Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay (Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures) 3030812685, 9783030812683

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EDUCATIONAL FUTURES

Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay Stephen M. Morrow

Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures

Series Editor jan jagodzinski, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

The series Educational Futures would be a call on all aspects of education, not only specific subject specialists, but policy makers, religious education leaders, curriculum theorists, and those involved in shaping the educational imagination through its foundations and both psychoanalytical and psychological investments with youth to address this extraordinary precarity and anxiety that is continually rising as things do not get better but worsen. A global de-territorialization is taking place, and new voices and visions need to be seen and heard. The series would address the following questions and concerns. The three key signifiers of the book series title address this state of risk and emergency: 1. The Anthropocene: The ‘human world,’ the world-for-us is drifting toward a global situation where human extinction is not out of the question due to economic industrialization and overdevelopment, as well as the exponential growth of global population. How to we address this ecologically and educationally to still make a difference? 2. Ecology: What might be ways of re-thinking our relationships with the nonhuman forms of existence and in-human forms of artificial intelligence that have emerged? Are there possibilities to rework the ecological imagination educationally from its over-romanticized view of Nature, as many have argued: Nature and culture are no longer tenable separate signifiers. Can teachers and professors address the ideas that surround differentiated subjectivity where agency is no long attributed to the ‘human’ alone? 3. Aesthetic Imaginaries: What are the creative responses that can fabulate aesthetic imaginaries that are viable in specific contexts where the emergent ideas, which are able to gather heterogeneous elements together to present projects that address the two former descriptors: the Anthropocene and the every changing modulating ecologies. Can educators drawn on these aesthetic imaginaries to offer exploratory hope for what is a changing globe that is in constant crisis? The series Educational Futures: Anthropocene, Ecology, and Aesthetic Imaginaries attempts to secure manuscripts that are aware of the precarity that reverberates throughout all life, and attempts to explore and experiment to develop an educational imagination which, at the very least, makes conscious what is a dire situation.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15418

Stephen M. Morrow

Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay

Stephen M. Morrow Louisville, KY, USA

Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures ISBN 978-3-030-81268-3 ISBN 978-3-030-81269-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © jan jagodzinski This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

There Are No Genres A Waveness Emerges Groping Experimentation Does It Work? The Poet Attends References

1 1 4 14 17 22

2

Thinking Schools & Scholarship Purely Coincidental Both and More Unintentional Teaching References

25 25 29 31 34

3

No-Ology & Recklessness The Unknown Known The Real McApple The Purpose of Philosophy Is to Sadden Leap Before You Look Swarms of Difference If You Want Middles, Read Novels Connective Tissue References

37 37 40 43 49 51 56 58 62

4

Key to Terminology References

65 104 v

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CONTENTS

5

Of ABER & Essai A Major Aim A Minor Aim A Thing Done Not Necessarily Sudden Insights Intact An Essay is a Search Movement Introduced into Thought The Totality of Kids Multiplicity of Circus References

107 107 114 118 121 122 124 126 128 130 132

6

Filmmakers Intermingled Left Bank Auteurs Vigo Morris Maddin Vertov References

135 135 143 145 147 153 156

7

Customary Conclusion References

159 165

Index

167

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5

Rhizome highway (Courtesy of Bruce Magnotti) Demolition for “slum clearance.” 1941. Photo by Edwin Rosskam. Farm Security Administration. Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) Developed expired Polaroid film photograph (Courtesy of the author) Group of workers. Boy on left refused to pose. Merrimac Mills. Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division) “Pinkie” Durham one of the smallest sweepers in the Merrimack Mill. Been sweeping for several months. The School Record shows he is eight years old now, but because his mother insists he is twelve, he is permitted to work. Very small and very immature. The mother said that the Family Record “ain’t here.” See Hine report. Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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12 13

20

21

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viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.6

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7

Fig. 3.8 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1

Closing hour, Saturday noon, at Dallas Mill. Every child in photos, so far as I was able to ascertain, works in that mill. When I questioned some of the youngest boys, they said they were 12, and then other boys said they were lying. (Which sentiment I agreed with.) Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division) The building that once housed Alton Road Baptist Church. Now named Hope Baptist Church (Courtesy of the author) Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Apples and Pears. 1891–1892. Oil on canvas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960) Vincent van Gogh’s Madame Roulin and Her Baby. 1888. Oil on canvas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Robert Lehman Collection, 1975) Orson Welles on air at CBS, where he performed War of the Worlds. 1938 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Elsie M. Warnecke) Francisco Goya’s A winged figure carrying witches and monsters through the air. 1796/1798 [Etchings. Aquatints]. Retrieved from https://library.artstor.org/ asset/24857945 Odilon Redon’s Christ. 1887 [Print]. Retrieved from https://library.artstor.org/asset/24604185 Caravaggio’s The Denial of Saint Peter. 1610. Painting (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Herman and Lila Shickman, and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997) Seagulls swarming above the ship in Leviathan (Courtesy of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor) Auschwitz Extermination Camp aerial photograph held together with tape (Department of Defense. Defense Intelligence Agency. Central Imagery Processing and Reference Division. 1961-?) Photograph of Hiroshima after atomic bombing (Department of Defense. Department of the Air Force. 9/26/1947) Still from Man with a Movie Camera The bloody runoff from many dismembered fish in Leviathan (Courtesy of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

22 39

42

44

46

52 53

55 60

138

141 156

165

CHAPTER 1

There Are No Genres

A Waveness Emerges Any piece of writing, especially one in academia, in which this book exists (however much that pains me), is underpinned by a hard-won point of view. Mine relies on concepts. I carry around a bag of them, open it occasionally, take a few out, and throw them at cupboards and artworks. If it sticks, it’s probably spaghetti, and it’s ready. Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” and while we could quibble about the meaning of the line, we could just as easily admire it for its ANDness. The Soul was speaking. We are bedeviled by slants, delicious, and otherwise. When I was in graduate school, not so many years ago, colleagues told me to seek out the work of Sharon Ravitch and Mathew Riggan (2012), those oft-cited arbiters of what counts and does not count as solid research, for a definition of the so-called “conceptual framework,” so that I could better situate myself. But I felt well situated. Comfortable even. Like Dean Young and Darcie Dennigan, the phrase “conceptual framework” makes me shudder. Something feels like it’s about to be a lot of work and for reasons having very little to do with art and its education. The authors define this thing as “an argument about why a topic one wishes to study matters, and why the means proposed to study it are appropriate and rigorous” (p. xiii). A conceptual framework, they

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_1

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write, sets the table for the “reasoned, defensible choices” about what one chooses to study (p. xiii). Among the formalities was this: You dive into these assorted literatures, noting the ways in which they speak to you and to each other, how they shape and refine your research questions, sharpen your focus, and give you insights into your methods. You continually reshuffle1 and reorganize them as you become better acquainted with their content. By the time you are finished reading, and thinking about what you have learned, you have a pretty clear idea of what you are looking for, and why, where you want to look, how you plan to look for it, and what you will do with what you find. And while you cannot be sure of what precisely that is, you have some reasoned ideas about what you will find will inform your thinking, and that of others, about this topic. You are ready to go… you have constructed a conceptual framework. (p. 2)

I am wary, circumspect even, of anyone who says “reasoned” around me, but the “diving into” I could understand. Oddly, perhaps, their directions for solidifying a point of view sounded much more like autodidact-ism than scholarship, and the kind of advice delivered indirectly by the works of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his psychotropic pal Felix Guattari, which is why maybe all sound advice about the search and research leads to the same place: follow your slants. A book like this, with this kind of purpose, should be slanted in such a way that all the pieces slide into the basin where they click and clack about. In the preface to Difference and Repetition (1994), for example, Deleuze says:

1 Is scholarship a card trick, and if so, who is fooling whom? More impressive than tricking onlookers is telling them what you’re going to do and then fooling them nonetheless.a. a. Section 2.12 of the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American

Psychological Association (2010) tells us that footnotes should “supplement or amplify” necessary information with the body of the text (p. 37). The authors add, though, that footnotes “should not include complicated, irrelevant, or nonessential information” (p. 37). In short, the manual goes to great lengths to discourage the use of footnotes. The manual makers fear that footnotes will detract from the main body, or the thesis being explored within the main body. But which is the “main” text—the body or the footnote? On the other hand, the Oxford English Dictionary includes entries for both the noun (footnote) and the verb (footnoting) form.

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How else can we write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. (p. xxi)

Deleuze points out that we learn to swim by becoming wave,2 i.e., by the event of swimming, moving our arms within the wave, wherein our very waveness emerges, and not by such impracticable ancillary methods as watching an instructor model arm movements or reading about water displacement in a book. Some scholars in education, on the Deleuzian track, advocate for getting better at not knowing and the truth (there is no truth by the way; read on to find out more) is that this book exists because, in so many words, they, along with poet Dean Young, told me to write it. Patti Lather (2014), for instance, is on record saying, “I want to endorse the incalculable, the messy, and the responsibilities of not knowing” (p. 16), a pronouncement not unlike those from the scientists Stuart Firestein wrote

2 Part IV of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens (1954) goes like this:

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are onea. . (p. 92) Swimming is when a wave and a woman are one. A constellation rather than a history (see Tervo, 2017). a. When poets deal with time, they are approached with some skepticism. James

Wright (2005) once wrote a poem in which he describes seeing a hundred cows from the window of a passing bus: An old farmer, his scarlet face Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins From the clover field. (p. 48) The story goes that a reviewer criticized Wright, asking how he could possibly know how many Holsteins were in that field, to which Wright responded: “I counted the hooves and divided by four.” Interestingly, Stevens was never questioned for seeing a man and a woman and a blackbird as one, or for describing the emperor of ice cream.

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about in his book Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012). “Forget the answers,” he writes, and “work on questions” (p. 16) because “knowledge is a big subject” but “ignorance is bigger. And it’s more interesting” (p. 10). This dunce cap looks a lot like a birthday hat.

Groping Experimentation3 In his book, Firestein unsurprisingly refers to “Negative Capability,”4 a concept coined by the poet John Keats to describe Shakespeare’s incomparable (at the time) ability to capture mystery and doubt without wishing to reconcile the myriad threads. Old Graybeard Walt Whitman would pick this up in the late nineteenth century, embracing contradictions because 3 What is a plateau but the AND ad infinitum? Brian Massumi (1987) calls A Thousand Plateaus “a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub sets and noology and political economy,” adding that the book is difficult to understand not the least of which because its authors devote chapters to music and animals while denying that these are chapters at all (p. ix). Their book is something else—“a network of ‘plateaus’” arranged as chapters but that can be read in any order with “a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities” (p. ix). The plateaus do not amount to a book. Deleuze and Guattari recommend that we read their plateaus “as you would listen to a record” (p. ix). But recall, too, that Deleuze and Guattari admit to being unable to produce the multiple from the many plateaus (p. 22). But they woke up every day and went at it: “we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants” (p. 22). The book is still circular. This book, too, cannot outrun the book-ness of books. But what if we could use plateaus to produce the multiple, the connected but independent, luminous? 4 I was mystified to learn that business and other fields have co-opted Negative Capa-

bility. Robert French appears to have taken the concept and run with it, writing several widely read articles for such publications as Journal of Organizational Change Management, Human Relations, and Leadership. In a way, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) saw this coming, and in What is Philosophy?, reflected on the way the word concept itself, a philosopher’s word, was being co-opted by “computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication” (p. 10). It was “the most shameful moment” (p. 10), they say, when those fields “seized hold of the word concept itself and said: ‘This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers’” (p. 10). French and company surely see themselves as the creative ones, bringing a fresh set of eyes to an old concept. In one article, French and his compatriots (Peter Simpson, and Charles E. Harvey) (2002) list the myriad fields that have picked up on Keats’s idea: “It has, for instance, been applied to religious experience, to the practice of teaching and, especially, to psychoanalytic method, where Milner, for example, comments that she first became aware of the term in the 1930s” (p. 1210). Then they turn toward the completely prosaic field of business: “Most recently, negative capability has also entered the language of organization

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“I am large, I contain multitudes,” paving the way for creative nonfiction.5 Firestein says that scientists “do reach after fact and reason, but it is when they are most uncertain that the reaching is often the most imaginative” (p. 17). Firestein tells the story of physicist Albert Michelson6

and leadership studies (Bennis, 1989/1998, 2000; Handy, 1989)” (p. 1210). Luckily for us, because “its meaning and implications in this field have not been analysed in detail,” they decide “to bring Keats’ original insight, and its subsequent development, to bear on the ongoing debate over leadership” (p. 1210). Sure, its meaning and implications have not been analyzed in the field of leadership studies, but maybe there’s a reason for that? Was there a Keats-size hole in the scholarship on the interior design of executive suites? 5 Mary MacLane’s little-read 1902 memoir titled The Story of Mary MacLane, reissued later with the more apt (and her preferred) title I Await the Devil’s Coming, is one of the earliest (and most overlooked) creative nonfictions in the style of Whitman’s celebration of body, self, and world. MacLane published the book at the tender age of 19. Arguably, MacLane all but invented the confessional memoir that would later find fame with such works as On the Road (Jack Kerouac—see, here’s my obligatory Kerouac mention, as Sasha Archibald foresees in a review of MacLane’s memoir), The Liar’s Club (Mary Karr), and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Alison Bechdel). With hyperbole and penchant for the ecstatic, MacLane becomes liberation before women’s liberationa. . She wrote about what couldn’t be written about, especially in the Midwest at the turn of the century— desire, mainly: desire for other women and the devil, a character who recurs throughout (there goes MacLane, playing with reality before it was de rigueur). Impossibly, too, she possessed more arrogance (or is it confidence?) than Whitman. The first sentence of her first book goes like this: “I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel” (2013, p. 6). A few lines later, she writes “I am a genius.” And a few pages later: “Had I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world—on some part of it” (p. 13). It would be silly to argue with any of her pronouncements. a. MacLane wrote her book 47 years before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and nearly a hundred years before bell hooks had to tell people feminism is for everyone. MacLane likely wasn’t aware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) wasn’t written for another 27 years. Still, the swagger and outright defiance in MacLane’s voice was at least a half-century ahead of their time, and she likely would have enjoyed Woolf’s assessment of women’s place in arts and letters. And maybe she did enjoy it when she had grown and moved to Chicago chasing intellectual and sexual freedom. Maybe she teared up a little, or grew angry, when she realized that she had written much the same thing, in fewer words and with a more personal approach, years earlier, when, as Woolf says, no one was listening because no one listens to women, especially poor women (and, I’ll add, especially farm women with no one around for hundreds of miles to hear them). Quoting Sir Arthur Quillen-Couch, Woolf (1935) writes:

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who won the Nobel Prize for failing to find “luminiferous ether,” a substance many others had claimed to have found (p. 22). In a sense, Michelson won the prize for breaking from the herd, for, as Deleuze might say, seeing lines, not points. He got good at not knowing what

The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance…a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born. (qtd. in Woolf, 1935, p. 162) “That is it,” she says, by way of exhaustion, after having explained some hard truths about the unlevel playing field in which women, especially those who are naïve enough to want to be writers, find themselves. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time” (pp. 162–163). In poetry, a little-read article by Adrienne Rich (1972) looks closely at the “Muse,” an inspirationmachine dreamt up by the male ego but unavailable to women. “I have to ask myself whether it is because I am a woman that the idea of the muse seems so uninteresting to me,” she writes (p. 275). Men, she adds, see the muse as a human lover. “For women in her sexual nature,” she says, “the woman cannot be the human lover (as man) because it is man and man’s world which makes it especially difficult for her as an artist” (p. 275), echoing what Woolf wrote, connecting to what MacLane wrote and felt three quarters of a century before. The death of the muse, for Rich, will come with the Soul ousts the Muse, as seen in the work of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. 6 The theory of luminiferous ether isn’t as bizarre as it may sound to us now. Physicists at the time thought that light, like sound, was a wave, and therefore had to travel through a medium. Sound waves travel through air; light must, they thought, travel through its own version of air, what they called “luminiferous ether.” Michelson and his fellow physicist Edward Morley built a device called an interferometer to measure the phenomenon but failed in their endeavor when they couldn’t identify a medium. They published their un-findingsa. in the November 1887 issue of The American Journal of Science. Einstein’s special theory of relativity put an end to the ether hypothesis but that reportedly didn’t change Michelson’s mind (he believed it until his death and perhaps still believes). Without Michelson, perhaps, we wouldn’t have an Einstein. a. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn (for better or

worse) popularized the phrase “paradigm shift.” Kuhn studied the way in which new ideas find their way into science and influence all subsequent research. He found that scientists work on their puzzles with the tools they have; and when those tools cease to be useful, a phenomenon they cannot foresee, they necessarily seek out other tools that will more practically help them solve their puzzles. Basically, un-findings begat findings, etc. When any current knowledge proves insufficient or incomplete or useless to solve their problems, they, or at least the lucky ones, stumble upon new solutions that change the direction of research. The broken tools are abandoned in favor of working ones. Overcoming the impasse, says Kuhn, or the shift from “normal” science (everything is going well, everyone is solving his

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he was supposed to know. Just because a bunch of scientists (or worse: art educators) are standing around a hole doesn’t mean there’s something down there. Down with certainty. Is there anything more embarrassing than listening to someone who knows exactly what they are talking about? (Fig. 1.1). Lather and Elizabeth St. Pierre (2013) have called this “postqualitative,” a brand of research that enables “what becomes possible in the sense of ‘lines of flight’ that open up in not having to over-attend to external pressures and developments” (p. 631). They remind us, too, in case we get too enamored with ourselves and our philosophies, or start to over-attend to internal pressures, that we must “question our attachments that keep us from thinking and living differently” (p. 631). According to John Rajchman (2000), who has done much to bring the work of Deleuze into focus, “to make connections one needs not knowledge, certainty, or even ontology, but rather a trust that something may come out, though one is not yet completely sure what” (qtd. in St. Pierre, 2013, p. 652). In art education, Graeme Sullivan and Janet L. Miller (2013) have called for innovative research that is “not only systematic and rigorous but also creative and critical” (p. 3), that “break with the strictures and mandates of yet-again current positivist and technical-rational versions” of what they ironically coin “acceptable” research (p. 4). We must be knowledgeable in order to break where necessary from the herd.

or her puzzles) to “revolutions” (new tools emerge and prove more useful), is what he calls a paradigm shift. What is important to remember is that a paradigm shift is not called for or predicted; it just happens. Einstein put an end to Michelson’s luminiferous ether puzzle with his special theory of relativity. Einstein didn’t publish a paper in which he called for someone, himself maybe, to overthrow the luminiferous etherists in favor of some more streamlined mathematics. He did the work and it was entirely useful to solve puzzles. Michelson did the work and it was not entirely useful. In art education, for some reason, the phrase paradigm shift gets thrown around as if it could be summoned, and worse: as if it should be summoned. Juuso Tervo (2017) recently published a thoughtful article on this very topic. Tervo is especially interested in history, seeing, a la Walter Benjamin, that time for art educators in the non-physical sciences is a less useful frame than constellations (p. 77) for conversations about revolutions within the field. The shift from “normal” art education research to “revolutions” does not happen as it does in other sciences. He shows, too, that art educators have an obsession with using Kuhn’s phraseology to describe their own field (p. 70). In the context of this book, constellation is much more useful a term for what is happening at the fringes than time. The phrase “paradigm shift” is completely useless in art education.

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Fig. 1.1 Rhizome highway (Courtesy of Bruce Magnotti)

St. Pierre (2013) calls on Deleuze, too, saying “Deleuzian ontology is also experimental… to help us with the work of thinking the world differently” by rejecting “binary logic in favor of a logic of connection, a logic of the and (this and this and this and…), of becoming” (p. 652). “Once we take up the Deleuzian ontology,” she says, “representational logics and phenomenology are unthinkable” (p. 652) because we are talking about “living rather than knowing” (p. 652). For St. Pierre and other educational theorists, “The Deleuzian concepts assemblage 7 and rhizome 8 are particularly helpful in thinking connections rather than oppositions, 7 David Shields’s 2010 book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto consists of unattributed paragraphs, or blocks of text, blocs of language. Attribution takes a backseat to connection. The book is essentially an assemblage. The curious reader could look to the references in the back of the book for attributions, but who said what hardly matters. The voice is multiple but the voices are one. Some of the words were written by Shields, but even those lack attribution. Some of the snippy phrases we have heard before, likely in pat quotation books or memes, but where and by whom were they spoken or written hardly

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movement rather than categorization, and becoming rather than being” (p. 653). She and others point to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism9 as a way forward (not, recall, a “method” because Deleuze opposes methods

matters. If you want to know what is “going on,” you (1) missed the point; and (2) there are no points, only lines. 8 In art education, we often talk about the rhizome fondly as connection. Let’s not forget, though, that the rhizome, in botany and dendrology, is an audacious troublemakera. , and that is another reason to love it for art education. It is after all nicknamed the creeping rootstalk. Bamboob. , as one example, is feared in suburban circles because of its tendency to spread quickly and take over large swaths of land, ignoring artificial boundaries of yards and inconsequential above-ground barriers like fences. Homeowners at battle with bamboo often must bring in the earth movers. The “thuggish nature” of many plants, including bamboo, poison oak, and Venus fly traps but also desirables like turmeric (especially for golden lattes at specialty coffee cafés, which are in vogue), “is due to the vigor of the rhizomes of these aggressive plants” (Beaulieu, 2019). Even when contained, they, as if in a frenzy, loop and loop to cover every inch of uninhabited soil. a. Here is what a troublemaker looks like when you try to tame it: b. Bamboo plays an important if mostly overlooked role in the invention and

improvement of the light bulb filament, and even there it was mostly a thug. Thomas Edison was looking for something that burned evenly, long, and well. At first, he tried cardboard. “Paper is no good,” Edison concluded. “Under the microscope,” he said, “it appears like a lot of sticks thrown together.” Like a scout bonfire. The problem with paper was the distribution of fibres. “There are places where the fibres are packed,” said Edison, “and other places where there are few fibres, dense spots and great open holes.” In other words, the fibres in manmade, commercial paper were slipshod. Clusters and caverns. Holes don’t burn. In the 1870s, then, Edison and his team of researchers began looking for “a vegetable grown with geometrically parallel fibres… Look for it.” Eventually they settled on bamboo, what they were then calling “Gramina.” Edison charged Frank McGowan, his stenographer, a scrappy Irishman, and C. F. Hanington, his assistant, a Civil War veteran, with traveling to South America in search of the perfect loop material, which reportedly was readily available in great numbers in the Amazon. The first correspondence between Edison and McGowan is dated February 7, 1888. The trip south had not gone well: “I arrived here on the 12th, inst., from Iquitos, Peru. To use the pugilistic expression,—‘I got it on the neck’, on this trip up, as you will see by my remarks later on. I will now speak of what I was sent here to obtain.” Then, in call caps and centered is the word that would plague McGowan for the next two years: GRAMINA. In that first letter, he quotes from memory (and nearly recalls every single word correctly) from Prof. Orton’s book Andes and the Amazon. Orton calls bamboo “the king of the grasses” and describes its features: “frequently rising 80 feet in length

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in the traditional scientific sense). The task is impossible with such distinctions as ontology, epistemology, and the false distinctions of objectivity (see Haraway, 1988) and validity. But there is hope. St. Pierre along with Jackson and Mazzei (2016) suggest “rethinking the nature of being is an though not in height, for the fronds curve downward.” This all sounds majestic until McGowan gets to the point of his exercise in recollection: “Orton deliberately lied” when he called gramina beautiful, “and it was well for posterity that he died soon after.” To McGowan, it seemed that everyone in his estimation had lied to him. The samples they had received in New Jersey before leaving for Quito had been lies, too. “I never allowed a day to pass that I did not examine the Gramina on the banks of the river under which the canoe was poled,” he writes, “but ever came across anything at all comparable with the samples furnished me, and I have had this statement corroborated by people who know the country.” But, says McGowan, he had spoken to the “Governor of the Orient (all that portion of Ecuador lying East & South of papallacta)” and from that conversation had developed a theory that the landscape and geography in Napo is inhospitable to gramina; and then without evidence he adds that “salt water air” is necessary. “I am going to the mountains of the Esmerelda,” he declares, before getting in a small dig at Edison: “which I told you about five years ago, and which I suggested to you we should try first on this trip.” The letter goes on and on for over 4,000 words. Very little positive (information or vibes) is conveyed. The diminutive gramina dulled his machetes. The Indians (his guides) threw away some of his bamboo samples, and, according to his account, kept looking at his small box of cash. Rain plagued them for 32 days straight. The mosquitoes feasted. At one point, while trying to brave a considerable torrent on the river, McGowan tried to steady the canoe with a pole. “Th [sic] velocity with which the canoe was goint [sic] at was too much,” he wrote, “however to be resisted by one pressure on the pole and consequently it slipped through my hand tearing the flesh off in ribbons into the very bone. But I would not let go and hung on until the pole struck the tree but did not hurt anything.” McGowan paints a picture of himself as a warrior. “I doctored my digits and in a week commenced to use my pole again.” Eventually, when McGowan reaches the end of the saga—this was just one letter of many—he includes, jokingly, a poem to be etched on his tombstone: “Here lies wee Mac, who kept on the track “As long as life’s wheel went around; “How he lies on his back on a different tack,“But, –he don’t take up much ground.” His words took on a slightly macabre note when, just months after he returned to the United States, he disappeared. On March second, 1890, just over two years since writing that lengthy letter to Edison from Quito and having had only a few months of respite, the The New York Times reported the following fate: Frank McGowan, for several years in the employ of Thomas A. Edison as a stenographer, and whose thrilling experiences in search of a peculiar kind of bamboo for

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experimental project in which we lay out a different plane10 of thought on which we can create new concepts that will help us live a different existence” (p. 100). Unsurprisingly, they call on us to use Deleuze to lead the way to this “new” research: Whether work is “new” is always a matter of debate, and scholars doing new empirical, new material work usually begin by addressing that issue and pointing out that the descriptor “new” does not necessarily announce something new but serves as an alert that we are determined to try to think differently. (p. 100)

The authors quote Deleuze scholar Brian Massumi, who explained “that by definition the ‘new cannot be described, having not yet arrived’” (p. 104) and bring in Gayatri Spivak to ask “What counts as ‘new?’” and “How do scholars even know if their work is new?” (p. 104). They then echo what poet Dean Young says about originality—that it is both a nod toward the old and a defiant break from it (p. 104)—in order to adapt what Spivak called “persistent critique” (qtd., p. 104) (Figs. 1.2 and 1.3). Following St. Pierre, who advocates for following Deleuze, we cannot adopt the old ways of doing social science but must adapt for a new way of doing this particular study in this particular moment—“emergent in the act of creation” (p. 105), what Deleuze and Guattari called a “groping his employer in the wilds of South America during eighteen months formed an interesting story a short time ago, is the subject of a mysterious disappearance. (Where Is Frank M’gowan, 1890, p. 8) He was never found. 9 Transcendental empiricism, Deleuze’s own brand of philosophy, “aims not at stating

the conditions of knowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering the conditions of creative production” (Gilles Deleuze, 2018). Imagine a brand of art education (is it pedagogy, is it scholarship?) that sought similar aims. 10 When they call for a different plane of thought on which pulsate new concepts, they are referring directly to the plane of immanence of concepts, or “planomenon,” defined by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? “It is a table, a plateau, or a slice,” they say, adding that the concepts exist on a plane as “multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them” (1994, pp. 35–36). Another way of thinking about it, they say, is that the concepts are events on a plane that is the event horizon (p.36). The argument here is that other planes of immanence do exist in the field, but the concepts upon them amount to the opposite of those described by Deleuze and Guattari, and are more akin to being (static) than becoming (alive).

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Fig. 1.2 Demolition for “slum clearance.” 1941. Photo by Edwin Rosskam. Farm Security Administration. Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

experimentation” (qtd., p. 105), and more in line with becoming than being, the pre-subjective than the subjective. As such, any “new” research, says Levi R. Bryant (2008) “must remain open to the outside,11 which

11 Being open to the outside is what a city does, despite the best designs of city planners. Jane Jacobs taught us that during New York City’s massive reorganization in the 1960s with The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1963). Todd May discusses these ideas at length in his book, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Referring to the work of Jacobs, May (2005) calls urban planning “a spectacular failure” (163), because “planners want things arranged in neat patterns. Shops go over here, residences over there, and highways go through everything to add accessibility. But cities are not like that. Cities are messy affairs” (163). Messy, sure, and unpredictable. Urban planners try to domesticate the city by planning its movements, but people are the movers and the shakers, and we cannot predict where they will be or what they will do with any given space. In addition, urban planners separated (and perhaps continue to separate) the

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Fig. 1.3 Developed expired Polaroid film photograph (Courtesy of the author)

wealthy from the impoverished, further widening the economic and racial divides. Jacobs showed that this is not how cities work. Instead, she suggested that city planners place everything together so the users will organize the chaos themselves (164), advice that was not taken during her lifetime. The problem, according to May, is that city planners work in terms of identity, not in terms of difference in the Deleuzian sense. City planners plan. That is their job, their identity. City planners prescribe meaning to cities, identities to thoroughfares and neighborhoods, to corners and city parks. This is where people will walk dogs, they may say, and this is where they will shop. “Cities are not matters of function,” however, as May writes; “they are matters of connection. They are rhizomes, not trees” (165). In other words, and in Deleuze’s vocabulary, cities are machinic, not mechanic (165); they are “actualizations of a virtual difference” (p.166), which “brings out aspects of people and of the neighborhood that could not have been foreseen, and that were not there in advance” (165). May likens them to a “chemical process where the elements themselves change their composition as they come into contact with other elements”a. (165). They are alive. We, too, are alive, and are better described not in

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will contaminate12 and disrupt it” (qtd., p. 105) in the most delicious ways. One of the ways to think differently is “a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation” that St. Pierre traces to Foucault, Deleuze, and Deleuze with Guattari (p. 102). She urges us to study the image of thought, which is what I do later in this book, because the social sciences are no longer able to claim that the Cartesian tripartite of “the knower and the known for the sake of knowledge” (p. 102) is invisible, incidentally contaminating our papers. The “new” work to be done is to re-work those connections, to cross the borders again and again, wall or no wall.

