insiste sourdement dans chaque « Qui ? » ? La question « Qui ? » n’active–t-elle pas spontanément un sujet possesseur, n’implique-t-elle pas une tendance à l’appropriation qu’il s’agit précisément de conjurer et de dépasser ?

Dans les lignes qui suivent, je me propose de présenter sommairement – et dans un certain désordre – la méthode de dramatisation telle que Deleuze l’interprète chez Nietzsche et la développe pour son propre compte dans Différence et répétition (1968). Il s’agira de montrer comment la question « Qui ? » s’articule à la rencontre des plans spéculatif et pratique et littéralement importe – en premier lieu peut-être des « personnes vivantes », au sens non-anthropologique que lui donne Alfred N. Whitehead. [1] Finalement, en dialogue libre avec la philosophie pragmatiste des possessions développée par Isabelle Stengers et les différents penseurs et praticiens attachés au groupe d’étude constructiviste de l’université libre de Bruxelles (GECo), j’indiquerai comment cette idée s’accorde avec une pratique de la caractérisation active aux abords du théisme et une conception plutôt guerrière de l’écologie des pratiques.

Qu’on m’excuse le caractère fragmentaire et accéléré de la réflexion qui suit. Il s’agit avant toute chose de partager, sur le mode du survol cartographique, un trajet d’enquête ou d’apprentissage qui se révèlera peut-être aussi une forme de pédagogie radicale, avec l’espoir que malgré l’emportement du geste d’intercession ainsi esquissé, se dégageront quelques inflexions et éléments de pensée à partir desquels opérer des reprises.

1. Le dernier livre d’Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (2013), s’ouvre sur un prélude rédigé par Brian Massumi. Ce dernier y met en lumière la présupposition réciproque du un et du multiple à la base de la philosophie processuelle de Manning à partir de l’analyse d’un passage déterminant de Procès et réalité de Whitehead :

[The term one] stands for the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article “a” or “an”, and the definite article “the”, and the demonstrative “this” or “that”, and the relatives “which or what or how”. It stands for the singularity of an event. The term “many” presupposes the term “one”, and the term “one” presupposes the term “many”. (2013: ix; je souligne)

Massumi montre comment la pensée de l’individuation développée par Manning part du milieu et, forte de l’ouverture processuelle d’un « quoi d’autre » pluriel, révoque toute forme de jugement moral pouvant justifier l’exclusion. C’est un élément qui s’avère d’autant plus crucial que dans Always More Than One, Manning explore un mode de perception dit autiste qui est l’occasion d’une remise en question et d’un élargissement des habitudes perceptives des « neurotypiques ». De fait, l’insistance de Massumi à souligner le potentiel d’inclusion mutuelle qui réside dans la différence qualitative ou le « comment » de l’événement exprime parfaitement l’ethos cultivé au sein du SenseLab. [2] Il en va d’un appartenir-ensemble indiscernable de sa manière ou du ‘comment’ de l’événement. Toujours en lien avec la conception whiteheadienne de l’idée générale, Massumi précise :

Whitehead’s general idea stretches all the way from “the” to “how” . In other words, it is a span of modal variation, a range of kinds or degrees of definiteness inflected by differences in manner (“how”). Although it is all about definiteness, it is not about mutual exclusion. Without the hierarchy of the “the” over the “a”, there is no a priori way of ensuring non-contradiction. This is a logic of mutual inclusion: a logic for the many’s “underlying” belonging-together. (Manning, 2013: xv)

L’enjeu (et la difficulté) est d’arriver à penser une logique d’inclusion mutuelle qui préserve son « potentiel de netteté » (definiteness) [3] et qui ne se résorbe jamais dans l’indistinction d’un commun. Maniérisme radical pourrait-on dire, duquel se dégage une éthique fondée sur le potentiel d’inclusion du « plus que » de l’expérience perceptive et de l’événement. En découle également une politique du potentiel, dont les effets se distinguent sensiblement de la politique des possibles telle qu’elle se définit dans l’optique cosmopolitique d’Isabelle Stengers, porteuse de « gestes spéculatifs » qui s’engagent par et pour un possible qu’il s’agit d’activer dans le présent. Suffit pour l’instant de souligner que l’insistance sur le potentiel relationnel d’inclusion constitue une des inflexions éthico-politiques les plus déterminantes du SenseLab, et que celle-ci conditionne en profondeur la manière dont la question « Qui ? » peut être (non) entendue au sein du collectif. C’est en toute cohérence de cause que la pensée du potentiel relationnel de l’événement développée par Manning culmine dans une célébration de l’affect de vitalité qui anime et traverse une vie. Comme le souligne Massumi :

Process philosophy is how we burst with life, in and of the world. It’s about our worlding. (…) Manning’s word for the singular-generic burstability of life a-worlding across the scales is “a” life (a term adopted from Deleuze). “A” life does not exclude the “this” and the “that” and the “which” and the “what” and the “how”. It doesn’t even exclude the “the”. Emphasizing the “a” is a way of saying that the “the” is not the categorical “The” but the potential for definiteness that comes of the processual mutual inclusion of the definite with the indefinite article, the demonstrative and the relative. (Manning 2013: xvii-xviii)

Massumi montre bien, dans la foulée de Deleuze, comment l’article indéfini « un » est l’indice du champ transcendantal, à partir duquel il devient possible de concevoir « une vie impersonnelle et pourtant singulière, qui dégage un pur événement libéré des accidents de la vie intérieure et extérieure, c’est-à-dire de la subjectivité et de l’objectivité de ce qui arrive. » (Deleuze 2003: 361) Mais comment une telle célébration du débordement de cette vie anonyme et de son potentiel d’inclusion s’accommode-t-elle de la dramatisation d’inspiration nietzschéenne et son sens particulièrement aigu de la sélection ? Dans les dernières pages de Différence et répétition, Deleuze décrit en effet l’Éternel retour comme « temps du drame » et établit une progression fulgurante où la liberté potentielle d’« une » vie se trouve artistiquement contractée « pour qu’enfin la Différence s’exprime, avec une force elle-même répétitive de colère, capable d’introduire la plus étrange sélection, ne serait qu’une contraction ici ou là, c’est-à-dire une liberté pour la fin d’un monde. » (Deleuze 1968: 375). De manière plus schématique donc: comment « une » vie répond-elle à la question « Qui ? » et sa mise sous tension dramatisante ? Est-ce que toute dramatisation n’impliquerait pas, à un degré ou à un autre, un processus de personnalisation/personnification ? [4]

2. Contraste sombre, geste obscur, étonnante et d’autant plus inquiétante étrangeté qu’elle se déprend d’un fond d’extrême proximité. Hiver 2013, Bruxelles, groupe de lecture du GECo. Nous lisons le Foucault de Deleuze. Au détour d’une discussion, Stengers, inspirée et avec un zest de provocation, affirme que « L’immanence: une vie… » de Deleuze, pourtant largement considéré comme son testament philosophique, constitue une grave erreur de parcours, que c’est un texte qui fourvoie. Notons que durant toute la durée du séminaire, chaque occurrence du terme « dehors » autour duquel s’organise la progression dramatique du livre sur Foucault est sévèrement critiqué. [5] Ma lecture de Foucault en clé anonymat ne semble guère bienvenue d’ailleurs. C’est que tout l’effort éthico-philosophique de Stengers, l’importance qu’elle confère à l’explicitation fine des modes par lesquels les éléments hétérogènes d’un agencement font collectif, vise à nous prémunir contre la tendance à la fusion extatique des différences dans un embrasement « commun ». Il s’agit, et c’est sans doute là une des inflexions les plus précieuses de tout son travail, de faire passer que résister à la piété, même lorsqu’il s’agit de Foucault ou de Deleuze, importe… Nul doute, sans même le savoir, l’initiation à la philosophie des possessions avait commencé.

3. Philosophie des possessions est un ouvrage majeur réunissant des auteurs tels que David Lapoujade, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers ou Didier Debaise pour interroger dans une optique pragmatiste des penseurs tels que Simondon, James, Souriau, Dewey, Whitehead et Tarde. Didier Debaise, éditeur du projet, explique:

Le projet qui anime ce livre est de dégager, à partir d'une série de portraits de philosophes du 20ème siècle, les axes fondamentaux de ce que nous proposons d'appeler une “philosophie des possessions”. (...) Notre projet, suivant la proposition de Tarde, peut se résumer en une phrase: substituer à l'ontologie classique et aux catégories qui lui sont associées, une logique de la possession. Les termes varient pour l'exprimer: ‘capture’, ‘prédation’, ‘préhension’, ‘prise’ ou encore ‘appropriation’, mais au fond, ils expriment tous une même opération, un même geste, celui par lequel des éléments psychiques, biologiques, psychiques ou techniques sont intégrés, capturés par un être qui les fait siens. (2011: 5)

Philosophie des possessions est un livre d’une richesse exceptionnelle, chargé d’une indéniable puissance programmatique. Il ne faut pas se laisser abuser par le caractère apparemment conservateur de la question de la possession. Au contraire, les différentes contributions du livre multiplient les manières de battre en brèche l’individu-propriétaire, en restant au plus près du caractère fluctuant de ce qu’un individu dit « sien ». [6] C’est ainsi que Debaise pourra dire qu’il en va dans ce livre d’« un monde de captures qu’il s’agirait d’opposer au monde des clôtures. » (2011: 5)

À la fin de son allocution au colloque sur « Les gestes spéculatifs » en juillet 2013 à Cerisy, Stengers a suggéré une image géophilosophique qui illustre efficacement cette option de pensée. Avec une provocante simplicité, elle a caractérisé les Grecs comme « peuple des entrepreneurs ». Avec ce mot, entrepreneur, elle cherchait à faire entendre le jeu des prises enchevêtrées qui mettent à l’aventure, et la « morsure d’un possible » qui insiste en chacune d’elle. Mais n’est-ce pas une décision périlleuse et surtout partiale de mettre la philosophie sous le signe de l’entreprise? N’y perd-on pas quelque chose comme un accès inconditionné à « l’être » ? L’image du peuple des entrepreneurs diffère profondément de celle où un groupe d’hommes sages, barbus et désœuvrés contemplent la perfection sphérique de l’être, pour reprendre la scène primitive de la philosophie telle que fabulée par Sloterdijk dans Globes, à laquelle nous sommes davantage habitués. [7]

4. Prise, capture, prédation: la poétique de la philosophie des possessions suggère une agressivité naturelle et première qui fait directement écho à la conception pluraliste des forces chez Nietzsche et, en contraste avec la politique animale d’inclusion mutuelle des potentiels disparates, se montre plus encline à détailler le jeu des forces qui découpent, enrôlent, sélectionnent et excluent. On en trouve une indication succincte mais déterminante dans la préface de Bruno Latour à la réédition de son traité métaphysique, Irréductions: « Il s’agit donc de passer des vertiges de la puissance à la simple et banale positivité des forces. » (2001: 8) On voit aisément comment le principe d’irréductibilité à la base de la théorie de l’acteur-réseau de Latour, réaliste et agonique, informe en profondeur la (trop) combative ontologie orientée-objet de Harman et l’esthétique argumentaire de tous ces blogs qui, à sa suite, multiplient les arrêtés doctrinaux et autres « prises de position ». Ce théâtre de forces et d’actants qui se mesurent/ s’éprouvent et s’enrôlent mutuellement semble d’ailleurs préfiguré par ce passage de Nietzsche et la philosophie de Deleuze :

La vraie science est celle de l’activité. (…)« Qu’est-ce qui est actif? Tendre à la puissance ». S’approprier, s’emparer, subjuguer, dominer sont les caractères de la force active. S’approprier veut dire imposer des formes, créer des formes en exploitant les circonstances. (…) Il en est chez Nietzsche comme dans l’énergétique, où l’on appelle noble l’énergie capable de se transformer. La puissance de transformation, le pouvoir dionysiaque, est la première définition de l’activité. (1962: 47-48)

Le rapport polémique au monde (au sens littéral de polemos, « guerre ») qui sous-tend le grand projet diplomatique latourien découle tout naturellement de l’idée d’irréductibilité. Car le grand problème de Latour, c’est de rendre compte de « l’obstination des choses à persister dans l’être » (Latour 2012: 149). Sa poétique actantielle suggère moins une labilité métamorphique et dionysiaque des forces que le défi d’instaurer des agencements qui durent – jusqu’à Enquête sur les modes d’existence, Latour n’aura cesse de rappeler « par quelles séries de petites discontinuités il convient de passer pour obtenir une certaine continuité d’action » (2012: 45). [8] De même, lorsqu’il s’agit pour Stengers d’honorer la puissance métamorphique des agencements et de se « réapproprier l’animisme », son attention se porte d’abord sur l’hétérogénéité des éléments qui entrent en composition, de manière à écarter, « autant que faire se peut » pourrait-on dire, la tentation de penser une puissance de transformation « en général ». [9] Au final, c’est moins les vertigineuses puissances de métamorphose de Dionysos qui intéressent Latour et Stengers que l’agencement actuel des multiples masques qu’il génère.

5. La question « Qui ? » pose le problème de l’appropriation. Dans le cinquième chapitre de son Nietzsche, « Le surhomme contre la dialectique », Deleuze reconstruit pour son compte l’histoire post-hégélienne de la dialectique, et discute en détails de l’influence déterminante de Max Stirner sur la conception nietzschéenne du surhomme. L’allusion à l’auteur de L’unique et sa propriété est en effet incontournable : « Le surhomme me tient à cœur, c’est lui qui est pour moi l’Unique, et non pas l’homme: non pas le prochain, non pas le plus misérable, non pas le plus affligé, non pas le meilleur. » (1962: 188) Deleuze présente ainsi Stirner comme la figure la plus extrême de la dialectique, qui « sut retrouver le chemin de la question : Qui ? », révéler le nihilisme comme vérité de la dialectique et se défaire du concept abstrait de la liberté :

La question: Qu’est-ce que l’homme? Devient: Qui est l’Homme?, et c’est à Toi de répondre. Qu’est-ce que? Visait le concept à réaliser; commençant par qui est, la question n’en est plus une, car la réponse est personnellement présente dans celui qui interroge. (je souligne)

Je n’ai rien contre la liberté, mais je te souhaite plus que de la liberté. Tu ne devrais pas seulement être un homme libre, tu devrais également être un propriétaire. (1962: 184)

Et c’est immédiatement suite à ces deux citations de Stirner que Deleuze pose la question: « Mais qui s’approprie ou se réapproprie? Quelle est l’instance réappropriatrice? » (1962: 184) La réponse nietzschéo-deleuzienne exige le dépassement du moi propriétaire, avec toute l’agressivité du penseur dionysiaque et le self-enjoyment qu’il se doit.

6. Suite à ces remarques préliminaires, voici une série d’extraits de Nietzsche et la philosophie qui retrace l’implication de la question « Qui ? » dans la définition de la méthode de dramatisation.

Il faut en venir à l’idée que partout où l’on constate des effets, c’est qu’une volonté agit sur une volonté. (1962: 8)

Glose α : Cette citation est tirée de Par-delà le bien et le mal. En creux, se profile une première fois la question « qui ? » - du « qui ? » comme principe de caractérisation active. Ce passage ne va pas sans rappeler la méthode paranoïco-critique de Dali – voir son étonnant travail d’enquête dans son livre Le mythe tragique de l’Angelus de Millet, où, armé de sa géniale intuition « paranoïaque », il remonte le cours de l’instauration créatrice du tableau jusqu’au moment où Millet aurait vraisemblablement effacé un tombeau pour le remplacer par une charrette, occultation dont dépendrait le puissant mystère dont cette toile est chargée et qui fascine unanimement depuis. Plus près de nous, on pensera à la définition du travail de thérapeutique proposée par Tobie Nathan, lequel vise à transformer le patient en témoin dans le cadre d’un processus de guérison orienté cosmos. Pour Nathan, pas de métamorphose possible sans des « êtres » tiers auxquels se lier. Et un être, pour Nathan tel qu’il l’a expliqué au colloque de Cerisy sur les gestes spéculatifs, c’est une chose dont on a réussi à identifier l’intention. La puissance métamorphique de l’agencement thérapeutique dépend donc de la capacité à caractériser activement des « volontés ». On dira ainsi que Tobie Nathan met en œuvre une méthode de dramatisation pluraliste qui vise à l’activation généralisée des psychés selon une logique discriminante et intéressée des possessions.

II.

« Quoi donc ? M’écriai-je avec curiosité. – Qui donc? Devrais-tu demander! Ainsi parla Dionysos, puis il se tut de la façon qui lui est particulière, c’est-à-dire en séducteur. » La question : « Qui ? », selon Nietzsche, signifie ceci: une chose étant considérée, quelles sont les forces qui s’en emparent, quelle est la volonté qui la possède? Nous ne sommes conduits à l’essence que par la question: Qui? (…) L’essence, l’être est une réalité perspective et suppose une pluralité. Au fond, c’est toujours la question: qu’est-ce que c’est pour moi? (87; je souligne)

Et ainsi la question : Qui ? résonne pour toutes choses et sur toutes choses : quelle force, quelle volonté? C’est la question tragique. Au plus profond, toute entière elle est tendue vers Dionysos, car Dionysos est le dieu qui se cache et se manifeste (…) la question : Qui ? trouve son instance suprême en Dionysos ou dans la volonté de puissance; Dionysos, la volonté de puissance, est ce qui la remplit autant de fois qu’elle est posée. (…) partout et toujours la volonté de puissance est ce qui. Dionysos est le dieu des métamorphoses, l’un du multiple, l’un qui affirme le multiple et s’affirme du multiple. « Qui donc ? », c’est toujours lui. C’est pourquoi Dionysos se tait en séducteur : le temps de se cacher, de prendre une autre forme et de changer de forces. (1962: 88)

Glose β : La présentation de Dionysos comme « l’un qui affirme le multiple » correspond exactement à la présupposition réciproque de l’un et du multiple mise en lumière par Massumi concernant l’idée générale selon Whitehead. Elle ajoute cependant une dimension temporelle et proprement dramatique – « le temps de se cacher » – à cet élément de logique processuelle, en thématisant l’élément pratique de la différence comme pragmatique de la séduction. La caractérisation nietzschéenne de Dionysos s’articule ainsi à la rencontre des plans spéculatifs et pratiques : « l’affirmation du multiple est la proposition spéculative, comme la joie du divers, la proposition pratique. » (1962: 225) En dernière instance, la question « Qui ? » telle que Nietzsche la pose aboutit à la mise en indétermination active de Dionysos et de la volonté de puissance, dans un geste de dépassement créatif du moi propriétaire. C’est conformément à ce mouvement général de pensée de « la vertu qui donne » que Manning peut écrire :

For Nietzsche’s will to power never situated itself in the subject. For Nietzsche what is at stake is the relational field, how a movement of thought is generated in the radically empirical field of experience. (Choregraphing the political, à paraître)

Manning traduit ainsi dans le langage de l’ontogénèse relationnelle l’élan insondable du Dionysos séducteur et mystérique. Cette affirmation de l’impersonnalité radicale du champ relationnel et de la vertu qui donne est à la source même de l’éthique de la générosité spéculative pratiquée au sein du SenseLab, et définit sa manière « noble » et hautement métamorphique d’hériter de Nietzsche et d’entretenir son horizon de futurité. [10]

III.

La méthode: qu’est-ce qu’il veut, celui qui dit ceci, qui pense ou éprouve cela? Il s’agit de montrer qu’il ne pourrait pas le dire, le penser ou le sentir, s’il n’avait pas telle volonté, telles forces, telle manière d’être. (1962: 88)

Vouloir n’est pas un acte comme les autres. Vouloir est l’instance à la fois génétique et critique de toutes nos actions, sentiments et pensées. La méthode consiste en ceci: rapporter un concept à la volonté de puissance, pour en faire le symptôme d’une volonté sans laquelle il ne pourrait même pas être pensé. Une telle méthode correspond à la question tragique. Elle est elle-même la méthode tragique. Ou plus précisément, si l’on ôte du mot « drame » tout le pathos dialectique et chrétien qui en compromet le sens, elle est méthode de dramatisation. (1962: 89)

Nous ne devons pas être abusés par l’expression: ce que la volonté veut. Ce que veut une volonté n’est pas un objet, un objectif, une fin. Les fins et les objets, même les motifs sont encore des symptômes. Ce que veut une volonté, suivant sa qualité, c’est affirmer sa différence ou nier ce qui diffère. On ne veut jamais que des qualités: le lourd, le léger… Ce qu’une volonté veut, c’est toujours sa propre qualité et la qualité des forces correspondantes. Ce que veut une volonté n’est pas un objet mais un type, le type de celui qui parle, de celui qui pense, qui agit, qui n’agit pas, qui réagit, etc. (…) Or un type est précisément constitué par la qualité de la volonté de puissance, par la nuance de cette qualité et par le rapport de forces correspondant (…) Donc, quand nous demandons: « qu’est-ce que veut celui qui pense ceci ? », nous ne nous éloignons pas de la question fondamentale : « Qui ? », nous lui donnons seulement une règle et un développement méthodiques. Nous demandons, en effet, qu’on réponde à la question, non pas par des exemples, mais par la détermination d’un type. (1962: 89; je souligne)

Glose γ : La méthode de dramatisation nietzschéenne est un art de l’interprétation et de l’évaluation typologique et différentielle. La question « Qui ? » affirme une différence qualitative et se rapporte à une figure « originale » (typos) ou plutôt, suivant l’idée de généalogie, originaire, quelque chose comme un type paradigmatique, toujours à instaurer. En chaque situation, en chaque chose, il s’agit d’identifier, de caractériser un principe génétique interne et qualifié – de la dramatisation comme art des différences qui importent. Il en va d’une pensée par types ou figures qui déterminent une nouvelle image de pensée.

Car si Nietzsche est un penseur qui dramatise les idées, c’est dans la mesure où il procède par mobilisation d’affects: psychodrame de la pensée où les idées sont présentées comme « des événements successifs, à des niveaux divers de tension » (Deleuze 1965: 38), de manière à révéler la topologie accidentée du pathos qui couve sous chaque logos. La méthode de dramatisation agit ainsi comme mise en scène de forces qui le plus souvent restent dissimulées sous les représentations. Elle révoque l’idéal de vérité désintéressée s’adressant à quiconque: le perspectivisme radical inhérent à la question oblige à des mises en jeu locales et situées; un « qui ? » qui sait faire sentir la matérialité vibrante et qualifiée de son expression. [11] D’ailleurs, Nietzsche « penseur sur scène », comme le présente fort justement Peter Sloterdijk dans le livre qu’il lui a consacré, ne croit pas aux choses ni aux sujets mais aux actions qualifiées (rappelons qu’en grec drama signifie justement « action »); et sans doute se détournerait-il de cette ontologie plate qui, au nom d’une plus grande objectivité, opère selon un principe d’humiliation et de déqualification généralisés. [12]

Mais qu’en est-il du rapport entre la différence qualitative appelée par la question « Qui ? » et le processus de personnalisation qu’elle suggère? Bien sûr, la méthode de dramatisation se rapporte à l’ensemble des processus d’individuation, et non seulement aux « humains ». En ce sens, elle s’applique aux entre-possessions sous ses formes les plus variées, des « sociétés de molécules » aux organismes qui personnent le monde, selon la belle formule de Arakawa et Gins. Se réappropriant pour son propre compte la méthode de dramatisation nietzschéenne, Deleuze montre dans des pages essentielles de Différence et répétition comment elle concerne les dynamismes spatio-temporels et leur processus intensifs d’actualisation: « C’est l’intensité, le déterminant dans le processus d’actualisation. C’est l’intensité qui dramatise. (…) Qui ? c’est toujours une question d’intensité… » (1968: 316-317) Pour Deleuze en somme, la méthode de dramatisation est indiscernable du problème de l’individuation:

La grande découverte de la philosophie de Nietzsche, sous le nom de volonté de puissance ou de monde dionysiaque, celle qui marque sa rupture avec Schopenhauer, est celle-ci: sans doute le Je et le Moi doivent être dépassés dans un abîme indifférencié; mais cet abîme n’est pas un impersonnel ni un Universel abstrait, par-delà l’individuation. Au contraire, c’est le Je, c’est le moi qui sont l’universel abstrait. Ils doivent être dépassés, mais par et dans l’individuation. L’indépassable, c’est l’individuation même. (1968: 332).

Ce n’est pas le lieu de discuter dans le détail la réappropriation deleuzienne de la méthode de dramatisation. Cela exigerait de discuter des rapports entre l’Idée et le concept, le virtuel et l’actuel, jusqu’au rôle proprement dramatique des précurseurs sombres pour l’Éternel retour. Ce qui m’intéresse davantage ici, ce n’est pas tant de décrire sur le mode spéculatif le plan ontogénétique où les intensités entrent dans des rapports de résonance, que de caractériser plus finement la différence pratique introduite par la puissance individuante de la question « Qui ? » sur le seuil de la « personnalisation ». Comme nous l’avons entrevu plus tôt, la méthode de dramatisation implique une dimension typologique ou imaginable [13] qui, à l’exemple des travaux de Nietzsche, commande un rapport attentif aux modes de subjectivation. Car Nietzsche ne s’est pas contenté de critiquer le jeu des forces actives et réactives menant aux impasses du nihilisme et du ressentiment; il a mis l’autogenèse du sujet à l’ordre du jour de la philosophie et multiplié les observations sur les manières d’exacerber la vie et d’entretenir créativement les contrastes. Nietzsche penseur sur scène performe un drame de la véridiction qui expose comme jamais auparavant (à en croire les déclarations mégalomanes de Ecce homo) aux périls de l’énonciation. C’est en rapport pratique et direct avec les configurations (éthopoïétiques, esthétiques, politiques) qui activent notre rapport au monde et mettent en cause le courage de la vérité que se pose le problème du sens et de la personnalisation. [14]

Dans un passage pour le moins étonnant de Nietzsche et la philosophie, Deleuze donne voix à une éthique gréco-nietzschéenne de la cruauté contre-effectuée qui pose en toute clarté le problème de l’imagination-qui-personnifie. Après avoir établi la nécessité de donner un sens à la douleur pour se soutenir dans l’existence, Deleuze écrit :

Pour juger la douleur d’un point de vue actif, il faut la maintenir dans l’élément de son extériorité. Et il y faut tout un art, qui est celui des maîtres. Les maîtres ont un secret. Ils savent que la douleur n’a qu’un sens: faire plaisir à quelqu’un, faire plaisir à quelqu’un qui l’inflige ou la contemple. Si l’homme actif est capable de ne pas prendre au sérieux sa propre douleur, c’est parce qu’il imagine toujours quelqu’un à qui elle fait plaisir. Une telle imagination n’est pas pour rien dans la croyance aux dieux actifs qui peuplent le monde grec (…) (1962: 148)

Cet exemple est édifiant à plus d’un égard et s’avère être une indication éthopoïétique de première importance. En révélant le « secret » technique des maîtres grecs pour établir avec leurs propres souffrances un rapport éthique empreint de liberté, Deleuze montre du même coup la part de fabulation active dans toute existence agie – de l’art des divines disjonctions. On sait la fortune que le concept de fabulation connaîtra dans les travaux subséquents de Deleuze, et spécialement dans ses livres sur le cinéma. On pressent également dans ce passage l’idée qu’il faut partout fabriquer ses intercesseurs pour pouvoir s’exprimer; et on pourrait même y déceler ce qui viendra thématisé plus tard comme besoin de croire au monde. Mais au-delà des préfigurations potentielles d’idées-clés dans la trajectoire deleuzienne, ce qui frappe dans cette description d’un rapport actif et fabulé à la souffrance, c’est que la différence ne semble pouvoir être complètement exacerbée, l’extériorité n’atteindre à son plein déploiement que sous la forme d’une volonté personnalisée – en l’occurrence celle de dieux se réjouissant du spectacle d’une cruauté à la fois personnalisée et personnalisante. Comme s’il se révélait là le principe génétique de ce qui nous fabrique en tant que personne – gare à qui négligerait de porter attention à l’extrême ambivalence qui creuse de l’intérieur ce terme technique crucial au sein de la tradition juridique et chrétienne et qui est presque parvenu à nous faire oublier, sous le poids de sa substantialité morale, l’âme légère qui s’origine comme persona et masque… [15]

Glose δ : Qui poursuit l’interrogation pragmatiste (au sens du souci pour les conséquences et les effets) sur le versant déiste de la question du « Qui ? » qui détermine en personnifiant ne peut manquer de rencontrer William James et Alfred North Whitehead sur son chemin. Je ne me contenterai ici que de quelques notes sommaires – le sujet mérite nul doute un développement plus approfondi et systématique.

Isabelle Stengers a relevé avec brio l’importance de la question de Dieu tant chez James que chez Whitehead. Dans son article sur James inclus dans Philosophie des possessions, elle pose une question toute pragmatiste à portée éthopoïétique :

La question qui se situe au cœur du théisme de William James me semble être: quel Dieu est susceptible, aujourd’hui, de faire exister des saints qui soient ceux de notre époque et non des reliques vivantes ? [16] (Debaise 2011: 67)

Discutant de Les formes multiples de l’expérience religieuse de William James, Stengers estime que « ce qu’il s’agit de faire vibrer est l’impossibilité de réduire à un simple problème de connaissance la confiance qui fait sentir que ‘le possible dépasse le réel’. » (Debaise 2011: 66) Ce qui me semble déterminant ici, c’est que pour James, la forme personnelle du théisme est la plus apte à faire vibrer un sens du possible capable de soutenir une existence active. Comme dans l’exemple des dieux grecs, il en va d’une définition nette de l’extériorité que seule la « personnalité » semble pouvoir assurer :

Nos perceptions et nos pensées n’existent qu’en vue de l’action. Dieu doit être conçu en premier lieu comme la puissance la plus grande de l’univers et, en second lieu, sous la forme d’une personnalité mentale. La personnalité de Dieu doit être considérée, à l’instar de toute autre personnalité, comme un objet extérieur à moi et différent de moi, dont je découvre et constate simplement l’existence.

La seule espèce d’union de la créature et du créateur que puisse comporter le théisme me semble devoir revêtir cette forme émotive et pratique; et elle se fonde invariablement sur ce fait d’expérience que le sujet pensant et l’objet de la pensée sont numériquement deux. C’est dans la certitude pratique de ces données empiriques (…) que gisent le repos de l’âme et la puissance à laquelle le théiste aspire. (James 2005: 149; je souligne)

Le problème se pose en des termes somme toute assez similaires (mais plus abstraits) chez Whitehead. C'est sur fond cosmologique que Whitehead s’interroge sur les mérites d’un ordre théiste personnaliste. Dans Religion in the Making par exemple, il écrit : « The extremes are the doctrines of God as the impersonal order of the universe, and the doctrine of God as the one person creating the universe. » (Whitehead 2011: 135) Sa préférence semble aller vers l’option personnaliste (même s’il se démarque en profondeur de la théologie chrétienne « réellement existante ») parce qu'elle intègre mieux, à son avis, le problème éminemment factuel-actuel du mal en sa contingence historique; et surtout, parce qu’elle encourage le sens de ce qu’il appelle la « personnalité active » :

Buddhism is a metaphysic generating a religion. In respect to its treatment of evil, Christianity is more inclusive of the facts. It derives the evil from the contingent fact of the actual course of events; it thus allows of an ideal as conceivable in terms of what is actual. Buddhism, on the whole, discourages the sense of active personality, whereas Christianity encourages it. (2011: 125)

Dans son Penser avec Whitehead, Stengers s’est penchée de près sur l’évolution du concept de Dieu dans la pensée de Whitehead. Dans un développement qui a été ajouté dans la traduction anglaise de l’ouvrage, elle pose le problème de comment Whitehead hérite du théisme de James en ces termes:

Whitehead presents himself as the philosopher who comes after William James. It is thus permissible to wonder to what extent Whitehead is not also the heir to James’s God. (…) If the speculative God, derived from the adventure of rationality, is not able to satisfy the vital need that James’s God answered, how does Whitehead inherit this need? (…)

For me, it is crucial that Whitehead did not speak of his God as a person or a personality, and that the reversal of the physical and mental poles suppresses any possible relation of consanguinity between him and us. (Stengers 2011: 491-492; je souligne)

Le rapport entre théisme et personnalité active devra être repris en profondeur, en investiguant par exemple du côté de l’effort pour être une personne chez Bergson, ou de comment Latour conçoit la religion comme la « fabrication des personnes remises en presence ». (Latour 2002: 185) L’intention ici n’était finalement que de montrer en quoi le « qui ? » qui personnalise est le creuset d’un formidable contraste théorique et pratique, qui traverse les œuvres de plusieurs des philosophes spéculatifs et pragmatistes qui nous sont chers et s’incarne de la plus stimulante des façons dans la polarisation mutuelle et amicale du GECo et du SenseLab.

Da capo al Coda

In a field

I am the absence of field.

This is always the case.

Where I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

And always

The air moves in

To fill the space

Where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

For moving.

I move

To keep things whole.

(Marc Strand, Keeping Things Whole)

Notes

[1] « In the case of the higher animals there is central direction, which suggests that in their case each animal body harbours a living person, or living persons. Our own self-consciousness is direct awareness of ourselves as such persons. (…) All the life in the body is the life of the individual cells. There are thus millions upon millions of centres of life in each animal body. So what needs to be explained is not dissociation of personality but unifying control, by reason of which we not only have unified behaviour, which can be observed by others, but also consciousness of a unified experience. » (Whitehead 1978: 107-108)

[2] Le concept d’inclusion mutuelle constitue d’ailleurs l’axe central autour duquel s’articule la politique du jeu et de l’animalité élaborée par Massumi dans son essai « Ce que les bêtes nous apprennent de la politique » (Duke, 2014, à paraître en 2015 aux Éditions Dehors). « Dans la logique de l’inclusion mutuelle (…) le continuum sur lequel instinct et intuition diffèrent par degrés est celui du faire-corps animal. (…) Le synonyme pour l’inclusion mutuelle différentielle tient en un mot : la vie. » (Massumi 2014: 34)

[3] On trouve dans Religion in the Making de Whitehead une précision concernant la notion de définition qui, sans être contradictoire, contraste passablement avec l’inflexion tournée vers le potentiel que Massumi donne au problème du un et du multiple. « The essence of depth of actuality – that is the vivid experience – is definiteness. Now to be definite always means that all the elements of a complex whole contribute to some one effect, to the exclusion of others. The creative process is a process of exclusion to the same extent as it is a process of inclusion. » (2011: 99-100). Il n’est pas anodin, comme nous le verrons à la toute fin de ce dossier, que cette précision s’intègre chez Whitehead à une réflexion sur le théisme.

[4] Cette question est d’ailleurs préfigurée par Manning dans son analyse de Valse avec Bashir (Ariel Folman, 2008). Pour plus de détails, voir le chapitre 3 de Always More than One, « Walzing the Limit ».

[5] Le contraste ne peut pas être plus marqué avec cette lecture somme toute « orthodoxe » de Deleuze et Guattari proposée par Massumi dans User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “The order-word of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is the anti-orderword of the call of the outside: listen closely for existential imperatives which, rather than limiting I and I’s realm of virtuality, take it out of bounds.” Dans les toutes dernières lignes du livre, Massumi précise en quoi cet appel au dehors défie les limites des subjectivities privées du capitalisme et vise de nouvelles individuations collectives : « Becomings are everywhere in capitalism, but they are always separated from their full potential, from the thing they need most to run their course: a population free for the mutating. (…) The way lies ahead, in taking the inventive potential released by capitalism so far that we become so other as to no longer act in the perceived private interests of a separate Self that we have in any case already ceased to be (if we ever were it). We must embrace our collectivity. » (Massumi 1992: 41, 140-141) (je souligne)

[6] « C’est ici que la distinction établie par le droit romain entre propriété et possession va importer. La possession requiert l’usage et ne tient qu’à l’usage. La continuité du « je » tient à l’usage de ce que chaque pensée fait de ce qui la précède. » Isabelle Stengers, « William James. Naturalisme et pragmatisme au fil de la question de la possession » (Debaise 2011: 47-48).

[7] Ce fut d’ailleurs l’occasion de se rappeler et de rire ensemble de ce délicieux bushisme: « The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur. »

[8] Voici quelques dramatisations bien latouriennes du principe d’irréduction: « Fais ce que tu veux, pourvu qu’on ne puisse revenir aisément dessus. Grâce au jeu des actants, certaines choses ne reviennent pas au même. Une forme est prise comme un pli. On peut appeler cela un piège, un cliquet, une irréversibilité, un démon de Maxwell, une réification, peu importe, pourvu qu’il y a ait des asymétries et qu’on puisse gagner sans perdre, aller dans un sens et non dans l’autre. Alors tout n’est plus égal et incommensurable : il y a du sens et des forts. » Ou encore : « En amour comme à la guerre, tout est permis pour accrocher les règles à quelque chose de plus durable que la force qui l’inspire. » (2012: 245-246). Toute la pensée de Latour porte la marque d’un souci institutionnel dont témoignent l’introduction et la conclusion du monumental Enquête sur les modes d’existence, qui s’intitulent respectivement « Avoir à nouveau confiance dans les institutions? » et « Éloge de la civilisation qui vient ».

[9] « When magic is reclaimed as an art of assemblage, assemblages, inversely, become a matter of empirical and pragmatic concern about effects and consequences, not of general consideration or textual dissertation. (…) one is never animist “in general,” always in the terms of an assemblage that produces or enhances metamorphic (magic) transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected—that is also to feel, think, and imagine. » (Stengers 2012; je souligne)

[10] Pour une réflexion du SenseLab articulée autour du concept de futurité, voir le texte rédigé collectivement à l’invitation de la Biennale d’art contemporain de Montréal 2014, « The Present Feeling: Contemporary Art and the Question of Time ». Dans La compétition des Bonnes nouvelles: Nietzsche évangéliste, Peter Sloterdijk décrit, d’une manière qui reflète intimement les visées éthopoïétiques du SenseLab, l’arc de générosité spéculative et ses effets « provocateurs » : « La noblesse est une position par rapport au futur. Le cadeau innovateur de Nietzsche tient dans l’incitation à adopter un mode d’être dans lequel le récepteur serait activé dans sa force de sponsor, c’est-à-dire dans la capacité d’ouvrir des futurs plus riches. Nietzsche est un enseignant de la générosité, dans le sens où il contamine celui qui reçoit son cadeau avec l’idée de la richesse, qui ne doit mériter d’être acquise que dans la perspective de la possibilité d’être gaspillée. (…) Depuis le motif de la « vertu qui donne », jaillit une source de pluralisme qui dépasse tous les espoirs d’unité. C’est la nature de la générosité provocatrice: elle ne peut être seule, et elle veut encore moins l’être. » (2001: 74, 78)

[11] La matérialité vibrante des « nouveaux matérialismes » à laquelle on pourrait ici penser est à problématiser avec soin. En effet, elle tend à une a-dramaticité qui laisse libre cours au petit triomphe académique de l’affirmation de la vérité abstraite du « posthumain », laquelle se contente de faire jouer les perspectives non-humaines en général contre l’humanisme présupposé des non-initiés. Pour une critique décapante de l’irénisme des nouveaux matérialismes et leur propension à « l’illumination ontologique », voir Christian Thorne, « To the Political Ontologists » (2013).

[12] Un effet d’aplatissement et de déqualification similaire est en jeu dans l’appellation « anthropocène ». Comme l’a souligné de manière fort suggestive Donna Haraway lors du colloque de Cerisy, « The Anthropocene manager never ask “Who?” » Le « Qui? » discriminant auquel en appelle Haraway est porteurs de mises en récit plurielles qui viennent compliquer (et politiser) la grande fable géocratique de l’Anthropocène, qui s’adresse à une humanité abstraite et uniformisée en espèce. Voir à ce sujet l'ouvrage de Christophe Bonneuil et Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’événement Anthropocène. La Terre, l'histoire et nous (Seuil, 2013). Ce livre propose une lecture critique du récit qui est souvent fait de l'Anthropocène. Pour les auteurs, « la question est tout sauf théorique car chaque récit d'un « comment en sommes-nous arrivés là ? » constitue la perspective à partir de laquelle s'envisage le « que faire maintenant ? ».

[13] De fait, l’écart qui s’instaure entre le spéculatif et l’élément proprement dramatique recoupe de près celui que Deleuze observe entre la pensée et l’imagination: « S’il appartient à la pensée d’explorer le virtuel jusqu’au fond de ses répétitions, il appartient à l’imagination de saisir les processus d’actualisation du point de vue de ces reprises ou de ces échos. » (1968: 284)

[14] Dans son séminaire intitulé L’antiphilosophie de Nietzsche tenu en 1992-1993 à l’École normale supérieure à Paris, Badiou recoupe ces préoccupations par le biais d’une interrogation sur la fonction des noms propres chez Nietzsche : « En réalité, comprendre Nietzsche, c’est pour une bonne part, sinon pour le tout, comprendre la fonction des noms propres. Pour reprendre le lexique deleuzien, c’est une pensée qui s’avère exemplairement une philosophie de personnages conceptuels, qui traînent et concentrent les points cruciaux du dispositif nietzschéen. » http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/92-93.htm

[15] C’est d’ailleurs sur ce fond que la naissance (et le déclin) de la tragédie trouve sa pleine intelligibilité : « La tragédie meurt en même temps que le drame devient conflit intime et que la souffrance est intériorisée. » (Deleuze 1962: 149)

[16] La lecture de Stengers met en valeur « le caractère vital de l’effort » chez James. Il est fort significatif à mon sens, en droite ligne avec le type de contraste que j’essaie d’articuler dans cet essai, que Manning, dans son essai « Carrying the Feeling », s’intéresse au contraire à ce que James dit de l’« effortlessness » en lien avec la (dés)inhibition.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Towards a Pedagogy of Moments

Melora Koepke
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalization of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something…Like Deleuze, I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.