Does It Work? The Oxford English Dictionary (2015) defines a “concept” as “senses relating to thought or understanding,” tracking it from the fifteenth century through Robert Browning’s 1880 line “a thought has fired you” and given “some cramped concept expansion.” Borrowing from Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari (1994) write that “you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them” and “to create concepts is, at the very least, to make something” (p. 5) and then to turn around and use it. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari created concepts and then expanded them as if they had been deflated balloons. For Deleuze, “concepts” are shapeshifters—“they change along with the problems” they investigate because they work “along a moving horizon”13 (p. xx) wherein “[e]very concept is at least double or triple” terms of identity, which is fixed, but in terms of becomings, the differences within us that emerge as a result of connections we make along the way. a. Surely we are all aware of the chemical reaction that occurs or, after years of

storage, fails to occur in a Polaroid. In the failures, the science of film photography is laid bare. There is no negative or print without chemicals and reactions. The images that often emerge from expired film stock look like they were culled from space, from the surface of other planets, look, in fact, like abstract oil paintings. A picture of a friend becomes an X-ray; a picture of a father becomes a solar prominence; and maybe they are one and the same. 12 Dean Young (2010): “Mistakes aren’t contaminants any more than conception is an infection” (p. 154). 13 Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral artworks operate solely along a moving horizon, such as the one for which he fused icicles together with the heat from his mouth before laying

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(p. 15). This book, then, must change as it progresses, as it addresses and unearths problems. For poet Dean Young, a concept is a hammer and the proper use of a hammer, as he tells us, is to stand fifteen feet away and throw it at the nail. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003) represents one of Deleuze’s most ambitious attempts to use concepts (e.g., fact, diagram, cliché, event) on visual art to illuminate what makes the work work. Using concepts is a way forward but not a method. Deleuze invented concepts (the diagram, for instance) in addition to using existing concepts (the cliché, for instance), though renewed, and he used them to illuminate. Once we have questions and a toolbox of concepts at the ready, it follows that we should be able to write insightful, persuasive texts that challenge and overcome psychic clichés. Deleuze so helpfully showed us in Francis Bacon that we can do this with very little, using only two physical items: interviews and artworks. My sources, both the artists and the thinkers, I have chosen because, as Deleuze advises, I like them and admire them. “If you don’t admire something, if you don’t live it,” says Deleuze, “you have no reason to write a word about it” (2004, p. 144). He learned this from Nietzsche and Spinoza, two philosophers “whose critical and destructive powers are without equal” and who used them to advance affirmation “against those who would mutilate and mortify life” (p. 144). Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I define the concept as a tool, something to be used on something to reveal something. A concept is only as good as its use. Like Nietzsche, I don’t trust a concept simply because it exists, because someone before me urged its uptake, but because I intuit its use on something to make connections, to create new living. Deleuze was particularly interested in using concepts to uncover “the violence of paint as the aesthetic truth of art, as opposed to pleasure and the harmony of the beautiful” (Bernstein, 2006, p. 259), a clear break from aesthetics but a new aesthetics. The question is not “Is it good?”14 them to melt in the sun, glistening, on a rocky crag. “The very thing that brings the work to life”, i.e., heat, he says, “is the thing that will cause its death” (qtd. in Barrett, 2008, p. 137). In the film Rivers and Tides (2001), the viewer is privy to the ephemerality of Goldsworthy’s works, such as those made with leaves that must eventually blow away, or those made in water that must eventually drift away or sink, or fall apart as pieces come unmoored. 14 This question is a kind of disease in an artist’s mind. Once, in a writing workshop, a student, after listening to five minutes of criticism of her poem, was asked if she had any questions for the group. She did. “Okay,” she said, “but is it good?” This was the most

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but “Is it alive?”, which jives with translator Brian Massumi’s (1987) summary of Deleuze’s entire oeuvre: “The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?” (p. xv). And, I’ll add, does it work on you in unexpected ways? In Francis Bacon, Deleuze urges us to “listen closely… to what painters have to say” (p. 99). I urge us to listen closely to what poets and filmmakers have to say, too. Badiou and Cassin (1981) remind us that Deleuze’s book (and books) is no ordinary book, adding “is this even a book ‘on’ Bacon? Who is the philosopher and who is the painter?… Who is thinking, and who looking at thought? One can certainly think painting, but one can also paint thought” (p. viii). “The idea that one can design a study using Deleuzian concepts appears nonsensical,” says St. Pierre (2016), because “such normalized concepts and practices condition a study in advance and tie it to the strata” (p. 122). On the other hand, one can do Deleuzian concepts. In other words, we can use concepts, and along the way may end up with some of our own. According to Deleuze, concepts and practices occur “in the context of the problem” (qtd., p. 122), which is to say they “cannot be determined in advance” (St. Pierre, p. 122), meaning, in a sense, that any research questions laid out in advance of my project here could not do justice to those found within and throughout. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) say, “we think too much in terms of history15 … Becomings honest moment of the hour, but also an indication of the writing workshop’s inherent faults. No one gave her a straight answer because there is no straight answer to give. 15 A recent article in Studies in Art Education (adding to what Mary Hafeli wrote in a 2009 article) lamented the loss of history in art education scholarship. Tyler Denmead (2020) laments that kids these days privilege recent scholarship and ideas over canonical literature. He worries that graduate students and young scholars are trying to blaze new trails before they have traveled the main thoroughfare, understood its bricks, laid down upon the manure. Plus, he says, we are a small field: “Blazing new trails will thus be lonely, with metrics of impact not serving as a good indicator of the strength of ideas” (p. 351). Implicit here is complicity. One underlying assumption is that not referencing or citing historical sources (in any one article) means not knowing them. Denmead and Hafeli before him privilege coding (counting how many scholars use “old” sources) over content (what the new scholars actually say). Being lonely is a good thing if the alternative is bedding down with the incompatible, past, or present. Art education has become a multi-disciplinary field whose scholars regularly converse with scholars across departmental divides (e.g., Philosophers and artists, past, present, and future). What some art education scholars, some of whom Dunmead is surely referring to, do is wrestle the field from its blind adherence to history and reorient scholarship to geography.

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belong to geography, they are orientations, directions” (p. 2). “The question ‘What are you becoming?’,” then, “is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does” (p. 2). What we can do, then, is shift our research “from identifying the characteristics of the thing (what is this?) to its genetic conditions (how is this possible?)” and a belief that “anything could connect to anything” (St. Pierre, p. 119) at any moment. A transcendental empiricist book, then, cannot set out to produce new knowledge (logical empiricism) nor “to study things in themselves” (phenomenology) (p. 121) but must be set toward something heretofore unthought. Notions of true and false give way to questions of the “singular and the ordinary” (p. 120). Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, St. Pierre urges us to “[e]xperiment, don’t signify and interpret!” (p. 120). “One cannot experiment,” however, “as long as one is tried16 [sic] to ‘a dogmatic image of thought’” that, says Patton (2000), “‘supports the view that thought needs a method, an artifice which enables the thinker to ward off error’” (qtd., p. 121). Beyond the prototypical social science methods is something else. This is where Recklessness enters to lead the/a way. “It is impossible to write poetry,” says Dean Young (2010), “therefore we do it” because “Sometimes the more impossible it is, the greater the debacle, the greater the poem” (p. 148). He could have been talking about research. What we have here is a reckless project—about Recklessness and hopefully itself reckless—clawing its way forward and out of the psychic clichés on the so-called tabula rasa. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) say: “it is not enough to say, ‘Down with genres’; one must effectively write [and create] in such as a way that there are no more ‘genres’” (p. 17).

The Poet Attends In 2009, Researcher Kakali Bhattacharya included a poem in a scholarly article. Called “The Small Small Things,” and described as arts-based educational research (ABER), it was constructed from words in a transcript (recorded conversations with research subjects) that were finagled 16 When Marcel Duchamp’s The Bridge Stripped Bare with Her Bachelors, Even (1915– 1923) was cracked in shipment, the artist reportedly said “It’s better with the cracks.” Dean Young (2010) reminds us: “YOUR GENIUS IS YOUR ERROR” (p. 48).

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into an art (poem) form. But the poem simply communicates academic information in the guise of a poem, rendering the attempt not a poem, not art, but something else. This is a charge indirectly admitted by Bhattacharya when she explicated her intentions, not her attendings: “I was positioning transnational de/colonizing existence that cannot claim indigenous ways of existing… that might be possible for some members of other cultural groups” (p. 14). Like Dean Young (2010), I believe that more than intending, which is closed off from connections, the poet ATTENDS17 : Any intention in the writing of poetry beyond the most basic aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed.... At every moment the poet must be ready to abandon any prior intention in the welcome expectation of what the poem is beginning to signal.... It is and needs to be a messy process, a devotion to unpredictability, the papers blowing around the room as the wind comes in. (p. 5)

Recall, too, what Deleuze (2000) learned from Proust: friends “communicate to each other only the conventional,” which means that they conceive “only the possible” (p. 160). Proust’s best work happened to him as he stumbled over stones. “Meaninglessness,” write Young, “results not from too little but too much meaning” (p. 91). Bhattacharya’s is just one example but an emblematic one18 in ABER. Eisner (2006), a proponent of arts-based research, believes that “arts-based research will need 17 T.S. Eliot (2009): “In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to

be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.” And: The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. 18 “The struggle against purpose in art,” says Nietzsche (2003), “is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against the subordination of art to morality… When one has excluded from art the purpose of moral preaching and human improvement it by no means follows that art is completely purposeless, goalless, meaningless, in short l’art pour l’art ” (p. 92).

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people who know how to create films, videos, narratives, literary texts, as well as texts of other sorts” (p. 17). He adds that if arts-based research is to be accepted, it must increase in quality (p. 17). James Sanders III (2006) has criticized arts-based researchers, specifically for “exploit[ing] arts technologies, mining them for meanings and metaphors that inspire new ways of conceptualizing problems, but without seriously considering their histories, sensibilities, or material characteristics” and “scholars who appropriate the language of an arts media and/or its construction techniques… without a sound grasp of a media’s technologies, history, or its metaphoric potential” (p. 91). “Such performances,” he writes, “(re)produce a simplistic, shallow, surface semblance of skill—practices that disserve and disrespect” (p. 91). This is a pitfall of ABER that should be remedied by its practitioners. Admirably, Bhattacharya has formally studied poetry, and crafts19 lines with the “found”20 words and phrases, but ultimately improvement in ABER means a shift in the underlying philosophy—not to communicate the possible but to think the heretofore unthought (Figs. 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6).

19 Dean Young (2010): “The emphasis on craft on a series of procedures and techniques,” Dean Young tells us, “is too much like the creation of perfectly safe nuclear reactors without acknowledging the necessity of radioactive matter for the core” (p. 153). “When art strives for the decorums of craft,” he adds, “it withers to table manners during a famine” (p. 156). 20 “Found art” is a label often tacked on to objects, including language, that have been found in the wild and re-presented as art. Duchamp’s readymades are perhaps the most famous example of this; and Fountain (1917), the urinal, is perhaps the most famous readymade. In the twenty-first century, we have become increasingly suspicious of artists, or anyone really, who attaches the modifier “art” to any object in the world. But what about art that is found in the world after it had been aligned with more pedestrian purposes? Consider, as an example, the following photographs, which are in the National Child Labor Committee collection of the Library of Congress, with their corresponding captions, written by the photographer (and reproduced in their entirety below) Lewis Hine (1913) in Huntsville, Alabama in 1913. Taken together, without explication, a story that far exceeds the individual pieces, a story that reveals but withholds, conjures even, emerges. Moreover, Hine took these photographs as documentation of an ongoing problem, not as art, so far removed and with context gulfed by a century.

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Fig. 1.4 Group of workers. Boy on left refused to pose. Merrimac Mills. Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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Fig. 1.5 “Pinkie” Durham one of the smallest sweepers in the Merrimack Mill. Been sweeping for several months. The School Record shows he is eight years old now, but because his mother insists he is twelve, he is permitted to work. Very small and very immature. The mother said that the Family Record “ain’t here.” See Hine report. Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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Fig. 1.6 Closing hour, Saturday noon, at Dallas Mill. Every child in photos, so far as I was able to ascertain, works in that mill. When I questioned some of the youngest boys, they said they were 12, and then other boys said they were lying. (Which sentiment I agreed with.) Location: Huntsville, Alabama (Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

References American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). American Psychological Association. Badiou, A., & Cassin, B. (1981). Preface to the French Edition. Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Continuum. Barrett, T. (2008). Why is that art? Aesthetics and criticism of contemporary art. Oxford University Press. Beaulieu, D. (2019, November 10). Rhizomes: Definition, examples and how they are different from roots, stolons. The Spruce. https://www.thespruce. com/rhizomes-definition-examples-2131103 Bhattacharya, K. (2009). Disrupting voices, silences, and telling secrets: The rigor of qualitative methods in arts-based approaches. Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Diego.

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Bryant, L. R. (2008). Difference and givenness: Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and the ontology of immanence. Northwestern University Press. Concept. (2015). In Oxford English Dictionary, online (3rd ed.). Retrieved at http://www.oed.com Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia. Deleuze, G. (2000). Proust and signs: The complete text (R. Howard, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.). Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert islands and other texts: 1953–1974. Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Denmead, T. (2020). Forget this commentary too: Cultivating an antipossessive, nonessentialist, and anti-edgy approach to art education scholarship. Studies in Art Education, 61(4), 349–355. Eisner, E. W. (2006). Does arts-based research have a future? Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 9–18. Eliot, T. S. (2009, October 13). Traditional and the individual talent. Poetry. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-indivi dual-talent Firestein, S. (2012). Ignorance: How it drives science. Oxford University Press. French, R., Simpson, P., & Harvey, C. E. (2002). Leadership and negative capability. Human Relations, 55(10), 1209–1226. Gilles Deleuze. (2018, February 14). In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ Hine, L. W. (1913). National Child Labor Committee Collection [photographs]. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-child-laborcommittee/?fa=subject:alabama%7Csubject:textile+mill+workers%7Clocation: huntsville&sp=2 Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. Lather, P. (2014). Top ten+ list: (Re)thinking ontology in (post)qualitative research. University of Illinois-Champaign. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. McGowan, F. (1888, February 18). Letter from Frank Mcgowan to Thomas Alva Edison, February 18th, 1888. Edison Papers Digital Edition. http://edison. rutgers.edu/digital/document/D8828AAK

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Nietzsche, F. (2003). Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Penguin. Ravitch, S. M., & Riggan, J. M. (2012). Reason & Rigor: How conceptual frameworks guide research. Sage. Riedelsheimer, T. (Director). (2001). Rivers and tides: Andy Goldsworthy working with time. Roxie Releasing. Sanders, J., III. (2006). Performing arts-based education research: An epic drama of practice, precursors problems and possibilities. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 89–107. Shields, D. (2010). Reality hunger: A manifesto. Vintage. Stevens, W. (1954). Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. In The collected poems of Wallace Stevens (pp. 92–94). New York: Vintage. St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). The posts continue: Becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 646–657. St. Pierre, E. A. (2016). The empirical and the new empiricisms. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 111–124. St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New empericisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 99–110. Sullivan, G., & Miller, J. L. (2013). Teaching for the possible: Doing creative and critical research. In C. J. Stout (Ed.), Teaching and learning emergent research methodologies in art education (pp. 1–20). National Art Education Association. Tervo, J. (2017). Always the new: Paradigms and the inherent futurity of art education historiography. Studies in Art Education, 58(1), 69–79. Woolf, V. (1935). A room of one’s own. Project Gutenberg. https://archive.org/ details/woolf_aroom/page/n161/mode/2up Wright, J. (2005). From a bus window in Central Ohio, just before a thunder shower. Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

CHAPTER 2

Thinking Schools & Scholarship

Purely Coincidental Princeton University is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report —the self-proclaimed arbiter of such things—as the best university in the nation in front of Columbia and Harvard. Within the university’s admissions pages (2016) is this note on the freshman seminars: “The students’ main responsibility is to think deeply about the material and bring their ideas to the table,” adding (quite confidently) “Each freshman seminar is hosted by a residential college, which means that discussions started in the classroom can continue over meals or in other informal settings.” Unsurprisingly, Princeton does not say students’ main responsibility is to think shallowly about anything, anything at all, and to leave all discussions, especially those that may give rise to indigestion, in the classroom, where their teacher, an underpaid, lovelorn adjunct, will happily resume the banal lecture in the morning. The above is a fairly representative admissions statement. Colleges and universities wish to sell themselves as fertile ground for thought and experimentation, for healthy debate and intellectual growth that happens both within and without a classroom. Universities fall back on the promise of “critical thinking” without ever much attending to a definition of it. Problematically perhaps, art schools and some art education scholars similarly privilege the kind of thinking described by Princeton, thinking as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_2

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a tree root, thinking as science, critical thinking that saves the world from itself, that—despite artmaking, i.e., the violence of paint, being one of the primary responsibilities of their students—happens before and after art. CalArts (n.d.), for example, sells itself as a school for the kind of student who “goes beyond mere aesthetics and expertise and one who thinks about the way their practice engages with the world at large.” During your stay, the admissions booklet (2016) says, “you and your peers will grow together as thinkers and makers” (p. 22). Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) (n.d.), says its website, teaches students “to engage… intellectually, philosophically and culturally” because “education at CCAD means gaining the technical skills…while learning how to think critically and conceptually.” The Rhode Island School of Design, goes its literature, “offers a multidisciplinary approach to learning fundamental concepts in studio production while emphasizing process, experimentation and critical thinking and making skills.” The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), through its BFA program, claims to give students “a broad education that balances thinking and making, academic rigor, and experimental play.” The “thinking” described above is somewhat at odds with what schools appear to want, and perhaps need, to pay the bills and fill the coffers. James Elkins (2001) reminds us that art school and department fliers advertise famous alumni because they hope that celebrity means success in the minds of impressionable teenagers and their parents. At The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, he says, “we list Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Estes, and Joan Mitchell,” adding quite ironically (but seriously) that “most of them dropped out” (p. 104). Elkins suggests adding this disclaimer to such “notable alumni”1 lists:

1 The most comprehensive list of “notable alumni”—by number of students and faculty who were or became celebrities of their craft, the game changers in such disparate practices as dance, music, painting, and poetry—may come from the short-lived Black Mountain College. But notability doesn’t necessarily translate to pedagogy. The list includes students Ruth Asawa, Robert Creeley, Viola Farber, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Susan Weil, among others; and faculty Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, R. Buckminster Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, and Peter Voulkos. It wasn’t an art school and yet it placed artmaking at its center. John Rice, not himself a professor of art or an artist but a professor with progressive ideas about education, founded the school in 1933 “not to train

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Although these artists did study at our school, we deny any responsibility for their success. We have no idea what they learned while they were here, what they thought was important and what wasn’t, or whether they would have been better off in jail. We consider it luck that these artists were at

professional artists but to sensitize people to the meaning of art.” The 1952 prospectus— a kind of admissions material without all the pomp and circumstance—boasted these two alarmingly vague principles: I. That the student, rather than the curriculum, is the proper centre of a general education, because it is he and she that a college exists for. II. That a faculty fit to face up the student as the centre to be measured by what they do with what they know, that it is their dimension as teachers as much as their mastery of their disciplines that makes them instruments capable of dealing with what excuses their profession in the first place, their ability to instruct the student under hand. (qtd. in Katz, 2003, pp. 36–37) What can be gleaned from the two principles perhaps is that the school had both students and faculty. There was nothing special about the school; there was something special about something else. It’s no surprise, given the above, that the pedagogy varied wildly and maybe was entirely absent. Josef Albers was “a meticulous planner and organizer, entirely devoted to his task as a pedagogue… while being equally devoted and prolific in experimentation” (Katz, 2003, p. 40). Willem (Bill) de Kooning’s, on the other hand, was a pedagogy of the loose. Elaine de Kooninga remembers it like this: [Josef] Albers preferred to talk to students as a group; Bill liked to talk to students one at a time. Albers’ students sat at desks and worked cautiously on small, neat compositions; Bill’s stood at easels painting boldly on large canvases. Albers presents his students with the same specific problems; Bill waited until they had evolved their own set of problems on canvas before discussing the range of options open to them. Since most of the students worked under both of them, the different approaches proved to be stimulating rather than mutually exclusive. (qtd. in Katz, p. 40) So loose in fact was de Kooning’s pedagogy that he often told students to quit school, move to New York, and start painting, because that was the only real path to becoming an artist. Such advice infuriatedb Albers who believed in meticulous preparation. Black Mountain is an anomaly, though, and could not exist todayc , founded as it was to challenge the State apparatusd . Black Mountain College, says the 1933–1934 Prospectus, was founded without a board of trustees (likely because its founders were bored of trustees). In its place, John Rice created a board of fellows made up of faculty members who had a stake in education, not business. Rice et al. also discarded the role of President in favor of a rotation of faculty members who would be responsible for the major administrative duties. So too were the deans replaced with faculty members who would take on short-term dean-like appointments and the students given a role, “encouraged

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our school… any relation between what we teach and truly interesting art is purely coincidental. (p. 104)

The interesting note that most of them dropped out is played for humor but is also true and instructive.

to assume whatever responsibility they will in the matter of work and conduct” (p. 1). The distinctions of freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior were replaced with the junior college and senior college groups, where the junior college was the place for finding a purpose and the senior college was the place for carrying out that purpose. Each student was given the chance to find his or her own path, and by all accounts it was much more rigorous than anyone was letting on: When a student, after consultation with his instructors, thinks he has reached sufficient maturity to make an intelligent choice of a field of specialization and that he has built an adequate foundation for the work he proposes to do in the Senior College, he will be required to take comprehensive examinations, oral and written, set by a Board of Admissions to the Senior College, and to submit a plan of work to be done in the Senior College. (p. 1) a. Elaine de Kooning was a superlative artist in her own right. Was she overshadowed by her husband or did she step back into the shadows for her husband? A 2015 show at the National Portrait Gallery, which showed “how she reinvented the modern portrait by using figuration with an Abstract Expressionist vocabulary” (Moonan, 2015), not only raised that question but made it more public. Interestingly, we can only know what we learn, which is that which is available to be learned, i.e., in the canon. Critic Sasha Archibald (2013) sums up the problem and its solution like this: Finding specifically women progenitors requires a bit of extra effort—Warhol or Kerouac or Nietzsche are readier-at-hand than Kathy Acker or Claude Cahun or Agnès Martin—but, thanks to the Internet, feminism, and other cultural shifts, no one comes up empty-handed. b. It also infuriated the federal government. The FBI did not approve of such looseness. A 1956 FBI memo reported that “they are conducting a very unusual type of school” in the mountains of North Carolina, wherein “[a] student may do nothing all day and in the middle of the night may decide he wants to paint or write, which he does, and he may call on his teachers at this time for guidance. They advised that everything is left to the desires of the individual” (Brown, 2019). Among other slights to the State, the school effectively ignored segregation a decade before Brown v. Board of Education when it admitted musician Alma Stone. c. “Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions… it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 103).

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Both and More What schools say in marketing materials is removed from the actual work of being an artist, or a person who thinks, is at times, though rarely, thinking within thought. Jack Richardson (2017) in “What Art Thinks” seeks to bring the conversation about education, and as a byproduct “thinking,” back to “the pre-subjective, inexpressible, unmeasurable, and unrepeatable point at which our mind is compelled to think” (p. 111), instead of trying, as demonstrated by art schools, to attach education/thinking to all sorts of afterthoughts, evidence, materials, and fields of study. The conversation is not new. David E. Templeton all the way back in 1969 thought that the term “critical thinking” was passé among art educators. Citing a 1964 handbook on educational objectives, Templeton (1969) says: “few serious workers now use the term ‘critical thinking’ when stating curriculum objectives” (7). The problem, according to Templeton and his source, the Bloom who drew up the famous taxonomy, is that the vocabulary concept “critical thinking” is completely abstract, nebulous, a ruse, which is true but only half of the story. The other half is more sinister. The gist is that while artmaking is the site of connection, many scholars in art education still ignore the kind of thinking discussed by Richardson, St. Pierre, and others, and go looking for ways to drag someone else’s definition of thinking into art, often relying on history, not geography. Until we bring the conversation back to the site of artmaking, the discussions will remain a ruse. Stephen Carpenter (2019) introduced a recent issue of Studies in Art Education by taking a stance on the theory (what matters?) versus practice (dense matter) debate. Carpenter says he is neutral. “These encampments are not at odds with each other,” he writes, “nor are they battling for superiority or persuasive status as far as I am concerned. There is much room in the lateral spaces of the field to accommodate different views, approaches, and motivations” (p. 4). Unfortunately or not, he is wrong. The two are incompatible. We are talking about the theory of special relativity versus the theory of luminiferous ether. Carpenter said all that as a preface to dueling commentaries in the issue: David Pariser’s “Dead Cat, Living Horse: Losing Our Heads d. Oddly, the main building of Black Mountain College, eighteen miles from the liberal refuge Asheville, North Carolina, was named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a misnomer for a building at a school for the arts. The name is a holdover from the pre-BMC YMCA campus that is still intact today.

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Over Theory” and Kevin Tavin’s “David and (His Own) Goliath: A Response to Pariser’s Critique of ‘The Cat, Cradle, and the Silver Spoon: Violence in Contemporary Art and the Question of Ethics for Art Education’.” Pariser argues that art education is an applied field with no room for theory per se. Tavin, on the other hand, argues that theory per se is a kind of application. Pariser thinks education happens only (or at least primarily) in the classroom whereas Tavin thinks art education happens beyond “formal schooling… and K-12 classrooms” (p. 64). To support his claim that art education is an applied field, Pariser cites the work of Anna Kindler, who he treats with blanket reverence. “In fact,” says Pariser, her work alone “points out the practical liabilities of theorydriven prescriptions for study” (p. 70). By using the word “prescriptions,” Pariser shows that he misunderstands Tavin’s entire enterprise. It seems to me that Tavin proscribes prescriptions. Pariser and company, on the other hand, appear to be the pro-prescriptionists. At its core, though, this is not a disagreement about art education. This is a disagreement about the definition of thinking. Among other texts, Pariser references the article “Academic Piracy: Rebranding Social Criticism as Critical Thinking” (published in the libertarian magazine The Independent Review) by Robert E. Martin. Martin (2015) begins by establishing that colleges claim to teach critical thinking. Essentially, Martin praises science faculty for teaching “western critical thinking” via the scientific method while criticizing Humanities faculty for teaching “social criticism.” Martin sums up the central differences like this: Western critical thinking emphasizes reasoned analysis, objectivity, and the prudent use of data or information in the pursuit of universal truths. Social criticism asserts that objectivity is impossible, reason is a trap, and all data are socially constructed; therefore, there are no universal truths, everyone is entitled to his or her own truth, and the dominance of any group or culture must be due to oppression. (p. 262)

Moreover, Pariser and Martin believe that scholars such as Tavin who subscribe less to the scientific method than, say, postmodernism or transcendental empiricism, are in fact teaching social criticism, and in doing so diminishing students’ true “Western critical thinking” skills, or at least that is what he implies. Martin (and Pariser?) goes so far as to discourage undergraduates from finding a home within the Humanities:

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If students major in the STEM disciplines or economics, they are introduced to the Western critical thinking model. If they major in the humanities and some social sciences, they may complete college believing Western culture and capitalism are evil. (p. 262)

Pariser (2019) echoes Martin when he implies that “reason and empirical examination” (p. 72) should resolve the Pariser-Tavin debate because, he thinks, they will prove that Tavin’s ineffable writings have no tangible use in classroom settings, which, in Pariser’s opinion, is the sole reason for the existence of arts education scholarship. If an idea cannot be dragged into the lab, be stuffed into a curiously classroom-shaped manila envelope, then how in the hell are we supposed to teach it? But what if the grappling—the inability to subdue and drag and package a piece of writing or philosophical investigation—is in fact education? What if this is thinking? By focusing on postmodern ways of thinking, Martin and Pariser have forgotten to consider that Tavin and friends may subscribe to definitions of thinking that eschew both postmodern and scientific methods, or that include both, or that include both and more, and that these other ways of thinking about thinking may provide insight into education (or learning) in general, which is to say beyond the classroom, without a classroom, etc., getting us closer to what Deleuze and Guattari meant by thinking.