- Stefano Harney & Fred Moten (2013: 117-118)

1. Salt of the Sea

Pacific Rim National Park, British Columbia, Canada – I am writing this from a beach house on the outer edge of North America, from a peninsula at the end of a promontory on an outlay of land between the open Pacific Ocean and the sheltered wildness of Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island. I've come here on a winter weekend to learn, again, how to draw salt from the sea.

There is this guy in a little hotel here who wrote to me to tell me that he has developed a new way to gather and collect sea salt here, with a system of ropes inside open-bottomed buckets that imitate the sea-tethered kelp forests that populate this ancient underwater terrain. As if the old ways didn't work well enough. But that is what we do, isn't it? Develop new technologies for the old things to do, because there are no new things, nihil sub sole novum. So this is my concern today: To find “new salt for the old ceremony,” to paraphrase Leonard Cohen.

I'm interested in this salt-gathering technique for several reasons. For one thing, I'm researching an article about how the sea salt gathered here informs the place-specificity of local cuisine and tourism practice; about how something so basic as salt can change the way that humans understand their landscape. This is a conception of extreme terroir, or rather, ‘merroir’ as the most salesmanlike Vancouver Island oystermen now call it, cleverly, as a way to point out that the sea as well as the land is particular and specific to this place. This salt from this sea is an appealing story on several registers – it's about the ‘how’ of the salt – how does it taste, how do people collect and use it, what do people remember of this place, is it the salt itself or something more ephemeral?

On another level, as a geographer, I am interested in the superstory of the salt – why such a hyper-local product can be used to highlight the particular qualities of a place, the current cultural trend that makes it suddenly desirable and necessary to devise new ways from the old ways, to derive a particularly specific, and also general and polyvalent, use-value for the salt itself and everything that surrounds it.

I have also come to these salty waves on this particular day for another purpose, more broad and selfish than gathering salt and the knowledge of salt: I’ve come to enter the ocean itself, to let my already-twisted body be further twisted by the wind, like a Krummholz pine, to become part of the storm. I have come for a break from the long temporalities of the classroom, to feel a different speed of learning in the accelerations and slownesses that are caught up in the storm's rhythm: To feel myself sink back into the natural order of things, to understand the everyday nature of salt as essential; radically so.

I have come to interrupt this institutional cycle that captures me as much as I capture it: The machine of knowledge production [1] of which I am part.

That anyone would even think to develop a new technology, a new technique, for so ancient a practice as collecting salt strikes me significantly pedagogical: Even if salt-gathering is ancient, every salt harvest is new. The ‘how’ of this act and its occurrence on so many registers at once, is as important as the doing of the thing itself: The process is practice. This concept is crucial. It describes everything about the life I want to describe.

Still, while the salt itself is real, I cannot simply gather it. There is also the my need to understand the procedure and its meaning in a way that will that will render it useful. Just as the sea is dried out to make the salt, so is this this practice distilled until its value is extracted. In a sense, it is only my take on the process that allows the salt to become “worth its salt.”

(The idea of salt being the measure of worth is ancient, by the way. The phrase itself dates back to the system used to renumerate soldiers in ancient Rome, who were paid in order to allow them to purchase salt as a seasoning and preservative for their food, and which is essential to the survival of the human body; payment allowed them to keep themselves alive. The word ‘salary’ derives from the Roman salarium, for which the root is sal, or salt. Historically, salt speaks the valuation or non-valuation that is part of professionalization but the opposite of the salt itself in its mineral form, which coming out of the sea is essentially free, and belongs to everyone. The oppositions of public/private, teacher/student, professional/amateur, valuable/useless are the salarial currency, where we are defined as subjects in relation to our others – if I am the student, what is my supervisor worth, and how does she in turn discern my worth? If I am the teacher, what and for whom am I teaching?)

Through the salt and the knowledge of the salt, I have re-begun to think about the differentiation between experience and its measure as the cause of our alienation within the institution. Its symptoms are manifested in my students’ contortions, so that they can become a shape that can fit into the contradictions of the institution, even as they are growing into themselves. They know their futures will be defined by professionalization.

(This semester, I am designing tutorials in an undergraduate class on use of global natural resources. My students must memorize a concatenation of concepts relating to the destruction of the future, even as they design functional models to measure it. This week one student tells me she felt an MDE (major depressive episode) emerge as she listened to a slide-lecture about terminator seeds inheriting the earth. Another student broke out in a full-body rash as she delivered a Powerpoint presentation about the South Pacific nation of Nauru, laid waste by the aftereffects of mining and now forced to import all their food. I understand them: I myself have been unmade in the classroom during a reading of Guattari's The Three Ecologies; the political is also personal; the more-than-human also contains a great deal of humanity.)

2. Salt of the Earth

The salt of the sea is, of course, not the same salt we use to salt the roads in the winter, or to cure meat; it has been abandoned for industrial uses, where refined land-salt is more expedient. But it is the same idea of salt; and the sea and the plants of the sea and the air of the sea is all part of the terroir, though I only call it terroir on weekends. Terroir, in the idiom of the institution, is aesthetic and elitist, a word used by those who savour food and landscapes as a form of leisure. How ironic that the language of the earth has become alienated from terroir, which quite literally comes from terre; the root of the word and the roots in the ground. In critical geography, we call terroir ‘space’ and ‘place’ and speak of it in conceptual terms, terms that are both more and less precise than the scrape of a knife gathering salt off of the rock-cliffs.

Geographers are largely caught up with critique of the spaces that inhibit or encourage individuation; as such, I read the classroom as a hopeful space, where we can become expressions of ourselves, and become more fully ourselves in the expressing. Most of my students instinctively revile the idea of their education as a means towards possessory knowledge in the Hegelian sense. They know how to surf difference, and they distance themselves more and more from the hierarchy of this knowledge even as they learn its language by heart. They have taught me to attune back to the existential refrain: It isn't what we learn, but how we learn it.

Like many teachers, I am accustomed to the dominant metaphor of teaching, which has always been to understand pedagogy as narrative: the teacher, together with her students, co-creates a story; she curates the course material forms an arc-shaped progression, with a beginning a middle and an end. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Marxist education theorist Paolo Friere introduced a concept of education as a processual “problem-posing,” rather than a narrative practice:

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity. (Friere 1970: 84)

We can think of a pedagogy of moments as a "problem-posing education" in the minor key: A mode of learning where attention paid to the gathering of salt in the sea as well as the idea of it, to the techniques for living that are both the subject and object of knowledge. An education based on the hope that learning is processual and not machinic. Friere reminds us that through a problem-posing pedagogy, "education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become… problem-posing education—which accepts neither a "well-behaved" present nor a predetermined future—roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary. (1970: 245)

There are opportunities for singularization that take place in the everyday. Beginning in and emerging from the classroom, learning frees itself in the becoming, and takes place in the everywhere-else: in the street, in the subway, in nature and in cities, in the kitchen, and in the private, domestic sphere.

This way, learning always folds back into the act. A pedagogy of moments seeks to have the infinite possibilities of existence narrowed down into the enunciation of the present, with the objects and experiences that are at hand. It “makes do” in the de Certeauian sense, “like the snowy waves of the sea.” Research becomes the time and space of the everyday (le quotidien) in which learning and doing become indistinguishable from each other.

This way, learning suffuses all of our multiple subjectivities: As a teacher, I am also student, citizen, and mother (since parenting is, without a doubt, the most radical pedagogy of all.)

Is this everyday pedagogy, then, a practice that is without enunciation? In the classroom, the “inseparability of time and space” (Massey 2005: 7) brackets the learning process; in the pedagogy of moments, our activities are indistinguishable from concepts: ‘doing’ engenders an expansive potential for “being.”

“The spectre of theoretical questioning goes from pure abstraction – the logic of identity – to the full complexity of the contradictions of the real,” says Henri Lefebvre (2004: 13). In this sense, the learning process is a processual “becoming” or “coming-to-being.” Or, as J.K. Gibson-Graham describe it, the everyday as “everything;” “The process of existence implicates all exteriors, and by virtue of this implication undermines the hierarchy of importance that defines some attributes as causes, as necessary or essential, and others as contingent and peripheral, to a particular locus of being” (Gibson-Graham 1996: 28).

Lefebvre himself describes the “moment” as “a modality of presence” marked by “an attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility” (Lefebvre 2002: 345). A typology of such moments, he indicated, could include play, love, work, rest, struggle, knowledge, poetry” (Butler 2012: 27).

These moments that are, thus, both emancipatory and ordinary. The classroom is one among many “universes of reference,” in the Guattarian sense; others exist in unexpected places based on relations born out of everyday interaction. In an interview from 1997, he describes the relationship that grew between psychiatric patients at his clinic, La Borde with a Cote-d'Ivoirien cook: “An unexpected process led to the secretion of different universes of reference; one sees things otherwise. Not only does the subjectivity change, but equally the fields of possibility change, the life projects” (Genosko 2008: 66).

A pedagogy of moments is, therefore, an expanding notion of the “fields of possibility,” one that is oriented away from the “result” or “training” as an end destination. If this conception of an education has a goal, it is the receding horizon of fixed subjectivity.

None of this is to banish learning from the classroom, or to say that the institution itself should be unmade. As Moten and Harney remind us, “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment” (Harney & Moten 2004: 102).

But by virtue of a pedagogy of moments, when we are asked to confront the monolith of professionalized knowledge, we can offer something other than another monolith: We gather salt from the sea instead.

Notes

[1] For more on the “knowledge machine,” see Gerald Raunig’s Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity.

Works Cited

Butler, Chris. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City. London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2012.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Genosko, Gary. “Life and Work of Félix Guattari”. In The Three Ecologies Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York and London: Continuum, 2004.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. Thousand Oaks, California and London: SAGE Publications, 2005.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. “The University and the Undercommons: SEVEN THESES”. Social Text 22.2 (Summer 2004): 101-115.

Raunig, Gerald. Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Subversive Pedagogy The Intruder

Geoffrey Edwards
Laval University, Quebec City

What, exactly, is teaching?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that to teach is “to cause or help (a person or animal) to learn how to do something by giving lessons, showing how it is done, etc.” First of all, it is clear from this that the notion of teaching depends on the notion of learning - teaching involves helping someone to learn. There is furthermore, implicit in this, and other, definitions, some idea that the process of learning can be enhanced or improved through the process of “teaching,” that is, by having someone show us “how it is done”. Before going into this any further, perhaps we should find out what the dictionary tells us about learning. To cite the Merriam-Webster again, to learn is “to gain knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something”. Here we have a kind of core notion of what it means to learn, that is, “to gain knowledge or skill,” a notion that does not return us to teaching within an infinite loop. Finally, what about “pedagogy”? M-W says it is “the art, science, or profession of teaching”. The Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com) says something very similar to what the M-W tells us about learning and teaching, but has this to say about “pedagogy”: the “method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept”. [1] From either point of view, pedagogy is, at its root, two levels of abstraction away from the core problem of learning.

Ever since I entered into a profession that is fundamentally a variation on that of teaching, the role of the university professor, I have questioned the nature of these ideas. The university would have one believe that these are perfectly well defined tasks, with standard ways of going about them, just as is suggested by the OED definition of pedagogy - that is, methods exist for doing this (e.g. Dalton 1998; ETS 2013). But there are some very real difficulties with these ideas.

First of all, it must be recognized that there is a large difference between “gaining knowledge” and “gaining skill.” These are two very different forms of learning, [2] indeed, cognitive studies demonstrate that these call upon very different neural processes (Sun et al. 2001; Damasio 1994; Keil 1989), and yet, somehow, in the university context they are rolled into one kind of aggregate process, and often very little distinction is made between the two kinds of learning.

Secondly, both dictionaries insist on the idea that teaching is about showing how something is done - that is, that teaching is more about causing-to-learn-as-gaining-skill than it is about causing-to-learn-as-gaining-knowledge. True, the OED gives alternative definitions, such as the following:

teach2: Give information about or instruction in (a subject or skill); and

teach3: Cause (someone) to learn or understand something by example or experience.

But these definitions raise new questions, such as the idea that teaching may be about ‘causing to understand’ and not only about “causing to learn” (are these the same?), or asks us to further dwell into a related concept, that of “instruction.” In fact, the latter leads us to the same endpoint, for the OED tells us that instruction is “Detailed information about how something should be done or operated”, and since “operation” is a form of action, instruction is revealed to be another way to talk about showing how things are done. So, ultimately, if we set aside the idea of “causing to understand” for the moment, it seems to be agreed upon that teaching is about showing how something is done. Most of university teaching, however, is not about showing how something is done. Showing how things are done may be part of university teaching, but it is, most of the time, not the main focus. Instead, most university teaching seems to be about the secondary idea, “causing to understand” or causing-to-gain-knowledge. After all, a discipline (universities are divided into disciplines, and each discipline includes of a collection of knowledge) must be understood to be “learned.”

Let us stop for a moment before pursuing our investigation into the nature of university pedagogy, and think about the first idea of what teaching is, that is, as showing how something is done. I have been taking dancing classes for most of my life as a pastime. Dancing is something that is difficult to learn “on one’s own,” even when the dances do not involve a partner. There is a style of Tai Chi teaching (Tai Chi being a movement practice not dissimilar to dance) that does not explain anything (Huang 1973). Instead, the students go through the movements by copying the teacher and each other, and the professor moves through the classroom simply correcting the movements of the students. In this style of teaching, the professor shows how the movement is done, he or she does not explain it at all. Understanding, even knowledge, may eventually emerge - to master Tai Chi, understanding in some form must come, but this understanding need not be in any articulable form. Learning to dance, especially dances involving partners, requires dancing in the presence of others, one or more of whom will be a designated “teacher.” Admittedly, there are many different styles of teaching-as-showing-how-something-is-done. Some people give a lot of theory, a lot of explanations, and expect students to integrate such theoretical knowledge into the practice of the task, itself a complex problem (see Hanna 2008, for a critique of this approach). Others, like

the Tai Chi master described above, may give no explanations at all. Dance teachers may adopt a first-person teaching style, where they put themselves in the place of their students (or their students into their own place), while others adopt a third-person style, where students are asked to watch and then try (Green 2002). A variation on the first-person approach involves somatic methods, based on the idea of teaching dance “from the inside out,” that is, teaching how it feels to dance rather than the outside forms per se (Dragon 2008; Green 2002). Issues of understanding are clearly present even in teaching-as-showing-how-something-is-done, so perhaps it is time we took a closer look at the nature of understanding and the role it plays in learning.

The OED tells us several different things about understanding:

understand1 : Perceive the intended meaning of (words, a language,

or a speaker)…

understand2 : Perceive the significance, explanation, or cause of…

understand3 : Interpret or view (something) in a particular way.

Aside from the process of teaching-as-showing-how-something-is-done, university teaching seems to be more about teaching-as-causing-to-understand, where to understand may involve any combination of these three kinds of understanding. Here we are more usually in the realm of learning-as-gaining-knowledge than in the realm of learning-as-gaining-skill. So, let’s get back to the main idea. The university would have one believe (a) that teaching-as-causing-to-understand, where by understanding is meant the process of perceiving-the-intended-meaning-of-things, the process of perceiving-the-significance/explanation/cause-of-things, or the process of interpreting/ viewing-things-in-a-particular-way, is a well understood task requiring the presence of a teacher-with-the-right-qualifications (Dalton 1998). And that (b), the standard ways of doing this, adopted by universities throughout the world (that is, lectures, readings, home-study, problem-solving in class or at home, etc.), are effective and efficient learning delivery vehicles. Furthermore, the universities would like one to believe that (c) not only are these standard ways appropriate, but also that their effectiveness can be measured (ETS 2013). Finally, the universities also want one to believe that (d) learning itself can be measured, and that measuring learning must be an integral part of the teaching program (ETS 2013).

I question all four of these arguments, but in addition, I also question the primacy of the role of teaching-as-causing-to-understand that universities throughout the world adopt. I believe that learning, the ground task that all these institutions claim to be addressing, is fundamentally not about understanding things or gaining knowledge, it is, instead, about gaining skill. And finally, I propose to replace the teacher, that is, the person-who-causes-to-understand, with an entirely different individual/role, what I call the intruder, the person-who-listens/provokes/rebels, enabling the designated “students” to learn-by-doing-in-response. The intruder, furthermore, is not part of the teacher-student dyad, nor the teaching-learning institutional structures, that is why he or she “intrudes.” This is what I call subversive pedagogy.

Teaching-as-causing-to-understand and Standard Modes of Teaching

In the previous section, I suggest that teaching-as-causing-to-understand is neither an appropriate teaching venue, nor is it as straightforward a process as we are led to believe. Let us explore this question in more detail.

To begin with, let us recognize and acknowledge that understanding as defined in the second OED definition, that as, as the perception of the significance, explanation or causation of something is, indeed, a legitimate form of learning (Bransford et al. 1999). What I mean is, that a new perception at these levels will involve the same kind of neurological plasticity as that involved when we acquire a new skill. Without necessarily reducing the argument about the nature of learning only to its neurological character (which would presume that other factors, such as the environment, are somehow less important for learning, an argument I do not myself believe), plasticity offers an interesting

way of situating where and how learning occurs. Modern neurocognitive approaches to learning have found strong linkages between human motricity and our brain plasticity (Ungerleider et al. 2002), whether the latter is used to track learning new movements or new ideas (Diamond 2000; Broaders et al. 2007; Rowe and Goldin-Meadow 2009). One of the consequences of this new knowledge of the neurocognitive properties of learning is that it appears that learning, even of concepts and ideas, is enabled through movement (Durisko and Fiez 2010; Strick et al. 2009; Kelly and Strick 2003). This begins to break down the separation that is widely understood to exist between learning-by-doing and learning-by-studying/reading/thinking. It appears that doing is necessary to the latter form of learning, often considered to be more passive, and certainly usually done while still and quiet. Indeed a new model of cognition is called upon, one which conceives the mind as grounded in bodily action and environmental interaction (Gabarini and Adenzato 2004).

These insights emerging from state-of-the-art studies in human cognitive function challenge the idea that learning-as-gaining-knowledge is separate from learning-as-gaining-skill, or, put another way, that teaching-as-causing-understanding is different from teaching-as-causing-learning. In the introductory section, I indicated that neurocognitive studies suggest that learning knowledge involves different processes than learning skills. This remains true, but although different brain modules are involved, they both share common components, one of which is the importance of movement.

These results, then, begin to challenge the idea that teaching should be about causing a change in understanding, or that standard ways of university teaching are effective tools for either causing changes in understanding or showing how something is done. The standard university pedagogical tool is the lecture (Pritchard 2010) - the designated “teacher” stands in front of a group of students who are required to sit quietly for a given duration (between one and three hours), listening to the teacher ‘lecture’. Many argue that lectures are a valuable way of teaching (Pritchard 2010), not the least as a means of

motivating students. Modern cognitive science, however, is challenging this approach to teaching - it appears to be highly artificial and inappropriate given what we now know about learning. Indeed, how students “learn” anything by such a means should probably be studied and re-situated, knowing what we now know.

The movement studies suggest that one of the ways movement is important is that it is fundamentally creative (Slepian and Ambady 2012; Cheung 2008). People, even when asked to move repetitively in the same way, will find ways to vary the movement - humans seem unable to perform movement in purely mechanical ways (Stergiou and Decker 2011). Indeed, some studies suggest movement repetition may be detrimental to learning (Lee et al. 1991; van Tulder et al. 2007). It has long been known, often anecdotally, that when one is “stuck” thinking through a problem, taking a walk or playing music or taking part in a sport will often result in the “flash of insight” needed to solve the problem (e.g. Flowers and Hayes 1977). It has been assumed that this is because these activities “distract” the person from obsessively repeating the problem and hence allow the unconscious to find other routes to a solution, and there is a part of truth in this idea, but it has been demonstrated that the movement inherent in these distractions may be the key element necessary to generate the solution (e.g. Thomas and Lleras 2009; Kercood et al. 2007).

Let us take this further. The process of “perceiving the significance, explanation or cause of something” is not merely facilitated by movement, the evidence suggests that it is movement itself that yields the change in perception (Cook et al. 2008; Rissotto and Tonucci 2002). Fidgeting in class can be fundamental to gaining new insights. Learning requires movement. If learning requires movement, and movement is the means by which individuals acquire new knowledge, then what is the role of the teacher? The student is faced with information which he or she may have encountered in a book, through conversation with others, by watching a video, or, possibly, by listening to the teacher. We do know that watching a person move activates some of the same

neural machinery as doing the movement ourselves (Jeannerod 1995), so watching the professor pace up and down in front of the blackboard may be the necessary trigger to learning! The point here is, the teacher’s presentation of the material in class may, vicariously, allow the student to gain the new perceptions, but the teacher’s role is hardly the necessary lynchpin of the process that has been claimed!

There are a thousand more effective ways to learn the material, knowing what we know now, we should be able to invent many new approaches that will be much more effective (e.g. Minton 2008). Often the existing classroom arrangements and teachers inhibit this learning (Cheung 2008). We need to abandon the idea that sitting still enhances learning - on the contrary, it acts as a brake to learning. Indeed, we have come to understand learning in a very limited way by the confining environmental conditions under which most “teaching” occurs. We believe that learning requires “effort,” “concentration,” “discipline.” And like most statements about learning, there is some truth in this idea, but not the truth we believe to be the case. Those who learn to sing know that although singing requires all these things, it requires first and foremost, a state of relaxation (Wormhoudt 2001). Once cannot sing properly when one is tense. And yet, most of us “tense up” when concentrating on a lecture, making an effort to “filter out” extraneous noises, and quieten our bodies so as to be more “receptive.” Learning, however, in its full spectrum, can be, indeed probably should be, noisy, messy, chaotic - it will involve as much peripheral attention as “spotlight” attention (Grossberg 1999), it will require attending to our bodies instead of trying to negate them (Stinson 2004), it will take place in social environments (Lave and Wengler 1991) and so forth. We have to rediscover what full spectrum learning really is. We have to deprogram ourselves, away from the brainwashed ideas we have about how learning occurs. And probably, we, ourselves, will never recover full spectrum learning - this will be reserved for individuals in several generations, once we humans have made a concerted, communal effort to divest ourselves of these harmful myths we have all acquired about how learning should occur.

Within such a renewed understanding of learning, the role of the teacher as “causing understanding” cannot be maintained. Humans learn spontaneously, all the time, in myriad ways. Movement is what leads to new understandings. Full spectrum learning happens best within communities, not in artificial settings such as a classroom - it is a profoundly ecological function. [3] Humans do not require a “person-with-any-qualifications-at-all” to help them do this. True, we have a long way to go to understand how to reorganize our communities and environments to enable full spectrum learning, and, in the mean time, some “teaching” may still be required. But let us be more prudent about how we allow this to happen. Accepting the necessity of a “teacher” goes hand-in-hand with giving up our access to full spectrum learning - by confining the environment in arbitrary ways, we limit the nature of the learning that can take place. To use a folk expression, we “shoot ourselves in the foot” - both feet at the same time.

What I have described above applies more directly to the idea of learning-as-gaining-knowledge than to learning-as-gaining-skill. As I pointed out earlier, the latter may require someone to “show us how to do things,” which is the formal definition of a teacher. However, it should be clear by now that learning a skill could also be changed by our growing understanding of how humans learn. The same habits and practices which straightjacket our learning-as-gaining-knowledge in institutional settings also affect how we learn practical skills. Breaking out of these habits and assumptions should lead to radical new ways of “teaching” skills as well (note that some of these “radical new ways of teaching” already exist - we need to review the many alternatives that have been proposed over the years within the framework of our new insights into the learning process).

Evaluation of Teaching and of Learning

By now, the reader will appreciate that the revolution which is beginning to take form in our understanding of how we learn, will also impact ideas about

how we evaluate these practices we call “learning and teaching.” First, let us begin with the evaluation of learning. If what I have called here “full spectrum learning” is a natural, human behaviour (that we are trained out of doing by our school system and prevailing sociocultural attitudes), then evaluation as it is currently practiced is unlikely to be of any use in propelling the learning forward. Arguably, it might be possible to measure an “inhibition factor” - that is, how much do ambient environments and practices inhibit full spectrum learning - as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of our environments for encouraging learning. In fact, it is possible that existing evaluation methods do a variation on this. Students who “do well” are those who have acquired fewer “inhibitors” of a certain kind than students who do less well. It might also be argued that different “intrinsic” learning capabilities are present among students. I tend to discount such arguments. It is not that I entirely disagree. The evidence indeed suggests that individuals have varying abilities - not everyone learns the same way - but what we know about human creativity and play suggests that even individuals who appear to have learning disabilities may learn to compensate for their limitations in ways that give them abilities that outstrip those of others who do not have such limitations to begin with (Reis and Ruban 2004).

What can still be measured, however, is the extent to which knowledge and/or skills have been acquired in a given area of expertise. This does not assess learning, nor does it assess, ultimately, the ability of an individual to carry out a certain practice or profession. But it provides some guidance for assessing the latter.

Teaching, however, is seen to be very different under the new model, and cannot possibly be evaluated in any similar way. One of the characteristics that determines a “good teacher” is their personality. What I mean is, limiting our scope to teaching-as-causing-learning-as-gaining-skill, that is, to the process of teaching a skill, requires some level of first person engagement between the teacher and the student (Green 2008). The teacher must physically position

themselves so that the student can “enter into” their position and so learn the task by carrying it out vicariously. This requires a kind of “mutual empathy” between teacher and student. This is necessary because of the way motor-based learning occurs. Motor-based learning happens in three complementary ways (Jeannerod 2006) - that is, three kinds of activity generate similar brain reorganization processes (plasticity). These activities are (a) carrying out the movement task oneself; (b) watching someone else carry out the movement task; and (c) imagining oneself carrying out the movement task. It is believed that learning such a task requires a cycle of all three types of motor activity - a person watches someone carry out the task, imagines him or herself doing so, tries the task, returns to either imagining or watching, tries again, and so on. Furthermore, the process is further enabled by the activation of what are called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are coded for particular tasks and are excited by any one of the three types of activity, but empathy enhances their effectiveness (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2010).

Hence teaching a skill invokes some very particular neurocognitive machinery. Effective teaching in this context requires empathy, and requires an openness and sensitivity on the part of the “teacher” to move back and forward between the different modes of learning as a function of the needs of the student. Some people are very effective at developing the empathy necessary for this to occur (although empathy may be more effective with some teacher-student combos than with others).

It may be that this kind of teaching is implicitly present in so-called “classical university teaching” as described earlier, at least some of the time, although it is not particularly easy to engage students empathically when one is confronted with several dozen in a classroom. Again, however, it becomes clear that the effectiveness of teaching in this way has little to do with the ostensible content of a class, but rather with the ways the teacher adopts to present the material. That is, some of the learning on the part of the students may result from a “sympathetic identification” with the teacher as the teacher “talks through” the

material - the learning occurs as a result of movement-enabled spontaneous knowledge integration within social environments, but it is accompanied by some empathic task learning.

Current teacher evaluations probably tap into some mix of these different elements - the ability of a “teacher” to create empathy and to cycle through motor excitation activities, to release inhibitions that hamper learning (e.g. by relaxing the class or reassuring students), and to enable movement in the classroom (e.g. changing the class format around during class time). They are not, however, effectively evaluated on their ability to “create understanding” because the latter is more a property of the student than anything over which the teacher has control.

The Primacy of Teaching over Learning

Within our current learning institutions, although lip service is paid to the importance of learning, teaching has nonetheless primacy over learning. This is true from elementary school right through to undergraduate university degrees. Arguably, graduate studies involve a more balanced mix of teaching and learning, however, this depends to some extent on the nature of the student-supervisor relationship.

This primacy of teaching over learning is accepted as the (desirable) norm by nearly everyone - certainly by many, perhaps even most students, by the vast majority of teachers, by the institutions themselves, by the governments that prop up the whole system and by the public which supports the governments. Nobody knows any other way of doing things, and this way of organising how learning occurs has been around for a long time. Although our scientific understanding of how learning happens has changed, it is going to take either a long time for this new understanding to effect change in our so-called learning institutions, or someone is going to have to stir things up to encourage a more rapid changeover.

For a long time, I thought the scientific evidence would drive change, but although the evidence is still relatively new, and more evidence is emerging from ongoing studies that reinforces the new understanding, there are few, if any, signs of change in the learning institutions themselves. These appear to be power structures with a vested interest in the status quo, and hence highly resistant to change of the type that the new model of learning will call into being. The new learning model, as we have hinted, calls into question major elements of our current socio-economic organisation, worldwide. How do we organize our learning environments (or rather, how do we re-organize all our environments so they encourage full spectrum learning all the time!)? How do we prepare people for specific tasks and roles (I’m not sure the idea of a “job” in the traditional sense will be preserved - a “job” presumes a single, limited range of knowledge and skills)? How do we assess who should do what? And how do we determine who receives what as compensation? No wonder our institutions/governments/power structures resist the changes called upon by the emergent ideas about how humans learn!

Subversive Pedagogy, the Role of the Intruder

The idea of a subversive pedagogy is partly a way of interrupting current teaching/learning practices that reinforce demoded pedagogical ideas, and partly a way of exploring new pedagogical relationships with a view to enhancing full spectrum learning.

In the face of entrenched power within the current teacher-centred role of learning, a subversive pedagogy can be seen as a growing necessity. It has become clear to me that the existing organization of learning will not give way easily to the new model. Radical new models are required, and subversive practices. In a limited way, I have been carrying out subversive pedagogy most of my professional life, although I certainly didn't perceive this for most of that time.

In the preceding sections, I have argued forcibly against the role of the teacher. It may appear that I have accepted the idea of teacher-as-showing-how-to-do-something, but in fact, I believe that “teacher” may not be the right word for this task. The word itself suggests that the person, the “teacher,” is somehow responsible for the learning that takes place, and I dispute this idea. I think the role of the dance teacher is not to “show” so much as it is to “accompany” the person who wants to learn. The process of teaching, of teaching a skill, is more a process of collaboration, of partnership, of companionship, than a process involving “expertise” or “mastery” or “knowledge.” Not that knowledge isn’t present, or know-how, or mastery, but these things exist in both persons, in different ways. Within the ecology of learning, each person gives something of themselves to the collaboration which results in new learnings in both individuals. [4]

So a subversive pedagogy, for me, consists of challenging the hegemony of the teacher. I seek to create a different relationship, not that between teacher and student, between master and trainee, but that between familiar and stranger, between insider and outsider. I seek to play the role of the intruder. This seems odd, given everything I have said about the importance of empathy, of “putting oneself in the place of the other,” and so on. But I think it fits, albeit paradoxically.

If we accept this radical idea that learning is fundamentally ecological, that it has less concern with the presence or absence of a “teacher” and more to do with one’s environment, and with how one functions within one’s environment, then the role of a teacher is precluded. Learning “knowledge” is less about being shown something as it is about allowing oneself to engage creatively with one’s environment. However, this creative component to learning points to the existence of a tension. Learning is how we move from the familiar, from the territory of what we know, into the territory of what we do not. It is a deterritorialization, to take up the language of Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

And learning is active, it is creative, it involves stepping outside of our comfort zone in order to engage with things we do not know, do not recognize.

In this act of stepping out into the unknown, the stranger, the intruder has a role to play (Greene 1973). The stranger is not a guide so much as he or she is a provoker. The intruder, “l'étranger” goads us away from the simple, the reassuring, the return to the familiar (Camus 1971; Schuetz 1944). The role of the intruder is to perturb us, to pry us away from our certainties (Becker 2008). This is fundamentally subversive.

Does the stranger need to be empathic? Perhaps. Empathy is not excluded from the role of the intruder, even though one may be distrustful at first. [5] But there is a danger in empathy, of converting the stranger into the familiar. The intruder needs to remain an outsider in order to assist a person in their learning. It is a delicate role to play, this task of remaining distant but not inimical to another person - the alternative to absorption within the familiar is destruction at the hands of the other, as found in myths that deal with the intruder. [6] Perhaps it cannot be maintained for very long, and a learner must constantly trade one stranger for another, as each becomes respected, tamed, included within the familiar - or utterly destroyed.

I think this role of intruder is a reasonably good approximation of my ongoing efforts at pedagogy. It explains both facets of my experience - the exhilaration that arises when students get excited by the challenges they face, but also the virulent reactions they exhibit when they view the challenge as too costly. The students (some students) reject me, because I provoke them. I challenge them to go beyond the current pablum-type learnings they are encouraged to engage in. I want them to work harder, to play at learning, to examine problems that are outside their usual spheres of interest, to open themselves up to new ideas and approaches. When they think they are starting to get the hang of something, I often change the conditions again, alternating between encouragement and unsettlement.

Furthermore, I jump at opportunities to play the intruder within an existing student-teacher dynamic. I have been asked many times to join another teacher’s seminar, to take part in someone else’s pedagogy, and more recently I have begun to request to enter such situations. When I do so, I adopt the role of the intruder - neither student nor teacher, but something else. In this situation, it is easier to play a more sympathetic role, that of the maverick rather than the intruder of whom one is suspicious. As a maverick, I can propose ideas or avenues of exploration that are tangential to the main direction of discussion.

In addition, one may play the intruder or the maverick not only with respect to the students, but also with the university, with the same ambiguous reactions - distrust, enthusiasm when viewed as a positive challenge, but with the danger that the response may sometimes become destructive. The role of the stranger is never easy, for any of the players in the learning ecology. Hence in today’s world, subversive pedagogy, whether as the provoker or the maverick, offers the possibility of contributing to changing the ways in which we situate learning.

If we all engaged in full spectrum learning, would subversive pedagogy still have its place? It would be all around us, all the time, and so no longer subversive. We would each play the role of the intruder for each other. The role of the intruder is a necessary partner to full spectrum learning, that is, it is an important role within the ecology of learning, but we do not need “intruders with the right qualifications,” rather we need intruders with the right attitudes, and each intruder will find their own style of provoking.

Conclusion

In these few paragraphs I have laid out a critique of our current, almost universally accepted model of teaching and learning. Despite its almost global acceptance, recent and emerging research at the intersection between neuroscience and cognition highlights just how deeply this approach is flawed.

Furthermore, introducing a more modern, more fully human, model of learning will not be easy, because the new knowledge requires challenging not just our modes of learning, but also our modes of functioning as a socio-economic ensemble. In the face of the resistance to a more “human” approach to learning, subversive pedagogy may be a necessary tool. Like all subversive activities, it embraces its own paradoxes. Subversive pedagogy cannot be carried out from without - it must be done from within. One must engage in subversive pedagogy within our current learning environments, even though the ultimate goal of subversive pedagogy may be their complete overthrow. However, an argument can be made that the practices embraced by subversive pedagogy are natural components of true, full spectrum learning. The intruder role is fundamental to learning.

Notes

[1] See - http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/concept

[2] In Kraiger et al. (1993), an argument is made for three distinct types of learning – cognitive based, affective-based and skill-based.

[3] The idea of “learning ecologies” is beginning to make an appearance in the literature. For example, Bailey and Barley (2011) discuss how different environments generate distinct forms of learning. Thomas (2010) argues that we need to situate learning environments in space if we are to understand learning.

[4] See Lave and Wengler, 1991, for more discussion of the social framework of learning.

[5] For an example, see Shaw (1975).

[6] e.g. John Heath examines the myth of Actaeon, a hunter transformed into a stag who is then torn to shreds by his own dogs (Heath 1992).

Works Cited

Bailey, Diane, and Stephen R. Barley. “Teaching-Learning Ecologies: Mapping the Environment to Structure Through Action”. Organizational Science, 22.1 (2011): 262-285.

Becker, Howard Saul. Outsiders, Simon and Schuster: New York, 2008.

Bransford, John D., Anne L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999.

Broaders, Sara C., Susan Wagner Cook, Zachary Mitchell, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. “Making children gesture brings out implicit knowledge and leads to learning”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136.4 (2007): 539-550.

Camus, Albert. L’étranger. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

Cheung, Rebecca H. P. “Designing Movement Activities to Develop Children’s Creativity in Early Childhood Education”. Early Child Development and Care, 180.3 (2008): 377-385.

Cook, Susan C., Zachary Mitchell and Susan Goldin-Meadow. “Gesturing Makes Learning Last”. Cognition 106.2 (2008): 1047-1058.

Dalton, Stephanie S. “Pedagogy Matters: Standards for Effective Teaching Practice: Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence”. Research Report #4. Santa Cruz: University of California, 1998.

Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error. New York: Grosset-Pulmann, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1987.

Diamond, Adele. “Close Interaction of Motor Development and Cognitive Development and of the Cerebellum and Prefrontal Cortex”. Child Development 71.1 (2000): 44-56.

Dragon, Donna A. Toward Embodied Education, 1850s–2007: Historical, Cultural, Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives Impacting Somatic Education in United States Higher Education Dance. Ann Arbor, Michigan: ProQuest LLC, 2008.

Durisko, Corrine, and Julie A. Fiez. Functional Activation in the Cerebellum During Working Memory and Simple Speech Tasks. Cortex 46 (2010): 896-906.

ETS. Guide d’accueil des nouveaux professeurs à l’École de technologie supérieure, Montreal: Ecole de technologie supérieure, 2013.

Flower, Linda S., and John R. Hayes. Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process. College English 39.4 (December 1977): 449-461.

Gabarini, Francesca, and Mauro Adenzato. At the Root of Embodied Cognition: Cognitive Science Meets Neurophysiology. Brain and Cognition 56.1 (2004): 100-106.

Green, Jill. “Somatic Knowledge, The Body as Content and Methodology”. Journal of Dance Education 2.4 (2002): 114-118.

Greene, Maxine. Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1973

Grossberg, Stephen. How Does Cerebral Cortex Work? Learning, Attention and Grouping by the Laminar Circuits of Visual Cortex, Spatial Vision, 12.2 (1999): 163-185.

Hanna, Judith L. “A Nonverbal Language for Imagining and Learning: Dance Education in K–12 Curriculum”. Educational Researcher 37.8 (2008): 491–506.

Heath, John. “Actaeon, The Unmannerly Intruder: The Myth and Its Meaning in Classical Literature”. New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers: New York, 1993.

Huang, Al C.-L. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: The Essence of Tai Ji. Boulder, Colorado: Real People Press, 1973.

Jeannerod, Marc. Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell About the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Jeannerod, Marc. “Mental Imagery in the Motor Contex”. Neuropsychologia 33.11 (1995): 1419-1432.

Kelly, Roberta M. and Peter L. Strick. Cerebellar Loops with Motor Cortex and Prefrontal Cortex of a Nonhuman Primate. Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 8432-8444.

Kercood, Suneeta, Janice A. Grskovic, David L. Lee and Sophie Emmert. “The Effects of Fine Motor Movement and Tactile Stimulation on the Math Problem Solving of Students with Attention Problems”. Journal of Behavioural Education, 16.4 (2007): 303-310.

Kraiger, Kurt, J., Kevin Ford and Edouardo Salas. “Application of Cognitive, Skill-based and Affective Theories of Learning Outcomes to New Methods of Training Evaluation”. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78.2 (1993): 311-328.

Keil, Frank C. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wengler. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Lee, Timothy D., Laurie R. Swanson and Anne L. Hall. “What Is Repeated in a Repetition? Effects of Practice Conditions on Motor Skill Acquisition”. Physical Therapy 71.2 (1991): 150-156.

Minton, Sandra. Using Movement to Teach Academics: The Mind and Body as One Entity. Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2008.

Pritchard, David. “What’s right with lecturing?” MSOR Connections 10.3 (2010): 3-6.

Reis, Sally M. and Lilia M. Ruban. “Compensation Strategies Used by High-Ability Students with Learning Disabilities”. Neuropsychology and Cognition 25 (2004): 155- 198.

Rissotto, Antonella and Francesco Tonucci. “Freedom of Movement and Environmental Knowledge in Elementary School Children”. Journal of Experimental Psychology 22.1 (2002): 65-77.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. “The Functional Role of the Parieto-Frontal Mirror Circuit: Interpretations and Misinterpretations”. National Review of Neuroscience 11.4 (2010): 264-274.

Rowe, Meredith L. and Susan Goldin-Meadow. “Differences in Early Gesture Explain SES Disparities in Child Vocabulary at School Entry”. Science 323 (2009): 951-953.

Schuetz, Alfred. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology”. American Journal of Sociology 49.6 (May 1944): 499-507.

Shaw, Michael. The Female Intruder: Women in Fifth-Century Drama. Classical Philology 70.4 (October 1975): 255-266.

Slepian, Michael L. and Nalini Ambady. “Fluid Movement and Creativity”. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141.4 (2012): 625-629.

Stergiou, Nicholas and Leslie M. Decker. Human Movement Variability, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Pathology - Is There a Connection? Human Movement Science 30.5 (2011): 869-888.

Stinson, Susan W. “My Body/Myself : Lessons from Dance Education”. Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds - Landscapes: The Arts, Aesthetics and Education 3 (2004): 153-167.

Strick, Peter L., Richard P. Dum and Julie A. Fiez. “Cerebellum and Nonmotor Function”. The Annual Review of Neuroscience 32 (2009): 413-434.

Sun, Ron, Edward Merrill, and Todd Peterson. From Implicit Skills to Explicit Knowledge: A Bottom-Up Model of Skill Learning. Cognitive Science 25 (2001): 203-244.

Thomas, Herbert. “Learning Spaces, Learning Environments and the Dis’placement’ of Learning” British Journal of Educational Technology 41.3 (2010): 502-511.

Thomas, Laura E. and Alejandro Lleras. “Swinging into Thought: Directed Movement Guides Insight in Problem Solving”. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16.4 (2009): 719-723.

Ungerleider, Leslie G., Julien Doyon and Avi Karni. “Imaging Brain Plasticity During Motor Skill Learning.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 78.3 (2002): 553-564.