Unintentional Teaching The Pariser-Tavin debate represents the larger divide in the field. Critical thinking is not a stranger to art education literature (Eisner, 2002; jagodzinski, 2012; Lampert, 2006; Lazo & Smith, 2014; Stout, 1995; etc.). Some researchers have concerned themselves with questions of critical thinking in terms of aesthetic development and critique (e.g., Barrett, 2008; Bresler, 2006; Greene, 2001), believing that thinking about art is a natural extension of making art, and vice versa. The logic goes that an artist cannot make work until she understands what work is, what the different kinds of work are, and what exactly it is about those works that she wishes to make. But that logic is extra-art. The outlook from the inside is different. David Mollin and John Reardon (2009) interviewed teaching artists throughout Europe, asking among other questions: “Can you teach art?” Many interviewees tried to dodge the

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question, or asserted the impossibility of defining art, let alone teaching it. John Armleder’s response was “I don’t know if it’s teaching… my experience with the students is more experimental, much more like a laboratory” (p. 28). Phyllis Barlow says, “No,” you can’t teach art, “but you can provide an endless process of enquiry and debate and discussion and conversation around it” (p. 45). Michael Corris says that at best teachers “can provide the means for that to happen, for learning to happen” (p. 95). Vanalyne Green says “sure you can… You’re teaching people how to think” (p. 198). Green begins every semester by telling students that their desire to “create a sublime moment for other people” is “a construction” (p. 198). Klaus Jung says, “art and pedagogy are very closely related because making art is a great way to learn,” adding “I can help people learn, which is very close to teaching, but it’s not teaching in a traditional sense” (p. 238). This represents only a small percentage of teaching artists, but still the responses, being overwhelmingly one-sided, point beyond intention. Art education’s resident philosopher, jan jagodzinski (2008), is not much more optimistic. “While I recognize that very little of what I advocate will find its way in schools, universities, galleries, museums, art departments, design schools and so on,” he says, “in the machinery that produces contemporary art and its education, there is a multiplicity of such artistic becomings, that push this avant-garde ‘edge’” (p. 159), suggesting that we shouldn’t shy away from trying just because it may not penetrate the system. Barbara Bolt (2007), who is well-represented in the arts education theory-based literature, looked not at teaching and learning but intellectual insights, which she calls “theorizing out of practice” in order to begin a “dialogue with existing practical and theoretical paradigms” (qtd. in Smith & Dean, 2009, p. 7). James Elkins, too, who was schooled in art and art history, eventually turned his attention toward these questions with such books as Why Art Cannot Be Taught (2001) and What Do Artists Know? (2012), both of which probe the history of art education and attempt to find footing and direction for both theory and practice of the current studio art undergraduate and graduate programs. Elkins (2001) says that we do not know how to

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teach art2 (p. 91), a claim he says comes from Plato and the Romantics (wherein the artist was an individual, so group instruction could not succeed [p. 96]) and the Bauhaus (“craft is fundamental,” not art, which is impossible to teach [p. 96]). More specifically, when we look at what art schools—undergraduate art schools and art departments around 2 Dean Young: “Purposeless is not meaninglessness. I wasn’t put on this planet to explain myself”a. (2010, p. 30). a. Darcie Dennigan operationalized this in her “review” of Dean Young’s The Art

of Recklessness. Instead of explaining, Dennigan does the concepts done in Young’s book. She meets him in the blizzard because a review of a storm from the calm of one’s fireplaced office captures none of the storminess of the storm. It is like telling me what is in the refrigerator without opening the refrigerator, or worse, teaching me how to drive from the comforts of a classroom. Sounds easy. Also sounds far away. Dennigan digs a hole in the earth the size and shape of Dean Young’s literary organ and then shouts at it for 2,000 words. It’s a damn-near perfect review because it is not a review and I wish others would take notice. But there I am again using the word review again and again. It is not a review. It is a doing. After some opening remarks, most of which proclaims into the sunset a litany of listeners, Dennigan (2010) says, “I will try to give you a review of The Art of Recklessness, a book of prose about poetry.” Then, she tells us why she is not qualified: Once, I was teaching a poetry class. I began the semester by declaring that no one could teach poetry. I mumbled mysterious and recipeless and sweated a lot. That instilled just about zero confidence in the students. Then, she tells us more about why she is a bad teacher, which is why she is a good teacher, or why I would like to take her class: I had an attendance policy. But then I felt compelled to tell them a story about Gertrude Stein. About how she was taking a philosophy class at Harvard from William James. William James! And she was excelling, of course. And then it was time for the final exam, and it was a beautiful spring day, and she’d just been to the opera or something the night before—and it was spring! Which in Boston is really something. So she sat down and looked at the exam and wrote, “I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today” and left. And William James later sent her a postcard saying I completely understand and here’s your A. Take notice, young writers! This is a review that DOES the art of recklessness, which tells us more about the book than any other approach could. Here are some gems:

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the country—teach, we see that teachers “continue to behave as if they were doing something more than providing ‘atmosphere,’ ‘dialogue,’ or ‘passion’” (p. 92). According to Elkins, teaching is intentional—in other words, what happens in the classroom is not teaching until the teacher directs a lesson to a student (p. 92) and much of the class is not teaching. A teacher might, for example, tell a student to study the work of Francis Bacon. That is an intentional move. If the same recommendation came up “in the course of a long conversation about other subjects,” says Elkins, it would not amount to teaching (p. 92). Clearly we are a misguided bunch.

References Archibald, S. (2013, June 18). I await the devil’s coming by Mary MacLane [book review]. The Rumpus. Retrieved at http://therumpus.net/2013/06/ i-await-the-devils-coming-by-mary-maclane/ Barrett, T. (2008). Why is that art? Aesthetics and criticism of contemporary art. Oxford University Press. Bresler, L. (2006). Toward connectedness: Aesthetically based research studies in art education. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 52–69. Brown, V. (2019, November 3). The story of Black Mountain College—And a look at its continuing legacy. Charlotte Magazine. https://www.charlottemag azine.com/the-story-of-black-mountain-college-and-a-look-at-its-continuinglegacy/ CalArts. (n.d.). Programs of study. California Institute of the Arts. https://cal arts.edu/academics/all-programs

Rather than studying it, you’d do better to tear out its pages, eat them, and let Dean Young’s excited ink stimulate your spleen into writing poems… AND: Donald Barthelme once wrote, “I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that fails.” The oceans are rising! The streets will soon become canals. And before us we see a nice cruise ship, and the first raft a human ever built, and a dinghy, and my daughter’s imaginary red boat, and a banana peel, Who’s to say which is the best craft?

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Carpenter, S. (2019). Editorial: What is (the matter) with art education? Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 3–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018. 1564601 Columbus College of Art and Design. (n.d.). Core studies. Retrieved at https:// www.ccad.edu/academics/core-studies Dennigan, D. (2010). Dean Young’s The art of recklessness: A review? https:// therumpus.net/2011/03/dean-young’s-the-art-of-recklessness-a-review/ Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of the mind. Yale University Press. Elkins, J. (2001). Why art cannot be taught: A handbook for art students. University of Illinois Press. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. Teachers College Press. jagodzinski, j. (2008). Postmetaphysical vision: Art education’s challenge in an age of globalized aesthetics. Studies in Art Education, 49(2), 147–160. jagodzinski, j. (2012). Commentary: Materialist nonrepresentational thought. Studies in Art Education, 54(1), 84–87. Katz, V. (2003). Black Mountain College: Experiment in art. MIT Press. Lampert, N. (2006). Critical thinking dispositions as an outcome of art education. Studies in Art Education, 47 (3), 215–228. Lawson, T. (2016). Introduction. Untitled [admissions brochure]. California Institute of Art. Lazo, V. G., & Smith, J. (2014). Developing thinking skills through the visual: An a/r/tographical journey. International Journal of Education through Art, 10(1), 99–116. Martin, R. (2015). Academic piracy: Rebranding social criticism as critical thinking. The Independent Review, 20(2), 249–264. Mollin, D., & Reardon, J. (2009). Ch-ch-ch-changes: Artists talk about teaching. Ridinghouse. Moonan, W. (2015, May 8). Why Elaine de Kooning sacrificed her own amazing career for her more-famous husband’s. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www. smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-elaine-de-kooning-sacrif iced-her-own-amazing-career-her-more-famous-husbands-180955182/ Nietzsche, F. (2003). Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Penguin. Pariser, D. (2019). Commentary: Dead cat, living horse: Losing our heads over theory. Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00393541.2018.1557439 Preliminary Announcement of Black Mountain College, 1933–1934. (1933). Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Collection, D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville. Retrieved at http://toto.lib. unca.edu/findingaids/mss/bmcmac/03_bmcmac_documents/bmcmac_ann_ prelim.html

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Princeton University. (2016). Freshman seminars. Retrieved at https://admiss ion.princeton.edu/academics/freshman-seminars Rhode Island School of Design. (2016). Open RISD [admissions booklet]. Rhode Island School of Design. Richardson, J. (2017). What art thinks. In What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari (j. jagodzinski, Ed.) (pp. 93–110). Smith, H., & Dean, R. T. (2009). Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh University Press. Stout, C. J. (1995). Critical thinking and writing in art. West Publishing. Tavin, K. (2019). David and (his own) Goliath: A response to Pariser’s critique of “the cat, cradle, and silver spoon: Violence in contemporary art and the question of ethics for art education. Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1557440 Templeton, D. (1969). Critical thinking & teaching art. Art Education, 22(1), 5–9. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (2016). Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.saic.edu/ academics/degrees/bachelor-fine-arts-studio Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

CHAPTER 3

No-Ology & Recklessness

The Unknown Known The poet John Keats is known for “Negative Capability,”1 which he coined to describe what he loved about Shakespeare: the skill “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (qtd., The Poetry Foundation). The celebrated poets, thought Keats, especially Shakespeare, possess “the power to bury selfconsciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated” (“Negative Capability”). A poet, in other words, embraces curiosity and questions, not the narrow funnel of certainty. Contemporary poet Dean Young has recently given Negative Capability a new life with the concept “Recklessness,” a word he borrows from poet and critic John Ashbery, who once wrote that “most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and Recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the

1 The term “Negative Capability” may itself be a misnomer. The original letter in which the concept is named and defined is lost. It was transcribed by a man who married the widow of Keats’s brother, George, to whom the letter had been written. The transcriber made other mistakes, such as writing “insolated versimilatures” when, says Young, “Keats probably meant ‘isolated versimilutudes’” (Young, 2010, p. 84).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_3

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strong possibility that they are founded on nothing”2 (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 42) (Fig. 3.1). Recklessness, per Young, is a way of working that “requires to some extent various polarizations,” such as “intensity and contradiction”3 because “at the center of any artistic practice is a resistance as well as a contrary impulse to identify, to stand off from the 2 Churches may be founded on architecture, not religion. Notre Dame de Paris is case

in point. On April 15, 2019, the church roof caught fire. The spire collapsed. Journalists, Catholics, and others didn’t lament the loss of Saturday service; instead, they lamented the loss, or at least the partial loss, of historic architecture and relics within the building. It was this kind of thinking, and his reaction against it, that led Eero Saarinen to design North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. He thought that churches had begun to prioritize meeting rooms, offices, etc., all the accessories of religion, and sought to put worship at the center of the church. Saarinen wanted to “solve” the church problem once and for all: I want to solve it so that as an architect when I face St. Peter I am able to say that out of the buildings I did during my lifetime, one of the best was this little church, because it has in it a real spirit that speaks forth to all Christians as a witness to their faith. (qtd. in Columbus Area Visitors Center, n.d.) From the parking lot, which was itself thoughtfully designed, the church looks like a roof and spire and not much else. This was entirely intentional. What is seen from the parking lot is the sanctuary, a hexagonal building; and inside, at the center of the sanctuary, is an altar. The seating faces the altar from all sides. Natural light pours in from an oculus in the spire. Beneath the sanctuary, and beneath the earth, hidden in a basement, are offices and rooms, the likes of which could not be seen or even intimated from the outside, given that the structure looks to the observer like a one-room church and nothing more. So successful was Saarinen’s design, though, that it has become a modernist gem, if not a whole-hearted masterpiece, and one of the seven (three were designed by him!) National Historic Landmarks in the small town (roughly 50,000 citizens) of Columbus, Indiana, perhaps eclipsing the religiosity. Even Baptist churches, the ones in the Midwest where I spent much of my youth, possess a unique architecture. They look like small white houses, sometimes ranches, with spires in place of chimneys. 3 Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy (1956), claims that art is the utmost metaphysical concern of man, “a kind of divinity if you like, God as the supreme artist, amoral, recklessly creating and destroying, realizing himself indifferently in whatever he does or undoes, ridding himself by his acts of the embarrassment of his riches and the strain of his internal contradictions” (p. 9). Around the same time, Whitman (2004) wrote these famous lines:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (p. 66)

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Fig. 3.1 The building that once housed Alton Road Baptist Church. Now named Hope Baptist Church (Courtesy of the author)

tribe and to be part of it” (p. 37). As an assertive force, Recklessness is “unhindered by doubt (while acknowledging that doubt can begin the inspiration toward liberation)” and “is composed of convictions of first needs, first minds, of truth in language arising from the active impulse of emotion, moving through the calculations of the rational toward irrational detonation” (p. 12). Essentially, Recklessness is getting better at not knowing.4 4 Robert Persons, about his process of making his award-winning experimental documentary General Orders no. 9,a. writes:

I was messing around with it a good bit before I got married, but it was a long period of collecting material and trying to figure out how to put it together, and not really knowing what I was doing, and not knowing what the next steps were. (qtd. in Scott, 2011). a. Oddly for a movie about the Deleuze|Guattari concept of the smooth and

the striated, the title is a reference to orders written by General Robert E. Lee after the confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. “After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude,” he

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Young is especially interested in the push and pull of the tribe—why, for instance, we come into this world running full go with our creative impulses only to slack and give way to the pressures of conformity. As a poet in the schools, Young saw this firsthand: “Kids begin feeling immense pressure to conform and conceal, accept responsibility and obligation, expect punishment, fear being ostracized, shunned from the herd” (p. 14). Young saw this specifically in their writing: “Unicorns everywhere,” he notes, “the same unicorn, commodification” (p. 14). I saw this, too, when I helped facilitate a poetry in the schools program. In a subsequent article—“Aces in the Deck: Four Principles for Assessing and Strengthening Student Poems” (2008)—professor and poet Terry Hermsen and I wrote about the experience, concluding that overall students hadn’t improved on the measured skills of metaphor, surprise, detail, and point of view. Only those students who started out strong yielded measurable improvement, which, of course, means there was likely zero improvement. The cliché is robust. Repetition as a return of the same stands in the way. Sameness, a comfort in seeing what we expect, stands in the way. “Civilization,” says Young, “makes us ill” (p. 15).

The Real McApple Gilles Deleuze (1998) says that the term “auteur” is misused because “People who say ‘there are no more auteurs today’ assume that they would have been capable of recognizing yesterday’s, at the time when they weren’t yet known” (p. 52). The obsession with originality continues, possibly because the artwork, unlike the commercial enterprise, “is supposed to make gush forth the problems and questions which grip us rather than give us answers” because “in creative works there is a multiplication of emotion, a liberation of emotion, the invention of new emotions, which distinguish themselves from the prefabricated emotive models of commerce” (p. 52). We feel alive. Unfortunately, the cliché wrote to his soldiers, “the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” He told them that the war was not a “useless sacrifice,” which by all accounts it was for them, and bid them “an affectionate farewell.” My best guess is that the film, which takes place in the south and was written and directed by a southerner, is haunted by a Faulknerian point of view: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner, 1994, p. 73).

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stands in the way. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze (1986) calls our attention to the anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the others in the world which surrounds him. (pp. 208–209)

Writing about Francis Bacon, Deleuze (2003) says that “It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface”5 because “Clichés are already on the canvas” (pp. 71–72). The canvas is covered with everything that has come before the painter, both seen and heard, and everything that has been accepted as good, ready to manipulate the painter. The central problem of painting, for Deleuze, was this: the painter cannot simply act “to transform the cliché, to deform or mutilate it, to manipulate it in every possible way” because “this reaction is still too intellectual” (p. 72). Such a childish acting out “allows the cliché to rise again from the ashes; it leaves the painter within the milieu of the cliché, or else gives him or her no other consolation than parody” (p. 27). Deleuze’s study of Bacon shows us one way an artist can overcome the cliché. Before the first brushstroke of any new painting, Deleuze says, Bacon did not “have to cover a blank surface” (the surface being un-blank-able) “but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it” in order to remove the “figurative givens” (p. 71). Among other examples, Deleuze refers to Cezanne, who, according to D.H. Lawrence, “had to fight the hydraheaded cliché” before finally “knowing an apple” (qtd., p. 72). It took him years, and Lawrence says it was the only thing Cezanne ever accomplished, but it was “real appleyness… and you can’t imitate it” (qtd., p. 73) (Fig. 3.2). This struggle against the hydra-headed cliché caused Bacon (and Cezanne before him) to destroy many of his paintings, calling some of his most popular—the popes, the bullfights, etc.—“very silly” (qtd., p. 73). For Deleuze, “the painter must enter into the canvas before beginning” because “he knows what he wants to do, but what saves him is the fact that he does not know how to get there” (p. 78). “He will get

5 The French “carte blanche” literally means “blank paper” but figuratively means either “Full discretionary power granted” or a substandard hand in cards (“Carte Blanche”). The artist is both winning and losing before she begins. This is why we can say a writer suffers from writer’s block, but we cannot say a plumber suffers from plumber’s block.

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Fig. 3.2 Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Apples and Pears. 1891–1892. Oil on canvas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960)

there,” however, Deleuze said of Bacon, but “only by getting out of the canvas” (p. 78). That process of getting out, of overcoming the cliché, is one of charging in and clawing out, the latter act of which Deleuze calls “the diagram” (p. 81). Every artist has his or her own brand of diagram. One look at the history of the avant-garde, from Cezanne to Ann Hamilton say, reveals a history of diagrams, of one supplanting another. “Cezanne takes you backstage,” writes critic Robert Hughes (1991), whereas before him there was only the finalized physical artwork (p. 18); and Picasso and Braque who, although they admired Cezanne for “sweeping painting clear of the idea of mastery” (qtd., p. 27), took painting one step further. “I paint forms as I think them,” said Picasso, “not as I see them” (qtd., p. 32). Cezanne tried to paint them as he saw them, but he, according to his account, he failed: “I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses…I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring

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that animates” (qtd., p. 18). For Bacon the diagram necessitates zones of clarity—“to scrub, sweep, wipe the canvas in order to clear out locales” he says, adding “it is as if the Sahara, a zone of the Sahara, were suddenly inserted into the head… a piece of rhinoceros skin… stretched over it… two halves of the head were split open by an ocean” (qtd., pp. 81–82). The result is “the emergence of another world” (p. 82), but, it must be emphasized, not just any world—this is Bacon’s inimitable world. Deleuze says the way out of “the optical organization of representation” of the “blank” canvas is with “a catastrophe, a chaos” brought on by “irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random, a- signifying marks” that are at once manual—my hand moving—and disembodied (p. 81). Any overdetermination, says Deleuze, “can spoil the diagram, botch it” (p. 82). Any overdetermination means the work is no longer this artist’s but any artist’s. The diagram is “suggestive,” not dogmatic, “to introduce to possibilities of fact” but not fact itself in all its baggage (p. 83). This is what allowed Van Gogh to create a diagram from “straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist the trees, make the sky palpitate” (p. 83). The diagram is thus indistinguishable from the moves that distinguish a Van Gogh as a Van Gogh or a Bacon as a Bacon. Such is why, says Deleuze, we can identify the exact date, the exact artwork, in which the artist found her diagram—“a moment when the painter confronts it most directly” (p. 83). Van Gogh found his diagram, says Deleuze, in 1888 (Fig. 3.3), a fact critic Robert Hughes (1991) agrees with, saying that’s when Van Gogh found his “terrible lucidity” (p. 269). In 1888, Van Gogh went to Arles, where he would paint some of his most enduring paintings, live with Gauguin, who likely was impossible to live with, as was Vincent, and cut off his own ear.

The Purpose of Philosophy Is to Sadden Paul Klee famously said “Genius is an error in the system” because, well, perhaps obviously, there exists a system—its form is the cliché; its image is the tree whose only underground activity is the finite root— in which we exist like squirrels hiding our little ubiquitous treasures. “Not only has there been a multiplication of images of every kind,” writes Deleuze (1986), “around us and in our heads, but even the reactions against clichés are creating clichés” (p. 27). In the introduction to Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Smith (2003) writes that for Deleuze “the cliché is precisely what prevents the genesis of thought,”

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Fig. 3.3 Vincent van Gogh’s Madame Roulin and Her Baby. 1888. Oil on canvas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Robert Lehman Collection, 1975)

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adding that for Deleuze a fundamental question was “What are the conditions for the production of the new (an image, a thought)?” (p. xxiii). Thinking requires a momentary lapse in the flow of representational6 thought, which is why Deleuze coined it “thinking within thought.” Deleuze spent his life on this task. In fact, he invented “no-ology,” the study of the image of thought, which, according to him, runs through his oeuvre: It’s what Difference and Repetition is really about… the image of thought. And the questions runs right through The Logic of Sense… I come back to it in Proust and Signs … then I come to it again, with Felix, in A Thousand Plateaus, because the rhizome’s the image of thought. (1990, p. 149)

Deleuze wanted to find the “new ‘undogmatic’ ways of doing philosophy”7 so that he could practice, as a career, “‘thinking in his own right,’ which he says above all reading Nietzsche inspired in him” (Rajchman, 2000, pp. 34–47). According to Smith (2003), this “thinking in his own right” was the basis of all Deleuze’s undertakings, and which “is at one and the same time the condition for the destruction of the cliché” (p. xxiii). In doing so, Deleuze did not “claim to be comprehensive,” but rather focused “on what interests him most, what is active and living in each philosopher…taking what he wants and ignoring the rest” (Hardt, 2006, p. xxi). In the foreword to Nietzsche and Philosophy, Michael Hardt (2006) writes that herein “readers can discover together with Deleuze many of the concepts” that would find their way into his oeuvre (p. ix), including the attack on stupidity, a stupidity that persists uninterrogated as “true” and “right,” and an argument for the important role philosophy plays in overturning that stupidity. Essentially, the dogmatic image of thought, says Deleuze, possesses three tenets: that “the thinker wants and loves truth” and “that thought possesses or formally contains truth”; that “we are ‘diverted’ from the truth” by error and “take falsehood to be truth”; and that we need a “method” to think, a method that would apply “for all times and places” (2006, p. 103). The history of

6 Scholar jan jagodzinski (2012) writes about the “avant-garde without authority” (p. 85), in which the prioritized “creative event” creates the fertile ground that finally “ruins representation” (p. 85). The “avant-garde without authority” is not limited to artists. 7 Dean Young (2010): “Just because a thing can’t be done doesn’t mean it can’t be did” (p. 148).

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Fig. 3.4 Orson Welles on air at CBS, where he performed War of the Worlds. 1938 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Elsie M. Warnecke)

writing on thinking has been obsessed with truth, much like the current temper, which ousts an author’s reputation based on presumed falsifications (Fig. 3.4).8 On the contrary, says Deleuze, truth is not “an abstract 8 After discovering that his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained errors and exaggerations, most of which he wittingly included, Oprah shamed writer James Frey in front

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universal” but entirely concrete, determined by “the established order and current values” (p. 104), and error has been entirely mishandled by philosophers, treated as if it meant “the state of thought separated from truth” and as if truth meant right and a diversion therefrom meant wrong (p. 105). There is no truth except for the one you will. “Stupidity is not error,” he writes, because “There are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses, that are made up entirely of truths; but these truths are base, they are those of a base, heavy and leaden soul” (p. 105). Philosophy is what saves us from the imbeciles, what saves us from the will to truth, the fear of error. “When someone asks ‘what is the use of philosophy?’,” writes Deleuze, “the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic… The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not philosophy” (p. 106). Philosophy exists to overturn “all forms of baseness of thought” and “for turning stupidity into something shameful” (p. 106). These ideas came to Deleuze as a direct result of his close study of Nietzsche, who wrote that the philosopher’s task is “an active critique of stupidity and baseness” (qtd., p. 107). In response to the three tenets of thinking that had been laid down by philosophers before Nietzsche, and with which he took great issue, Deleuze says: Thinking is never the natural exercise of a faculty. Thought never thinks alone and by itself; moreover it is never simply disturbed by forces which remain external to it. Thinking depends on forces which take hold of thought. Insofar as our thinking is controlled by reactive forces, insofar as it finds its sense in the reactive forces, we must admit that we are not yet thinking. Thinking means the activity of thought. We are awaiting the forces capable of making thought something active, absolutely active, the power capable of making it an affirmation. (p. 108)

of millions of viewers and a television audience. Oprah had chosen the book for her book club and sales had exceeded two million copies in three months (Wyatt, 2006). Embarrassment, though, led Oprah to change her mind about the book. The discrepancies that she had before defended became too public. Oprah later apologized for the shame spectacle, but her initial reaction and its ensuing public support is telling and temporarily damaged Frey’s reputation. Frey is joined by dozens of tinkerers, such as Laura Albert (J. T. Leroy), Annie Dillard, Clifford Irving, and Frank McCourt, among others. Breton: “Our brains are dulled by the uncurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known” (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 114).

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Thinking for both Deleuze and Nietzsche before him meant being thrown into a “becoming-active,” which, according to Hardt, is the key that Deleuze took from Nietzsche: “multiplicity and becoming” (p. ix). Both Deleuze and Nietzsche embrace affirmation, joy, becoming, difference. Over a century ago, Nietzsche (2003) said “Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means. Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves” (p. 76). The dogmatic image has kept its hold on us. In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze says “men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking” (p. 132). On the other hand, men excel in recognitions (p. 133). Difference and Repetition, more than any other of his books, betrays his belief that the history of philosophy is repressive,9 which he mocked by saying “you can’t seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you’ve read this and that, and that on this, and this on that” (p. 5). Difference and Repetition characterizes the dogmatic image of thought as that which “crushed thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar” (p. 167). The history of philosophy is obsessed with recognition couched inside “the two halves of the doxa”: common sense and good sense (p. 134), wherein “good sense” refers to the ability of the faculties to collaborate and “common sense” refers to every person’s ability to apply the faculties and see “the Same” (p. 134). This model of thinking, says Deleuze, based entirely upon recognition “elevated to the rational level… will never inspire anything but conformities” (p. 134). The cliché has been institutionalized. On the other hand, says Deleuze, the new “calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition” (p. 136). The new image of thought is thus characterized by “trespass and violence” and “contingency” and is “the enemy” to representation and recognition (p. 139). For Deleuze, creation and critique are one: they raze the dogmatic

9 Late in life, Deleuze criticized Difference and Repetition for being too academic, saying “I like some passages… That’s as far as it went, but it was a beginning” (1990, p. 7). Part of the reason for his stance on Difference and Repetition possibly comes from its subject—one of criticism, not affirmation. He later said that if he ever “stopped liking and admiring people and (some) things,” he would “feel dead, deadened” (p. 4). Regardless, it was a beginning, as he says, in no small part because it defined, quite verbosely, the dogmatic image that the rest of his liking and admiring worked to outrun. Taken with his later thoughts, it also defines the central struggle of a scholar and this book—to marry affirmation and criticism.

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image of thought and raise “the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself” (p. 139).

Leap Before You Look10 Deleuze believed that Proust the poet, outsider to philosophy, was perfectly situated to criticize “what is most essential in a classical philosophy of the rationalist type: the presuppositions” of philosophy (2003, p. 159). Proust brought Deleuze one step further, allowing him to “set up an image of thought in opposition to philosophy” (p. 159). Deleuze saw Proust’s work as a critique of communication. Friends “communicate to each other only the conventional,” which means that they conceive “only the possible” (p. 160). Proust was more interested in the violence that leads to thinking, i.e., getting at the unthought, the heretofore impossible. “More important than thought,” writes Deleuze, “is ‘what leads to thought’,” which are “impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think” (p. 161). For Proust, this meant what “life has communicated to us in spite of ourselves ” (qtd., p. 161), and he animated the concept in the scenario of the trip: I had not gone looking for the two cobblestones of the courtyard where I had stumbled. But precisely the fortuitous, inevitable way in which the sensation had been encountered governed the truth of the past which it resuscitated, of the images which it released, since we feel its effort to rise toward the light, since we feel the joy of reality regained. (qtd. in Deleuze, p. 161)

The cobblestones represent, for Proust, the power of signs to deliver violences. The sign, says Deleuze, is what forces us to think, is “the object of an encounter; but it is precisely the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of what leads it to think” (p. 162). The work of art, being a sign, and object, says Deleuze, is perfectly situated to both deliver encounters (in a viewer) and generate them (in the artist) (p. 163), which led him to say that creation “is the act of thinking within 10 The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap. (Auden, 1940)

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thought itself,” helping us see how thinking (active) differs from thought (passive) (p. 162). In great literature, says Proust, “all our mistranslations result in Beauty” (qtd. in Deleuze & Parnett, p. 5). Deleuze adds this caveat: “always provided that they do not consist in interpretations, but relate to the use of the book” (p. 5). “Philosophy,” says Deleuze, “is nothing compared with the secret pressures of the work of art” (p. 163). The secret pressures are essences that “dwell in dark regions,” far from the “temperate zones of the clear and distinct” (where we can imagine the friends gathering to communicate representations) (p. 165). This goes back to Plato who conceived two kinds of thought: the active and the inactive, objects of force and objects of recognition (p. 166). Thinking within thought thus requires vigilance. We must be ready to encounter the sign. We must train ourselves toward the involuntary, toward what Dean Young called “getting better at not knowing what we are doing.” The fundamental encounter11 is precisely that which unhinges common sense and good sense, displaces the model of recognition to make way for the heretofore unthought, which is what jagodzinski and Wallin call for this in their critique arts-based research. The encounter forces creation. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze calls this intensity. What we encounter, he says, is not the gods but “the demons… powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant” and the contingency that forces the faculties to miscommunicate, to realize their own difference (pp. 143–146). The new image of thought “requires the explosion of the clear and distinct” (p. 146). For Deleuze, this kind of thinking within thought, this new image of thought, was epitomized by Artaud, who said that the problem (for him) was not to orientate his thought, or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or to acquire application and

11 In a 2008 interview with American Art, Ann Hamilton describes her process like

this: What you’re doing all the time [is] trying to cultivate a space for yourself where not knowing is a really active, productive, intelligent space to work from. And that’s why it’s an act of attention. What you [the artist] hope is that you’re making a similar situation for someone else, so that instead of trying to tie it up and say what does all this mean and making a story out of your experience, you’re actually having an experience. (qtd. in Wallach, 2008, p. 57)

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method for his poems, but simply to manage to think something… to bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other word, all the rest is arbitrary mere decoration). To think is to create—there is no other creation—but to create is first of all to engender “thinking” in thought. (qtd. in Deleuze, p. 147)

Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” owes much to Artaud, who replaced the concept of innateness with the concept of creation (p. 148). Thus would Deleuze’s concept of thinking become “thinking within thought.” For jagodzinski (2008), “art becomes a way to explore what is unsayable, unthinkable, and invisible” and “artistic becoming demands an encounter of the art process as an event ” (p. 154). Art education can then help by becoming one site for the “ruin of representation” (p. 154) that moves us, or at least some of us, toward originality as long as we overcome the “dominant forms of screen representations that have shackled the organ of the eye” (p. 154).

Swarms of Difference In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes to great lengths to overturn identity in favor of difference in itself. He was writing a metaphysics of the multiple and identity simply doesn’t fit. Deleuze says “the difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical,” and then turns to imagine a world in which things aren’t distinguished from other things (empirical) but one in which things distinguish themselves (p. 28) during the central breakdown. Deleuze thinks the most monstrous move is to raise the ground and dissolve the non-ground, the form, the face (p. 29), the pure-past moonlighting as present, presumably because this is an act of identity violence or violence by identity. Deleuze turns to artists, and the chiaroscuro, to say that difference can be saved from the distinctionobsession it has undergone. He is impressed with Goya’s (Fig. 3.5) and Redon’s (Fig. 3.6) ability to use the abstract line, and for the abstract line’s ability not to distinguish itself from the multiple layers of the work— not the ground, not the form (p. 29). And yet, at the same time, the viewer sees something in the frame that carries the meaning of a line, or of a form. Film noir, perhaps more than any other genre, made its name by chiaroscuro—the figure, being indistinguishable from the ground, or being distributed across the screen as both figure and ground, took on a new monstrosity. The protagonist is defined by his or her inability to be

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Fig. 3.5 Francisco Goya’s A winged figure carrying witches and monsters through the air. 1796/1798 [Etchings. Aquatints]. Retrieved from https://lib rary.artstor.org/asset/24857945

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Fig. 3.6 Odilon Redon’s Christ. 1887 [Print]. Retrieved from https://library. artstor.org/asset/24604185

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distinguished from the ground at every moment, and the ground, being inconsistently illuminated, is unreliable, misanthropic. The protagonist is a machine defined almost entirely by his or her connections to darkness and light, which is why noirs can be watched without sound and lose little meaning.12 In fact, noir must have been heavily influenced by the likes of Goya and Redon in addition to German Expressionism (Fig. 3.7).13 The importance of identity is inflated in everyday conversation. We are machines living to connect. If the things that constitute our identity in the common parlance were removed from our life, for instance, we would not be terribly affected. Todd May (2005) imagines that he decides to pick up the trumpet because a girl at the local record store seems to enjoy songs with trumpets in them, a fact he surmises because she is playing songs with trumpets whenever he visits the store. There was not, as May imagines this man thinking, “a trumpet player in me waiting for release” (p. 166). Rather, the trumpet-playing desire rose up within him in the moment, as a way, presumably, to get closer to the girl, to be the kind of person he thinks the girl wants a man to be (p. 166). The trumpet player-ness of this man is a result of a connection with the girl’s seeming trumpet player-liking-ness, not an inherent desire within him, and likely, too, not a desire within her. It wasn’t there and then it was. Stephen West (2019) takes May’s hypothetical a step further. “If two weeks from now,” says West, “he is walking down the street, both his arms get ripped off by a passing trolley and he quits the trumpet, is there 12 One notable exception is The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which is widely agreed to be confusing in both its novel (by Raymond Chandler) and its subsequent adaptation (directed by Howard Hawks). In fact, it was not much clearer to the actors and director. Bogart in particular was mystified by a particularly confusing scene in which the chauffeur shows up dead without anyone or anything being tied to his death. Hawks asked Chandler if it was murder or suicide. “Dammit,” he said, “I didn’t know either” (qtd. in Ebert, 1997). This scene may be more confusing to the viewer who has the sound turned on than the one who has it turned off, but as Ebert says, the point of the movie is not who was killed but how the investigation proceeds. 13 While not the originator of chiaroscuro, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who came before both Goya and Redon, did much to canonize it. Curiously, his life story, at least the end of it when he committed murder (allegedly) and went on the run, sounds a lot like the plot of a film noir.

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Fig. 3.7 Caravaggio’s The Denial of Saint Peter. 1610. Painting (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Herman and Lila Shickman, and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997)

a trumpet-player identity lying dormant inside of him that can just never be expressed for the rest of his life?” Of course not. “Deleuze would say,” says West, “‘No, this is not how identity works. The fact that man decided to be a trumpet player in a given succession of moments was entirely contingent upon his open-ended identity as a machine seeking connections’.” Beyond identity, we are all amalgams of difference, “swarms of difference that actualize themselves into specific forms of identity” (May, 2005, p. 114), if only temporarily, and buzz inside those identities until they form new connections elsewhere.

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If You Want Middles, Read Novels In A Thousand Plateaus 14 (1987) Deleuze, this time with Guattari, finally gave shape to the new image of thought. They called the new image “the rhizome.” “Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter,” they write by way of introduction (p. 15). The tree can at best produce “a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity” (p. 16). The tree system has taken root within us, within our society, and created totally accepted systems of hierarchy. The rhizome, on the other hand, is an apt visual representation of a non-hierarchical, anti-organizational, multi-directional proliferation, like a pack of rats with no master. This is not an image at all, says Artaud (and seconded by Deleuze and Guattari), but an anti-image, thought’s greatest ability: “it lives solely by its own incapacity to take form” (qtd., p. 378), which is the “central breakdown” (qtd., p. 378). In this breakdown thought takes on not what is inside (the well-organized brain drawn inside textbooks) but what is outside. Not fixed points but lines. The rhizome is best characterized not by a form but by attributes: irreducible “directions in motion”; “a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills”; “made only of lines”; “variation, expansion, conquest, offshoots, all manner of becomings” (p. 21). In this scheme, the middle is not the “average” but intensity—“where things pick up speed” (p. 25). Dean Young once said that poetry is beginnings and ends—“you want middles, read novels” (2010, p. 86). What he means is what Deleuze and Guattari mean—intensity, starts and stops, lines and movement, are in direct conflict with the static, with the mean, 14 Brian Massumi (1987) calls A Thousand Plateaus “a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub sets and noology and political economy,” adding that the book is difficult to understand not the least of which because its authors devote chapters to music and animals while denying that these are chapters at all (p. ix). Their book is something else—“a network of ‘plateaus’” arranged as chapters but that can be read in any order with “a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities” (p. ix). The plateau does not amount to a book. Deleuze and Guattari recommend that we read their plateaus “as you would listen to a record” (p. ix). But recall, too, that Deleuze and Guattari admit to being unable to produce the multiple from the many plateaus (p. 22). But they woke up every day and went at it: “we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants” (p. 22). The book is still circular. This book cannot outrun the book-ness, in part because you have been trained to read it from front to back, but it could prioritize the connected but independent, luminous, multiple, the never one, the AND. So, too, I hope you can read this book in any order and lose nothing of its meaning.

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with standing still. What we mean here are “intensive” (not “extensive”), which “have the potential to disturb sensorimotor habits, thereby forcing thinking to happen” (jagodzinski, 2016, p. 103). Intensive terms harness, Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense, “all the powers of the unconscious, or all the powers of nonsense15 in the unconscious” (qtd. in jagodzinski, 2016, p. 101). With Guattari’s help, Deleuze arrived at the thought without image. The answer is the AND. Recklessness. Force and creation. “The self does not undergo modifications,” writes Deleuze (1994), because “it is itself a modification” (p. 79). Writing about Godard, Deleuze (1990) says “the key thing is Godard’s use of AND” because AND “brings in all relations, there are as many relations as ANDS, AND doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb… and so on, ‘and… and… and…’ is

15 Much of what is called “nonsense” in art is not without sense but rather with different sense, an internal logic, an emerging sense. Take Gertrude Stein, the poet, as an example. Some of her most memorable works—Tender Buttons and “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso”—for instance, have been criticized as modernist nonsense. Stein: “I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible…. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them” (qtd. in Schuster, 2011). In 1905–1906, Picasso painted a portrait of Stein that has now become famous because it foreshadowed Cubism while touching on his then-obsession with sculpture. Stein, as the MET describes her likeness, is a series of dark masses, a tumor with a head, with a mask for a face (“Gertrude Stein”). Picasso was told that Stein would not, could not, like the way she looked. “Everybody says that she does not look like it,” he responded, “but that does not make any difference—she will” (“Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” n.d.). As a reply, Stein wrote a cubist poem that was a portrait of Picasso:

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him. Now. Not now. And now. Now. Exactly as as kings. Exactitude as kings. So to beseech you as full as for it. Exactly or as kings. Shutters shut and open so do queens. (Stein, 1924).

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precisely a creative stammering” (p. 44). As Semetsky and Ramey (2012) write, “learning is, on Deleuze’s account, a matter of indexing all possible conjunctions, i.e. a body in conjunction with a wave: a body and wave”16 (p. 67), referring to what Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition about learning to swim—not by watching someone ape the movements but by being thrown in, by becoming wave. Watching someone paint a portrait does not teach us anything about painting a portrait. Learning to paint, in fact, includes learning to see up close what others can see only from a distance; learning not to paint a face but learning to paint this spot right here; etc. Seeing that perhaps a dot is a face. Recall that Dean Young values intensity but he values contradiction. Recklessness is a way of working that harnesses the rhizome, that maximizes chances for overcoming the cliché, that masters Negative Capability, and that is what Deleuze with Guattari says of thinking: “a perpendicular direction, a transversal moment that sweeps one way and the other” (1987, p. 25). A desire to join and a desire to stand off from the herd. Recklessness is “a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect” (Young, 2010, p. 156). Boxing with baseball gloves. Sneaking hugs within tackles on the football field. D. H. Lawrence: “Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos… Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella, and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision” (1998, p. 234). Recklessness is both the man who erects the shield and the man who tears it open.

Connective Tissue According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the concepts “the smooth” and “the striated” originated in 1400, the year when maritime exploration started in earnest, a period called “The Age of Discovery” (despite the obvious misappropriation) of which Columbus was a part, though not a

16 Stevie Smith (2003):

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought. And not waving but drowning.

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very accomplished one. One might initially assume the two concepts are opposites because Deleuze and Guattari associate the smooth with the nomad and the striated with the sedentary (p. 474)—trail hikers against couch potatoes. But they are quick to point out that the two are not merely opposites. In fact, the concepts do not exist alone; they exist as mixtures, as a solution whose proportions are regularly in flux: “smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (p. 474). Even the desert, they say, is organized until it “gains and grows” with the wind or rain (p. 475), or perhaps until it grains and goes. The defining characteristic of the smooth and the striated is the very unpredictable, or un-definable, aspect of their composition, because they are not mere opposites nor are they a predicable mixture, and one does not flow into the other but one could flow into the other; also the other could flow into the one—they are “not at all symmetrical” (p. 475). The defining principle of the mixture seems to be that it is a mixture. Deleuze and Guattari propose a number of models, or examples, to illustrate the concepts, which is useful because the concepts have no inherent definition (shape!) out of practice. In other words, we cannot know what they are talking about until we see the concepts in action (and even then we may not know what we see) because the plane of immanence is the abstract machine in which the concrete but fluid and fractal concepts live and work (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 36). Of the many models discussed in A Thousand Plateaus, the “Maritime Model” has the most to say about the city versus the country, the polis versus the nomos. “In a striated space,” they write, “lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another,” whereas in a smooth space, “it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory” (p. 478). The sea is an exemplar, “a smooth space par excellence” (p. 479), because the sea was once the ultimate directionality and, for many of us, still is, especially when out on the open waters and we are grasping for home, for calm, between retches. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a smooth space is characterized by “a direction and not a dimension,” which is to say both the schools of fish and the waves act in terms of “local operations involving changes in direction” (p. 478), which is why “smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice” and the striated “is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriving from it” (p. 479). The sea was all wind and noise,

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Fig. 3.8 Seagulls swarming above the ship in Leviathan (Courtesy of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

wet and salt (Fig. 3.8),17 until people came along to measure and categorize and otherwise understand it by its position relative to the stars and sun. Later, or perhaps around the same time, came “the map, which intertwines meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes plotting regions known and unknown onto a grid” (p. 479). Since 1400 or so, then, the sea has been in a constant struggle between the smooth and the striated, at least according to the authors. Google Earth and Google Maps, with their grids and precise measurements and blue dots, or Garmin’s old “Rerouting,” tip every place and space, including the highway and the sea and the desert, toward the striated, and they can do it on a phone, which used to be subordinated to a point on the kitchen wall. The country/city contrast was once directional/dimensional contrast but now moves between the two, with the countryside domesticated, however temporarily, by farms and ever-encroaching suburban satellites replete with cellular towers, Amazon and Facebook data centers, and the city made chaotic by architects designing it into extinction (and away from distinction), tearing down historic structures to make way for new, 17 The sea returns to the wind and rush and salt and fish in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s 2012 Leviathan, but only for 87 min.

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hastily built developments with little of the touches of yesteryear, keeping only a façade or two for the tourists. Deleuze and Guattari look to the ancient Greeks, who opposed the nomos (the open space, and those who traverse it according to season and opportunity, locally most of all) to the polis (the city, the one with architects who design all sorts of mechanisms to turn lines into points) (p. 481). The smooth and the striated can be understood according to three considerations: 1. “by an inverse relationship between the point and the line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the smooth the point is between two lines)”; 2. “by the nature of the line (smooth-directional, open intervals; dimensional-striated, closed intervals)”; and 3. by “the surface or space” itself. “In a striated space,” they say, “one closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in a smooth, one ‘distributes’ oneself in an open space” (pp. 480–81). They compare the striated to the tree (finite, ordered) and the smooth to the rhizome (seemingly infinite, spreading) (p. 482). The city is striated— defined by points (buildings and blocks and building blocks)—until the people appear at rush hour; and the countryside has been closed off according to intervals, to plots farms, assigned territories, yet livestock distribute themselves across the space, and the foliage often does not heed borderlines. One could argue that the city is the striated one while the countryside is smooth. But then again, one can see how the stockbrokers trade with short-term memory, as the authors say, while farmers work with long-term memory. The farmers consult the almanac, but what do the traders consult but their phones, pocketbooks. The more we look at the skyscrapers and the corn and wheat, all rising in the distance, the more each can be folded into the other. Cities, though “designed,” cannot be striated, or rather cannot be definitively striated, and therefore are constantly overtaken by the smoothers, and because in this view of the world, there can be no identity, not of people nor of places. Flux is the word. If we, the nomads, distribute ourselves into open spaces, as Deleuze says, then the open spaces must be subject to our dispersals, having no identity without us and yet not having us long enough to have an identity with us, or defined in part by our being there. Moreover, my dispersal is not your dispersal, and though a street or sidewalk may be fixed in itself, it is never fixed by itself, and thus cannot be separated from its use in any one moment.

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References Columbus Area Visitors Center. (n.d.). Columbus, Indiana Architecture— Churches. https://columbus.in.us/churches/ Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1990). Negotiations: 1972–1990 (M. Jauphin, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia. Deleuze, G. (1998). The brain is the screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on The Time-Image (M. McMuhan, Trans.) Discourse, 20(3), 47–55. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.). Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2006). Nietzsche and philosophy (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Ebert, R. (1997, June 22). The Big Sleep [review]. RobertEbert.com. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-big-sleep-1946 Faulkner, W. (1994). Requiem for a Nun. Vintage. Hardt, M. (2006). Foreword. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Nietzsche and philosophy. University of Minnesota Press. jagodzinski, j. (2008). Postmetaphysical vision: Art education’s challenge in an age of globalized aesthetics. Studies in Art Education, 49(2), 147-160. jagodzinski, j. (2012). Commentary: Materialist nonrepresentational thought. Studies in Art Education, 54(1), 84-87. jagodzinski, j. (2016). A response to: “Deconstructing Deleuze and Guattari’s a thousand plateaus for music education”. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 50(3), 101–121. jagodzinski, j., & Wallin, J. (2013). Arts-based research: A critique and a proposal. Sense Publishers. Lawrence, D. H. (1998). Chaos in poetry. In Selected critical writings (pp. 234– 242).Oxford University Press. Lee, R. E. (1865, April 10). General Orders No. 9, the Confederate surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lilly Library U.S. History Manuscript. http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/history/history3.html Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Negative Capability. (n.d.). The poetry foundation. https://www.poetryfounda tion.org/resources/learning/glossary-terms/detail/negative-capability

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Nietzsche, F. (1956). The birth of tragedy and The genealogy of morals (F. Golffing, Trans.). Anchor Books. Nietzsche, F. (2003). Twilight of the idols and The anti-Christ (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Penguin. Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze connections. MIT Press. Scott, D. J. (2011, June 24). Director Robert Persons on General Orders No. 9. Filmmaker Magazine. http://filmmakermagazine.com/25168-general-ord ers-no-9-director-robert-persons/#.WJScuLGZPeQ Semetsky, I., & Ramey, J. A. (2012). Deleuze’s philosophy and Jung’s psychology: Learning and the unconscious. In I. Semetsky (Ed.), Jung and educational theory. Wiley. Smith, D. W. (2003). Introduction. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. University of Minnesota Press. Stein, G. (1924). If I told him: A completed portrait of Pablo Picasso. http:// www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/ifitoldnew.html Wallach, A. (2008). A conversation with Ann Hamilton in Ohio. American Art, 22(1), 52–77. West, S. (2019). Deleuze pt. 5: Difference. Philosophize this! https://www.philos ophizethis.org/podcast/episode-129-transcript Whitman, W. (2004). Song of myself . Penguin. Wyatt, E. (2006, January 27). Author is kicked out of Oprah Winfrey’s book club. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/books/27o prah.html Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

CHAPTER 4

Key to Terminology

Within this book, I have, in the course of things, defined terms, concepts, and keywords. I go to great lengths, for instance, to define arts-based educational research (ABER) and its relatives; the image of thought (rhizome); the essay and essay film; and so on. On the other hand, out of a self-imposed economy, to which I rarely subscribed, I have mentioned or intuited but not defined (or at least not in a way that does justice to their complexity) many other important terms, concepts, and keywords. I thought it prudent, then, to include an additional chapter with those definitions, descriptions, and examples.1 My thought is that the information below could, if nothing else, contribute to a fuller understanding of this book and my scholarly enterprise, being so beholden as it is to connections, and many of those connections being useful to know. The idea to put the glossary smack-dab (a wonderful hyphenate, don’t you think, one that on the surface says violence and not much) in the middle is to try to give it a core. A book by nature is chronological, front to back, idea to idea, incapable of being a rhizome; and the only way to overcome, if only for a while, the bookness of the book is to put at its very core a web of connections that could, only metaphorically, reach out and connect with chapters before and after it, and that could, if read first even, contribute 1 And, yes, the occasional footnote.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_4

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to the overall argument of this book, or, if read only, say something of its own. ∗ ∗ ∗ I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, pp. 14–15)

Actual/Virtual. It is perhaps this double-sided concept more than any other in this book that best exemplifies my argument about a kind of artsbased educational research (ABER) to come (borrowing from jagodzinski and Wallin, who were borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari,2 who were thinking about how we could live, not how we should live), an arts-based research via a pedagogy of the concept, which is a pedagogy of the permanent circuit, a non-hierarchical, non-coalescence of the yes and the no, art and non-art, science and non-science, etc., the AND ad infinitum, trembling, seizing, and pulsing on the horizon. The clearest explanation of the actual and the virtual, one that is uncustomarily (for Deleuze) clear in fact, is found in Dialogues II, in a chapter (too3 ) directly titled “The Actual and the Virtual.” According to Deleuze (2006), philosophy is “the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements” (p. 148). Deleuze first found this kernel of an idea in Bergson, who eschewed the possible and the real in favor of the virtual and the actual. In the possible and the real, a hierarchy is established, one that relegates the possible to the non-real, the un-truth, etc., instead of being univocal. One of Bergson’s points, according to Deleuze, was that “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual 2 See the entry for Deleuzoguattarian. 3 This point is made by translator Eliot Ross Albert (in 1980) in the end notes of

Dialogues II . Unlike most of Deleuze’s texts, he writes, “in which a thought of soaring complexity is expressed with an elegant, limpid clarity,” the essay titled “The Actual and the Virtual” is filled with simple sentences with “frequently blunt assertions of the form ‘the virtual is x’ rather than Deleuze’s customary rigorous philosophical argumentation” (p. 157). It is this fact that makes Albert hypothesize, though there is no way of knowing, that this essay from Deleuze is a draft, a fact that was seconded by scholar Eric Alliez, who is reported as saying it is “quite obvious” this is a draft. Either way, it is a good start, a simple if rudimentary primer about the concepts, and Deleuze, to his credit, excelled at being plain and clear in conversations, many of which are available on the internet.

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image coexisting with the actual perception of the object. Memory is a virtual image contemporary with the actual object, its double” (p. 150). From this example, we can see why Deleuze could write with confidence “Purely actual objects do not exist. Every object surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images” (p. 148). All of these virtualities exist for the shortest possible duration, those unavailable to consciousness, keeping them tied to “a principle of uncertainty and indetermination” (p. 148). He goes on to say that every virtuality surrounds itself with a chaotic cloud of more virtualities, which in turn do the same, creating endless circuits of virtualities that surround and engulf every actuality, which is why our perceptions amount to pixels and particles (p. 148), seeing them as one and the same. It is as if from a tree of virtualities, says Deleuze, that the fruit of actuality falls,4 pointing back logically to the virtual, being inextricable from the singularity of tree/fruit/seed (p. 150), all of which insist. They point to each other. Going further than singularity, Deleuze calls it a crystallization wherein “the two are indistinguishable” (p. 151). The virtual preserves the past while the actual does the present, and in doing so does the same for truth and fiction.5 The virtual, being a linear and spreading in all directions simultaneously, is not resigned to

4 Cezanne’s attempt to paint the appleyness of an apple, which was discussed at length by Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), to achieve real apple-ness, fails in the Deleuzian sense when looked at from the vantage of the actual and the virtual. To Cezanne, there was a “real” apple, one that truly represented the epitome of apple, and this is not in keeping with Deleuze’s philosophy, although the idea that there are several iterations of Cezanne’s renderings of apples is. A more Deleuzian way to paint an apple would be to render it in all its complexity and connectedness, painting all the virtual particles orbiting the actuality of the apple. A more Deleuzian apple might be Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) painted with an apple instead of a nude. 5 A 2018 article in the Journal of Neuroscience revealed that our brain is capable of thinking into the future, if only by a fraction of a second. Elle van Heusden, Martin Rolfs, Patrick Cavanagh, and Hinze Hogendoorn found that the reason, or at least one of them, we as a species are so remarkably capable of following a fast-moving object through space (think of a tennis player, for instance), is because our brain is one-step ahead of us. Instead of following the object, in fact, the brain calculates where the object is going to be and sends the eyes (and other motor activities, if necessary) there. We get better with practice, and some people are just much better at it than others. Thinking along this line, with time in the usual sense unmoored, it is possible to see that Deleuze and Guattari were well ahead of their time in making inquiries such as Deleuze is doing in his draft on the actual and the virtual, inquiries that result in what may at first seem like metaphors. But Deleuze doesn’t work in metaphors.

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time or orientation in the ordinary sense. Actuality commits to the monolinear, left–right movement of time like a flare from the gaseous sun that quickly re-enters the circuit of actual-virtual. Deleuze uses the example of the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady of Shanghai (1947), wherein the mirrors totally engulf the character, rendering pure virtuality and making him “no more than a virtuality” at the same time as the actual is the virtual momentarily (p. 150): the figure is the ground. In contemporary film, Primer (Carruth, 2004) is an example of “no more than a virtuality” being realized. The film is marked by a proliferation of clones, an accident of time travel, one being impossible to differentiate from any other. Near the end of the film, there exist so many of each of the two protagonists, both of whom kept using the time machine, though it is unclear which version is using the time machine at any one moment, given that they look identical, that they all become the original. Artists are able to create such crystallizations through Negative Capability, a concept first introduced by poet John Keats, of keeping two competing, non-hierarchical ideas in one’s head simultaneously without favoring one or the other during which a circuit of one-all is birthed; when such a force is rendered in an artwork, as is done by filmmaker Guy Maddin in My Winnipeg (2007), the result is a permanent circuit between the actual and the virtual that reveals, finally, a point of indiscernibility,6 as Deleuze would say in Cinema 2: Time-Image (1989) of Joseph Mankiewicz’s work. ∗ ∗ ∗ Becomings—they are the thing which is the most imperceptible, they are acts which can only be contained in a life and expressed in a style. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 3)

Becoming. Gilles Deleuze thought of himself as a Marxist,7 a fact that is realized in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia books he wrote with Felix Guattari,8 even though they both leveled serious criticism of Marxism over 6 See the entry for Time. 7 Deleuze did not agree with Marxism’s “judgment of history,” which he saw as no

better than “a people’s tribunal — which are even more disturbing than the others” (1989, p. 14). See the entry for Machine. 8 See the entry for Deleuzoguattarian.

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the years. He also characterized himself as a transcendental empiricist and “pure metaphysician” (Gilles Deleuze, 2018) and probably a number of other things. Looking at his entire oeuvre, including his collaborations, it would be difficult to argue that he was wrong about any of those tags. But it would also be difficult to argue that Deleuze, being a Marxist, pure metaphysician, and transcendental empiricist, meant that he was their opposites or rather that he was opposed to everything that those represented. Being in contact with Marxism, for example, meant that Deleuze, as one particle in its orbit, was also in contact with antiMarxism, Capitalism, Libertarianism, and any number of other discussions about fungibles,9 constantly dissolving into and territorializing them and being territorialized by them, which is to say at any moment it would not be impossible to see a Deleuze dressed as Uncle Sam: Deleuze as Becoming-Capitalist and Capitalism as Becoming-Deleuze. But this is too simple. It must be said that Deleuze does not actually become Capitalism nor does Capitalism become Deleuze; it is the becoming that is important, becoming as its own subject, needing not anyone nor anything to do its bidding; it is not the marriage of hydrogen and oxygen, for example, to take this further, but it is water, having bits of this and that but expressing itself as itself. Such is the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence.10 In the process of trying to define any one of the concepts11 now 9 In fact, perhaps for the first time in the history of the world, the word fungible is being used frequently in polite conversation. The reason: non-fungible tokens, or NFTs as they are commonly called. NFTs, as we are told by the BBC (2021), are “‘one-of-a-kind’ assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but they have no tangible form of their own.” If that doesn’t make sense, it is because NFTs don’t make much sense. Essentially, person A can buy a digital something from person B and though it is not “fungible,” meaning it has no direct exchange value, which is to say no monetary value whatsoever, person A will pay a lot for it. “Yes,” the BBC says, “It’s as wild as it sounds.” This is like what has been happening with artworks for centuries, especially those that are considered rare, when the price is set by desire alone, but these new NFTs are digital only and come with a certificate much like one of those autographed baseball cards available only from authorized resellers. Ownership is codified in what is called the “blockchain,” a series of computers around the world that maintain a permanent record of the purchase and ownership. So far, NFTs have been mostly steeped in irony and thus very much of the moment. Someone bought a GIF of a flying pop tart cat for $500,000, for instance, and another person bought a meme called Overly Attached Girlfriend (yes, it looks like what it sounds like) for $400,000. The first tweet was sold at auction for $2.9 million. 10 See the entry for Plane of Immanence. 11 See the entry for Concept.