Van Tulder, Maurits, Antti Malmivaara, and Bart Koes. “Repetitive Strain Injury”. The Lancet 369.9575 (2007): 1815-1822.

Wormhoudt, Pearl S. With a Song in My Psyche: On the Psychology of Singing and Teaching Singing. Xlibris, 2001.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Running-Ecologies
Thinking Movement Pedagogically

Nikki Rotas
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

We shall not inquire how all of this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 9)

VIDEO ONE

Zigzagging though the streets we reach the train tracks and run alongside the train—its metal movement runs through our running-bodies. The ruderal ecologies of the urban landscape run with us too. The rapid springtime growth of roots and shoots follow us along the tracks. The protruding growth of ruderal species inhabits the smooth and jagged cracks on sidewalks and in buildings. Students often point out the unruly growth patterns and unusual locations of ruderal plants, noting the endlessness and pleasantness of what they code as “pretty flowers.” Also referred to as wildscapes, ruderal ecologies spontaneously colonize urban sites and are seen as a threat to nature (Jorgensen & Keenan 2010). However, the developing field of urban ecology offers ways of thinking about urban environments as living landscapes that respond to changing environmental conditions.

Using a similar approach, Jane Bennett describes environments as alive (2010). She makes note of things as having thingness, or to put it in her words, vitality and thus the power to generate affective qualities of experience. She specifically notes the power of metal, or metallic vitality and its capacity to transform itself in many different ways. Through Manuel de Landa’s work on the dynamics of spreading cracks, she suggests that cracks (such as those on sidewalks and old buildings) are operative of defects. She argues that “the line of travel of these cracks is not deterministic but expressive of an emergent causality, whereby grains respond on the spot and in real time to the idiosyncratic movements of their neighbours” (2010: 59). Bennett expresses a relational dynamism of things, which lends to thinking of our running-practice as an improvisational movement that absorbs (among many things) the metal movement of the train. Such movement generates new modalities of running that do not follow linear paths, but rather create routes that determine their own urban swerve.

Our learning process is this running. The group (10-15 students and 3-4 teachers) runs together after school and twice a week for one hour within a community in Toronto, Canada [1]. We all move differently: some faster, some slower. We even walk at times, provoking the students to create a different group they call the “Fun to Walk Club,” which experiments with slow to speed-walking movements. Participation is voluntary and varies throughout the weeks, depending on student commitments at home or school. We run different routes every week within the urban community near the school. We run on sidewalks lined by housing units and tall apartment buildings. The runners enjoy pointing out their homes and those of their friends as we pass by them. Students even know the name of the local ice cream vendor; his truck moves with us on our bi-weekly routes. Attached to our running bodies are miniature high-definition (HD) cameras, which are marketed towards and primarily used for extreme adventure or action photography and video. Commercially marketed as the GoPro, the camera has the capacity to take HD photos and video while it is in movement. The camera can be attached to human and nonhuman bodies using adjustable straps. With the use of plastic mounts, the camera can also be attached to moving objects, such as motorcycles and cars. The Hero 3+ Silver edition camera is worn during running-practice by the researcher, teacher, and students (Grade 2/3, ages seven to nine). Wearing the cameras on our head, chest, upper back, or wrist, we use the video recording function set (by default) at a resolution of 960 pixels at 30 frames per second. This creates an ultra-wide field of view, enabling a recording of relations as they unfold. Furthermore, the camera records our pounding movements as they meet the paved sidewalk and street. Notably the exhaustion of breath as it relates to the environment reminds us—along with the visual images—that we are embodied and embedded humans (Braidotti 2013). Yet, with and in our breath there is a rhythm that expresses a quality beyond physicality and exhaustion. The wearable camera, unable to capture this inaudible beat, also reminds us that the technological apparatus is generative of the force of relations that also shapes the running-ecology.

Rosi Braidotti writes of zigzagging as a practice of becoming that shapes subjectivity. She argues that practice will shape its own swerve “in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past—in the spaces that flow and connect the binaries” (2013: 164). This non-linear movement expresses a Spinozian notion of enthusiasm that Erin Manning explains as that which captures the unformed qualities of experience in-between movement (2013). Put differently, the running-group actually zigzags through the streets, but it is not this literal movement—in its representational form—where relations to technology, the self, and place become undone. Nor does zigzagging represent a running method, nor was the movement triggered by a conceptual framework or application of theory (Braidotti 2013). Zigzagging is invented in and of the process of running, in and of humans-animals-objects-things. Therefore, zigzagging as enthusiasm outruns the pattern and the garbage bins encountered on the sidewalk can be perceived as a positive force, or what Manning and Massumi refer to as “enabling constraints” that create new movement, rather than impede it (2014: 92). Enthusiasm cannot be captured nor measured. Its difference is felt in the pulsating rhythms that inform the running ecology as a collectivity, not a pre-formed group. As a collectivity, the ecology expresses a self-organizing enthusiasm through the co-composing movements of runners, technologies, garbage bins, train tracks, sidewalks, ice cream truck, and ruderal cracks. And perhaps it was this enthusiasm that escaped the running-ecology and that forced to form the “Fun to Walk Club.” The Club became a new node in the research process that continued with an experimental practice, but through a different mode of engagement and degree of intimacy.

Running-practice does not ‘train’ students for anything in particular. It is as an open-ended process capable of activating potential. Running is thus an opportunity for “creative participation” (Manning & Massumi 2014: 92). This entails a self-organizing potential in the act of, in our case, running with technology and with and in the community. In and of this technological milieu that cities, communities, and schools can force to form (in their own terms), running as a pedagogical praxis must be considered as potentially productive of new relationships to place. Not based on traditional participatory models, this proposes a re-valuation of participation as a “more-than human” engagement (Manning & Massumi 2014: 4). Such a proposal will inform future ecologies that educational researchers cannot know beforehand. This is a contingent praxis that similarly to the field of urban ecology, resists thinking about urban landscapes and the bodies that inhabit them as derelict or in need of management through didactic lesson plans. Urban ecologists attend to emergent relations generated with and in environments. They examine how urban places were used in the past and how such places can be re-thought and re-engaged in un-coded ways that are intimately produced. Taking a cue from ecology, the sciences, social sciences, and other disciplines of study then might redraw different questions (horizontally) that know that the knowing subject could never fully account for the more-than human rhythms that form and inform school ecologies.

Notes

The author would like to acknowledge that pieces of this text exist in a forthcoming publication in Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM).

[1] In accordance with the Research Ethics Board at the U

niversity of Toronto additional information in regards to geographic location and the identification of the school is withheld. This is required in order to preserve the anonymity of the students and the school involved in the research study.

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum, 2004.

Jorgensen, Anna and Richard Keenan, eds. Urban Wildscapes. New York: Routledge. 2012.

Manning, Erin. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Entering the Event, Through the Unconscious

Adam Szymanski
Concordia University, Montreal

A collective is more than the sum of its parts. Its force, trajectory and ethos are irreducible to the scale of human action. There is something more-than-human in the collective. We've discovered this much. [1]

How then, to contribute on this more-than-human level, to participate in the event's dynamic form-taking? [2] It's a risky affair. To contribute to the collective is to take a speculative risk, to intervene without the knowledge of how that intervention will turn out. That's because to contribute to the collective is effectively to be concerned with its modes of abstraction; hopefully enriching its ecology of practices with an eye to how these practices may or may not develop. [3] Contributions are never neutral additions. The event's metastability takes weight of contributions, and shifts accordingly. As much as contributions are gifts to the event, contributions never just give without taking away. Contributions double as interventions, and interventions cut. [4] To contribute to a collective then entails intervening in a collective, which entails enacting a cut into the eventfulness of a collective's development.

The ethico-political dimension that colours the act of contributing-intervening-cutting can make living and working collectively an anxiety-inducing task. For these acts entail responsibility for the possibilities that are incarnated by the cut of intervention, and the possibilities are undoubtedly more and more numerous and complex the more that an event develops and abstracts. It is possible to care too much for one's own good, to the point of petrification.

How then, to intervene and contribute under such conditions; to bring thought to enunciation, to bring desire to expression, to carve out a niche point of entry for productive contributions? How then, to enter the event? There is no simple answer, but one thing is for certain: interventions require their proper conditions of possibility.

In the opening lines of “The Discourse on Language” (L'Ordre du discours), his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault expressed his anxiety about beginning to speak, about beginning to intervene into discourse. He began by saying,

I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path—a slender gap—the point of its possible disappearance. (Foucault 1971: 148)

Yet in spite of his initial hesitation, Foucault can and did begin, because the institution had ritualized a beginning for him, had provided a place for discourse within the “established order of things.”

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outset, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surrounding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them. Inclination speaks out: I don't want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.' Institutions reply: 'But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it. (Foucault 1971: 149) [5]

University lecture halls create the conditions of possibility for lectures to happen. But research collectives, artist collectives, and activist collectives are quite different: they certainly do have some ritual forms, but at their best and at their most experimental, they can also take us into unknown territory. Territories of unknown subjectivities, unfelt experiences, unthought thoughts. Removed from the “established order of things” that so effectively quelled Foucault's unease and facilitated his entry into discourse, the prospect of intervening in the unknown can be paralyzing and petrifying, especially given the ethico-political dimension of the intervention's cut into the event. The project of crafting entry points into events (transindividually across the spectrum of neurodiversity), as events develop, perhaps past forms that we have seen before, is partially constitutive of a praxis we could, through further development elsewhere, come to call therapeutic activism. [6]

On the flipside of this accessibility conundrum, where events too complex and unfamiliar strike a petrifying anxiety in the hearts of would-be participants, lies another sort of challenge to entering the event. Sometimes events fall flat and fail to live up to the complexity that we labour and hope for. They neatly fall back into the current “order of things.” In these circumstances, a collective's plane of actuality isn't always conducive for interventions of radical appetition, appetitions that don't directly correspond to a ritual practice holding currency within the collective. Those on the inside of this ritual order, those who know its codes, who are familiar with its movement profile, who create a common plane of reference on it, may tend to create the space for one another to enunciate within the event and plan out the collective's creative development. In these less dynamic moments, ritual returns without difference, and reinforces in returning. It's the actual order of the event charting its own course.

These moments when a collective is so saturated with its own actuality can be just as challenging to enter, yet for the opposite reason as described above when the collective's abstractions leave the would-be actor with petrifying ethico-political decisions. When an event is well within the limits of its enunciatory potential, when ritualized statements are lined up and waiting for their turn, waiting for the space that they know will open, because it has before, entering can be just as difficult. I would like to suggest that in both cases where an event proves too challenging to enter, when it is seemingly too new or too old, too complex or too simple, that the unconscious presents itself for the taking, as wide open and welcome for schizoanalytic interventions.

In conceiving of the unconscious as a mobile zone of entry into the event, I aim to build on Guattari's use of the term, wherein it is understood as an “unconscious turned towards the future whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos...” (Guattari 2013: 10). Working through the event's unconscious, then, is to work on the event's quantum of possibility. Our speaking and our touching work on the event's unconscious to shape how the event articulates the possible in its dynamic form-taking.

Events are co-compositions of multiple acts, movements and enunciations that are transduced by the event’s articulation of experience and thus felt transindividually across actors in the midst. The event's articulation of experience through co-composition doesn’t just emerge out of thin air. The cusp of articulation may be spontaneous, but the conditions productive of spontaneous emergence have their basis in the collective’s processual memory. Thoughts and feelings are shared amongst event-participants long before the event transpires. Due to the limited duration of the event, and the limitations inherent in the various forms that a particular event moves through, only a selection of the thoughts and feelings actually manifest during that event proper. Yet so many of these thoughts and feelings do indeed manifest – but differently. There is a transduction that takes place between the swath of thoughts and feelings enunciated in preparation of the event and then those that come to enunciation in the event itself. Only a very few of all the thoughts and feelings that hover around the event actually come to enunciation in the event, come to perceptibility in the event's durational form-taking. Yet nevertheless, the rest of all that goes on before and around the event does indeed bear on the event and the possible forms it articulates. The event's cusp of sensuous perceptibility, of actuality, of formal articulation, is only ever a fraction of the event – the conscious fraction. Our preparations for the event, and our actions around the event, condition what is possible for the event to consciously articulate.

To work through the unconscious of the event can be understood as speculatively setting up of tentative limits between conscious and unconscious; the planting of seeds that sprout cuts in the field of relation. [7] If X or Y is expressed now, in some other situation outside of the event, or in preparation of the event, then maybe the event will tend in the direction of A, B, or C.

Speculative propositions launched in anticipation of the event can work on both conscious and unconscious planes. The difference is that the conscious variety of propositions are articulated transparently, officially, and thus usually to the collective as a whole. Conversely, unconscious propositions for eventful co-composition happen clandestinely, in cahoots with the outside. Unconscious propositions to the event could be an imperceptible affective bridge binding a groupuscule, an idea that is still too messy to have become dogma, an inarticulable zone of desire, etc. Whatever bears on the event's unconscious, it happens unofficially, outside of the event, but inextricable to how the event ends up functioning. While the conscious workers work within the existential territories of actuality, and put their selves and bodies into the mix, the unconscious workers work in the domain of the machinic Phyla, machining the realm of possibility (virtual incorporeal Universes) which then in turn bear on the actual existential territories where those conscious workers work.

The transduction that machines the event’s potential functions at the threshold the event's actual articulations (consciousness) and the component parts (inclusive of clandestine propositions) that machine its possibility (unconscious). [8] Transduction is a selective process. The event selects out from a number of propositions that were launched into it and around it, in a radically democratic act of de-personalized, eventful appetition. We could also call this the event’s desire at work.

In working through an event's unconscious, we can never be entirely sure what acts, movements, thoughts, feelings, etc. will come to expression, will enter the event's consciousness. That uncertainty stems from the quasi-chaotic force of transduction. [9] The richness of our collectives determines the richness of our events, though not through a relationship of predetermination. The richness of our collectives enriches the field of possibilities that the event has to draw from. If there is one thing in the world that we don't need to be anxious about, it's that events will be rich and experience will be saturated with potential because they are bound to be just that – rich in potential – if we have cultivated a milieu rich with universes of possibility from which the event emerges. To work the unconscious, to structure the event's coordinates of virtuality, [10] is to act on a belief that this transductive conjunction between the event and its broader milieu does indeed take place. Thus working on the unconscious requires a leap of faith to get started, but then a pragmatic commitment to assess the effects, so that future unconscious operations can be tweaked according to shifted collective desire, political urgency, etc.

While it would be presumptuous to say with utter certainty how the event transduces from its broader and historical milieu because of desire's quasi-chaotic nature, it is possible to pinpoint at least one structure that this transduction may take. The event's process of transduction frequently operates free indirectly. The term “free indirect” originated as a way of accounting for expressive moments in the modern novel when the author's “indirect” and a character’s “direct” voice momentarily merge, giving life to a free indirect discourse. [11] In understanding the various ways that actors contribute to an event, the free indirect is a useful model.

Have you ever been in a meeting, a situation, an event, where somebody else spoke exactly your thoughts? It is proof of the free indirect at work in the event's unconscious structuring the enunciatory cusp of the event (and doubly proof that the thoughts were never entirely yours or theirs to begin with). Conversations that had taken place long before the event condition the possibilities for linguistic enunciation in the event. Experiences shared outside the event colour the event's affective tonality. Both are examples of free indirect transduction from unconscious to conscious domains of the event, where one is indivisible from the other – and where we are equally indivisible from one another, in the moment of the event's expression.

Working through the unconscious allows for personal contributions that immediately de-personalize and deterritorialize, yet nevertheless, add to the force of the event and the spirit of the collective, by reformulating its coordinates of the possible. Working on the event's unconscious, in the lead-up to the event, or even outside of the event, can be a way of machining the event's universes of possibility all while keeping one's self at least one degree removed from it all. It can be easier to put one's self into the mix in conditions that are different from those which the event comes to take, which is why working on the event's unconscious and preparing its conditions of possibility can be enabling for some otherwise petrified actors across the spectrum of neurodiversity. The unconscious is an ally to accessibility.

Not having to put one's self into the event can also be a safeguard against exhaustion and considered an anti-depressive technique. As Alain Ehrenberg provocatively argues in his book on depression entitled The Weariness of the Self, neoliberalism is predicated on the performance of the self, and the epidemic of depression seen in the Western world is largely a phenomenon of being unable to uphold performance expectations. If our events only offer personal performance as an entry point into participation, then we risk creating an exhausting paradigm characteristic of society at large, which would surely be counterintuitive given that we aim at reinventing and renewing society when engaged in event design. Alternatively, in broadening our range of perceptibility to recognize depersonalized contributions to the event’s unconscious we simultaneously broaden our understanding of participation, and offer additional entry points into the event that previously hid below the threshold of accessibility.

Accounting for the free indirect nature of eventful enunciation also works to dissolve the habit of lending personal attributes to what are in fact collective enunciations. In accounting for the unconscious of an event, and all those who have worked on and through it, we shift the burden of responsibility for a seemingly personal enunciation from the individual to the collective, and thus broaden that once-burdensome weight of responsibility from the one to the more-than-one. Since a collective is more than the sum of its parts, its shoulders can bear that much more than a group of individuals ever could. Accounting for the unconscious facilitates a greater awareness that what we say and do, though it is spoken and moves through us, does not in fact originate with or belong to us.

Here, where we’re soaked with the unconscious, it’s impossible to tell who did what, who should take credit for this or get a promotion for that. Here, where we have entered the event of studying for the sake of studying in whichever way we do, the neoliberal university isn’t quite sure how to striate the collective through a mode of personal valorisation within a value-system of general equivalence. Unable to be ordered, like discourse, the unconscious lingers over the arid fields of possibility prepared for us by seemingly omnipresent logic of neoliberalism, and stubbornly insists that teaching and learning could be otherwise.

Notes

[1] In the preface to Erin Manning's Always More Than One, Brian Massumi describes the theoretical turn that Manning makes in order to advance a more-than-human, rather than a non-human, theory of individuation. He writes: “The singular-generic field that enters into the constitution is already inhabited by the manyness of the more than one or two. The vitality affect that eventuates is not one-or-the-other of the two, but an unexpected thirdness of both-and.” (Manning 2013: xx) The force of the collective, and the potential immanent to it, is an expression of this thirdness.

[2] In Relationscapes Erin Manning offers a definition of dynamic form that is useful for thinking how the unconscious bears on movements of the event. She succinctly writes: “The dynamic form of a movement is its incipient potential” (Manning 2009: 6).

[3] Isabelle Stengers points out the difficulty of caring for abstractions and entering into co-composition with them (which is the duty of the philosopher), given the power that they can wield over us. “We cannot think without abstractions: they cause us to think, they lure our feelings and affects. But our duty is to take care of our abstractions, never to bow down in front of what they are doing to us – especially when they demand that we heroically accept the sacrifices they entail, the insuperable dilemmas and contradictions in which they trap us” (Stengers 2002: 50).

[4] Cuts into the event open up new fields of possibilities by cracking open the duration of total movement. As Erin Manning writes, “In order to have a metric movement, one that is added or subtracted in a measurable way, we must cut the total movement, crack the duration that, otherwise, flows unimpeded through all expressions of the world. In this cracking, new durations will create new processes. There is never stability. And there can never be non-movement—even in what appears to be complete stillness there is quality of movement-moving, force of form” (Manning 2013: 13).

[5] Translation modified.

[6] The term therapeutic activism is inspired by the writings of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Josep Raffanelli i Orra, and the general spirit of anti-psychiatry that colours the writings of Félix Guattari. In The Soul at Work Berardi proposes that “In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same” (Berardi 2009: 220); and Raffanelli i Orra, in a similar autonomist vein, writes that “Treatment, before wanting to say: 'How do I heal?” presupposes a prior question: “What world must be actualized?” (Raffanelli i Orra 2011: 284). In my article, “Toward a Melancholy Aesthetics of the Cinema” in |Π| Magazine for Live Arts Research, I offer a reading of the film Olso, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011) as an example of an emerging political aesthetics in global art cinema cognizant of the inextricable relationship between therapy and militancy under neoliberal hegemony.

[7] This sprouting of cuts in the field of relation that opens onto novel sets of possibilities is analogous to the process that Guattari describes in Schizoanalytic Cartographies wherein Universes of possibility are produced by the machinic Phyla's striating tensor. “Striation reveals itself to be synonymous with processes of the enrichment of the possible and the virtual” (Guattari 2013: 98).

[8] This in-between space – or milieu – where transduction between unconscious and conscious is operative is Deleuze’s “outside.” In his book on Foucault, Deleuze conceives the outside as “always an opening onto a future [where] nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed” (Deleuze 1988: 89).

[9] Following Guattari, assemblages come to enunciation through a process of chaotization and complexification. The operations of assemblages of enunciation begin in and emerge from chaos. (Guattari 2013:106)

[10] Guattari defines the virtual as “the possibility of the possible” (Guattari 2013: 178).

[11] For Deleuze's reading of the free indirect, a reading which he performs through Pier Paolo Pasolini's “cinema of poetry,” see the first section of “The perception-image” in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.

Works Cited

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia. Los Angeles: Semtiotext(e), 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesots Press, 1988.

Ehrenberg, Alain. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language”. Social Science Information 10 (1971): 148-161.

Guattari, Félix. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Trans. Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.

Guattari, Félix. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Trans. Andrew Goffey. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Manning, Erin. Always More than One: Individuation’s Dance. Preface by Brian Massumi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013.

Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2009.

Rafanell I Orra, Josep. En Finir Avec Le Capitalisme Thérapeutique: Soin, Politique et Communauté. Paris: La Découverte, 2011.

Stengers, Isabelle. “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism”. Subjectivity 2002 (2008): 38-59.

Szymanski, Adam. “Toward a Melancholy Aesthetics of the Cinema”. |Π| Magazine for Live Arts Research 2 (Fall 2013): 25-28.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How To Rethink Value

Erin Manning

Study

Let classrooms be invitations for study, not knowledge consumption. Beware of the idea that certain things “must be covered.” Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney argue, is about creating dissonance. It’s about allowing learning to continue, rather than continuously cutting learning off in the name of what we’ve decided, in advance of our coming together, is worthy of being called knowledge. Don’t look too hard for the through-thread. Don't worry too much about drawing a line. Make learning a weave.

Start in the Middle

When we make study the way we enter into the pact of collective learning, we must unlearn the habit of stopping thought in order to start it again. Think of all of the times you’ve entered a classroom where a lively discussion is taking place only to close it down. We, teachers, tend to stage the classroom that way, marking our entrance as the start of learning. What is lost in this gesture? What is left unheard?

“Refuse to call the class to order,” Moten and Harney suggest. Recognize learning’s fragility. Learn to listen from the middle of the many conversations. Connect in the rhythm. Think of it as a soundscape:

when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. (Halberstam in Harney & Moten 2013: 9)

The soundscape of learning is full of inklings which reside below the threshold of actual perception. Think of the site for learning as encompassing what it cannot quite articulate, and listen to what that sounds like, even if you can’t quite hear it. It makes a difference. “[W]hen we refuse the call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth” (Halberstam in Harney & Moten 2013: 9).

Think Beyond the Institution

A pedagogical process that starts in the middle has much more difficulty discerning who is doing the teaching and who is doing the learning. When this distinction is eroded, the class has always already begun. The thinking seen as a prerequisite by the institution is not here what is at stake, though it likely is being learned, by and by. The institution may provide a site, but learning cannot but exceed it. There is no way to hold learning to curriculum.

Value what is in excess of curriculum, the unknowable as heard in the interstices of the uneasy soundscape which is the ever overflowing classroom. Listen here, where value is still in the forming.

Beyond Value

Value at the university is measured in credits. With each credit comes a fee. For some this fee is exorbitant, leading to the vicious cycle of debt and credit. For others it is financially viable, and so debt feels kept at bay. But one way or another debt is at work. It haunts us, and it exceeds us, and it sustains, like the gift it is at its underside.

There is a direct relationship between credits and the value of education in the accredited academic institution. How we succeed depends on how many credits we accumulate. This accumulation makes clear demands on how learning is lived, and defined. With the accumulation of credit comes the calling to order. There is a way to learn, material to be covered, assignments to be graded. Value is squarely tied to use: part of the lesson we learn (if we succeed) is that our value coincides with our ability to be called to order.

The student in the undercommons resists this call to order. But she doesn’t do it in the mode of critique. Her no is affirmative. She is eager to learn, an eagerness that leads her elsewhere than toward the call to order, or the ordering of her credit(s). In fact, the call barely registers, she is so busy learning. This student is a bad debtor: she won’t let credit run her life. She has real debt, she struggles with it, holding not one but two part-time jobs, and yet she refuses to give in. She barely hears the call of credit.

[T]he student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned they could measure her progress, establish her attributes, give her credit. But the student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt. The student does not intend to pay. (Harney & Moten 2013: 62)

Who is this student who (un)learns, in debt, beyond credit? She is the student who reads and speaks and dreams her studies. She is the student you learn from, as long as you are willing to similarly resist the call to order. She is the one who takes a stand wherever she is and does not discriminate between degrees and shades of learning. The classroom is only one of the sites in which she invents and explores. She is the student who remains “beyond interest,” in a field of relation that doesn’t accept the vicious cycle of debt and credit, who understands in advance that debt will always exceed the capacity for it to be repayed, who knows that learning cannot be encapsulated within a narrow understanding of interest demarcated in advance of the giving. She thinks of learning as a gift.

She knows the debt far exceeds the credit, and she is proud to be indebted to learning. She is indebted and she honours the debt. The more she learns the more indebted she is. This is a learning that refuses credit, that refuses the cycle that pretends our bases can be covered in advance. “Interest the students! The student can be calculated by her debts, can calculate her debts with her interests. She is in sight of credit, in sight of graduation, in sight of being a creditor, of being invested in education, a citizen” (62).

She just isn’t interested in what credit promises. She prefers the uneasy reciprocity of debt unpayable and gifts beyond return. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t pay her debts. She just knows that debt and credit must not be so easily aligned, that the alignment of debt and credit discredits the gift. She doesn’t want to quantify interest. She’ll take the credit, but she won’t work for it. She’ll work despite being told what is worth and not worth knowing. She will resist the idea that learning can be captured by the interests of a discipline. She will resist discipline. “The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt” (62). This student doesn’t want a private university. In fact, privatization, as she understands it, just produces more need for credit. And so she invents other kinds of collectivities, participating in undercommons as they emerge.

Beyond Evaluation

She is hard to evaluate, this student who resists credit. The institution finds her slippery: she does her work, even gets the credit, but this doesn't seem to be what motivates her. She knows how to write a good paper, how to cover the necessary bases, and yet when she sticks to this approach she finds herself sinking into a black hole. Something else has to be at stake, and it is this that really motivates her.

How to teach such a student who learns beyond, who learns despite evaluation? The student who feels so strongly and who follows the feeling? The student who isn’t afraid of friction, who adapts not only to the question, but to what remains unarticulated but not unheard? “To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption” (Harney & Moten 2013: 87).

Pragmatics of the Useless

A pedagogy engaged with a pragmatics of the useless invents value in the learning. It does not decide in advance what is useful. In fact, it is skeptical of the very idea that we should know in advance where learning will take us. The whole conversation about the future, about jobs and security reeks of a power politics. Isn’t this the call to order? How could we possibly know what will be of value in a time yet to be invented? Even capital doesn’t pretend to know this.

A pragmatics of the useless is dedicated to uselessness, to practices that have not yet been defined in accordance to value imposed from the outside. A pragmatics of the useless celebrates the fact that we do not know where a thought can take us. It delights in study for study’s sake.

A pragmatics of the useless is pragmatic in the sense that it is absolutely engaged with what is in the world, right now, and speculative in the sense that it is open to transformation by the potentializing force of where study can take us.

Making-Thinking

Value is often allied to what can be articulated. What of the forces in experience that are felt but remain ineffable? What of other ways of expressing that defy articulation? What of the soundscapes that move us more by their undertow than by their waves? Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin touches on this ineffable undertow in experience.

The infrathin cannot be generalized across iterations of its coming to be. It is exemplary. As Duchamp writes: “One can only give examples of it” (in de Duve 1991: 160). From Duchamp’s hand-written notes: “The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin (#4),” “Subway gates—The people / who go through at the very last moment / Infra thin—(9 recto),” “Velvet trousers – / their whistling sound (in walking) by / brushing of the 2 legs is an / infra thin separation signaled / by sound. (it is not an infra thin sound) (#9 verso),” “Difference between the contact / of water and that of / molten lead for ex, /or of cream. / with the walls of its / own container moved around the liquid. … this difference between two contacts is infra thin. (#14)” (Perloff 2002: 101).

The infrathin is interested in what is backgrounded in experience, yet still makes a difference. Usually, what can actually be apprehended – the actual share of experience in the making – is the measure of use-value. What is not actually included in the occasion of experience, in the event, is considered useless. This unactualized share is not only too difficult to describe, it is unmeasurable. How could it possibly be evaluated?

Yet it is this very unmeasurability that gives experience its value. The student knows this, and this is why she learns everywhere she goes. In fact, the university is only one of many sites where she experiences the welling force of the undercommons. Sometimes she even wonders whether the undercommons doesn’t have a stronger undertow away from the walls of the academic institution. But she persists because she is a life-long learner and she loves the idea of there being a site dedicated to pedagogy. She knows, from her experience of valuing the edgings into experience, that there are emergent collectivities even in the most rigid of systems. And so she finds ways to keep encountering the speculative share of experience, exploring how it colours the event in its pragmatism. Like all life-long learners, she knows about the magic of the verge.

New Forms of Knowledge

The verge is a new form of knowledge that’s been there all along. The only reason it hasn’t stood out is that it activates a kind of value that resists evaluation. We just couldn’t see it, we were so busy with evaluations. This might be to its advantage: it still has the potential for creating new forms of value, new useless ways of valuing experience in the making.

If we look up from our evaluations, we may note: thought was always transversal, the classroom always a site for learning at the verge. What we need is not a new classroom, not new students, but new techniques to orient perception.

To think study transversally involves a rethinking of the concept of thought itself. Thought is reoriented toward the incipiency of the event at hand, toward the inquiry of study, refraining from delimiting it to existing academic definitions of intellectuality. Where else does thinking happen?

We must also undo thought of its dependence on the human subject. Thought is not first in the mind. It is in the bodying. And the bodying is always in an ecology of practices. In the ecology of practices where it is not the mind that speaks, what emerges is not a subject-centered narrative but an account of how thought moves, how it moves us, and how it moves the world. A practice of collective learning is about the movement of thought, engaging thought at the immanent limit where it is still fully in the act. Learning happens through us, with us. We are bearers of thought in the sense that it is carried along. We move in this carrying, and this carrying moves us.

Beyond Method

A methodological approach begins to unravel if it asks what knowledge does. What knowledge does cannot be packaged. There is no call to order for thought in the act. Study seeps and leaks and shifts and bounces.

As study, what thought can do is begin to attend to the appetitions activated in the everyday, taking the thinking-in-the-act as rigorous on its own speculative terms. Thought now begins to coincide with the most creative definition of philosophy, philosophy that asks how, and what else? No method will ever assist philosophy in this enterprise of thinking in the act, nor will any method be an adequate mantle for the dissonance of thought’s soundscape. Each thinking in the act must invent its own practices for learning, its own techniques for carrying. In study, what we seek is not the homogenization of thinking-doing but the creation of conditions for encountering the operative transversality of difference at the heart of all living.

Research-Creation

At the SenseLab we’ve called this activity of thinking-doing research-creation. Research-creation, as we experiment with it, is study. We have asked: How can the rethinking of how knowledge is created in the context of artistic practice become an opening to thinking philosophy itself as a practice? How, following Gilles Deleuze, might a resituating of research-creation as a practice that thinks provide us with the vocabulary to take seriously that “philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object”? “It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and we must judge it in light of the other practices with which it interferes” (Deleuze 1989: 280; translation modified).

What research-creation does is ask us to engage directly with a process which, in many cases, will not be or cannot be articulated in language. This is the paradox: that philosophy does want to find words for thought in the act. The ongoing work of the creative collaboration that is research-creation involves honouring the dissonance of the push-pull of the textures and movements of practice that refuse naming, feeling the reverberations of that which cannot quite be put into words, while activating, in writing, the infrathin that sounds as much as it says.

Research-creation does not need new methods. What it needs is a re-accounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking-doing. This involves experimenting with listening at the verge, a practice that engages with the not-yet at the heart of learning. This is radical pedagogy: the commitment to the creation of practices that foreground how learning creates its own value.

Works Cited

de Duve, Thierry. The Definitely Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe/New York/Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

Déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance. Les études décoloniales et les imaginaires dispersés

Laura T. Ilea

Être contemporain. Un regard transversal

En se demandant qu’est-ce que c’est que d’être contemporain, Giorgio Agamben fait référence à un poème d’Osip Mandelstam, Le siècle, où la question fondamentale regarde la relation du poète à son époque, comparée avec une bête indomptable, les vertèbres disparates. Dans sa tentative de mettre ensemble ces vertèbres, le poète devrait regarder la bête droit dans les yeux, et ce regard lui obscurcit la compréhension. Pourquoi ? Parce que c’est un regard transversal, inhabituel, irrévérencieux et, en même temps, inactuel.

Agamben affirme que « la contemporanéité est cette relation avec le temps qui adhère à lui par disjonction et anachronisme. » (Agamben 2009: 41) Elle présuppose un regard paradoxal, capable de déceler l’obscurité à l’intérieur d’une certaine époque. L’explication de ce regard paradoxal consiste dans le fait qu’entre le temps individuel et le temps collectif il y a une fracture. L’obscurité est inévitable. « Toutes les époques sont obscures, pour celui qui veut comprendre la contemporanéité. » (41)

Agamben propose deux analogies pour prouver le fait que l’obscurité est une création plutôt qu’une absence: 1. Une analogie neurophysiologique – l’absence de lumière rend active une série de cellules périphériques dans la rétine. Activées, elles produisent un genre particulier de vision que nous appelons obscurité. Par conséquent, l’obscurité n’est pas une notion privative (non-vision) mais plutôt le produit d’un type spécial de cellules rétiniennes, une action de notre rétine. En continuant l’analogie, Agamben conclut que celui qui est contemporain possède l’habilité de neutraliser les lumières qui proviennent de son époque, afin de dévoiler son obscurité particulière. 2. Une deuxième analogie provient de l’astrophysique – l’explication des scientifiques concernant le noir cosmique est la suivante : dans un univers en expansion, les galaxies marginales s’éloignent de nous à une vitesse tellement grande que leur lumière ne peut jamais nous atteindre. Ce que nous percevons comme étant l’obscurité est justement cette lumière qui ne nous rencontre jamais. Être contemporain avec une certaine époque signifie être à temps à un rendez-vous que nous ne pouvons que rater.

La rencontre avec sa propre époque se manifeste comme une pression transformatrice, comme une urgence qui se rapproche de ce que Nietzsche appelle « l’inactuel », l’anachronisme qui nous permet de nous rapporter à notre temps dans la revitalisation du passé, dans la réactivation de ce qui est considéré comme étant inexorablement divisé ou mort.

Être contemporain signifie aussi pouvoir retrouver ce qui est archaïque dans le présent, ce qui opère en lui comme une force de la création, de même que l’embryon continue à être actif dans les tissus de l’organisme mur. L’archaïque introduit la fracture dans le temps. Mais cette fracture est celle qui précisément rend possible la rencontre entre les époques et les générations.

Enfin, être contemporain signifie non seulement percevoir l’obscurité du présent, la lumière qui ne peut atteindre sa destination, mais aussi être capable de transformer son propre temps, le mettre en relation avec d’autres temps.

Transformer son époque, ça ne veut pas du tout dire ce que le XXe siècle appelait la création d’une nouvelle humanité. Cette création radicale présupposait toujours une rupture, la destruction de l’ancienne humanité, une version hégélienne, linéaire de la temporalité, dans laquelle la fin de l’histoire avait déjà été annoncée. Être hanté par la nouveauté radicale nous expose, en même temps, à la fin radicale.

Études décoloniales. Apprendre à désapprendre

Ce n’est pas ce que les études décoloniales proposent. Elles explorent l’obscurité de notre époque, le fait que le corpus des connaissances, tel qu’il a été établi par l’université corporatiste, n’est plus capable de se régénérer, de produire de l’humanité dans ses capsules de l’inhumain, de l’efficacité et de la productivité. Elles lancent aussi un défi à l’idée d’une conjonction entre signification et efficacité économique, censée apporter du bonheur.

Ce que les études décoloniales apportent de nouveau est radical dans le sens où elles essaient d’ancrer leur expérience épistémique, leurs imaginaires dispersés dans l’immédiateté de l’expérience vécue, de l’histoire, en réagissant contre l’universalité des catégories de la connaissance et affirmant que le processus d’engagement influence à un degré élevé les résultats de l’engagement même. C’est ce que le livre de Leanne Simpson, Dancing on our Turtle’s Back, propose: « the processes of engagement highly influence the outcome of the engagement itself. » (Simpson 2014: 17) C’est aussi la thèse du livre écrit par Madina Tlostanova et Walter Mignolo: « We enact border thinking in building our argument, which means that we do not place ourselves as detached observers (the myth of modern epistemology) but as involved and embodied in the process we describe. » (Tlostanova & Mignolo 2012: 7)

En lisant les deux livres (Dancing on our Turtle’s Back et Learning to Unlearn), j’ai eu la surprise de découvrir une urgence de la pensée qui s’articule sur l’immédiateté de l’expérience vécue et sur la spécificité traumatique de l’imaginaire dispersé, en dépit des contextes géopolitiques et culturels différents. Le livre de Tlostanova et Mignolo parle de la logique coloniale et conséquemment de la déconstruction décoloniale dans l’ancienne Union Soviétique et l’Amérique du Sud, tandis que le livre de Leanne Simpson raconte des histoires de recréation Nishnaabeg, de la nouvelle émergence d’une nation oblitérée par la honte. Ils ne parlent pas de la mobilisation sociale, de la résistance mais plutôt d’un changement de logique, de la réactivation des processus, de la fracture imaginative, et de la capacité d’être contemporain à une époque où le langage de la connaissance devrait être transformé par le fait même de l’affirmation et de l’engagement. [1]

Comment se délimite le corpus des sciences, tel qu’il est conçu dans les universités occidentales, au regard de cette problématique? Y-a-t-il une réaction envers l’universalité des catégories de la connaissance, telle qu’elle est pratiquée en Occident? L’idée centrale des souteneurs de la théorie décoloniale est précisément le déplacement de la géopolitique de la connaissance. (Tlostanova et Mignolo 2012: 10) Un exemple serait la création de l’Universidad Intercultural, Amawtai Wasi, en Équateur.

La pensée décoloniale essaie de créer un équilibre entre les trois dimensions épistémiques: knowing how (la source de la survivance, de l’intégration dans une certaine communauté), knowing that (le premier niveau de la connaissance théorique) et knowing what (le niveau théorique profond, où les sciences se différencient). Ce que les sciences humaines, dans une perspective décoloniale, proposent, c’est la non-obédience épistémique et la réorganisation critique autour de quelques catégories distinctes, capables de se soustraire à des valeurs et à des subjectivités capitalistes. Elles déconstruisent les présupposés non-questionnés et les idées préconçues sur lesquelles se fonde la matrice du pouvoir colonial – les Blancs possèdent la connaissance, les Premières Nations la sagesse; le troisième monde a la culture et les pays développés la science, les uns ont de l’expérience tandis que les autres la philosophie. Afin de contrecarrer ce dualisme écrasant, il faut réinventer la pensée frontalière (dans les deux sens – frontière et frontalité, expérience marginale et transversale). Cette pensée traverse directement les méandres de la modernité, dans une tentative de repositionnement à l’extérieur de la logique coloniale. Ainsi, la pensée de frontière (border thinking) est « une réponse épistémique spécifique à partir de l’extériorité de la modernité occidentale, une réponse de l’extérieur créée par une perspective de l’intérieur (c’est-à-dire, l’extériorité dans la construction de sa propre identité comme humanitas). » (Tlostanova & Mignolo 2012: 6) Cette perspective de l’intérieur est celle sur laquelle les études décoloniales insistent – démarquer; dé-interpréter; déterritorialiser. En même temps, exercice géopolitique et exercice d’imagination; placement à l’intérieur d’un réservoir dispersé et immédiateté de l’expérience vécue.

Les stratégies de mobilisation ne font que restreindre l’accès à la source même de la résistance. « Living through the most grievious of the circumstances » (Simpson 2014: 17) n’a rien à voir avec les « mouvements sociaux » et la « mobilisation ». Cela réinscrit le potentiel transformatif d’une certaine épistème dans le cadre préétabli de la logique de la modernité. Le plus important c’est d’échapper à la logique de l’action-réaction, de créer des contextes transformatifs à l’intérieur d’un paradigme d’interprétation qui ne subit plus la contrainte des catégories universelles de pensée, de connaissance et d’être de la pensée coloniale. En d’autres mots, vivre dans la contemporanéité, être contemporain, voir dans l’obscurité du présent ce qui est créatif dans le passé, être incorporé dans le processus qu’on décrit.