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associated with Deleuze, as is clear, it becomes nearly impossible to pin down a definition without stepping all over oneself. The “yes, but” or “yes, and” (the language of improvisors) prevails, or, in Deleuze’s terms and on his terms, insists. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze tried to overturn identity12 in favor of difference-in-itself. The problem he was tackling was one that he spent his career overturning: the insufficiency of binaries. Things are either this or that, and if they are this, they are not that, and more, if they are this, then they cannot be anything that is not this; in identity, Deleuze showed, things are simplified under the guise of different from, as in this is different from that. Deleuze was interested in the very becoming-this of this, how it could differ not from that but from itself by way of becoming. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari took this a step further to show how what is thought of as an individual thing (a noun, a wasp, for instance) in addition to becoming itself, forms connections with other things (such as another noun, an orchid, for instance). They provided an image: the wasp and the orchid “caught up in one another” (p. 10). It is a nature story. The orchid, by nature of its makeup, attracts the wasp that by nature of its makeup must act upon and with the orchid and thus contribute to the pollination and reproduction of the orchid. The authors look closely at the moment of connection, seeing it for what it could (and this is an essential word in this philosophy) be seen as: not imitation on the part of the orchid that is enticing the wasp by nature of its shape, scent, color, etc., but “a capture code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (p. 10). When the two come together, forming a connection, they say, a rhizome is formed, and that rhizome forms a line of flight “that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying” (p. 10). As a result, a becoming expresses itself, insists, not as a wasp or an orchid, and not as an orchid pretending to be a wasp, but a pure becoming. This is not resemblance, say Deleuze and Guattari, resemblance is arbitrary and has nothing to do with becoming. In the movie Willard (1972), which the authors use as an example, the protagonist’s relationship with two rats, his best friends, brings him closer and closer to becoming-rat; but in the end, because his journey to becoming-rat is derailed when he is forced by other characters to mistreat a rat, is the cause of a rat’s death, betrayer of

12 See the entry for Identity.

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rat kind, he cannot form a becoming-rat/becoming-human connection (p. 233). Willard, the protagonist, never crossed over and he, like the woman he falls in love with because she looks like a rat, is all resemblance (p. 233). A wrench in the system of becoming. In the case of becoming, becoming insists; in the case of resemblance, no circuit, no rhizome or line of flight is formed and thus no becoming one-all can insist. ∗ ∗ ∗ You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two that is neither in one nor the other. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 10)

Concepts. In the translator’s introduction to What is Philosophy? (1994), Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell describe the book as a manifesto in which the authors, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, entreat philosophers to “create!” (p. ii); they say this because the authors believe philosophy is about creation, not discovery, and their playfulness is bound to make other philosophers, even the laziest, go out and make something. For the casual bookstore browser, the title was (and still is) misleading; as a result, it spent weeks on best-seller lists. The book is not about philosophy, in general, but rather about the authors’ conception of philosophy, one they had been cultivating for decades. For Deleuze and Guattari, who by this time had published the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series in which they had done philosophy to great interest but little understanding, it was time to tell everyone what exactly they had been up to. The answer was concepts; they had been doing concepts. According to them, “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (p. 2). They built on Nietzsche,13 who wrote “[Philosophers] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing” (p. 3). It is important to the authors, and to Nietzsche before them, to identify the purpose of philosophy, to justify or rather to make clear the justification for its very existence, which preceded them, and which is in opposition to what is generally thought to be its raison d’etre: discovery through contemplation (p. 6). Philosophy is not contemplation, they say, just as 13 See the entry for Zarathurstra.

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it is not reflection, because people don’t need philosophy to do those things. It is absurd, they say, to think that artists need philosophy to reflect on painting (p. 6). Contemplation, reflection, a grouping to which they add communication, “are not disciplines but machines for constituting Universals in every discipline”14 (p. 6). They refer us to Plato who said that “Ideas must be contemplated,” but then they point at the often overlooked but obvious fact that “first of all he had to create the concept of Idea” (p. 6). They give credit to Nietzsche for saying “you will know nothing of concepts unless you have created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane,15 and a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds and the personae who cultivate them” (p. 7). Here it is possible to begin to see the way one concept cannot live without others, is a product of its connection to others, is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “a multiplicity” along the same plane, knocking into and being shaped by other concepts that share its components (p. 15), in the way that becoming is inextricable from multiplicity is inextricable from AND, etc. ∗ ∗ ∗ In Guattari there has always been a sort of wild rodeo, in part directed against himself. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 11)

Deleuzoguattarian. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, often described as just Deleuze and Guattari, sometimes described, in the case of their whole philosophy, as the portmanteau “Deleuzoguattarian,” collaborated on a series of books in the late twentieth century, including the duology Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand 14 Arts-based educational researchers (including a/r/tographers and all the other offshoots) are wholeheartedly bound to communication and reflection, which are neither inherently scholarly nor artistic, nor anything really, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and therefore what they are doing is best characterized as ordinary, regularly carried out by anyone in any field at any time. It is difficult, then, despite their proclamations, to think of their work as connected in any meaningful way to Deleuze and Guattari, and the gulf widens when we consider that research is on one end and art on another, setting up a hierarchy of sorts that is incompatible with D + G’s philosophy. But this isn’t to say they couldn’t, with one giant leap (without looking) away from some of their current fixations, give their work the force it needs to become otherwise. 15 See the entry for Plane of Immanence.

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Plateaus, published in 1972 and 1980, respectively), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), and What is Philosophy? 16 (1991), all of which contributed to my book project here and arts education (in addition to all sorts of other disciplines), especially showing up in conversations of arts-based educational research (the intersection of arts and scholarship) and theory17 (thinking through what arts education could be). In 1968, Deleuze was very ill with tuberculosis, finishing and eventually defending his dissertation, and Guattari was heavily involved in the infamous May protests. Deleuze defended his doctoral work at the Sorbonne in the midst of the protests that were happening just outside the building. Because of this, and because of his failing health, and because he was downright impressibly brilliant to his advisors, the defense was expedited and Deleuze, without much opposition, easily passed. Shortly after, Deleuze underwent surgery in which one of his lungs was removed. It was during this time, as he recovered in Limousin, France, that he finally met Guattari, an activist, intellectual, and radical member of the psychiatric community, who was part of an entourage that drove out to see Deleuze and raise his spirits with philosophical discussion. According to François Dosse (2010), who wrote a dual biography of Deleuze and Guattari with the apt subtitle “Intersecting Lives,” the middleman was Jean-Pierre Muyard, to which Anti-Oedipus would eventually be dedicated (“To Jean- Pierre, the true culprit, the leader, the initiator of this perverse undertaking”). Muyard, who had met Guattari at a seminar in 1964, remembered Guattari less as a person and more as emission of energy: “The connection took place then and there and I accepted the energy more than the personality or the man himself. He was exceptionally intelligent, like Lacan, devilishly brilliant. Lucifer was, of course, the angel of light” (p. 2). Muyard, clearly taken by his new friend’s energy, would later write that Guattari, likened to an overactive child, could use a serious dose of Ritalin (p. 2). Muyard met Deleuze in 1967 after having read the latter’s book on Sacher-Masoch. “The two men became friends,” writes Dosse, “and Deleuze began a running discussion with Muyard so as to better understand the world of psychotics” (p. 2). According to Dosse’s research, the meeting that changed their lives went like this:

16 See the entry for Concepts. 17 See the entry for St. Pierre, Elizabeth.

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In June, he put Félix Guattari and François Fourquet in his car and drove them to Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, in Limousin, where Deleuze was living. Guattari and Deleuze immediately connected. Guattari’s conversation was full of topics that interested Deleuze, such as mental illness, La Borde, and Lacan—he had just finished a lecture entitled “Machine and Structure” that he was to give at the Freudian School of Paris. For his demonstration, he drew from Deleuze’s arguments in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. (p. 3)

Until this moment in Guattari’s career, he had been a follower of Lacan, but had begun to find faults in the master’s arguments, particularly singling out “Oedipal triangulation” and “the signifier” (p. 3). It seems that after his meeting with Deleuze, Guattari turned a corner and Lacan’s ideas began to fall away: “Step by step, the rest [of Lacan’s ideas] dissolved like a rotten tooth, like a saltpetered wall,” he is thought to have said (qtd. in Dosse, 2010, p. 3). At Muyard’s urging, the two men met again, this time at Dhuizon near La Borde, where Guattari lived and worked. François Fourquet, who was there, described the second meeting in a letter: It’s pretty strange here. Having Deleuze at Dhuizon has triggered a series of events that I think will continue for a long time. Many people are here besides Félix and Arlette: Rostain, Liane, Hervé, Muyard, Elda, etc.; they’re all buzzing around the daily primal scene, in which Félix and Deleuze create intensely, Deleuze takes and then adjusts notes, critiques, links Félix’s work to the history of philosophy. In a word, it’s working. That’s not to say that it’s easy going in the little family (which includes Geneviève and me). One of the younger siblings has the privilege of watching the battle of the gods: Muyard, who was responsible for having Guattari and Félix meet. (qtd. in Dosse, 2010, p. 4)

It was then that Muyard, even though he was encouraged by Deleuze to be part of the discussions, withdrew and let the two men work without him as a distraction. “I had the feeling,” he said, “that I was no longer useful even though Deleuze wanted to work with me and wanted me to be at the meetings, but I felt that I was bothering Félix. The alchemy had worked and would continue to do so for a very long time” (qtd. in Dosse, 2010, p. 4). ∗ ∗ ∗

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Error 404. ∗ ∗ ∗ The State no longer has at its disposal the political, institutional, or even financial means which would enable it to fend off the social repercussions of the machine; it is doubtful whether it can eternally rely on the old forms like the police, armies, bureaucracies, even trade union bureaucracies, collective institutions, schools, families. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, pp. 13–14)

FBI. The FBI or Federal Bureau of Investigation, is a United States law enforcement agency responsible for protecting American citizens and upholding the Constitution. Its priorities, according to the FBI website (n.d.), are to: • Protect the U.S. from terrorist attack • Protect the U.S. against foreign intelligence, espionage, and cyber operations • Combat significant cybercriminal activity • Combat public corruption at all levels • Protect civil rights • Combat transnational criminal enterprises • Combat significant white-collar crime • Combat significant violent crime Unfortunately, the FBI has a dark history of betraying some of its priorities, especially the one related to civil rights. For example, the FBI, as mentioned in the footnotes of this book, contributed to the dissolution of Black Mountain College, one of the most progressive academic institutions ever to be founded in the United States, by launching an unwarranted investigation into the college’s appropriation of GI Bill funds and, it appears, looking for communist activities, which revealed only that nothing particularly wrong had been done even if administrators had not excelled in keeping records (Pampillonio & Krivchenia, n.d.). Artists, it turns out, unsurprisingly did not make diligent college administrators; and since the school was run more like a commune or cooperative, the students were required to do a lot of the formal recordkeeping themselves. The FBI did succeed, however, in making students and faculty

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uncomfortable. According to poet Charles Olson, a teacher and later Rector at the college, agents “disrupted the creative peaceful atmosphere of the campus” (Pampillonio & Krivchenia, n.d.). The subsequent FBI communication revealed that the investigation, which employed informants in the guise of students and spies who, to the students’ mystification, wore trench coats as they snuck around campus taking notes, “furnished no specific information indicating subversive or disloyal activity on the part of the students or instructors at the school” but, the report concluded, there was insufficient evidence that the veterans were attending classes, or that there were classes at all, and thus the VA funding, it said, should probably be withdrawn (Charlotte, 1956, p. 1). The report says this in the same breath as it admits that the school is a very unusual school where such things as “classes” were fluid and students often worked on their own schedules (Charlotte, 1956, p. 2). The students, for their part, asserted their power, if only temporarily (this was a game, after all, wherein one team had the ball and then the other team intercepted the ball and ran with it, temporarily, and so on), by pretending to be hippies, walking around barefoot in the snow, extinguishing cigarettes on their exposed soles (Pampillonio & Krivchenia, n.d.). The FBI, like all fingers of the state, is an always-relevant player in the pageant of territorialization and flows18 involving art, artists, and thus must be understood as such. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1983), “the State operates by means of euphemisms” (p. 196) and, I’ll add, it is itself a euphemism, answering to such other names as government, power, law enforcement, legislators, FBI, and more. In a series of stages, say the authors, and in one of its defining, originary moves, the State captures land, decontextualizes it, erects it anew under a new name, that of personal property, and divies up what it will to the members of the State and those who are connected to them (p. 196). What then follows is the protection and proliferation of that land and all the mechanisms of the State machine that the corresponding wealth and power have brought into being. To control the land and its distribution, say the authors, is to control the people (p. 197). The FBI, since J. Edgar Hoover’s involvement, has sought to control the people. Famously, Hoover’s FBI spied on what he and the agency’s documents called “subversives,” a category that expanded to include artists, anti-war protestors, and civil rights

18 See the entry for Geography.

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leaders (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) (NPR, 2012). That behavior did not end with Hoover’s death. In September 2013, The American Civil Liberties Union released a 69-page report on the FBI and its post-9/11 indiscretions. Despite the agency’s “crucial role in securing the United States from criminals, terrorist, and hostile foreign agents,” says the report, “throughout history, the FBI has also regularly overstepped the law, infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights” (p. i). The litany of these oversteps between September 11, 2001 and 2012 when the report was written is long and carefully documented. Among the FBI’s indiscretions, which the report points out being part of its shameful history, are “unfairly targeting immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and political dissidents for surveillance, infiltration, investigation, and ‘disruption strategies’” (p. i). That last one, which comes in quotations marks to indicate the FBI’s use of it as a keyword worth repeating, means the agency can “effectively disrupt [a] subject’s activities” (p. 13) with, among other things, “deportation, security clearance revocation, or employing informants to act as agents provocateur to instigate criminal activity” (p. 37) even when these “subjects” (read suspects) have not been charged with any crimes (p. 18). It should be said that this cannot be a criticism of the FBI alone because the culture at large takes part in the production and consumption of artifacts that celebrate the State machine in movies, TV shows,19 and on social media where all the State’s best advertising is done at no cost to it. ∗ ∗ ∗ Future and past don’t have much meaning, what counts is the presentbecoming20 : geography and not history, the middle and not the beginning or the end, grass which is in the middle and which grows from the middle, and not trees which have a top and roots. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 23)

Geography. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, we find reference to the concept21 of geography, which in their estimation should replace the established concept of history. This is taken up most completely in their 19 See the entry for New / Original. 20 See the entries for Actual / Virtual and Becoming. 21 See the entry for Concept.

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work on nomadology and the war machine.22 “It is true,” they write, “that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography” (1987, p. 393). Foucault (1972), in his preface to Anti-Oedipus (1983), calls the book the “art of living counter to all forms of fascism,” a label that comes with a number of “essential principles,” including “Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (p. xiii). What Foucault means by sedentary is not sitting on the couch watching television; instead, sedentary is that which does not seek and form connections, which is a core principle of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In fact, the nomad, far from being the image of a traveling salesman, is an associate of atheists and orphans and can be recognized by “the schizzes flows—forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions…no habits, no territories” (Seem, 1983, p. xxi). The image, if there is one, is that of a de- and re-territorializing machine.23 It is an assemblage of vectors more than a timeline that speaks to what the nomad has been doing. “Multiplicities are defined by the outside,” say Deleuze and Guattari (1987): “by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities” (p. 9). Their plane of immanence24 is one entirely geographic: multiplicities, rhizomes, lines of flight, de- and re-territorialization, flows, etc. Even the rhizome, the image of thought, is “stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.,” perhaps like the lines on a map (highways, roads, rivers), but always there is the break: “lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (think of exit ramps, crossroads, tributaries, and other bodies of water) (p. 9). The 2009 film General Orders No. 9, directed by Robert Persons, epitomizes Deleuze and Guattari’s description of geography over history, which itself is a flux between the two, with an eventual escape of the former over the latter. The film begins with close-ups on several items, artifacts that seem to have been collected from fields, being pulled from an antique box and held in a pair of hands: a bird skull, a rusty coin, a cicada skin, a dice. Then we see a forest, and the narration begins:

22 See the entry for Violence. 23 See the entry for Machine. 24 See the entry for Plane of Immanence.

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A forest season, a boundless palace…

Then the image of a forest dissolves to reveal the image of an historical map, and the camera pulls away, widening its view, though the geography is unclear. The narration continues, not missing a beat: …from a wilderness to a state, from unnamed lands to chartered streets, deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road. In the beginning, it was vast and wild…

It is here, on the word “wild,” that we finally see the word GEORGIA in its entirety, but also see regions demarcated by tribes: CHAUCTAWS, YAMACRAW, and YAMASSEE, in addition to areas marked by the names of states: “Part of Louisiana,” we see, and “Part of Florida.” The narrator continues: …it was the entire middle south, it was bound in the east by the Savannah River and in the west by the Mississippi…

The image dissolves again and we are returned to the forest, albeit a different area, one with a river in the background, and the narrator continues: …and in between a new world, a world of river, tribe, and beast…

The image dissolves into a close-up on calm water: …there was a small colony in the mouth of the river…

The image dissolves and again we see the map, but the focus is reoriented, revealing a section labeled “TALLAHASSEE.” …the rest was Indian land, parts unknown and unmapped…

Yet another dissolve reveals a gray shape against a black background. This is Georgia. …this land was the mother of Alabama and Mississippi. This was the state of Georgia. A shrunken sea, a prayer, a keystone in the southern states…

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Another dissolve and we are zoomed in on the western side of Georgia, still gray against a black background. Parts of the shape of Georgia are extended, and new gray areas emerge. …from east to west, Indian land became English land and English land became American. The Creek were pushed out, the Cherokee pressed into a corner…

The camera zooms out and the state, a gray mass with lines dividing its sections, is further divided. …square mile by square mile, square foot by square foot, and they were gone. From east to west, the land was made into counties and towns, an alliance of equal kingdoms, none claiming precedence over another. Deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road…

The film continues in this way, with the map dissolving into other maps that dissolve into scenes of Georgia and/or other maps, historic, historical, or just made of twenty-first-century computer graphics, while the narrator reflects on the history of Georgia with more emphasis on sounds, the way a poet might work on a film script,25 than on meaning, which, as is shown in images, is slippery and tree-covered at best. The narrator and his images, for it feels like they come from some deep place within his voice, are intent on capturing the history of the region by way of geography alone. It is as if history cannot settle in and get comfortable as the subject of the film, cannot become politicized or rather pure politics (even though the subject may at the outset appear to be), because always the map, the line (of flight) of rivers, roads, counties, demarcations, etc., always return and consume. ∗ ∗ ∗ 25 In many ways, this is exactly what happened when Alain Resnais let Marguerite Duras write his film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). The film was ostensibly a love story that took place in Hiroshima after the bombing; but, at the same time and more forcefully, the film entered the horror of Hiroshima directly, revealing, in Duras’s own words, that the only thing one can talk about is the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. In this same way, Persons shows that the only thing we can talk about when we talk about what happened in the American south (genocide gave way to slavery gave way to war gave way to Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow) is the impossiblity of actually talking about what happened there.

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For example, we get the feeling that some books are written for the review that a journalist will have to produce, so that there is no longer even any need for a review, but only for empty words (“You must read that! It’s great! Go on! You’ll see!”) to avoid reading the book and putting the article together. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 3)

Herd. At the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave Le Bon published an influential book about the mob mentality called The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1903). He began by saying that, based on observation, individuals within crowds took on new psychological characteristics not associated with those individuals without crowds. In fact, he writes, they differ “to a very considerable degree” (p. 5). “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals,” he writes, “is one of the principal characteristics of the present age” (p. 5). It was Le Bon’s belief that complicated intellectual ideas, once taken up by crowds, were simplified in order to be understood by the masses (p. 71), which is to say, they got dumber. This simplification, he wrote, was one of the reasons crowds could be heard espousing around several contradictory ideas without knowing it (p. 70). The wisdom and reasoning of crowds “are always several generations behind learned men and philosophers” (p. 73). In nature, among the animals, this is true, too. The herd is a safe space: how much lower the chances of one’s capture and death, for instance, when running in a group. The loner is easily cornered, caught, and devoured by a team of skillful predators. The loner is totally vulnerable whereas the herd distributes that vulnerability through its many bodies. Since Le Bon’s work, and especially in the last few decades, there has been a steady stream of texts that try to understand what happens to a person’s mind when among a crowd, most recently as an offshoot of the self-help movement (which is why so many books on business “culture” deal with similar ideas). Terms vary but the popular descriptors are mob mentality, pack mentality, groupthink, or herd mentality. In 1916, English surgeon Wilfred Trotter published Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. In 1921, Sigmund Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In 1960, Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti published Crowds and Power, in part a commentary on every book about crowds that preceded it. Throughout the twentieth century, many academic studies have popularized the investigation of the power of persuasion and the personal

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importance of fitting in with the herd (most notably Asch, 1951; Millgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 1971) and the Nazi soldiers in the Second World War provided a real-life experiment for everyone to study. More recently, the subject has been popularized by writers such as Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2002) and James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2004). This topic comes up in my book because poet Dean Young,26 writing about recklessness, mentioned the herd mentality that plague’s young people’s ability to outmaneuver the cliché. A similar phenomenon was documented by me and poet and scholar Terry Hermsen in an article about a poetry in the schools program (Hermsen & Morrow, 2008). This book is in part an argument for breaking from the herd to achieve thinking in our own right, creation, living and doing art education (scholarship) otherwise. ∗ ∗ ∗ Having a bag into which I put everything I encounter, provided that I am also put in a bag. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 8)

Identity. According to Todd May (2005), one of the ways Deleuze rewrote ontology was by inverting the established relationship between identity and difference (p. 17), a rewriting Deleuze did quite a lot of in Difference and Repetition. This, he adds, like much of Deleuze’s philosophy, is difficult to talk about without also talking about another inversion he performed: flipping the coin from discovery (in traditional philosophy) to creation (in Deleuze’s and Deluze and Guattari’s philosophies). For philosophers whose purpose is to discover and describe, identity is important. They discover things and then they describe them. But Deleuze was part of a group of philosophers in Europe who thought this way of thinking about ontology was wildly inaccurate. According to May, “Nietzsche and Sartre and Foucalt and Derrida argue that there are no ontological identities to be discovered, because what looks like a stable identity is not” (p. 18). History and language and structures have forced images upon us, images of defined things, but totally misses “the shifting character of reality27 or the porous quality of our language” (p. 18). 26 See the entry for Young, Dean. 27 See the entry for the Actual / Virtual.

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These philosophers began to see ontology as a failure because it is impossible to discover identity, which is to say being, what a thing is, and therefore it is impossible to do ontology. Deleuze took this a step further, though, as he often did with things, pushing them to their limits. Whereas his contemporaries declared the death of ontology, Deleuze declared its beginning (p. 18). Deleuze’s project of ontology begins, says May, “when we abandon the search for conceptual stability and begin to see what there is in terms of difference rather than identity” (p. 19). May likens what Deleuze does to what doctors do: When doctors seek to understand a lesion they cannot see, they palpate the body. They create a zone of touch where the sense of the lesion can emerge without its being directly experienced. They use their fingers to create an understanding where direct identification is impossible… We might say that palpation “gives voice” to the lesion. It allows the lesion to speak: not in its own words, for it has none, but in a voice that will at least not be confused with something it is not. (p. 20)

For May, Deleuze operates on patients with concepts and the lesions emerge. Deleuze, for his part, was much drier when describing his take on identity, a dryness he later criticized but understood from afar with a kind of detached parental satisfaction. Deleuze (1994) says that Difference and Repetition was his first attempt at doing philosophy (p. xv). He wrote it for one because he had to write something; it was his dissertation. On the other hand, he was obsessed with something he had noticed in the history of philosophy: “the majority of philosophers had subordinated difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous” (p. xv). As a result, he says, there was no concept of difference, only difference as it relates to other things, as in resemblance (we perceive this differently than that), opposition (this thing is opposed to that different thing), and analogy (this thing is judged to be an analogue of that thing) (p. xv). The same is true of repetition, he says, because when we think of it, we think of the same thing coming again and again (p. xv), which simply cannot be the case on the plane of immanence where the other concepts are multiplicity, becoming, virtuality, and others. ∗ ∗ ∗ Just Kidding.

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∗ ∗ ∗ The more one has been fooled in one’s life, the more one gives lessons. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 8)

Living. Gilles Deleuze’s (and by extension Felix Guattari’s) entire enterprise is about living: thinking about how we might, or how we could, live; this is counter to the traditional philosopher who sought to define how we ought to be living. So much is this the case that Todd May devotes an entire chapter, and the first chapter at that, of his 2005 book, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, to the question “How Might One Live?” What is abundantly clear to May is that Deleuze’s work is constantly reminding us that “however it is we are living, we might live otherwise” (p. 1). Moreover, living doesn’t necessarily refer only to a person, a human, living in the world, but could mean “a mouth, a gesture, a style, a relationship” or even “a group or an epoch” (p. 24). The very fact that we don’t daily ask this question about living otherwise, or even periodically, especially in conversations about philosophy, perplexes May. He chalks this silence up to tradition. Philosophy in the twentieth century, he says, concerned itself with language and the limits of science, which are investigations with a narrow focus, not with broader, expansive tasks like “reflection on what we ought to become or might become,” which were and perhaps still are “external, perhaps even incoherent, concerns” to many philosophers (p. 2). For May, Deleuze is following in the footsteps of Nietzsche,28 the first philosopher to do away with those antiquated questions that presuppose a God, a Goodness, keeping us in line. With the two Gs discarded, Nietzsche was able to see that we and we alone are in control of the geography of our lives. According to May, It is the death of God and the consequent vanishing of transcendence that reopens the question for us, allowing us to enlarge our lives beyond the limits our history had set for us. Once again we can ask what we might make of ourselves in this world, the world we inhabit. We can stop denying our larger dreams and projects in the name of a transcendence that judges us, and free ourselves instead for what is most noble in our nature. (p. 7)

28 See the entry for Zarathustra.

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To May, and to Jean-Paul Sartre, too, the reason we don’t always ask the question, How might we live?, is conformity.29 “The structure of society, the weight of history, the legacy of our language,” May writes, echoing what Sartre came to think at the end of his life and what Deleuze would later say, too, “all conspire to keep the question from us, and to keep us from it” (p. 8). This is why Deleuze devoted so much energy to noology, or the study of the dogmatic image of thought and the new image of thought, the rhizome. For Foucault and Derrida, Deleuze’s contemporaries, ontology was the problem and a dangerous one that had to be unraveled and laid bare; but for Deleuze, ontology could be stretched to its limit and there, at the edges, something else could happen (May, p. 15). The missing piece, the one Deleuze inserted, was creation. Deleuze overturns the conventional wisdom that in ontology philosophers discover what is there. For Deleuze, ontology meant something else, it meant that “the distinction between creation and discovery is no longer relevant”; instead of discovering the limits of being and then creating concepts to explain them, Deleuze thought philosophers could create concepts30 to probe the limits and structures that stood in the way (p. 18). According to Deleuze, argues May, philosophy’s job is not to “settle things” once and for all but to disturb things (p. 19). Identity31 reveals the tip of the iceberg, “the froth of what there is,” but concepts probe the depths beneath the froth (p. 19). Once out there, though, concepts, like teenagers leaving the nest, link up with other concepts and new creations happen. It is not identity that concepts reveal but difference, difference not from other entities but different from itself; the little differences, in May’s words, are palpated by concepts in the way a doctor might palpate a patient’s body to have revealed to her what is there (p. 20). My book seeks to palpate art education scholarship, especially that known as arts-based educational research, to ask What might it be? While I don’t have an answer (and am skeptical about the efficacy of any answer), the only thing I know for sure is that the current practices under the guise of Deleuzian concepts, far from offering up new ways of thinking, merely repackage existing models of research and don’t go far

29 See the entries for New / Original, Herd, and Unicorn. 30 See the entry for Concepts. 31 See the entry for Identity.

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enough. I have tried to use concepts to palpate the body of that research, to reveal difference, not identity. ∗ ∗ ∗ This machine in its turn is thus not the state itself, it is the abstract machine which organizes the dominant utterances and the established order of a society, the dominant language and knowledge, conformist actions and feelings, the segments which prevail over the others. —Gilles Deleuzeand Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 129)

Machine. “A machine,” according to Deleuze and Guattari (1983), “may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)” (p. 38). They characterize machines as things within a continual, possibly even continuous, relationship with associated machines, using, as an example, both the meat slicer and the deli meat, to capture both the flow of meat to the cutting off of the flow of meat (p. 38). Further, in a move in keeping with their philosophy, a third machine always emerges: the flux machine (p. 38). If there is a deli meat machine and a cutting deli meat machine, there is a flux machine that insists becomings32 of the back and forth, the flow and cut off, river and dam, working independently of the other two machines and yet in concert. But already we have over-simplified the machine. “Cutting off” is not the right language, not the bon mot. Harkening back to the initial definition above, the authors prefer the word “break” to “slice,” the image of a detachment, not a cutting (p. 39). The word slice almost certainly implies a violence done by one thing, possibly a subject, onto another, possibly an object, an action disallowed by Deleuze and Guattari’s enterprise, one that removes the subject and ego from the equation, replacing them with schizophrenia, or the un-subject, un-ego, pure vector. Instead of a meat slicer, then, we must think of a chain of infinitesimal units being fed through a machine made for detaching along preconceived intervals singularities. Agency is distributed in both directions. But another problem arises: if a thing is defined by its code, or rather its code defines it, brings it into existence, then the detaching of

32 See the entry for Becoming.

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part of the code, as in the case of html, will bring about the disorientation of the thing, leading to a 404 Error33 or an incredibly fragmented whole with few markers of the original. Imagine the milk machine and the baby-mouth machine. The milk machine and baby-mouth-machine and flux machine insist in intervals and keep on insisting; and, important to note, the milk machine, once some of its code has been detached, does not flail and fail, does not cease to produce milk; in fact, it continues, as if the code was never interrupted, meaning detachment does not equal severance. Part of the code is taken up in the baby, who reorganizes those building blocks into poop: the poop-machine releases and is cut off; the cycle continues. It is as if every detached piece is a building block, and the schizo carries them off, building new structures that insist themselves elsewhere, the blocks having no memory of the whole from which they came. The building blocks of the original code, then, having been detached and repurposed under a new regime of madness, lacking resemblance to the original code, being no longer part of the original system, cannot thus be thought to have subtracted meaning from the original code, and both the detachment, the flux, and the rhizome act out momentary becomings of each other after which each code is thought to be complete in itself, becoming itself, and the blocks keep changing hands (p. 43). Such is the nature of nature. We operate not according to repressed Oedipal desires, as some post-modernists would have said, but as desiring machines, as Deleuze and Guattari say, continually seeking out and consummating productive connections (p. 3). This world is a world of machines from the political to the personal. ∗ ∗ ∗ New/Original. For a culture so obsessed with the new, the original, the next best thing, we spend an inordinate amount of time making 33 In the computer world, a 404 Error, also called an HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) 404 Error, is what we see when a page we are looking for cannot be found. The searching bot is always on the trail of the finding bot; the 404 Error signals that the searching bot is late, maybe even by just a split second, maybe by years. Also, the 404 Error is not an error in the conventional sense even though its name and the screen that comes up might imply otherwise. In fact, it is just one of many ways a website communicates to a browser. Seeing a 404 Error means the code is working, albeit not in your favor. The website reclaims a bit of privacy, if only for the time being, and cuts off the browser’s constant supply of receiving, which is part of what gives us so much pleasure. See the entry for Error 404.

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and consuming copies, reproductions, and clichés.34 Hollywood is the obvious, and perhaps a too-easy target, culprit, leading the charge of the cliché culture. That some movies get packaged under the category of franchise says everything. Disney, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate: all the executives, directors, producers are miners, hoarders, collectors, digging through what has already been created in order to find that which could be sold for profit. They don’t create movies any more than a metal detectorist creates coins buried in the sand on beaches everywhere. Susan Sontag, in the 1970s, wrote a damning critique of “image junkies” and “aesthetic consumerism,” two concepts that have only grown in monstrosity (2003, p. 18). Deleuze and Guattari were interested in creation back in the 70s, too. Deleuze, in particular, with or without Guattari, spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, thinking about the creation of the new. He spent a lot of time with noology, the study of the image of thought, trying to parse the dogmatic (read as the cliché, the arborescent image) image of thought from the elusive new image of thought (read as the rhizome), seeing if he could provide advice for unshackling the eye and the hand; and while he found its culmination with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), he extended the conversation, and did so specifically about art, in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003), in which he writes that “modern painting is invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés that are already lodged on the canvas before the painter even begins to work,” adding “it would be a mistake to think that the painter works on a white virgin surface” (pp. 10–11). This sentiment applies to all artistic disciplines but is especially pertinent to painting because it historically rivaled the photograph, which is supposed to be a rendering of real life. Bacon was particularly aware of this fact, thinking, according to Deleuze, the photo “is not a figuration of what one sees, it is what modern man sees” (p. 11). Abstraction, Deleuze theorizes, was necessary “to tear modern art away from figuration” (p. 11). According to Deleuze, the opposite of cliché and its pal the sensational is sensation (p. 34). At first, he says sensation “has one face turned toward the subject” and “one face turned toward the object,” but then, in a Deleuzian knot, he corrects himself, returning to the line of flight, the becoming that happens when the wasp and orchid meet, when an apple, not the likeness of an apple, is rendered

34 See the entries for Herd and Unicorn.

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on canvas in all its color, scent, and texture, saying “it has no face at all, it is both things indissolubly” (p. 34). For Cezanne, this amounted to “paint the sensation”; for Bacon, it was “record the fact ” (p. 35). Importantly, these painters did not paint to react against clichés, or react against clichés with their painting, which would have birthed new clichés in the way a parody so often seen these days in movies about, not within, the superhero genre (e.g., Deadpool and its obligatory sequel, Deadpool 2) or in satires of political absurdities (e.g., The Interview) add nothing but more clichés to an already crowded field. In fact, the same is true in fiction. Novelist Chris Bachelder wrote about the insufficiency of satire in 2004 (almost 20 years ago by now), saying “that in wanting to engage the world but in reacting against the sincere, naïve, programmatic [novel], today’s satirists in fact often end up writing Novels of Wry Gags that are just as superficial, tendentious, and programmatic.” The original thus is not a reaction against cliché like so many novelists and painters have tried to do; rather, it is an entering into the cliché without knowing why, without having formed an image of the anti-cliché, without having a thesis (e.g., I will take them down once and for all!) (p. 96). In keeping with Deleuze’s philosophy, the painter and the canvas, like the wasp and the orchid, form a becoming-canvas and becoming-painter, and a third flux emerges: the becoming insists itself, a line of flight is formed out of which something that is not the canvas (cliché) and not the painter (intention) is birthed, having no genetic marks but, and this is the key, being entirely made of sensations, pulsing, seizing, warm with meaning. ∗ ∗ ∗ This other plane knows only relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness, between unformed, or relatively unformed, elements, molecules, or particles borne away by fluxes. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 92)

Plane of Immanence35 : In Chapter 2 of What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari take on the difficult task of defining the Plane 35 Also called Plane of Consistency and Planomenon. This kind of doubling is common in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, wherein one word is often referred to as another word, a fact only realized in readings of subsequent books, as in the case of rhizome, thinking, creation, and the image of thought, which create a web and become indiscernible. See the entry for Time.

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of Immanence (henceforth called the PoI). Put simply, the PoI is a surface on which all the concepts of a philosophy pulsate. The concepts, according to the authors, are “fragmentary wholes” that do not interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather resonate with each other; and though they are the result of a philosophy, likely a philosopher’s work, they are not placed there carefully on the table by the creator but rather fall as if by “throws of the dice” (p. 35). Taken together, these fragments amount to a Whole philosophy that is still open to the outside, which is to say is still open for the business of unlimited connections (p. 35) and since this is a philosophy of univocity (none is transcendent, none is better or best), they exist without hierarchy, they exist defined, if by any one thing, by connections. Given the authors’ enterprise, we can assume that at any moment their PoI consists (yes, think consistency, texture) of every possible combination (think amoeba amalgam) of the actual and virtual36 and is obsessively dogged by the plane of organization that tries to domesticate it. It is important to Deleuze and Guattari that concepts and the plane are not conflated, or reduced to a picture of physical items spread out on a table, a metaphor that captures none of the forcework or openness of them. Instead, they use a different metaphor, that of a big wave (the plane) within and about which smaller waves (concepts) rise and fall although not according to a predictable tide (p. 35). It is clear that they are separate, individual, and yet they appear to occupy the same fluid body,37 accepting that which enters from the outside and sending out its own flares. In case readers begin to see the two as one metaphor, though, an impossibility for this brand of philosophy, the authors provide a second metaphor that cannot be easily reduced to concrete physical images: that of the skeleton, the spinal column (concepts), and the breath (plane) that suffuses it (p. 36). Further complicating the picture, Deleuze and Guattari say the PoI is the image of thought, which they had defined in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia as the rhizome38 ; and because we are slow thinkers who aren’t often thinking (and creating) at all, when we look out on the distant horizon at a PoI, our mind is subject to all sorts of mirages, vapors, fogs (pp. 49–51), and thus the multiple (predictably) eludes us. We are biologically incapable of seeing

36 See the entry for the Actual / Virtual. 37 See the entry for Becoming. 38 See the entry for Rhizome.

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the infinite speeds within and without the plane although we may intuit their insistence. As a result, we don’t often understand whole philosophies, have trouble sussing out the concepts from the plane, and truly grasping the difficulties of philosophical texts. The best we can do is create “mental, noetic, and machinic portraits”39 (p. 55), getting only as close as resemblance, likely monstrously so, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is what this book amounts to. This is also why this book does not quite grasp either Deleuze or arts-based educational research, but, if it succeeds at all, at least, as a machine itself, forms a rhizome with them. ∗ ∗ ∗ Rest. ∗ ∗ ∗ Today schools are no longer fee-paying, but operate for the benefit of a still darker organization: a kind of marketing, where the interest has moved and no longer relates to books but to newspaper articles, broadcasts, debates, colloquia, roundtables about a doubtful book which, at the limit, doesn’t even need to exist. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, pp. 26–27)

St. Pierre, Elizabeth. Elizabeth St. Pierre is a Professor at the University of Georgia in the Mary Frances Early College of Education, where she teaches classes on post-qualitative research, theoretical frameworks, new materialism and new empiricism, and philosophers Michel Foucalt and Jacques Derrida and their impact on education, among other courses and topics. In addition, she has written influential articles on Deleuze and Guattari, post-qualitative research, and post-structuralism. Taken together, her work amounts to an indictment of the way things are often done in graduate programs and in scholarship and, in a very Deleuzian way, an argument for how we could be living our lives in those spaces. Recently, St. Pierre (2016) wrote a brief but clear article about theory’s role in education courses, a relevant topic for art education, too, based on what I have seen in my studies. St. Pierre had been noticing a trend among her graduate students: they were arriving without much

39 See the entry for Machine.

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background in theory. In fact, many of them didn’t believe it was important to learn theory in the first place. “One of my Master’s students in a theory course I’m teaching for the first time this semester asked, ‘Do we have to go this deep?’” she writes, “and I replied that deep is where things pick up speed and get interesting” (2016, p. 10). This is a very Deleuzian and Guattarian answer. This student is not alone, she says, and that sentiment is echoed by students entering their third or even fourth year of doctoral studies. “The more I read from new materialist texts,” one student wrote to St. Pierre, “the more background I seem to be missing” (p. 8). It is highly unlikely that graduate students will have the time to devote to important texts on theory and complete their individual doctoral or master’s projects and yet, as St. Pierre keeps reminding us, theory and practice are inextricable. There is no practice without theory. According to St. Pierre, there is a larger “inattention to theory” at work, which is “a product of logical empiricism / logical positivism, which Steinmetz (2005) argues is the epistemological unconscious of U.S Sociology” but that St. Pierre argues is a problem of “the social sciences more broadly” (p. 9). She traces this recent wave, a tenacious one, to the State’s campaign to scientize every aspect of education, which has been lurking for decades but most publicly came to light with 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act (p. 9) and its obsession with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, the four pillars of an effective society, according to some. St. Pierre’s argument is similar to my argument, though we approach it from different angles. “Not having carefully studied a theory can be dangerous” she writes, for example, when a novice researcher plucks a concept like a rhizome or assemblage from Deleuze and Guattari’s experimental ontology and transcendental empiricism and plops it down into a humanist phenomenological interview or positivist grounded theory study, which are typical research designs discussed in qualitative research textbooks. (p. 6).

This is a similar criticism to the one leveled by jan jagodzinski at a pair of researchers who were trying to do something like that in an article about music education. The problem here is obvious: students’ and even researchers’ theories don’t fit with their studies and they don’t even know it or care to know it and that graduate programs (and undergraduate programs before them), according to both Patti Lather and St. Pierre, spend a lot of time on methodology at the expense of epistemology

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and ontology, so it is unlikely to improve. But what, she asked, could be gained by bringing them back? A lot, it turns out, about how we could live, about how we might do what it is that we do otherwise, a central question in Deleuze and Guattari’s and Deleuze’s own work. “My point,” she writes, “is that it’s important to recognize the prevailing system of thinking that not only offers us possibilities but also contains us, limits us, and stifles creation” and aren’t we here to think the new? (p. 4). In a 2017 article, St. Pierre went a step further, realizing that method and methodology, far from being essential to an educator scholar’s work, could be displaced by concepts in the Deleuzoguattarian sense. Before, it seems, she had not been thinking radically enough. Certainly, allegiances have historically been granted to traditional social science research. Casting aside traditional ways of doing research, and the reverence given over to methods and methodology, she writes, will not be easy, but “in new empirical work, we might think concept as method and begin with concepts like assemblage and haecceity in the middle of the mixture of words and things, in the folding of the Outside that makes the new, the new we will create” (p. 1087). ∗ ∗ ∗ It is like Mozart’s birds: in this music, there is a bird-becoming, but caught in a music-becoming of the bird, the two forming a single becoming, a single bloc, an a-parallel evolution—not an exchange, but a ‘confidence with no possible interlocutor,’ as a commentator on Mozart says; in short, a conversation. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 3)

Time. One of the first French words I learned, and one I was never able to pronounce, along with hundreds of others, was temps, which is translated simply as time in English. I liked this word. I liked it because it was like so many words that I had come to love in English: a little promiscuous by association. The word temps mean time, sure, but le temps mean the weather, temporiser is akin to procrastination, and printemps is spring. Casting grammar aside, I could say something like “The right time and weather for procrastination is spring.” Working backward, we can see, too, that the word time in English has its own incredible variability. The Oxford English Dictionary (2021) lists over 35 entries for the word in its non-verb form (with several subentries for each) in addition to dozens

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of idioms, phrases, and compound words. The word comes from the Germanic, finding its way into Old Icelandic, Old Swedish, Old English, Middle English, and all sorts of variations, such as in the tongues of Scotland and Ireland. The first entry is predictably the one for “An extent of time”; the second one includes its cohabitation with “the” as in “all the time”; and it really picks up speed in the eight definition, which mentions doing time, as in “A term of imprisonment.” The first recorded use of the latter is from 1790 but it was probably brought to popularity, based on the examples provided, around the time Charles Dickens was writing Oliver Twist (1838). The word goes on like this for what are probably tens of pages in the physical dictionary (and those are enormous pages as far as pages go!), wherein “her time” as in childbirth and “his time” as in death are mentioned. We see both the beginning and the end. All of this is to say that time is not only a complicated concept, it is a complicated word, which is doubtless why Deleuze chose to investigate it closely in his work, especially in his 1985 book on cinema, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps ). The first book in the series, Cinema 1, was about movement: The Movement-Image, he called it. After the world wars, though, Deleuze saw a shift in films from movement (affect, perception, and action) to time (Tomlinson & Galeta, 1989, p. xv). It is in TimeImage that Deleuze’s understanding of Bergson’s actual/virtual40 is most clearly described in a book. Also, because Deleuze’s concepts all work together, the book covers thought, cliché, rhizome, becoming, and other of his enduring ideas. Time, like many things in Deleuze’s work, cannot be clarified in a vacuum. Deleuze (1989) draws a distinction between Realism and Neo-Realism, and finds, among Antonioni and friends, “a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer a place from which to ask” (p. 7). This idea is clearly born from the author’s work on Bergson, and we can feel the aftershocks in phrases like the above and here: It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each was being reflected in the other, around a point of indiscernibility…. Neo-realist description in the nouveau roman is completely different: since it replaces its own object, on the one hand it erases or destroys its reality 40 See the entry for Actual / Virtual.

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which passes into the imaginary, but on the other hand it powerfully brings out all the reality which the imaginary or the mental create through speech and vision. (p. 7)

The old-guard was defined by a discernibility, which amounted to action alone, but the new guard, including the neo-realists and French new wave, were defining cinema with indiscernibility, a word that runs throughout The Time-Image, through the manipulation of two tools, sound and image, each given equal weight not overall but in individual moments, providing those moments with what Deleuze will term the fork (in reference to Joseph Mankiewicz, p. 49). Time forks, he says. Once time is forked, it loses its grip on past, present, and future, and becomes indiscernible but for its insistence in that moment. This allows more than one thing to happen at any one moment, opening the possibility for the actualization of a virtual difference in cinema, which was not the norm before the war. Even though the book is subtitled “time-image,” the book becomes a book about indiscernibility. Deleuze refers to Hitchcock, who had dreamed of a “camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into” and in so doing frees itself from the movement image, or the camera capturing movements (p. 23). It is really not so important anymore what the actor does, although that certainly factors into the equation, or rather it is important but only by its part in the AND. Later, Deleuze, referring to the actual and the virtual, sees indiscernibilty as a circuit in which they are chasing each other around and neither is able to be identified; and so they “ultimately become confused” (p. 46). A contemporary example of the circuit between “the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental” (p. 69) is the voice-over sequences in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). Later Malick would return to and perfect this circuit with Tree of Life (2011), but it is in the former that he finds the indiscernibility. In one such scene, two Navy officers, Lieutenant Colonel Tall and his superior, Brigadier General Quintard, are walking the deck of an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. Tall, like a good subordinate, follows right behind Quintard. Then we begin to hear Tall’s thoughts in voice-over: “Worked my ass off, brown-nosed the generals, degraded myself for them, my family, my home.” Quintard removes his glasses and turns to Tall: “I admire you, Colonel,” he says. “I do. Most men your age would have retired by now. It’s okay. We need general offices with maturity and character like you.

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We’ve got good sargeants, we’ve got good lieutenant colonels, but once a man gets those eagles, he can’t wait to get that star, can he, and he becomes a politician, right?” Through this, Tall puts on a smile. He plays the game. “Goes along to get along,” adds Quintard. “So god-damn hard to stay upright.” “You said it there, sir,” Tall agrees. They look off screen. “Like the admiral watching,” says Quintard, pointing; “which he will be. There’s always someone watching.” As he says this, Quintard turns his head to the side, and spears his stare into Tall’s forehead, menacingly. Tall’s face betrays discomfort. “Like a hawk,” adds Quintard. “Someone ready to jump in if you’re not.” A wave crashes. This whole exchange, including the voice-over, which is directed at us, takes only one minute, but reveals decades of Tall’s life and the animosity of their relationship. The three layers of audio (voice-over, dialogue, and everything else) and shifting focus of the camera-consciousness (back and forth throughout, from Tall’s face to Quintard’s) come together in this brief encounter in such a way that we no longer know which is primary and from whose perspective the story is being told. ∗ ∗ ∗ An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 13)

Unicorn. In The Natural History (published in English in 1855), Pliny the Elder, best known nowadays as a famous craft beer from Russian River Brewing Company in California, but once known as a Roman author with lots to say about the world, as part of his description of India, recorded the “monoceros, which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.” This, the translator tells us, is the famed unicorn. It can’t be taken alive because it isn’t real, and thus not alive in the first place. Earlier, in his description of Ethiopia, he reported the pegasi: “horses with wings, and armed with horns.” In the 1855 edition, translator John Bostock felt compelled to intervene. “Of course the winged horse is an imaginary being,” he writes about the pegasi; and about the unicorn, he writes that there had been many accounts

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throughout history, but they “do not amount to that kind of evidence which can at all supply the place of direct proof.” In his defense, he was compiling this information from respected but wildly inaccurate accounts that preceded him, like those from Ctesia and Aristotle (Waters, 2013, p. 232). According to Malcolm South (1987), the unicorn is “a union of fact and myth” (qtd. in Waters, 2013, p. 233). In other words, the unicorns described by ancient authors have enough in common with real animals and creatures in the mythology being circulated in their time. It was believed by Odell Shepard, scholar, and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, that the real-life animals in question were the Indian rhinoceros, onager (Asiatic wild ass), and antelope, while natural historian Chris Lavers recently wrote that the animals were in fact the chiru, wild yak, and kiang (Tibetan wild ass) (ctd. in Waters, 2013, p. 234). Oddly, the Indian rhinoceros is the only animal on the list that sports a single horn, although it is much stubbier and nubbier than that usually attributed to the unicorn. Regardless, the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland, an odd choice given that the creature isn’t real, but a logical choice is given that it was thought of as the natural enemy of the lion, which was England’s national animal (O’Neill, 2015). Dean Young41 refers to the unicorn, the same unicorn, being produced by children who were once creative, once followed flights of the imagination, but then have reached an age when fitting in is more beneficial, less harmful even, than standing out. Deleuze and Guattari (1983), in their noology, the study of the image of thought, made this criticism: “the less people take thought seriously,” they write, “the more they think in conformity with what the State wants” (p. 376). Perhaps the reason children draw unicorns, the same unicorns, is because they are taught, conditioned even, not to take thought seriously. They are conditioned, however, to take each other seriously, whether or not they should, teachers, too, and to take hierarchy seriously, though that is something they learn by experience. Interestingly, at some point in history, the unicorn horn became a special object, something to have, much like the tusk of an elephant is today. “They went for tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money,” writes Matt Simon (2015), “and were particularly popular among paranoid royalty.” Children, while not trying to buy faux-animal parts, seem to have a firm grasp on that specialness despite the fact that incredibly nuanced one-horned

41 See the entry for Young, Dean.

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creatures actually live on the earth right now (narwal and rhinoceros, for two) and, if directed to investigate them by curious teachers, would be just as magical to draw; or children could be encouraged to break from the herd42 and imagine their own mythical beasts. Either way, it is interesting that in our culture the word unicorn now denotes a rare perfection while in the art classroom it signifies cliché. ∗ ∗ ∗ Everything which belongs to a thought without image—nomadism, the war machine, becomings, nuptials against nature, capture and thefts, interregnums, minor languages or stammering of language, etc.—is crushed and denounced as a nuisance. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, pp. 13–14)

Violence and the War Machine. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, violence and the war machine are inextricably linked, although violence can be found off on its own, too, just as the war machine can be spotted trawling alone. In fact, violence is just one line to cross the path of the war machine, but, like the others, it operates in terms of a kind of doubling, the violence is always tempered by a periodic and strategic non-violence, a kind of evolutionary device like survival of the fittest. Violence is, after all, an act of deterritorialization, the end result of which is a reterritorialization by either whomever enacted the violence (e.g., subjectification, slavery, or the like) or the processes by which bodies are returned to dust (i.e., decomposition). The war machine knows, too, that total violence now leaves none for later, which leads to a particularly poor outlook. “Rather than operating by blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence ‘once and for all,’” then, “the war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlimited” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 396). The war machine talks like a CEO, emphasizing sustainability. But, they add, in keeping with their entire philosophy wherein interiority is challenged, violence is not within the war machine but without:

42 See the entry for Herd.

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Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war—either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combato—or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function. (p. 394)

In the common parlance, this kind of deflection of responsibility is often called plausible deniability, a term meant to mean one is removed enough to no longer be easily identifiable as the agent. The State, like a puppeteer, operates the head of the military, but the ventriloquist is talented. Deleuze’s most salient discussion (he would despise that word being associated with his work) of violence is in Difference and Repetition (1994) in regard to Descartes and Kant. In particular, Deleuze looks at what Decartes says about the triangle: that our ability to imagine that all three corners add up to 180 degrees supposes thought. Deleuze is obviously appalled by this because truths of that kind “presuppose all that is in question and are incapable of giving birth in thought to the act of thinking” (p. 139). For Deleuze, thinking, i.e., the act of creation, i.e., the image of the rhizome, is something that happens, not something we choose to do. Of those ideas Deleuze says, “They lack the claws of absolute necessity… the claws of a strangeness of an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor” (p. 139). “Thought is primarily trespass and violence,” he adds, and then turns to submit a concept that has been picked up by art educators: the fundamental encounter (p. 139). For Deleuze, the very act of thinking, which happens without thought, is a violent act that cannot be done out of will by a subject. “Something in the world forces us to think,” he writes (p. 139), an idea that is incompatible with Decartes and Kant. It is the nomads who drive the war machine. “Thought,” says Deleuze (1989), speaking to Claire Parnet, “should be thrown like a stone by a war machine. Absolute speed is the speed of nomads, even when they move about slowly. Nomads are always in the middle” (p. 31). It is in the war machine that the nomads are able to avoid the past and the future, to be only a series of becomings, because they are pure geography and not of time in the ordinary sense (p. 31). The rhizome, too, which grows in the middle, from the middle, is a war machine, created and recreated with each becoming, with each cross and twist and turn.

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∗ ∗ ∗ Writing always combines with something else, which is its own becoming. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 44)

Young, Dean. Dean Young is a poet who treads closely on the heels of the New York School poets like Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery but who has Romantic urges all his own. Young’s concept of Recklessness, or at least the germ, was actually borrowed from Ashbery, who spent most of his professional life as both a poet and art critic, and so was well-situated to say, “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing” (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 42). Ashbery spent a lot of time thinking about nothing, about how meaning is formed in the reader and viewer, and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1976 because he codified some of that thinking in his 1975 book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the title poem of which was a reference to Parmigianino’s sixteenthcentury painting of the same name that was likely the first mirror painting in art history. Ashbery’s poem about the painting is not by definition an ekphrastic, a poem about an artwork, but instead uses the painting as a launching pad for musing on many of art’s and life’s central problems, as evident in such lines as “nothing can exist except what’s there” (p. 70); “Of course some things / Are possible, it knows, but it doesn’t know / Which ones” (p. 72); and “Today has that special, lapidary / Todayness” (p. 78), among others. Needless to say, it is a long, sprawling poem because it does many things well. John Malcolm Brinnin, in his review which appeared in the New York Times in August 1975, in it must be said a positive review, wrote: “Ashbery’s own kind of recklessness takes the form of an austere refusal to honor any of the claims of sentiment, beauty and good conscience that poetry is supposed to make.” Kenneth Koch took Ashbery’s irreverence much further. The Poetry Foundation (n.d.) describes his style as “surrealism, satire, irony, and an element of surprise” while fellow writer David Lehman calls him “the funniest serious poet we have” (qtd. in The Poetry Foundation, n.d.), which seemed to be a consensus among critics and writers. Perhaps Koch’s most famous poem is not original at all but a send-up of poet William Carlos Williams’s thenpopular “This is Just to Say.” Koch’s version, “Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams,” takes Williams’ disingenuous narrator a step

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further. In Williams’ poem, the narrator is apologizing to someone else for eating the plums that were not his and belonged to that someone else. His apology goes like this: “Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold” (Williams, n.d.). Koch’s narrator has to apologize for grand indiscretions, such as chopping down a house (not his house), spraying flowers with lye (not his flowers), giving away money (not his money), and breaking a leg (not his own). Despite its silliness, or perhaps because of it, it remains Koch’s most enduring poem. It is not surprising then, to see Dean Young, a poet who was weaned on the silly, irreverent, and yet touching poems of Ashbery and Koch, and whose most famous book (one that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), features an elegy to Koch, be described by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic like this: Although his work comes out of the poetries of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and James Tate, Young has his own voice. The language, the invention, the imagination and the sheer fun of his poems is astounding. It’s not all dazzle either. The poems are also moving. This man reminds us that there is nothing more serious than a joke. (qtd. in Academy of American Poetry, n.d.)