Voici la prise de position de Leanne Simpson par rapport à cet exercice d’intériorité :

Shame traps us individually and collectively into the victimry of the colonial assault, and travels through the generations, accumulating and manifesting itself in new and more insidious ways in each re-generation. The cycles of shame we are cognitively locked into is in part perpetuated and maintained by western theoretical constructions of “resistance”, “mobilization” and “social movement,” by defining what is and is not considered. Through the lens of colonial thought and cognitive imperialism, we are often unable to see our Ancestors. We are unable to see their philosophies and their strategies of mobilization and the complexities of their plan for resurgence. (Simpson 2014: 15-16)

Même chose pour la prise de position du livre Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas :

Thus, we perform an act of demarcation or delimiting with the previous principles of interpretation of history and modernity, without which it is not possible to enact the decolonization of being, thinking and knowledge… This (commonality) survives in culture, labor, intersubjective relations, knowledge, production, books, cultural patterns, and other aspects of modern existence… [2]

Pour résumer, on peut affirmer que les épistémologies de l’avenir devraient absolument mettre à l’épreuve les catégories de la connaissance apportées par la rhétorique occidentale de la modernité, les processus historiques tels qu’ils sont présentés par la logique coloniale et les théories du mouvement et de la mobilisation sociale, telles qu’elles relèvent des processus historiques linéaires et d’une téléologie qui impose la conversion civilisatrice, au nom du progrès et de la modernité. En d’autres mots, il faut déplacer la géographie de la raison [3], reconstituer la géopolitique de la connaissance par l’insistance sur les imaginaires dispersés comme source d’immédiateté cognitive.

Imaginaires dispersés. Déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance

C’est d’ailleurs le thème du colloque Repenser le politique à travers des imaginaires dispersés, qui se tiendra les 18 et 19 septembre 2015 à l’Université de Montréal, un colloque transnational qui aura comme partenaires principaux le SenseLab de l’Université Concordia, le Laboratoire sur les récits du soi mobile de l’Université de Montréal et le Centre Phantasma sur les recherches de l’imaginaire de l’Université Babes-Bolyai de Cluj-Napoca.

Ce colloque questionnera le modèle standard de l’université actuelle, dont l’histoire s’appuie premièrement sur la structure de l’université de la Renaissance, basée sur la ramification théologie, philosophie, sciences, auxquelles s’ajoute la rhétorique; deuxièmement sur le modèle d’université kantienne-humboldtienne, issue du XIXe siècle, dans laquelle la philosophie séculaire avait triomphé sur la théologie chrétienne et sur la rhétorique; à cette époque l’université est organisée autour de la philosophie et des sciences, au service des États-nations émergents; enfin, l’université corporatiste, qui remplace, dans les pays industrialisés, la tradition kantienne-humboldtienne à partir de 1970. Cette dernière subit le contrôle de qualité de la faculté : des publications dans des systèmes peer review; gestion de la quantité des publications; accumulation de signification équivalente à l’accumulation de capital; par conséquent, l’esprit critique, relié traditionnellement à l’université, centre de révolte contre plusieurs formes d’hégémonie, est de plus en plus amputé.

Afin d’explorer un nouveau modèle de la connaissance, nous pensons qu’il faille creuser les obscurités de notre époque, ce que la pensée décoloniale a l’audace de proposer comme alternatives viables à l’universalité affirmée par l’université occidentale. Il ne faut pas déstructurer, mais relancer le défi, dans un geste de non-obédience épistémique : des catégories de pensée qui surmontent le dualisme entre accumulation capitaliste et révolte démocratique; qui soulignent la réciprocité au lieu du gain et du progrès; qui développent l’action au lieu de la passivité; qui créent des événements et des passages au lieu de reproduire des outils de management; d’imaginer des avenirs non-managériels qui se questionnent sur la portée éthique d’une vie bonne, d’une vie accomplie; qui soutiennent la création au lieu de la résistance (« we are makers and not consumers or shoppers » [4]), qui scrutent les impostures simultanées entre lesquelles nous façonnons notre parcours intellectuel, en leur réaccordant la valeur de formation tout en leur enlevant le spectre de la honte. Ces nouvelles catégories devraient reformuler la valeur de vérité d’une vie bonne, le rôle des imaginaires dispersés dans la construction des identités; elles devraient prendre des risques conceptuels, questionner les évidences et « apprendre à désapprendre afin de réapprendre » (Tlostanova & Mignolo 2012: 12). Il faut déspécialiser les sciences humaines, les disloquer du corpus des connaissances qui les place à côté des spécialisations diverses (gestion des affaires, médecine, etc.) et les replacer dans un horizon éthique relationnel et composite.

Les chemins que les sciences humaines (humanities) empruntent quand elles affrontent le social, l’idéologique et le politique seraient, selon Tostanova et Mignolo : 1. L’alignement avec les idéologies du marché et du progrès, du développement, et de l’accumulation capitaliste, etc. 2. L’appel à la théologie de la libération et les idéaux d’une société démocratique et juste, sans toutefois questionner les principes de base de l’économie capitaliste. 3. La troisième alternative est la déconstruction des deux autres options hégémoniques et le déplacement de la géopolitique de la connaissance. Ce troisième chemin est celui choisi par les études décoloniales.

Qu’est-ce que cela signifie, déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance? Ce syntagme affirme l’impératif d’apprendre à désapprendre afin de réapprendre, idée qui veut se détacher de l’illusion que la connaissance dans toutes les sphères de la vie est liée à un certain nombre de catégories universelles et occidentales. On peut regarder les événements de différentes manières, comme des processus qui se font en vertu des interprétations-limite (border thinking) et consciences-limite (border consciousness) et qui reconfigurent la rhétorique de la modernité – basée sur un discours homogène, prenant en compte les centres qui définissent le paysage politique contemporain: le capitalisme occidental et le libéralisme, le communisme et le néo-communisme, les paradigmes épistémiques qui configurent le paysage actuel.

Le défi qui nous hante au début du XXIe siècle est celui de repenser le XXe siècle à partir de ses imaginaires dispersés, c’est-à-dire en faisant un exercice immanent d’interprétation à partir des figures qui ont dominé les constructions identitaires de manière récurrente. Ce n’est pas un exercice de rationalité, il n’est pas possible de rationaliser l’expérience tortionnaire, par exemple. C’est plutôt reconfigurer certains paradigmes de l’espace vital à travers les limites de l’être, de la pensée et de la connaissance.

Les propos décoloniaux présents dans le livre de Madina Tostanova et Walter Mignolo (Learning to Unlearn, 2012) nous ont servi comme des pistes pour réarticuler nos propres propos. Nous avons pris comme points de départ leurs conclusions concernant l’histoire des sciences humaines, tracée par le plan Bologne en Europe et la rencontre de Davos – des débats-clé tournés vers l’efficacité de l’enseignement; ainsi que leur projet de reprendre en considération la structure de la modernité en ce qu’elle a de plus fabuleux mais aussi de plus menaçant : en tant que lieu du progrès, le projet de la modernité constitue aussi la mise en marche de la machine de l’inhumain. En ce sens, nous pensons que chaque chercheur a une responsabilité critique, éthique et politique dans l’évènementiel de la connaissance.

Dans le cadre du colloque, cet exercice de repenser le politique à travers des imaginaires dispersés n’est pas seulement un essai de récupération mais aussi de reconfiguration. Par rapport à la perspective décoloniale, qui propose un type de connaissance entièrement en conflit avec le modèle des Lumières de la société occidentale, notre projet part de la présupposition de non-exhaustivité. C’est un non-exhaustif qui pose le problème du politique à partir de la perspective d’une récupération de la mémoire traumatique, de la destructivité de la torture, de l’antiutopie, des constructions de la différence, du caractère dysphorique et traumatisant de l’écriture migrante, qui pourrait couvrir des thèmes de recherche tels que l’itinérance, la migration, les cultures autochtones; les politiques de la communauté et de l’espace dans les Amériques; les traces du sacré et ses implications pour la pensée littéraire et philosophique dans le contexte mondial; l'exil et l´exophonie, des pratiques culturelles telles que l'écriture expérimentale, la théorie de la mondialisation, la notion de récit de soi en résistance.

La réflexion sur le politique et sur l’avenir des sciences humaines s’organise autour de quelques axes :

1. Repenser le rôle politique de la connaissance dans la société contemporaine et plus précisément à l’université par l’insistance sur des imaginaires dispersés. L’imaginaire dispersé est un réservoir qui passe par l’épreuve d’une expérience déstructurante, qui témoigne d’une crise du commun: la torture, l’espace concentrationnaire, l’espace de l’antiutopie, l’écriture migrante. Ces expériences contestent un enracinement quelconque et soulignent la spectralité de la transcendance du commun.

2. En mettant en valeur cette crise du commun (Toni Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paulo Virno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Pál Pelbart), la tâche devient celle de redéfinir l’éthique (en suivant Deleuze et Spinoza) en tant qu’étude de compositions – compositions avec les relations et composition avec les pouvoirs.

3. En insistant sur l’expérimentation avec des altérités qui ont été configurées dans des contextes géopolitiques tout à fait différents – l’espace géopolitique québécois, tracé autant par la politique identitaire francophone que par le déplacement de l’imaginaire autochtone et le repositionnement des identités migrantes; l’espace géopolitique de l’Europe de l’Est, marqué par l’expérience du totalitarisme, de la destructivité et de la réappropriation du commun par le biais d’une « prophylactique de la mémoire »; l’espace de l’Europe occidentale, marqué par le récit du soi, qui se concentre sur la crevasse opérée entre l’histoire vécue et les témoignages a posteriori. Ces paradigmes peuvent néanmoins communiquer à travers leur regard critique ainsi qu’à travers une formule très percutante qui veut « faire et refaire le monde » dans le réceptacle des imaginations théâtrales. La torture est une théâtralisation de l’imagination dans un no man’s land; le parcours dysphorique de la littérature migrante dans son pays d’accueil est également une théâtralisation du récit, ainsi que les antiutopies, le théâtre politique et les antinomies irrésolues du fantastique représentent des cartographies non-exhaustives d’un territoire politique-imaginaire qui construit ses règles immanentes (plan de composition ou bien plan commun de l’immanence, tel qu’il est défini par Deleuze).

Ce que nous aimerions tracer à partir de ces axes de recherche, c’est donc d’abord le fait de penser ce qui constitue notre contemporanéité à partir de ce qui est le plus urgent – la prétention d’exhaustivité des catégories de la pensée occidentale, qui laissent de côté la spécificité des divers imaginaires dispersés, traumatiques; le lien entre la méthode par laquelle ces imaginaires dispersés proposent des conversions épistémologiques et l’immédiateté de l’expérience vécue; et finalement, leur capacité de créer des contextes transformatifs à partir d’un exercice d’intériorité, dans lequel on est entièrement impliqué et incorporé dans le processus qu’on décrit. En d’autres mots, l’altérité n’est pas un objet d’étude, mais un événement éthique à composer, basé sur la réciprocité, l’engagement, l’action et la fracture expérientielle. C’est un exercice frontalier et transversal – qui décrit parfaitement ce qu’Agamben avait en vue quand il parlait de la contemporanéité. On est contemporain en créant des structures du possible et des espaces où les imaginaires dispersés peuvent retrouver l’immédiateté de l’événement.

Notes

[1] Rodolfo Kusch (2010) – « We can make no form of affirmation without being involved and transformed in our act of affirming ».

[2] Maldonado Torres (2008), cité dans Tlostanova et Mignolo (2012: 7).

[3] Lewis Gordon (2006), cité dans Tlostanova et Mignolo (2012: 10).

[4] Leanne Simpson dans sa conférence prononcée le 29 janvier 2015 à l’Université Concordia, Montréal.

Bibliographie

Agamben, Giorgio. ”What is the Contemporary?” in What is an Apparatus?. Stanford, 2009.

Gordon, Lewis. Disciplinary Decadence. Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.

Kusch, Rodolfo, Maria Lugones, Walter Mignolo et Joshua M. Price. Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Maldonado Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on our Turtle’s Back. Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2014.

Tlostanova, Madina et Walter Mignolo. Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012.

INDEX
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

A Sahara in the Head - The Problem of Landing

Michael Hornblow

A Landscape Design student came to me once after class, with the feeling that his project wasn’t going to work on technical grounds - sand dunes just don’t move that way in the Sahara. We could both see the potential unraveling this might create for everything informing the design process - site analysis, socio-political context, tools and techniques, theoretical framework. Only weeks to go to final presentation and the “Crit-Sheet” could be heard flapping urgently with its reductive numerical evaluation.

Face-to-Face

A moment of shared concern, our Face-to-Face, for he was one of those rare students who really engages and integrates everything at a deep level. All the more difficult, and commendable, given that the design studio was by its very nature - abstract - in more ways than one. [1]

- A site we couldn’t visit - the desert of Western Sahara, except via

- Google Earth…

- A constantly changing landscape, with moving sand dunes and

persistent dust storms…

- A complex social-political-military context - calling for critical

responses, yet fraught by distance to the situation at hand…

sand

Fig. 1 Moroccan military fort with Berm wall partially obscured by sand dune movement.
Western Sahara, near the Mauritanian border (Google Earth 2015) © CNES/Astrium.

Our tools and techniques included physical exercises in embodied praxis, drawn from psychophysical dance performance - offering occasions for questioning the agency of the body in relation to memory, intention, affect, and environment. These were drawn experientially within the event, then diagrammed and annotated, to be contrasted with studies on the kinds of physiological mechanisms that Phosphate regulates within the body - muscle contraction, motor intention, cell respiration.

Phosphate is central to the Western Sahara conflict through the exploitation of its natural resources, a primary material for the international fertilizer industry, which finds its way through farming and the supermarket into our own bodies. To design across these relations seems an impossible stretch, stumbling at the disjunction of illustration, criticism and experience. And yet, speaking to a strange distance in more ways than one - geographic, embodied, critical, theoretical - where the gaps within and between open to a different beyond.

If the challenges of practice-based research may offer opportunities for radical pedagogy, the potential for abstract thought and aesthetic sensibilities call for an immanent critique of the process. [2] Immanent critique may take into account the confluence of design process (materiality, site, case study, etc.), institutional context, trans-disciplinary considerations, and affective experience.

This paper passes through several shifts, where problems turn upon the emergence of concepts and sensibilities to argue for the importance of aesthetic abstraction at the limits of critical academia. It is here that radical pedagogy find its urgency in the immanence of the event, at a critical crisis point.

Inflection and Slippage

Geography is not the field next door, nor even the neighboring district, but a line that passes through our objects, from the city to the teaspoon, along which there exists an absolute outside. (Cache 1995: 70)

Bernard Cache considers relations of force and their inflections through a poetic approach to dynamic systems - following divergent vectors across geography, architecture, furniture, body and soul. He finds a “rupture of scale” where an abstract line expresses dynamic states of transformation beyond their fixity within readymade space-time coordinates. These abstractions comprise lines of curvature, where a curve is seen to describe boundary conditions as a function of potentiality and modulation, rather than the contour of a thing in itself, or its contact with other things. A point of inflection marks a change of curvature - from convex to concave - not as a single point of contact, but where this indicates a series of singularities distributed along an abstract line. The point of inflection suggests a slippage, where an absolute outside confounds the outline, cutting through a mutable interior of dynamic meta-stability.

sky

Fig. 2 Bernard Cache’s inflection (simple).

Fig. 3 Slippage at the point of inflection as a feature of Baroque aesthetics. (Cache 1995)

Cache’s theory of inflection finds its slippage across mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while offering a different contour for resituating Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the diagram. Deleuze draws his own slippages - adopting

the diagram from Foucault’s critique of power, to find a field of forces where things are mutually affecting and affected by one another (Deleuze 1988). In-between, he identifies “the fact of force” - where any kind of interior is already held together by a quality of relation that always slips into the outside of what may define or delimit its inclusion in the first place. As he sees it in the painting of Francis Bacon:

This is what Bacon calls the Diagram; it is as if, all of a sudden, we introduced a Sahara, a Sahara region in the head... like a catastrophe happening suddenly to the canvas, inside figurative or probabilistic data. (Deleuze 2003: 71)

The Problem of Landing

And so this is where we have landed - at the coalface of the university where learning and teaching came Face-to-Face in a moment of shared concern. Landing in the middle of “A Sahara in the Head,” where the name of a design studio encounters its own outside. Because sure, it’s all very well to invoke the abstract in so many guises:

A theoretical conundrum for getting our head around the physiological

affects of phosphate…

Our inability to access a strange conflict in which we are all bodily

implicated…

A kind of lived abstraction at the psychophysical disjunction of motor

intention, affect, and environment…

All rolled up in endless desert, Saharawi Intifada, nomad tea

ceremonies of life, love and death…

And the World’s longest continuous landmine field.

But how do we land this thing?

Landscape design encounters its own outside through the very ground

condition of landing, where an insistence on built outcome frames the inherent fluidity of site. So, given an abstract premise - how can we land this outside? Or at least, how may we enter the frame of this encounter?

The landing problem was a specific concern for our Face-to-Face. The student had proposed an innovative method - a modular mesh system designed to solidify sand dunes, providing a new ground plane for land mine affected areas. All the more clever for considering the way in which sand dunes move - but only up to a point. On closer study the schema is under threat of collapse - where the isolation zones that move like torsional vacuoles at the minor cusp of a dune reveal the speculative nature of this endeavor. Notwithstanding several kinds of dune species, each with their own ways of moving, the isolation zone deforms and reforms the dune in a manner that even dynamic computational systems have difficulty modeling. Not without standing. Further testing is required, right? Beyond the scope of this studio, that’s for sure.

This calls into question the very value of testing, where a collapse in scope serves to reframe focus. Or to deframe their orientation and the felt weight of this value as a different ground condition. For what else has collapsed around the isolation zone? A technical meshwork, yes - but also a theoretical framework; or at least, complicating its value for practice.

Towards Immanent Critique

The sand dune project used Cache’s theory of inflection to reconsider Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space - two types of territorial relation, different in nature but always existing in mixture. For them, the desert is a nomadic smooth space par excellence, where an absolute outside constantly displaces a field of forces for any given interior (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). In some ways the technical collapse of the meshwork speaks anew to torsional shifts of the smooth and the striated, reminding us of the pitfalls in easy orientations of theory and practice (especially when it comes to actual conflicts, nomads, and desert terrains). To resolve the mix, or to move with its outside, requires a process of immanent critique. Which is to say, an encounter of thinking and feeling that may reframe the project - across its various modes of inquiry - where the aims of the studio are considered in relation to the institutional context of the university, its disciplinary parameters, and the value of theory vis-à-vis practice.

Often by default, theory comes to assume a certain “use value” in practice - to illustrate or be the illustration of an example - to solve a problem or left a solution - to serve as discursive jello for sweetening the passage across social, cultural, political, and aesthetic domains. Each with their merits, but nonetheless theory tends to enter practice by way of a critical function, without noting a slippage in terms - between the assigned value of critical judgment and the transformative weight of a critical crisis point.

It is often said that we learn by teaching, which may be to say that we also teach by learning. If this relation can be seen on either side - immanent to the process, it is where student and teacher may find a different way of landing. Not one of reciprocity exactly - a value exchanged and completed, but where a point of inflection deframes teaching and learning on either side. Not one of transference, but a shared outside that moves across and beyond our within and between. Beyond any given frame for being a student lies a passion for study. For Harney and Moten, study is an opening into collective thought - “allowing yourself to be possessed by others” (Harney & Moten 2013: 109) - a mode of existence that takes us into all kinds of world makings and life doings. I can’t do the final work for my students, nor necessarily offer a solution for a problem that belongs to either of us, except for our partial subjectivities in its own unraveling. But we can think together and let ourselves be taken by this Sahara in the head.

Getting our heads around a shared outside, the problem of abstraction moves beyond nonsensical juggling across multiple modes of inquiry. Points of tension and slippage open more transversely, when the event is felt as something co-extensive with life, for which the case study is already alive in its own sensations. Propositions begin to appear more speculatively - still open to the outside of this fragile interior. The impossibility of that which is not yet given in thought, may be felt as movement in a field of forces, before assigned values peg it down on a ground plane of possibility. Lets not complete them - instead, let propositional lures for feeling move along an abstract line, returning to divergent specificities where singular transformations are always and already emerging.

Concept and Sensibility

We can never fully know what this emergence is capable of, even as it returns again and again. As a learner / teacher I had a moment of realization (propositional at best), for what may be at stake here in the orientation of theory and practice.

What is the potential of a problem as a movement of thought through the absolute outside? Coming Face-to-Face at the coalface is a rare opportunity, given the pressures of teaching load, contact hours and class sizes. Every student struggles in their own way with the weight of representation, shifting assigned values through a different concreteness, where things become abstract in their lived relation. Design thinking encounters the initial problem of coming up with a good idea, which is already a problem - coming up in our heads - without passing through an outside. As if it were simply a matter of devising a method for bringing the idea to built form. As if the design brief could even assure this condition of possibility in the first place.

For all its complexity this became the landing problem of the sand dune project, where a technical method collapses and then shifts towards a transverse technique for immanent critique. Or its technicity - in the way Erin Manning describes an ethological process of worlding, immanently machinic across multiple yet irreducible dimensions, where passive and active forces become indiscernible within a more complex field of agency (Manning 2006). At the slippage of this shift, where a problem appears to transform, the idea gives way to the singular emergence of what might appear as a concept - an entity dispersed more processually across diverse modes of inquiry, remaining irreducible to any of them, yet tentatively robust in the speculative character of their meta-stability.

I should qualify my earlier comments about theory and practice, for there is a sense in which theory becomes a catch all term that institutes the very flattening of its application in practice. The appearance of a concept may be seen in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe it in philosophy - as a process of construction, immanent and emergent, where it “posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created” (Deleuze & Guattari 1996: 22). Just as D&G find an affinity for the construction of concepts in philosophy - with the creation of affects and percepts in art - we should also account for the ways design process intersects on its own terms. The philosophical concept retains its specificity, as lived construction and trans-disciplinary divergence, to which design finds its own points of singularity.

The sand dune slippage - if this may stand in as a trope - reminded me how many times students would repeat a similar pattern, each in their own manner, for collapsing the process of abstraction (or lets say, speculative potentiality) into built form, as a way of avoiding a problem. Over successive iterations however, this pattern of repeated blockages or blind spots may show signs of differentiation and self-organization, where their own manner of collapsing reveals elements of style, despite themselves. At a particular point, of inflection lets say, the weight of successive repetitions may find a rhythm, such that the problem turns upon itself to reveal the germ of a concept. The concept appears on the cusp of a problem, where it comes to test itself in the emergence of lived process. The affective dimension becomes critical in this transformation - as the felt aspect of lived sensations, giving rise to a particular sensibility in the wake of abstraction becoming non-sensible. If anything, it is the emergence of a particular sensibility via the problematic appearance of a concept – “beyond” the student - that is the gift of study in art and design.

Catastrophic Affects

Recalling the diagram - a field of forces is where things are mutually affecting and being affected, such that interiority opens to an absolute outside through the very fact of force. Affect reveals itself as key to prehending the force of the outside as a constituitive element of the event, moving on the cusp of what may be thought, indeed its very condition of possibility. As Francesco Varela shows us, the texture of experience inheres in the fact that we are always-already affected: “auto-affection” (Varela 2000). Varela offers a dynamical systems approach to understanding affect - where an underlying mood has an affective tonality that passes through a “shift in phase” for the subject when a specific emotional tonality is identified. Emotional expression occurs when feeling carries sensation into the realm of the sensible; response to external stimuli is always-already primed by a tonal scale - between situational transparency (co-extension) and its collapse (anticipation). Cognition is already enactive and extensive across multiple modes of attention - embodied, environmental, a-perceptive, intersubjective - such that phase shifts may always spike in unexpected ways.

Moments of crisis may be seen as a Cusp Catastrophe diagram, where performance, arousal and anxiety pass through strange bifurcations, when a situation seems no longer capable of holding implicit tensions within the actuality of an event. Affective tonality shifts on the cusp - moving with the torsional slippage of multiple durations, different rhythms, and their compression across divergent speeds and slowness.

satellite

Fig. 4 Zeeman Cusp Catastrophe, modeling the aggression behavior of a dog under stress (Zeeman 1976: 66). The three axes of the diagram describe conditions of physiological arousal (horizontal), performance (vertical), and cognitive anxiety (depth). A behavior surface is drawn between minimal/maximal states (attacking/cowering), where their divergence along a fold line remains unstable and prone to recursive bifurcations. [3]

Affinities between the Catastrophe diagram and Cache’s inflection should remain implicit, given his poetics. Nonetheless, inflection as slippage or rupture of a fold-curve offers an image for how the dynamical space of affect may be seen to transform. Where this may be seen to appear as an absolute outside delimiting every interior, auto-affection and affective tonality become the untimely strata that haunt the autonomous agency of the subject. As such, we may also see how affect becomes key for critiques of power, in the sense that the diagram reveals the “possibility for resistance” (Deleuze 1988: 89). Which is not to say, one already given as a form - as the contact of one thing against another - but rather, the tension that is always held within a field of forces and its capacity to shift phase. [4]

It is the aesthetic dimension that is able to dance this line, to slide with the slippage, to be taken by the outside in the passion of being possessed by others. The whole point (of inflection) is not to design for catastrophe to occur. The Whole is never given anyway. In fact the spectrum disappears as soon as it is actualized in the catastrophe. Of course, neoliberal assemblages like to “never waste a good disaster” - looking for slips in the fold-curve, already anticipating and modulating parameters to harness the infinite speed at which the spike lands. The ‘point’ of inflection is where forces remain deformable. Value finds a different weight here - a sensibility for affective resistance within the permanent catastrophe that is the modern institution under Capitalism.

How does an event reconfigure itself after the spike softens? We are left momentarily marooned - falling back out of the loop in the fold-line (flight), or up and forward from the S-bend (attack) (See Fig. 4). Both too late and too soon, the multiplicity of the event collapses into raw singularity. The outside suddenly enters the open as interiority distends for a moment. The mood in the room becomes non-sensible, almost sensate with heterogeneous potential. Gradually, points of inflection open new lines of slippage, curves undulating once more with a different weight. The field of forces gently cobbles the World together as we feel the Earth again, like some geological sedimentation of the event in which we - our together - is still and all ways to be invented.

Critical States of Criticality

In the process of writing and re-entering the Face-to-Face, I’ve come to realize something else (propositional at best), a blind spot for my own sensibility. If there are two sides or scales to immanent critique - lets say, experiential and structural - then the way I land upon our thinking together must also consider the ground condition of my complicity as a “critical academic,” at the disjunction of theory and practice. Harney and Moten point to a complicit negligence within the university, where professionalization parcels out and sanctifies a critical distance for the knowledge economy vis-à-vis market forces, while instituting the insertion of undifferentiated labor. Capital infers its modus operandi - Debt - as a limit condition for pedagogical encounters, where knowledge is predetermined by values of exchange, use, and acquisition. Critique becomes complicit in “privatizing the social individual” (Harney & Moten 2013: 38), redoubling the guise of professionalization as it sits on the fence of a quandary:

to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside. (Harney & Moten 2013: 31)

How does this call for a radical pedagogy, within the texture of this particular experience, Face-to-Face in the slippage of landing at a critical crisis point? To play the subversive academic is still to adopt the guise of being for and against, to recognize and be recognized by the university. From my perspective the design studio offered an opportunity to problematize the orientation of theory and practice, to mobilize differently the capacity for abstract thought. The value of this is recognized within a practice-based teaching context, and given a place - the part-time sessional teacher as thinker/practitioner from outside the discipline. But when we take this to a limit point we confront its disciplinary outside - the ground condition and the need for built outcomes. To some extent students take the studio because it seems different to other foundation courses offered by faculty staff. But when the aims of the course and the capacity for “study” in the student encounter this limit, it seems to put us both in an untenable position. The student might then choose to critique the aims of the studio, while necessarily recognizing and being recognized by its intentions. For the student, I am still the teacher who stands in for the institution, even as I adopt this guise of being for and against it, to whatever extent. It then becomes my position to advocate for and against their potential, in going out on a limb for and against me (or this guise that I’ve become). This outside comes out in the open in the closure of “Final-Crit,” and again in the moderation process where borderline cases are debated at whatever slippery points along the marking range.

Going Under and Overcome

Do we all come to institute the negligence of this internal outside - in the way oppositions slip through a thirdness, for adopting the institutional guise of criticality? The grinding machine becomes as nonsensical as a neoliberal debt mentality, but the implicit terror of this tonality is there nonetheless. So how do we find a phase shift that is anything other than catastrophic? How may this structural tonality be deframed in the felt experience of thinking together? If beyond the student there is study, and if teaching is to learn, then the aim of our study together may be to refigure this thirdness for instituting the guise.

What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection. (Harney & Moten 2013: 28)

What Harney and Moten call the Undercommons is an abstract area full of fugitives. What we have previously understood as the Commons is already overrun with privation, an impower for privatizing all vestiges of resistance. There is no refuge, only a fugitive undertaking. Not for going under the radar, but the kinds of “going under” that Nietzsche calls for - where active and passive forces are no longer clear cut in terms of what they do, or claim to be (see Deleuze 1983). Value needs to feel a different weight, where the outside shifts in strange ways - impersonal in nature as a pure field of forces, then assuming the character of a particular kind of outside within a given milieu (a

ground condition for Landscape, the body for Architecture, and so on). Across these two outsides the impersonal is impersonated by forms of power, such that persons feel a break in their relation to collective realms of possibility. Undercommon ways of landing confront that which passes across these two outsides. Calling it out into the open - it becomes an inherent auto-affection for the “brokenness of being” - a dynamic tonality that affects and is affected by everyone, regardless of position within system coordinates (status, affluence, etc.) The Undercommons is about finding common cause for this brokenness (Halberstam, in Harney & Moten 2013: 5).

Fugitive Guise of the Free Radical

The Fugitive is never fully under the radar. The institution recognizes their value - for recognizing their own precarity in becoming critical academia. The institution implicitly recognizes this outside for the way it fluctuates in relation to its own absolute condition - caught between the insertion of undifferentiated labor and the annulment of labor entirely through the managerial automatism of this insertion. The Fugitive is not a person that identifies as such - that takes refuge in refusal. It is a guise we occupy in the act of thinking together, the beyond of study, that moment of being possessed without refuge. It is not so much a person caught in an untenable situation, as a passion for landing upon what that capture affords when it is resisted. If the spirit of the university is to acknowledge academic freedom as the critic and conscience of society there is always an inherent tension throughout the organization as to how this freedom and its radicality may be defined within a neoliberal climate. [5]

The Fugitive may assume various guises - the Charlatan from a different discipline, landing by other means - the Doppleganger who mimics a practice, their own or others, so as to be overcome by a radical passion for not finishing themselves. Or the Free Radical - an abstract figure that moves with a different quality of that thirdness which haunts our institutional negligence. [6] Not a person per se, for it parses personing, and lets it pass. But persons may assume the guise of this figure in order to be taken by its force. The movement of the Free Radical always starts in the middle, and has already begun. From the absolute survey of a situation - where immanent critique discovers a structural perimeter - to an absolute condition for locating its outside - the Free Radical finds the texture of experience where phase shifts pass back and forth.

Sometime around the middle of the studio, I had a conversation with a friend and mentor of mine - a professor and artist in the area of relational aesthetics. We were talking about the difficulties of putting our research forward as a site for pedagogy - as both creative practitioner and academic. She said, “If you don’t risk something deeply of yourself, you’re wasting your time, and theirs.”

As Harney and Moten put it, the beyond of teaching is not the research post without teaching, or the sabbatical, or the directorship to come, and so on - but a fugitive area where study occurs in thinking together. Where practice-based research intersects with teaching, through the very problem of the institution, the emergence of an aesthetic sensibility demands that we risk the incompletion of being overcome. Where study becomes a lived endeavor, pedagogical encounters always affect and are affected by converging fields of practice, already diverging into the beyond where a field of forces feels the weight of the outside.

After Thought

Don’t follow an abstract line that defers the mutual thirdness of the guise to catastrophic negligence

The free radical is never truly free - but finds its radicality in the ‘maroon’ of escaped slavery, through a torsional backflip across structural and experiential tonalities, and into the beyond

‘Take the debt but not the credit’ (ibid)

Make the debt count, differently - not deferred along the line

but marooned here in slippage

Don’t even cite! (Unless parenthesis may open a new problem)

Just as their concepts no longer derive from your practice,

the debt of citation delimits how

they may land, and live

through sensibility

Notes

[1] This studio, A Sahara in the Head, was given at 2nd/3rd year and Masters level in the School of Architecture and Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia (2012). It’s not my aim for this paper to present the work of the studio, or to discuss the case study in detail, but to chart a wider problematic for practice-based pedagogy. As further background I’d like to acknowledge the Australian Western Sahara Association and the people of the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria who made this research possible through a residency there in 2007.

[2] Immanent critique becomes a key principle for contemporary critical theory, where it seeks to problematize ideological norms and contextual contradictions, in the way cultural forms are generated within a particular social system and broader historical processes. From a Hegelian-Marxian perspective this contrasts with Kant’s transcendental philosophy, where immanence is assured by a higher power, for which criticism assumes a position of judgment. Deleuze finds a different transcendental principle, where immanence becomes a lived relation within and across all entities and categories of experience. Critique then acquires a more eventful evaluation, where - “everything that enters the interaction must do so actively, not by proxy, as represented, simply spoken for, or even transmitted” (Massumi, 2010: 338).

[3] Zeeman posits several cases for visualizing catastrophe dynamics, including; stock market behavior (rising/falling), anorexia (gorging/fasting), self-esteem (anger/self pity), and phase transitions between liquid and gaseous states, or the buckling of an elastic beam. These suggest further

transverse movements across social, individual and material domains; for example where turnover cycles may be diagrammed in terms of personality characteristics and institutional functioning (van der Molen 1990).

[4] We may see this for example, in the way Tahrir Square became a site for occupying an untimely sphere during the Arab Spring, and how this blocked the auto-affective mode of Capital turnover in which Capitalism needs to function on a daily basis. If this may be seen as the invention of a people, always yet to come, it also evented a new mode of protest that was taken up in its own way by the Occupy Movement.

[5] See Harland, Tidswell, Everett, Hale & Pickering: “Neoliberalism and the academic as critic and conscience of society” (2010).

[6] The Free Radical is understood here as a kind of ‘latter-day trickster figure’, specifically in the way it has been performed by participants at SenseLab Research Creation events – “loosed upon the event to joyously scramble the emergent order.” (See - Generating the Impossible, 2012 – http://senselab.ca/events/technologies-of-lived-abstraction/generating-the-impossible-2011/). The Free Radical assumes the power of an individual without fixed identity, often working covertly, collaboratively or anonymously; looking to destabilize collective processes in productive ways.

Works Cited

Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Trans. Anne Boyman. Ed. Michael Speaks. Trans. Anne Boyman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Harland, Tony, Toni Tidswell, David Everett, Leigh Hale and Neil Pickering. “Neoliberalism and the Academic as Critic and Conscience of Society”. Teaching in Higher Education 15.1 (2010): 85-96.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Manning, Erin. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Massumi, Brian. “On Critique.” Inflexions 4 (November 2010): 337-340. http://www.inflexions.org/n4_t_massumihtml.html

Varela, Francisco. “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness.” In Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Eds. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 266-329.

Zeeman, Christopher. “Catastrophe Theory.” Scientific American (April 1976): 65-83.

Edited by Gerko Egert, Ilona Hongisto, Michael Hornblow, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Mayra Morales, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Adam Szymanski Editing of the Infrathin by Ramona Benveniste, Csenge Kolozsvari, Mayra Morales & Leslie Plumb Art Direction, Web Design by Leslie Plumb

NODE:

1. Entry Ways

2. Unprofessional Painting, Unprofessional Teaching

3. Deterritorializing Language – Shift, Mix, Trace and Express

4. Critical Passions: Building Architectural Movements Toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 steps)

5. Diagramming Double Vision

6. Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics

7. Pédagogie Radicale, ou Chemins de traverse de l’expérimentation individuelle et collective à l’événement esthétique

8. Eight Very Vary(s): Towards a Program of Mistakes-on-Purpose

9. Some Thoughts-Sentiments Around Teaching-Learning-Thinking-Living: A Small Emergent Sadness

10. if the earth is the pedagogy…

11. La méthode de dramatisation et la question Qui?: variations en marge de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie. SenseLab, Printemps 2014

12. Towards a Pedagogy of Moments

13. Subversive Pedagogy – The Intruder

14. Running-Ecologies: Thinking Movement Pedagogically

15. Entering the Event, Through the Unconscious

16. 10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How to Rethink Value

17. Déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance

18. A Sahara in the Head: The Problem of Landing

TANGENTS

1. Sharing Distance: On the Precarious Assemblage of Singularities and the Art of Collectivity. An Interview with Peter Pál Pelbart

2. Fictiōneering: A Technique for Living

3.

The Inflexions of the Undercommons. Lingering Ghosts: (Un)Answered Questions, (Un)Present Speakers, (Un)Read Books and Readers?

4. A Problem of Scale and Translation: A Design Project in 8 Acts

5. We are in a Social Emergency. Now What?

6. Inter-sections: notes autour d’une technique sur les rapports musique et pensée

7. The Unchoreography of Dance Politics

8.

Temporal Re-Scrambling

9. Perception: On Surprise and Expectation

10.

The Parasitic is Artistic

11. More Than Three Moves: Wind from the East to the West

Entry Ways

Ramona Benveniste, Érik Bordeleau, Michael Hornblow, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Mayra Morales, Csenge Kolozsvari, Leslie Plumb, Ronald Rose-Antoinette and Adam Szymanski

Unprofessional Painting, Unprofessional Teaching

Andrew Goodman

Deterritorializing Language - Shift, Mix, Trace and Express

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University

Critical Passions Building Architectural Movements Toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 steps)

Pia Ednie-Brown RMIT University

Problems of Scale and Translation A Design Project in 8 Acts

Samantha Spurr UNSW, Sydney

Diagramming Double Vision

Jorrit Groot, Toni Pape and Chrys Vilvang

6. Inter-sections: notes autour d’une technique sur les rapports musique et pensée

Collective Expression A Radical Pragmatics

Brian Massumi Department of Communication, University of Montreal

Pédagogie Radicale, ou chemins de traverse de l'expérimentation individuelle et collective à l'événement esthétique

Louise Boisclair Département de communication, Université de Montréal

10.

The Parasitic is Artistic

2. Fictiōneering: A Technique for Living

Eight Very Vary(s) Towards a Program of Mistakes-on-Purpose

Jondi Keane School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne

11. More Than Three Moves: Wind from the East to the West

8.

Temporal Re-Scrambling

A Small Emergent Sadness - Some Thoughts and Sentiments Around Teaching - Learning - Thinking - Living

Mayra Morales

5. We are in a Social Emergency. Now What?

if the earth is the pedagogy…

Ronald Rose-Antoinette Université Paris VIII

La méthode de dramatisation et la question « Qui ? » - Variations en marge de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie. SenseLab, printemps 2014

Érik Bordeleau Senselab, Montréal

2. Fictiōneering: A Technique for Living

Towards a Pedagogy of Moments

Melora Koepke Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Subversive Pedagogy The Intruder

Geoffrey Edwards Laval University, Quebec City

Running-Ecologies Thinking Movement Pedagogically

Nikki Rotas Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Entering the Event, Through the Unconscious

Adam Szymanski Concordia University, Montreal

10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How To Rethink Value

Erin Manning

Déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance. Les études décoloniales et les imaginaires dispersés

Laura T. Ilea

Edited by Gerko Egert, Ilona Hongisto, Michael Hornblow,
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Mayra Morales, Ronald Rose-Antoinette,
Adam Szymanski

Editing of the Infrathin by Ramona Benveniste, Csenge Kolozsvari, Mayra Morales & Leslie Plumb

Art Direction, Web Design by Leslie Plumb

1.
Entry Ways

2.
Unprofessional Painting, Unprofessional Teaching

3.
Deterritorializing Language – Shift, Mix, Trace and Express

4.
Critical Passions: Building Architectural Movements Toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 steps)

5.
Diagramming Double Vision

6.
Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics

7.
Pédagogie Radicale, ou Chemins de traverse de l’expérimentation individuelle et collective à l’événement esthétique

8.
Eight Very Vary(s): Towards a Program of Mistakes-on-Purpose

9.
Some Thoughts-Sentiments Around Teaching-Learning-Thinking-Living: A Small Emergent Sadness

10.
if the earth is the pedagogy…

11.
La méthode de dramatisation et la question Qui?: variations en marge de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie. SenseLab, Printemps 2014

12.
Towards a Pedagogy of Moments

13.
Subversive Pedagogy – The Intruder

14.
Running-Ecologies: Thinking Movement Pedagogically

15.
Entering the Event, Through the Unconscious

16.
10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How to Rethink Value

17.
Déplacer la géopolitique de la connaissance

18.
A Sahara in the Head: The Problem of Landing

1.
Sharing Distance: On the Precarious Assemblage of Singularities and the Art of Collectivity. An Interview with Peter Pál Pelbart

2.
Fictiōneering: A Technique for Living

4.

A Problem of Scale and Translation: A Design Project in 8 Acts

5.
We are in a Social Emergency. Now What?

6.

Inter-sections: notes autour d’une technique sur les rapports musique et pensée

7.
The Unchoreography of Dance Politics

9.

Perception: On Surprise and Expectation

11.
More Than Three Moves:

Wind from the East to the West

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen,
Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University

Pia Ednie-Brown
RMIT University

6.

Inter-sections: notes autour d’une technique sur les rapports musique et pensée

Brian Massumi
Department of Communication, University of Montreal

Louise Boisclair
Département de communication, Université de Montréal

Jondi Keane
School of Communication and Creative Arts,
Deakin University, Melbourne

11.
More Than Three Moves:

Wind from the East to the West

5.
We are in a Social Emergency. Now What?

Ronald Rose-Antoinette
Université Paris VIII

La méthode de dramatisation et la question « Qui ? » -
Variations en marge de la lecture collective de Nietzsche et la philosophie.
SenseLab, printemps 2014

Érik Bordeleau
Senselab, Montréal

2.
Fictiōneering: A Technique for Living

Melora Koepke
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Geoffrey Edwards
Laval University, Quebec City

Running-Ecologies
Thinking Movement Pedagogically

Nikki Rotas
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Adam Szymanski
Concordia University, Montreal