Young’s elegy for Koch is a case in point. It begins “You don’t need a pony / to connect you to the unseeable / or an airplane to connect you to the sky” (2012, p. 59). After saying it is necessary to die, the speaker turns to say “Necessary it is to love to live / and there are many manuals / but in all important ways / one is one’s own” (p. 59). Two stanzas later, the speaker twists the previous reference to living and dying: “Necessary it is to live to love, / to charge into the burning tower / then charge back out / and necessary it is to die” (p. 59). In the second-tolast stanza, Koch is called “the great poet” who, with cancerous sores in his mouth, “struggles with a dumpling” (p. 59). The final three lines, in characteristic Youngian wisdom, end like this: “When something becomes ash, / there’s nothing you can do to turn it back. / About this, even diamonds do not lie” (p. 60). Unsurprisingly, in an age of diminishing attentions, or ever-bifurcated, split, refracted attentions, Young’s poetry is very well liked, especially within the narrow field of contemporary poetry. In the only article to inquire as to why, poet and critic Tony Hoagland (2009) calls Young “the contemporary avatar of avant-garde populism” (p. 29), which is a fancy way to say he embodies principles of modernism,

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surrealism, and other avant-garde isms, but splits the difference with pop culture, idioms, and humor. The point of Hoagland’s article was to understand why so many young poets were writing like Young. A generation of MFA candidates were obsessed with Youngian poetry and their work showed it. According to Hoagland, Young’s poems “gratify the expectations of both art and entertainment” and satisfy both “the theoretical crowd and the hot-dog baseball-fans poetry crowd,” but, he adds, Young is more Romantic than surrealist (pp. 29–30). He believes in the poem-asevent, says Hoagland, like a good surrealist should, but ultimately revels in “the individual imagination, the opposition of the individual to mass society, the divinity of nature,” and more (p. 30). It has been remarked that Young writes a lot about the heart, both that object in a body and that subject in romance, an evincer of heart-things, and that is true, but unlike other poets, his obsession with the heart is personal. ∗ ∗ ∗ Nietzsche’s dietary regime and that of Proust and Kafka, are also forms of writing, and they understand it as such; eating-speaking, writing-loving, you will never catch a flux all on its own. —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, in Dialogues (1987, p. 122)

Zarathustra. Read the subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2016) and it is impossible not to think of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of multiplicity. A book for all and none, is what he called it, or a book for everybody and nobody. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that very few copies were sold (then, of course, not now, when many copies are sold each year to students at colleges the world over). The performative aspects of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus surely would not have been possible if it weren’t for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, nor were many of the pair’s ideas that are embodied in the title character. Speaking of the body, for example, the mad poet calls it “a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 23), clearing space, in a sense, for the body without organs. Robert B. Pippin, in the introduction to a 2006 Cambridge University edition, writes about the difficulty with interpreting the book, or saying what it is actually about, which in part explains why it was popular with German soldiers in WWII even though he, and likely us, too, cannot think of “a book less suitable

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for such purpose” (pp. x–xi). Thus Spoke Zarathrustra is difficult to interpret because Zarathustra embodies that multiplicity in dizzying hyperbole and contradiction: he is a god, maybe, a prophet possibly, and yet is “chronically indecisive, sometimes self-pitying, wandering, speechifying, dancing about and encouraging others to dance, consorting mostly with animals, confused disciples, a dwarf, and his two mistresses”; moreover, he makes incomprehensible speeches with “references to bees overloaded with honey, soothsayers, gravediggers, bursting coffins, pale criminals, red judges, self-propelling wheels, shepherds choking on snakes, tarantulas,” and more (p. xi). Importantly, Nietzsche considered the book to be not philosophy but music (p. xi), an insistence, really, in Deleuzian terms, and he was not quiet about it, announcing in the preface, “Beware! Something utterly wicked and mischievous is being announced here: incipit parodia [parody begins], no doubt” (qtd. in Pippin, p. xii). The book is philosophy, possibly tragedy, certainly fiction (a novel?), and a parody, both a difficult and prophetic book and a send-up of such genres, says Pippin (p. xii). He is multiple and this is why it is impossible to interpret because it is irreducible. Presumably, this is why he says, “Sleeping is no mean art, it is necessary to remain awake the entire day for it” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 18). The book is important for scholarship and is particularly interesting for art education because all the way back in 1994, Elliot Eisner proposed that novels (fictional texts) be allowed to count as dissertations in the field, which is to say a legitimate form of scholarship, and the debate has not yet been resolved. It is hard to believe, though, that a text such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, if submitted as a dissertation in a department of Philosophy, would be rejected. Howard Gardner, a psychologist, disagreed with Eisner, saying that he, too, believed that what counts as research could be expanded, but ultimately he couldn’t conceptualize the novel as part of that expansion. “Essentially,” he says, “in a novel you can say what you want, and you are judged by how effectively you said it without any particular regard to truth value” whereas, he thinks, “the essence of research is effort, however stumbling, to find out as carefully as you can what’s happening and then to report it accurately” (qtd. in Saks, 1996, p. 403). Eisner responded by pointing to the ability of fiction, or any art form, to capture the “essence” of things, such as what it feels like to be someone else, whether in prison or a school or, in the case of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an associate professor; adding, “I don’t want to excommunicate those forms which we in fact use in our culture to advance our understanding” (qtd. in Saks, p. 404). The seed was planted by Eisner

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and arts-based educational research has tried to cultivate it while calling upon the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, but to no avail; still, we stay tied to representation and communication and perhaps have not looked closely enough at Zarathustra. Nietzsche pits the creative one against the ones who follow and enforce the rules. Which ones are we?

References Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). Dean Young. https://poets.org/poet/deanyoung American Civil Liberties Union. (2013). Unleashed and unaccountable: The Fbi’s unchecked abuse of authority. https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-una ccountable-fbis-unchecked-abuse-authority Ashbery, J. (1975). Self-portrait in a convex mirror. Penguin. Bachelder, C. (2004, October 1). A soldier upon a hard campaign. Believer Magazine. https://believermag.com/a-soldier-upon-a-hard-campaign/ BBC. (2021, March 12). What are NFTs and why are some worth millions? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56371912 Brinnin, J. M. (1975, August 10). The deliberate lies down with the random. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/10/archives/the-del iberate-lies-down-with-the-random-selfportrait-in-a-convex.html Carruth, S. (2004). Primer [film]. StudioCanal. Charlotte. (1956, May 31). Office memorandum, United States government. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2191031-bmcfbifile.html Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). University of Minnesota. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.). Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2006). The actual and the virtual. In G. Deleuze & C. Parnet (Eds.), Dialogues II (E. R. Albert, Trans.). Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). Columbia University.

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Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting lives (D. Glassman, Trans.). Columbia University. FBI. (n.d.) Mission and priorities. https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission Gilles Deleuze. (2018). Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.sta nford.edu/entries/deleuze/ Hermsen, T., & Morrow, S. (2008). Aces in the Deck: Four principles for assessing and strengthening student poems. Teaching Artist Journal, 6(1), 20–34. Heusden, E. V., Rolfs, M., Cavanagh, P., & Hogendoorn, H. (2018). Motion extrapolation for eye movements predicts perceived motion-induced position shifts. Journal of Neuroscience, 38, 8243–8250. https://doi.org/10.1523/ JNEUROSCI.0736-18.2018 Hoagland, T. (2009). The Dean Young effect: “Regard the twists of the bugle/that yield one clear clarion.” American Poetry Review, 38(4), 29–33. Le Bon, G. (1903). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. T. Fisher Unwin. Malick, T. (1998). The Thin Red Line [film]. Fox. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge. Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A book for all and none (A. D. Caro, Trans.). Cambridge. NPR. (2012, February 14). The history of the FBI’s secret ‘enemies’ list. https:// www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862081/the-history-of-the-fbis-secret-ene mies-list O’Neill, E. (2015, November 19). Why is the Unicorn Scotland’s national animal? The Scotsman. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/why-uni corn-scotlands-national-animal-1489215 Pampillonio, C., & Krivchenia, C. (n.d.). FBI Investigations at BMC. Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center. https://www.blackmountainco llege.org/fbi-investigations-bmc/ Persons, R. (2009). General Orders No. 9 [film]. Variance. Pliny the Elder. (1855). The natural history (J. Bostock & H. T. Riley, Trans.). Taylor & Francis. Saks, A. L. (1996). Viewpoints: Should research count as dissertations in education? Research in the Teaching of English, 30(4), 403–427. Seem, M. (1983). Introduction. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), AntiOedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota. Simon, M. (2015, February 4). The weird, Kinda perverted history of the Unicorn. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2015/02/fantastically-wrong-uni corn/ Sontag, S. (2005). On photography. Rosetta Books. St. Pierre, E. A. . (2016). Chapter one: Curriculum for new material, new empirical inquiry. Counterpoints, 501, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857. 2016.1151761

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St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1080–1089. The Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). Kenneth Koch. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poets/kenneth-koch Time, n., int., conj. (2021). Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, H., & Burchell, G. (1994). Translator’s introduction. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), What is philosophy? Columbia University. Tomlinson, H., & Galeta, R. (1989). Translator’s introduction. In G. Deleuze (Ed.), Cinema 2: The time-image. University of Minnesota. Waters, E. (2013). Zoological analysis of the Unicorn as described by classical authors. Archeometriai M˝ uhely, X , 231–236. http://www.ace.hu/am/ 2013_3/AM-13-03-EW.pdf Williams, W. C. (n.d.). This is just to say. The Poetry Foundation. https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/56159/this-is-just-to-say Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf. Young, D. (2012). Bender: New and selected poems. Copper Canyon.

CHAPTER 5

Of ABER & Essai

A Major Aim ABER goes by many names, including arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Barone, 2006; Eisner, 1993; Eisner, 1996), artsinformed research (Cole et al., 2007), A/r/tography (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004), and practice-based research (Candlin, 2000). Beneath these ABER methodologies—and they are separate methodologies, each advocating slightly different methods (ways of proceeding), and each pulling from slightly different literature (from Dewey to Deleuze)—is a belief about knowledge. Elliot Eisner (2008) suggests knowing over knowledge because it’s a verb, it implies action (p. 4), and it embraces the “fact” that we may never nail down the “truth” but instead raise new questions and possibilities (p. 7). It should go without saying, but I’ll say it, that I stand firmly with this view. At other times, though, Eisner is conservative, choosing literal over nonliteral forms (p. 9). There again is this idea that the art created must be able to say something (make a proposition), a literal something, must communicate (one of the criticisms leveled by jagodzinski and Wallin, and now Morrow). Sullivan (2010) sums up the various strands like this: Arts-based researchers… are generally interested in improving our understanding of schooling and how the arts can reveal important insights about

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_5

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learning and teaching. Arts-informed researchers, Artographers, and the like have similar interest in schools, but their focus is on developing the practitioner-researcher who is capable of imaginative and insightful inquiry. Practice-based researcher (also known as practice-led research) is a term more commonly used in visual arts programs in higher education where studio art practice is being reconceptualized as questions about degree programs beyond the MFA are addressed. (pp. 20–21)

Eisner’s (1993) call to action supports Sullivan’s statement that arts-based research is about schooling. “The major aim, we must not forget,” wrote Eisner then, “has to do with the African American children with whom I worked on Chicago’s West Side at the beginning of my career. It has to do with the improvement of educational practice so that the lives of those who teach and learn are themselves enhanced” (p. 10). Rita Irwin’s1 (2004) introduction to A/r/tography, on the other hand, supports Sullivan’s claims that a/r/tography is about the self of the researcher. The subtitle of the book and the movement, after all, is “Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry.” “A/r/tography,” writes Irwin, “is a living practice of art, research, and teaching: a living mettisage; a life-writing, life-creating experience… Through attention to memory, identity, reflection, meditation, storytelling, interpretation, and representation, the artists/writers/teachers… are searching for new ways to understand their practices as artists, researchers, and teachers” (Irwin, 2004, p. 34). Fiona Candlin (2000) writes about practice-based doctorates—and blurring the boundaries between researcher and artist—which supports Sullivan’s definition of practice-led research, and which places it firmly within conversations of the studio-based PhD. Sullivan also notes the geographic differences. Practice-led research, for instance, is found among conversations in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, whereas the others are found (or at least founded) primarily in North America (p. 21). Overall, though, Sullivan (2010) says that the visual turn of art education research entails two main threads: (1) arts-based research and (2) arts-informed research and a/r/tography, the latter two being

1 Irwin also maintains a database of a/r/tography books, articles, theses, and dissertations at https://artography.edcp.educ.ubc.ca/?page_id=77. The most recent work is cataloged here: https://artography.edcp.educ.ubc.ca/?page_id=1485. The use of terms like “encounter” and “becoming” are commonly used but not done.

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lumped together and practiced heavily in Canada. For Sullivan, artsbased research, developed by Eisner with Tome Barone, is “a loose, collective term” applied to “educational inquiry that is grounded in the aesthetics of art and language, as hybrid and artistic practices, and as an embodied cultural practice” (p. 55). Eisner’s original idea, coming out the ‘70s, was akin to anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1973) “thick description,” privileging the researcher’s senses— “seeing and sensing is the basis for compiling thematic patterns of evidence from which meaning is made vivid” (Sullivan, p. 56). Eisner with Barone, Sullivan writes, later envisioned ABER as “the multiplicity of ways of encountering and representing experience through the arts and the use of forms of expression and representation that effectively communicate research outcomes in new ways” (p. 56). They, like me, have defined “research” flexibly, to mean “to return again and again in order to shed light on some phenomena of interest” (2012, p. 54). And they define the “art” of arts-based research to include stories and images and films “that will enable percipients… to raise important questions about the conditions under which human beings live” (p. 52). In speaking about a specific arts-based research project, they are quick to point out that there’s “a very specific purpose” that is “not simply to delight, as important as that might be, but to produce a disequilibrium in the reader or viewer—that is, to enable someone to ‘get a feel’ for a set of phenomena that calls into question previously held perceptions and understandings of that phenomena” (p. 51), implying perhaps the essay as a natural way to ABER. Patricia Leavy (2015) provides a nice if informal introduction to ABER, too, with her book Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. She notes what the other writers have noted, too: the “enormous growth in ABR over the past several years alone,” which has caused a plethora of different terms that mean the same thing (p. 5). To solve the language problem, Leavy used “the umbrella category” of arts-based research (p. 5). “Arts-based research practices,” she writes, are a set of methodological tools used by researchers across the disciplines during all phases of social research, including data generation, analysis, interpretation, and representation. These emerging tools adapt the tenets of the creative arts in order to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined. Arts based research draws on literary writing, music, dance, performance, visual art, film, and other mediums. (p. 4)

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The other thread within the visual turn is what comes out of Canada: arts-informed research and a/r/tography. Arts-informed research projects “take their cues from what artists do” (Sullivan, p. 58). A/r/tography was introduced by Rita Irwin et al. in 2001 but expanded in her book (edited with de Cosson) a/r/tography: Rendering Self Through Arts-Based Living Inquiry. In the foreword, William F. Pinar described a/r/tography as the space where “knowing, doing, and making merge.” Irwin (n.d.) has defined the practice as this: a/r/tography means to inquire in the world through an ongoing process of art making in any artform and writing not separate or illustrative of each other but interconnected and woven through each other to create additional and/or enhanced meanings. A/r/tographical work are often rendered through the methodological concepts of contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations and excess which are enacted and presented/performed when a relational aesthetic inquiry condition is envisioned as embodied understandings and exchanges between art and text, and between and among the broadly conceived identities of artist/researcher/teacher.

Irwin (2004) writes that “[t]o live the life of an artist who is also a researcher and teacher is to live a life of awareness, a life that permits openness to complexity around us, a life that intentionally set out to perceive things differently” (p. 33), which is all well and good, but then she links this kind of living inquiry with action research, which jagodzinski confirms in his follow-up critique of a/r/tography (2017, p. 273). She sees theory broadly: it “includes textual discussions and analyses set within and/or alongside visual imagery of educational phenomena and/or performance” (p. 32). The basic tenet (perhaps the place from which she started, though the movement has taken off) is what she said in that last line: the identities of artist, researcher, and teacher are interconnected, and thus cannot be separated. A/r/tography is the way Irwin et al. see the world, see their lives. Irwin and Springgay (2008) say that a/r/tography is a methodology built on the Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome—“an assemblage that moves and flows in dynamic momentum…by variation, perverse mutation, and flows of intensities that penetrate meaning, opening it to what Jacques Derrida (1978) called the ‘as yet unnamable which begins to proclaim itself’” (p. xx). They wish to take theory back from the theorists and put it back where it belongs—with practice (p. xx). To the a/r/tographers, “theory is understood as a critical

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exchange that is reflective, responsive, relational, which is continuously in a state of reconstruction and becoming something else altogether” (p. xx). Instead of calling it arts-based research, they called it “practicebased research” (p. xxi) that is “informed by feminist, post-structuralist, hermeneutic and other postmodern theories that understand the production of knowledge as difference thereby producing different ways of living in the world” (p. xxi). They cite Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), who wrote about new ways of knowing that invite us to “acknowledge the existence of forms of knowing that escape the efforts of language to reference a ‘consensual’, ‘literal’, ‘real’ world” (qtd. in Irwin and Springgay, 2008, p. xxii). They cite Graeme Sullivan’s (2005) call for research that moves “beyond probability and plausibility to possibility” (qtd. in Irwin and Springgay, 2008, p. xxiii). To explain a/r/tography, Irwin and Stephanie Springgay define its six concepts (“renderings”): contiguity (overlapping, folding, writing, artmaking, the in-between), living inquiry (ongoing, iterative), metaphor/metonymy (to make sense of the world anew), openings (as opposed to informing others), reverberations (shifting understanding of the artographers and audience), and excess (the “as yet unnamable”) (pp. xxix–xxx). According to J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole (2008), “Arts-informed research,” on the other hand, “is a mode and form of qualitative research in the social sciences that is influenced by, but not based in, the arts broadly conceived. The central purposes of arts-informed research are to enhance understanding of the human condition through alternative (to conventional) processes and representational forms of inquiry, and to reach multiple audiences by making scholarship more accessible” (p. 59, emphasis mine). The arts-informed methodology combines the following elements: a commitment to a particular artform; a methodological integrity; a creative inquiry process; a presence of the researcher; a strong reflexive quality (but the researcher is not the focus); and a broad audience (p. 61). In other words, researchers use one art (that they know well) to investigate a phenomenon that they will report to an audience beyond academia. But the focus is on the phenomenon, not on the research. Arts-informed research is linked to practice-based research, for which Smith and Dean (2009) advocate because of its becoming, its “bi-directional focus” that can be written as “practice-led research” or “research-led practice” (p. 1). They also stay open to questions: “what is knowledge, what is research and how can we understand the creative process?” (p. 1). They advocate for research that “needs to be treated,

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not monolithically, but as an activity which can appear in a variety of guises across the spectrum of practice and research” (p. 3). They see ways in which research may be conducted independent of the creative process but later applied to it (without knowing, of course, whilst conducting the research, how or even if the research will bear fruit); research undertaken for the specific purpose of “shaping an artwork”; or research on the other end: “the documentation, theorisation and conceptualisation of an artwork—and the process of making it” (p. 3). On the subject, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean (2009) make two arguments: “that creative work in itself is a form of research and generates detectable research outputs” and “that creative practice—the training and specialised knowledge that creative practitioners have and the processes they engage in when they are making art—can lead to specialised research insights, conceptualisation and theorisation which can arise when artists reflect on and document their own creative practice” (p. 5). What they really get, too, is that each is undertaken with its own purpose. Writing a novel, for instance, even though it may require extensive research and synthesis of information, some of which may be contradictory,2 ultimately does not wish to say something social or political or the like. This is not to say that it cannot say those things, for clearly it can (think of the novels by James Baldwin or William Faulkner). This is just to say that the goal is not to say those things. The goal, first and foremost, is to write a novel—is to engage language in such a way as to tell a well-written and developed story with style and grace. This basic underlying philosophy of practice-led research (or research-led practice), then, sets it on much firmer ground than a/r/tography (which leans toward social justice and self-actualization) and arts-based research (which leans toward arguments about the schoolroom), wherein the boundary is slippery—although they are all speaking the language of essai, violences and encounters that have the potential (energy) to shift us from one into another without making one into the other. Barbara Bolt says that out of the making process can arise “a very specific kind of knowing, a knowing that arises through handling materials in practice” (qtd. in Smith and Dean, p. 6). She calls this “praxical knowledge”—“its insights, she argues, can induce a ‘shift in thought’” (qtd. in Smith in Dean, p. 6). Bolt, like Smith and Dean, like many ABERs, allows us to envision scholarship that combines the 2 Louis Aragon: “Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real” (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 141).

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creative and the critical, that allows for “two different ways of working… a process driven one, and a goal-oriented one”—although “these two ways of working are by no means entirely separate from each other and often interact” (p. 23). Jane Goodall (2009)—not the anthropologist—is most articulate about the difference between writer and researcher, about how the goals differ, about how her novelist-self is not her academic self. She quotes Norman Mailer who lamented that one of his novels was being controlled by his research, not by his creative self. “I had been strangling the life of my novel,” he wrote (qtd., p. 205). Goodall says that the plethora of variables at work in good fiction make it impervious to the normal research-led approach of the creative process that others advocate (p. 205). The same is true for poetry, as Dean Young attests. When Mailer finally let go of the research, he wrote “The book had come alive in my brain” (qtd. in Goodall, p. 205). Goodall says “if research has taught me anything about the creative process itself… it is that fiction writing requires a finely calibrated balance between conscious planning and improvisatory caprice” (pp. 205–206). Recall Dean Young (2010): “Prescription and intention are traps. Any intention in the writing of poetry other than to engage the materials SHOULD be disappointed” (p. 4). Like Dean and Smith, Goodall notices a shaky boundary between practice-led and research-led works. But she also sees that creative work is first and foremost about the creative work. At any moment, the writer must be ready to abandon prior intention in favor of what the artwork is beginning to signal. Goodall’s fiction is based on historical research—and it is the same kind of historical research that she does in her academic post—but the goals are different. Incompatible even. “I’ve been learning,” she writes, “that the spooky art of fiction writing involves a commitment to improvisation and randomness, a submission to the erasure of authorial design, a readiness to be mesmerised by place and possessed by psychological energies from competing directions” (p. 207). Although research is necessary—for “there’s a need to know about the work of others and to build up a density of such knowledge” and research “can actually serve to calibrate awareness of the psychological displacements required to keep the work alive and manage its energies” (p. 207)—it is a different kind of research. She cheekily calls it “research lite” (p. 201) to draw the distinction.

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A Minor Aim In art education, jan jagodzinski has devoted some of his career to overturning baseness of thought in art education. In the article, “A Response to: ‘Deconstructing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for Music Education,” for example, jagodzinski challenges Estelle Jorgensen and Iris M. Yob’s superficial reading of A Thousand Plateaus. jagodzinski takes it upon himself to write a critique of their misreading, saying reading their article “has been a very painful experience, ‘painful’ in the sense the way their text ‘screams’ at them for their outright poetic mystifications, which many scholars have relished but which certainly causes them great consternation” (2016, p. 101). For some reason, Jorgensen and Yob feel threatened by Deleuze and Guattari’s tone instead of feeling, as was intended by the authors, affirmed and freed in a sense toward new possibilities, toward a kind of thinking unencumbered by cliché. jagodzinski also takes issue with how the two authors present their critique, which they describe bafflingly as an attempt “to preserve what is helpful in their work” (qtd., p. 101). jagodzinski’s retort is “thank heavens there are those who will ‘rescue’ Deleuze|Guattari from themselves and ‘preserve’ what is most useful for music education!” (p. 101). Although the authors claim to assess Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to music education and the implications for future contributions, they, per jagodzinski, do no such thing, leaving him to ask “whether they have indeed ‘read’ Deleuze|Guattari at all, for they present such a crude reading of this work, more as a play with the book’s index rather than engaging directly with any of the concepts that are offered in any significant way other than as farcical dismissals” (p. 102). What he says next is especially important and relevant for the field of art education, whose practitioners should understand theories before trying to put them to work in journal articles: “Their essay is a sad reminder that such essays are published on the pretense that academics, and now academic music educators, do not have to engage with such difficult reading material”8a (p. 102). This reminds me of a colleague who recently said that he will teach summaries of Kant’s texts to his undergraduates instead of the texts in themselves, to which I politely replied: the point is not to understand Kant but the hard work of trying to understand Kant. That is precisely the point of learning, wherein the brain fails miserably to comprehend what Kant means about the faculties, landing somewhere in the vicinity of “getting” his point, and thus being able to talk and possibly write about those difficult ideas concretely

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in relation to landscapes and artworks in the reader’s current world. This is precisely where ideas pick up speed, in St. Pierre’s estimation. With that same astute criticism, jagodzinski, this time with Wallin, wrote a critique and a proposal for the future of Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER), called aptly “Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal.” Charles Garoian (2013), in an endorsement that serves as the introduction or abstract to the book, provides this perfectly succinct summary: jagodzinski and Wallin make a compelling argument for blurring the boundaries of arts-based research in the field of art education. The authors contend that the radical ideas of leading scholars in the field are not radical enough due to their reliance on existing research ontologies and those that end in epistemological representations. In contrast, they propose arts-based research as the event of ontological immanence, an incipient, machinic process of becoming-research through arts practice that enables seeing and thinking in irreducible ways while resisting normalization and subsumption under existing modes of address. As such, arts practice, as research-in-the making, constitutes a betrayal of prevailing cultural assumptions, according to the authors, an interminable renouncement of normalized research representations in favor of the contingent problematic that emerges during arts practice. (p. vii)

jagodzinski and Wallin criticize ABER because they love ABER, because “another direction is required to continue to make its promises possible” (2013, p. 2). One of their main goals is “to develop the line of flight for arts-based research that builds on the performative machinic understanding of the arts, incorporating the view that art should not be theorized as an object but re-theorized as an event that first emerged with the avant-garde but remains suppressed” (p. 3). “Our quarrel with a/r/tography,” they write, “is not that it isn’t radical in relation to the state of the field of arts-based research, but that it is not radical enough” (p. 76). One problem with arts-based research, they say, is that it embodies the image of thought criticized by Deleuze “that effectively stops people from thinking ” (p. 4). The image in arts-based research is rooted in friendship—“under the banner of mutual goodwill ” (p. 4). The authors say that Deleuze (2000)—borrowing this idea from Proust— lamented the “order of thought… that would assure agreement between minds” (qtd., p. 4). In other words, “the goodwill shared between friends is insufficient to apprehend a radical ‘outside thought’ that forces us to

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think” (p. 4), a phenomenon that anyone who has been to an NAEA convention has witnessed. On the other side of this thought-blockage is violence. Recall that Deleuze wrote: “thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it” (qtd., p. 5). jagodzinski and Wallin see their book as a kind of betrayal, but a positive betrayal in the style of affirmation—a necessary betrayal that will shock the system away from complacency and perhaps toward thinking. They quote Deleuze: “The truth is [never] revealed… it is betrayed” (p. 5). The authors wish to shock the “representational lethargy” from which arts-based research suffers (p. 5) in order to find something radically other than the voluntary movement of memory (reflection), the application of representational matrices (transcendence), or the deployment of laws known prior to that which they apply (morality). It is via the act of the necessity of thinking that founds truth so that it may be unleashed from that which we have already discovered, given ourselves, or derived from an image set out in advance. (p. 5)

jagodzinski and Wallin suggest that we must double-cross common sense in order to create the new image (p. 7). For ABERs such as myself, if indeed this is ABER or a form/force of it, the betrayal “would entail shuttering the conventions of the field in such a way as to make strange the very prospect of what arts-based research might be capable of doing ” (emphasis on the -ing ), so that “arts-based research might become a place for the fabulation of a-people-yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which there exists no prior image, narrative, or transcendent organizing myth” (p. 7). When it breaks away from common sense, “art assumes its most non-representational force” (p. 7). When it breaks from non-representational forces, as they say Matthew Barney does to it in the Cremaster (2003) cycle, art eviscerates contemporary myths and tropes on its way to someplace new. So too, art as such—and artsbased researchers who practice in this vein—has the capacity to break from communication, one of the problems of the contemporary moment (p. 9), to “will a belief capable of unleashing the potentials of a life” (p. 9), of force, not representation, which is static (i.e., death). The curse of communication and representation “effectively limit what might be thought and what might yet become” (p. 9). Borrowing from Deleuze, they write that the artist (and arts-based researcher) must overcome a

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belief in this world in favor of “new images capable of releasing potentials in the world without necessitating that they conform to an image of the world as it is given” (p. 10). Regarding art, and cinema in particular, the authors point to Todd Haynes, who has rewritten what is with his anti-genealogical films I’m Not There (2007), in which Bob Dylan is created through several historical personae, including Woodie Guthrie (played by a young African American boy) and the sell-out folksinger Jude Quinn (played by the actress Cate Blanchett), and Velvet Goldmine (1998), in which the protagonist both is and is not David Bowie. The authors theorize this for ABER as “new questions, kinds of expression, or terms of subjectivity” (p. 13) that cannot be found in auto-ethnography (fixated on the personal, fixed, “real” self), which is what comprises the majority of ABER, and other representational research. By stressing becoming over being, effectively doing away with the subject/object binary (e.g., obsessed with the question “What is acting on what?”), artsbased researchers could potentially enter a post-human space in which they are “one ‘object’ among many” (p. 17) and—what jagodzinski and Wallin keep returning to—monumental in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, i.e., above and beyond but within, both/and. The authors via Gilbert Simondon remind us that “[e]very individual that emerges is an event” (p. 24), the individual is not, as constructivists say, pre-specified. Simondon introduced “preindividual singularity” in which the individual is not produced by someone or something but rather produces itself by a series of connections with the physical, biological, technical, and social, “forming ‘milieu’ within the individual itself as an event” (p. 24), which is the best way to describe art education for a people yet to come. In this respect, the individual is creation. In this respect, ABER could create an event that always differs from itself, forming a series of connections with the world in which it is becoming, an encounter, which is “a field of effects from which the creation of something new and unforeseen has yet to be determined” (p. 35). Art and its education, they add, “thought in this way, as encounter that is the event of becoming, and hence of ‘learning,’ emphasizes ‘doing’ rather than ‘knowing.’ Art research as ‘doing’” (p. 41). In addition to addressing some of what jagodzinski and Wallin propose, this book seeks to answer O’Donoghue’s

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(2009) questions about ABER. In “Are We Asking the Wrong Questions in Arts-Based Research?”,3 he asks us to shift our focus from philosophers to artists because the “proliferation and celebration of these theories/philosophies…limit the way art is imagined” (p. 353). He poses three questions: 1. How do arts-based research processes, products, and theoretical orientations connect with those in the professional fields of the arts? 2. How might a close, critical, and deeply contextual analysis of the work and work practices of artists advance, develop, and enhance understandings, theories, and practices of arts-based research? 3. What types of questions, challenges, and concerns might such an analysis of artists’ work and their work practices raise for arts-based researchers? (p.353) There has been much talk of philosophers, true; and there has been much talk of artists, true; but, as jagodzinski and Wallin say, there has not yet been enough doing.

A Thing Done Most contemporary sources trace the essay form back to Michel de Montaigne, who used the Middle French “essai”—“to test, to attempt, to experiment”—to describe his writings (D’Agata, 2014a). In the introduction to The Next American Essay, John D’Agata (2003), the editor and a creative nonfiction force himself, begs readers: “please do not consider these ‘nonfictions’” (p. 1). Instead, he says, “I want you preoccupied with art in this book, not with facts for the sake of facts” (p. 1). He goes on to dispel the myths about the word fact, which derives from the Latin word factum—“literally ‘a thing done’” (p. 1). D’Agata reminds us that the words “artifice” and “counterfeit,” among others, also come from the same root (p. 1). For good measure, he then quotes Emerson: “There are no facts, only art.”4 For D’Agata (2014a), the essay is “an art form 3 Yes. 4 This is reminiscent of a quotation, often attributed to Nietzsche, the gist of which is

that there are no facts, only interpretation. Likely this comes from Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche goes to great lengths to distinguish between facts that have been attributed to God and religious texts and the interpretations behind them.

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that tracks the evolution of consciousness as it rolls over the folds of a new idea, memory, or emotion.” For Deleuze by way of Leibniz: “The subject ‘becomes’ within the folds of matter” (qtd. in Richardson, 2017a, p. 99). John D’Agata (2014a) is the contemporary champion of the essay form5 —with all its slippery truthiness and questioning. “For me,” says D’Agata, “a ‘lie’ is something that feels incorrect on the page.” Ignoring others’ definitions of truth and fiction, D’Agata says that “if I can move through a text without wondering whether or not what I’m reading is ‘real,’ then that text has done its job of capturing the truthfulness of whatever it is that it’s exploring. And that’s what I’m looking for when I’m immersed in a literary experience.” On the other hand, he says, opposite the essay, are news articles and textbooks and instructions, which do not offer—and the reader does not expect—a literary experience. “I want every fact in those texts to have been verified multiple times,” he says, adding that “we do the literary essay a disservice, however, when we expect from it the same kind of verifiability as we would from a medical text book.” Despite the trouble of labels, D’Agata (2014b) reco-opted “the beautiful gangly breadth of this unnameable literary form,” noting that “nomenclature, while often limiting, polarizing, inadequate, and always stupid, can also be the thing that opens up our genre to new possibilities and new paths of inquiry, helping us to shape our experiences in the world in ways we have not yet imagined” (pp. 9–10). In a sense, he is talking about the Deleuzian AND. The essay could be the AND tool for scholarship. Recall that Deleuze himself says that he can write only on the boundary between knowing and non-knowing—“it is there that one

5 Force is a more appropriate word than form. The essay force. jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) write that an arts-based research for a people yet to come could “overturn a culture of consensus born from an overdose of common sense,” replacing that with “a way of thinking art that does not begin with form, but rather, with force” (p. 8). The five-paragraph high-school essay is a form; the scholarship essay could be a force. An old story about a Raymond Carver teaching a writing workshop called “form and theory.” After weeks of meetings, a student raised his hand and a little defiantly asked Carver when he was planning to teach form and theory because all it seemed like they had been doing was reading and discussing. Carver took a deep draw on his cigarette—he always had one handy—and replied that they had been doing that all along. “We read the stories and we form our theories,” he said. In a sense, the student assumed that knowledge could be transferred from the professor to the pupil. Carver, an artist, not a student, was oblivious to such a mandate.

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must settle in order to have something to say” (qtd. in Boutang, 2011). In that interview, Deleuze added: If I wait to know what I am going to write—literally, if I wait to know what I am talking about—then I will always have to wait and what I have to say will have no interest. If I do not run a risk, if I settle and also speak with a scholarly air about something I don’t know, then this is also without interest. But I am speaking about the very border between knowing and non-knowing. It is there that one must settle in order to have something to say. (qtd. in Boutang, 2011)

By challenging and then re-defining what is the essay, D’Agata has singlehandedly assembled its canon. Called A New History of the Essay, and spanning three volumes, this new canon includes Heraclitus, Plutarch, Seneca, Basho, Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, Natalia Ginzburg, Samuel Beckett, Anne Bradstreet, Washington Irving, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, Susan Steinberg, Sherman Alexie, and Susan Sontag (who was upset upon initially hearing that her short story “Unguided Tour” was being included in The Next American Essay), among others. His list includes what many others would call novelists and poets, not essayists, but categorization, he says, fails by genre. The essay is the in-between. Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” (1991) is another commonly cited text on the literary essay that provides an introduction to its history and definitions. In general, says Adorno, the essay “does not let its domain be prescribed for it” (p. 4). Unlike other forms that have strict rules, the essayist stops writing not when “there is nothing to say” but “when it feels finished” (p. 4). “The essay,” he says, “does not play by the rules” (p. 10), “challenging inducible certainty” (p. 14). The essay “proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically” (p. 13). The essay can be art and be about art (p. 5). The essay is marked by violence (p. 7) and nontraditional ideas of truth (p. 11). The essay “allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (p. 9). Along with Adorno, Lukas, too, defined the essay “as indeterminate, open, and, ultimately, indefinable” (Rascaroli, 2008, p.25).

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Not Necessarily Truth is often defined in narrow terms as “what happened,” despite the fact that many people watching an event, for instance, often cannot come to a consensus on what is happening or what has happened. Moreover, truth is often delivered in language, on the page or from the mouth. As Jack Richardson (2017b) rightly points out, referring to Deleuze, language “is already once removed from the encounter itself” (p. 118). Truth, then, is shackled to the subject, giving them the absolute power over what is and is not true. The pre-subjective experience, having already passed, though, is completely without a voice, calling into question any writing about the truth. This way of thinking about writing is taken up in creative nonfiction and film with the essay. David Shields tackles this problem in his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, with which he hoped to start a revolution. “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time,” he writes, “is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the works of art” (Shields, 2010, p. 3). What we have in any artistic movement is a mixture—the was and the will be, the smooth and the striated, with more of the will be sprinkled in as the artist gains power. Shields thinks literature has been sickened, mostly by the outsiders, by the current wave of truth officers policing nonfiction. The entire book is made up of quotations, some by Shields, without quotation marks or attribution. The appendix includes a list of sources for readers so inclined to the facts of the matter, but likely the appendix defeats the purpose. Shields relies on writers like Zola (“Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes” (p. 3) and Nabokov (“Reality…is the one word that is meaningless without quotations marks” [p. 4]) to drive home his point that the book is an “ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a multitude of forms and media… who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work” (p. 3). Unsurprisingly, some quotes date back centuries. This is not a new conversation. He names graffiti, film, and the lyric essay, among other artistic endeavors, and one of the key components as “a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real” (p. 5). The cult of reality, in other words, should give way because, after all, we have championed a blurring between the actual and the virtual for centuries, from Thucydides through Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). We have no trouble knowing that Lee’s movie is

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fiction—he wrote these lines, created these characters—while simultaneously knowing it is not fiction. Oscar Wilde was acquitted of “lewd and immoral” behavior because the court relied on childish (per Kushner) divisions of the real and the possible: Court: Mr. Wilde, why should a man your age address a boy nearly twenty years younger as “My Own Boy”? Wilde: I was fond of him; I have always been fond of him. Court: Do you adore him? Wilde: No, but I have always liked him. I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. You might as well crossexamine me as to whether a sonnet of Shakespeare were proper. Court: Apart from art, Mr. Wilde. Wilde: I cannot answer apart from art. (qtd. in D’Agata 2003, p. 181)

Sudden Insights Intact Another package for the essay force is film, or cinema. Deleuze (1989) argues that cinema, overall, is dying, and that the cinema of representation leads us into “blood-red arbitrariness”6 (p. 164). Like Artaud, following Artaud, he argues for avoiding two pitfalls: “abstract experimental cinema” and “commercial figurative cinema” (p. 167). Essentially, experimental cinema indirectly argues that we can think the new; and commercial cinema indirectly argues for the copy, the representation; but the true power of cinema, says Deleuze, lies in its ability to show us our inability to think—“impower” (p. 166). Artaud and Deleuze say the “innermost reality [of the brain] is not the Whole, but on the contrary a fissure, a crack” that introduces “a ‘dissociative force’ which would introduce a ‘figure of nothingness’, a ‘hole in appearances’” (p. 167). Godard has always thought that the world is bad cinema; and cinema can overturn it. The essay film has been a force for nearly a century, but has recently been noticed for what it is—for forcing us to confront the powerlessness of thought, thought’s inability to make Whole what is in the world not Whole to begin with. In a 2013 article about the essay film, which coincided with the cinema season “Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film” at BFI in London, Andrew Tracy cited Andre Bazin’s definition

6 Godard could not have agreed more and, on a similar note, famously called blood in films “just some red”.

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of the form, which focused on “its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen.” “No less than were the montagists,” says Tracy, “the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.” William E. Jones, whose films have been praised as “personal but also scholarly, calm but deeply felt, logical in its arguments but taking unexpected detours,” which is one of the defining tropes of the genre (Jones & Horrigan, 2013), credits Chris Marker with the advent of the essay film and as a profound influence on his own work. Yet, says Jones (in Jones & Horrigan, 2013), “people in the United States have a somewhat distorted version of [Marker’s] body of work, because it is enormous” and because the individual films (especially Grin Without a Cat (1977), Jones’ favorite) are demanding. Marker plays with time and the notion of “documentary,” if ever a thing can be documented. Timothy Corrigan (2011), who recently wrote a book about the history of the essay film, points also to Marker (along with fellow “Left Bank” filmmakers Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda) as the founder of the movement. Corrigan follows the line of essays from Montaigne (the birth of the written essay) to Marker (the birth of the essay film), with a few precedents (e.g., Eisenstein) and many contemporary takes (e.g., Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I or most films by Errol Morris). Corrigan wishes to uncover “where the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity” and “renegotiates assumptions about documentary objectivity, narrative epistemology, and authorial expressivity” (p. 6). Others point to Mark Rappaport as the founder of the essay film, though Rappaport points to Godard, who once called cinema the “form that thinks” (qtd. in Rascaroli, 2014, p. 22) and also that to describe with the camera “is to observe mutations” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 19). Everybody points to everybody else. What we have here are connections instead of a lineage. In the introduction to The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, Laura Rascaroli (2014) says the essay film is “sited at the intersection of documentary, art film and avant-garde practices” (p. 1). She calls attention to the term’s use, saying it shows up in scholarly and non-scholarly writing (e.g., reviews) alike, with various meanings, causing considerable consternation for anyone

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trying to write about the essay film (p. 1). Contrary to the documentary, though, which has a thesis, the essay film offers “an experience that is as incontrovertible as it is hazy and difficult to locate” (p. 1). Rascaroli turns her attention toward the problem of categorization. Why, she asks, do “we the audience feel that we are viewing an essay, quite the cinematic version of a literary one, as opposed to a documentary,” when we view such films as Night and Fog (dir. Alain Resnais), Letter From Siberia (dir. Chris Marker), Histoire(s) du Cinema (dir. Jean-Luc Godard), and Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir. Thom Andersen), among others (p. 2). At the end of her investigation, Rascaroli concludes that the “domain of the essayistic” is “a cinema in the first person, a cinema of thought, of investigation, of intellectual searching and self-reflection” (p. 189). Rascaroli nods to the history of the essay, which begins with Montaigne and has reappeared (after shrugging off the chains of representation and “truth”) through such tireless advocates as John D’Agata and Philip Lopate.

An Essay is a Search Regardless of the “correct” definition—which there cannot be—, the essay film does more than communicate—it asks questions, it muses, considers, it pulls us in several directions at once, it jukes the thesis statement, it buries the lede, the lead, the uranium. Like Adorno, who describes the essay as those “discrete elements set off against one another come together to form a readable context” (p. 13), many scholars (Astruc, 1999; Corrigan, 1995; Montero, 2012; etc.) see the literary essay as a springboard to the essay film. The essay film, according to Catherine Lupton, is a “setting out to depict the process of thinking around a given subject, with all its attendant messiness, hesitations, and sudden insights intact” (qtd. in Rascaroli, p. 8). The essay film “tracks a person’s thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands. An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something” (Lopate, 1992, p. 19). The possibilities thus extend well beyond what was possible with the written essay. Experiments in the essay film extend as far back (arguably) as A Corner in Wheat (1909), “a sharp social commentary on the commodity wheat trade” and Sergei Eisenstein’s 1920s projects (Corrigan, 2011, p. 3), preceding Adorno’s essay, but was not widely embraced until the 1950s, particularly in France. In fact, during the making of Capital (1927), Eisenstein wrote in his notebook about “a new form of cinematographic work—a collection of

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‘Essays’ ” (Rascaroli, 2008, p. 27). He was searching for a way to show the search. Rascaroli (2008) traces the first critical mention of the essay film to the 1940 essay “Der Filmessay, Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms” by Hans Richter. “In his article,” says Rascaroli, he “announces a new type of intellectual but also emotional cinema, able to provide ‘images for mental notions’” that is “‘can employ an incomparably greater reservoir of expressive means than can the pure documentary film’” (p. 27). Although some recent scholarship has been aimed at seeing the history of the essay film beyond Europe (Biemann, 2003; Papazian & Eades, 2016), most scholars point to France in general and, most notably, to the “Rive Gauche auteurs” (Left Bank auteurs)—the aforementioned Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda—as the most active purveyors. Catherine Lupton points to the proliferation of postwar documentary shorts—that pulled heavily on Surrealism—of Resnais and Franju in which “the boundaries between documentary and fiction (as well as art film) were fluid, and the filmmaker’s personal style in the approach to reality was valued” (ctd. in Rascaroli, 2008, p. 30). Philip Lopate, more a contrarian, coming as he does from the lyric essay tradition, refuses the label for filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jansco, or Tarkovsky, preferring instead a more stringent definition that includes Marker but excludes many that others have added to the list. Lopate (1992) says an essay is one’s search “to find out what one thinks about something” (p. 19) but adds that it must be interesting: “an essayist who produces magisterial and smoothly ordered arguments but is unable to surprise7 himself in the process of writing will end up boring us” (p. 19). To make an essay—either written or filmic— is to ask questions, but not necessarily to answer them (p. 19). According to Lopate (1992), the essay film (in his definition) must have five qualities: words; “a single voice”; “the speaker’s attempt to work out some reasoned line of discourse on a problem”; an essayistic, not journalistic, “personal point of view” that is 7 In a conversation published in The Believer (2008), Errol Morris points to Werner Herzog’s work as an exemplar of documentary, which happens “by the element of the unpredictable.” Without prepping, says Morris, “the movie emerges.” “I feel that the element of spontaneity… of the uncontrolled, of the unrehearsed, the unplanned, in every single film he’s made,” he says. That element of spontaneity is also what engages Morris about his own films. “The element of spontaneity is not knowing what someone is going to say to me in front of the camera,” he says, “having really no idea, of being surprised. I know that there’s this moment in all of the interviews that I’ve loved where something happens.”

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“more than information”; and “eloquent, well-written, and interesting” language (p. 19).

Movement Introduced into Thought In fact, a thinking scholarship in art education, which could have its future in the essay, will eventually move into the image—the video, the film. “I wasn’t naive enough to want to do a philosophy of cinema,” Deleuze (2006) says, “but what made an impression of me was a certain intersection or encounter: the philosophical authors I preferred were those who demanded the movement be introduced into thought, ‘real’ movement… I just went straight from philosophy to cinema and back again, from cinema to philosophy” (pp. 282–283). There are no boundaries and “cinematic criticism is at its worst when it limits itself to cinema as though it were a ghetto” (p. 284). We can reach from within our own discipline (e.g., art education) out to another (e.g., cinema, installation art, poetry) when our questions can be addressed there (pp. 284–285). Deleuze was onto this in Cinema II: The Time-Image, in which he points to Resnais (with Duras) and Welles as the filmmakers who “no longer rely on world or subject” (Tomlinson & Galeta, 1989, p. xvi). The essay film is a force for modern scholarship because the modern image has no totality, no whole, but instead poles from which reality is in continual passage. The essay film is thinking because it jams or breaks film’s normal sensory-motor schema, effectively tearing the image from the cliché, which is what Deleuze says about the time-image in Cinema II. The essay film does away with direct linkages between what is shown and what is meant, or leaves gaps, creates tears. Deleuze says that the cliché-image is what we see because we see what we want to see. If the cinema doesn’t force us to think by disallowing perfect linkages then we will see only clichés, only those things that are easy to follow. The essay film calls attention to the missing links, forcing us from our stupor. Deleuze (1989) says time is shattered from the inside (p. 40) in modern cinema but so too is meaning shattered from the inside. Deleuze saw that the confrontation causes thinking, which is why after the war he began to watch movies again. He noticed that the pre-war cinema obsessed over continuity, over what he calls the sensory-motor image (1989, p. 1) but that postwar cinema turned its attention toward “the new image… purely optical and sound situation which takes place at the faltering sensorymotor situations” (p. 3). What Deleuze says of postwar cinema, of the

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time-image, is what could be said (and what I am saying here) about the essay film (although the essay film takes it further): “we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental… The imaginary and the real become indiscernible” (p. 7). This is not because we are confused but because categories are shattered. Deleuze calls this “the point of indiscernibility” (p. 9). The essay introduces lines of indiscernibility, wherein multiple meanings are stacked atop one another until the overall meaning is no longer defined—the overall meaning becomes a number, a line drawn through the stack, connections not theses. Deleuze wrote a lot about the essayistic cinema of his time. Of Alain Resnais, for example, Deleuze (2006) says “his image is entirely founded in the coexistence of heterogeneous durations” (p. 291). About Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais admitted as much. The film was conceived as a documentary called Picadon (meaning “flash”) “about the bomb and its impact on Daiei Studios” (Jones, 2015.). The first 10 minutes of the film are remarkable, not in the least because they consist almost entirely of documentary footage of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bomb. When he changed his mind—when he decided it must be fiction—Resnais did so because the story had to be about the past and the present; it had to be in two tenses: “The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback... You might even imagine that everything the Emmanuelle Riva character narrated was false; there’s no proof that the story she recites really happened. On a formal level, I found that ambiguity interesting” (qtd. in Jones, 2015). After viewing the film, producer Anatole Dauman told Resnais that he had seen it all before, particularly in Citizen Kane, “a film which breaks chronology and reverses the flow of time” to which Resnais replied “Yes, but in my film time is shattered” (qtd. in Macaulay, 2014). Even the one flashback in the film—which takes us via a story, a recollection, to Nevers, France—is not so much a flashback as a coexistent time. Deleuze often refers to Resnais’s conception of time as “sheets” that can overlay, which is to say the present Hiroshima, in which the two characters sit and reminisce, is not removed from the backstory of Nevers, about which one character speaks. On the contrary, the two are overlaid like to sheets of paper on a desk. Time becomes the AND. Plus we don’t know if the woman is telling a true story, but, as Deleuze says about the shattering of the object/subject binary, we no longer stand in a place from which to ask such questions. They don’t even occur to us.

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The Totality of Kids Without using the term, Cinema II: The Time-Image is in a sense about the essay film, or the essayistic, the AND. The essay film is virtuality in cinema. In the translator’s introduction, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (1989) call attention to split nature of the modern image, which “cannot be integrated into a totality” and is “connected through ‘irrational cuts’ between the non-linked” in which “a confrontation takes place between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’” (p. xvi). This, they say, is where thought/thinking appears. According to Deleuze’s writings, they say, postwar cinema begins to explore “thought outside itself and an unthought within thought” (p. xvi). For Deleuze, cinema after the war begins to become a brain. The distinction between the subjective and objective begins “to lose its importance” in favor of “a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do know have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” (p. 7). Deleuze was drawn to the essayistic auteurs of his time. “Originality,” says Deleuze (2006), “is the sole criterion of a work. If you don’t feel you have seen something new, or have something new to say, why write, why paint, why shoot a film?” (p. 217). He goes on: There are two dangers: (1) repeating what has been said or done a thousand times already; and (2) seeking out the new for itself, for the mere pleasure of novelty, in an empty way. In both cases, you are copying. You are copying the old or whatever is in fashion… the new is always unexpected, but it is also what becomes immediately eternal and necessary. (p. 217)

He adds: “My argument is simple: the great auteurs of film are thinking, thought exists in their work, and making a film is creative, living thought” (p. 220). What may be most important about the essay film is its flexibility. The essay film has branched out into other genres—from the documentary to the narrative—and thus is not itself a genre but a collection of “distinguishing features” (Rascaroli, p. 3). They are “metalinguistic, autobiographical and reflective, they all posit a well-defined, extra-textual authorial figure as their point of origin and of constant reference; they strongly articulate a subjective, personal point of view; and they set up a particular communicative structure, largely based… on the address to the

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spectator” (p. 3). All of this plus the French word essayer, or to experiment, to try, creates space for the essay film across genres, and allows Rascaroli to discuss, among others, Godard, who once wrote: As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form, or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them. Were the cinema to disappear, I would simply accept the inevitable and turn to television; were television to disappear, I would revert to pencil and paper. (qtd. in Rascaroli, p. 89)

So what we are looking for, in a sense, is the planned unplanned. And this gets us back to the question of originality, of the central breakdown, of something that cannot be reduced to anything but itself. Deleuze (1989), following Bergson, says “we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés”8 (p. 20). To get beyond the cliché, which is synonymous with our interests, “our sensory-motor schemata [must] jam or break” (p. 20). The result 8 This probably explains Theodor Roosevelt’s (1913) critical review of the Armory show. Among other pronouncements, he wrote this:

Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P.T. Barnum showed with his fake mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint. (p.191) Tellingly, Roosevelt reserves most of his criticism for the European painters, remarking that the American painters and sculptors hold the most interest. Roosevelt admires and endorses the sentiment for young painters to move forward toward new frontiers, stopping to say that “there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries,” meaning, of course, the crazy European Cubists and Futurists (p.192). He compares the Cubists’ work to “colorized pictures of the Sunday newspapers” (p.192). He then pokes fun at the name of movements, dreaming of such new names as “Octoganists, Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle” (p. 192). Among the work that he doubtless is referring to is Duchamp’s Nude, Descending a Staircase (1912), that was little understood and much derided in its time.

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is not a metaphor but the thing itself. We finally see it for what it is: “a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be ‘justified’, for better or for worse” (p. 20). Deleuze uses the example of a factory that, we finally see, is a prison—not a metaphor for prison, a nod to imprisonment, but the prison itself. Hiroshima mon amour’s greatest achievement might be that memory and forgetting are one. Postwar Hiroshima is memory, is forgetting, is forever American and European and Japanese. Essayists achieve this by getting better at not knowing what they are doing in their time and place. Deleuze obsesses over the time-image in Cinema II, which allows him to understand memory in Resnais and other postwar filmmakers. What perhaps needs some exploring, though, is not time but meaning. He talks about sheets of time—the multiple pasts, the virtual pasts, all stacked, any ready to be pulled out and actualized in a recollection, pushed to the present, which is itself chronologically unmoored. The essay film does play with time but plays more with meaning—layers of meaning—wherein the meanings like wires (or “circuits” in Deleuze’s nomenclature) are connected and forked. The essay is not thus a school like Surrealism or Dadaism, is not a theory like Modernism or Postmodernism; it is rather an ever-evolving force that harnesses the AND. Essayists now (e.g., Morris and Persons) must use different techniques than essayists of the 1960s (e.g. Resnais and Varda), but they all use the fork, a concept he attributes to American filmmaker Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director of The Philadelphia Story (1940) and All About Eve (1950), among dozens of others.

Multiplicity of Circus Deleuze (1989) calls Mankiewicz “the greatest flashback author” (p. 48), that rare filmmaker who harnesses time the way Borges describes it: a “web of time which approaches, forks, is cut off or unacknowledged for centuries, embracing every possibility” (p. 49). In Mankiewicz, says Deleuze, the flashback finds “new meaning” in the “multiplicity of circuits” opened and connected “at each point where time forks” (p. 49). The flashback no longer belongs to one individual but to multiple (three in The Barefoot Contessa and A Letter to Three Wives, Deleuze tells us, and two in All About Eve). Each person’s recollection diverges, forks, creating new circuits, new possibilities, until what happened grows

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blurry. The forks in the flashbacks are compounded by the forks in the present-day narrative, creating a series of circuits that have the potential to create endless possibilities, endless maybes. Each deviation creates doubt. Mankiewicz uses Keats’s Negative Capability, managing to keep the picture within mysteries and doubts without defining the “true” and “right” path. Each fork, occurring in the recollections of characters, creates more doubt about what happened in the past—more virtualities— and about what then is happening in the present—because if the past is not clear, the present cannot be either. We begin to doubt our own ability to choose which road to follow. Some of the doubt can be attributed to another of Deleuze’s concepts—the actual/virtual Reals. The virtual and actual Reals travel together throughout time, but the actual is what we see as present, and the virtual is what we saw as the possible but the unrealized. At any moment, though, the virtual could become actualized, thus looking to us as the current-real, and the actual could become clearas-figment, throwing it back into the virtual, as in the case of the hall of mirrors in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Which likeness is the actual and which are the virtual? At any one moment, they could be both, only to be one once the flesh is presented as actualized, here and now. Welles uses a bit of Negative Capability, but must in the end resolve the problem: present one likeness as the likeness, as the actual real person. Mankiewicz, too, must resolve the problem, if only narratively, giving us actualized narrative to privilege over the others. Abbas Kiarostami’s (2010) Certified Copy carries Keats’s concept to its unnatural end. The story hinges on one fork, which takes place at the halfway mark. The couple, strangers who are getting to know each other, are mistaken for a married couple by a café proprietor. From that point forward in the story, although never directly alluded to, the strangers become a couple. They have been married for fifteen years. Nothing changes except those fifteen years—of tension, of regret, of anger. The story is about the fork. But unlike other films that resolve the doubt for narrative closure, Certified Copy uses that doubt as a wedge to keep open the actual/virtual circuit. The present is never actualized but rather the actual and virtual circuits, both open and alive, allow the electricity to pass back and forth between them. The loop never closes. We cannot know what is happening (the present) because we cannot know for certain what has happened (the past). We cannot even be sure there will be a future (after the film ends) because we cannot be sure the end of the movie is the present. They argue as if they were an actual real married couple, but

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the first half of the movie contradicts that fact. We don’t know which half is the actual and which the virtual—thus the film manages to be both, to be un-actualized, to be an open actual/virtual circuit. Kiarostami (2010) says that the film takes place over 15 years—the first half is the couple getting to know each other; and the second half is about those irreconcilable differences that have grown over the marriage’s 15 years. Yet the film takes place in one afternoon. Time is shattered, yes, but meaning is fractured, torn, forked. Recall that Dean Young says that making the new is just trying to copy but failing miserably. “If everything was planned,” says filmmaker Errol Morris to Werner Herzog (2008), “it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything.” For Morris, this includes documentary and feature filmmaking. “It’s what makes,” he says, “photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.”

References Adorno, T. W. (1991). The essay as form. In Notes to literature: Volume one (S. W. Nicholsen, Trans.). Columbia University. Astruc, A. (1999). The birth of the new avant garde: The caméra stylo. In T. Corrigan (Ed.), Film and literature: An introduction and reader (pp. 158– 162). Prentice Hall. Barone, T. (2006). Arts-based research then, now, and later. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 4–8. Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage. Biemann, U. (2003). Stuff it: The video essay in the digital age. Springer. Boutang, P. (Dir.). (2011). Gilles Deleuze from A to Z [film]. Semiotext(e). Candlin, F. (2000). Practice-based doctorates and questions of academic legitimacy. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 19(1), 96–101. Corrigan, T. (1995). The cinematic essay: Genre on the margins. Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, 19: 85–91. Corrigan, T. (2011). The essay film: From montaigne, after marker. Oxford University Press. D’Agata, J. (2003). To the reader. The next American essay (J. D’Agata, Ed.). Graywolf.

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D’Agata, J. (2014a, July). John D’Agata redefines the essay: Susan Steinberg Talks with the Editor of The Making of the American Essay about Facts, Lies and the Art of Consideration. Electric Literature. D’Agata, J. (2014b). We might as well call it the lyric essay. Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema II: The time-image. H. Tomlinson, & R. Galeta (Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2006). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995. A. Hodges, & M. Taormina (Trans.). Semiotext(e). Eisner, E. (1993). Forms of understanding and the future of educational research. Educational Research, 22(7), 5–11. Eisner, E. (1996). Should a novel count as a dissertation? Research in the Teaching of English, 30(4), 403–427. Eisner, E. W. (2008). Art and knowledge. In J. G. Knowles, & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, and Issues. SAGE. Garoian, C. (2013). Introduction. In J. jagodzinski, & J. Wallin, Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal. Sense Publishers. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic Books. Goodall, J. (2009). In H. Smith, & R. T. Dean (Eds.), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh University Press. Herzog, W. (2008, March/April). Werner Herzog in Conversation with Errol Morris. The Believer. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200803/?read=int erview_herzog Irwin, R. L., & de Cosson, A. (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Pacific Educational Press. jagodzinski, j. (2017) Betraying further: Arts-based education at the ‘End of the World’. In j. jagodzinski (Ed.), What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari. Palgrave Macmillan. jagodzinski, j., & Wallin, J. (2013). Arts-based research: A critique and a proposal. Sense Publishers. Jones, K. (2015, July 13). Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite. The Criterion Collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/291-hirosh ima-mon-aour-time-indefinite Jones, W. E., & Horrigan, W. (2013). An exchange [DVD insert]. Wexner Center for the Arts. Kiarostami, A. (Director). (2010). Certified Copy [film]. Criterion Collection. Knowles, J. G., Luciani, T., Cole, A. L., & Neilsen, L. (Eds.). (2007). The art of visual inquiry. Backalong Books/Centre for Arts-Informed Research. Knowles, J. G., & Cole, A. L. (2008). Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. SAGE.

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Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press. Lopate, P. (1992). In search of the centaur: The essay-film. The Threepenny Review, 48, 19–22. Macaulay, S. (2014, 2 March). “In My Film Time Is Shattered”: Producer Anatole Dauman remembers working with Alain Resnais. Filmmaker. https://filmmakermagazine.com/84759-in-my-film-time-is-shatteredproducer-anatole-dauman-remembers-working-with-alain-resnais Montero, D. (2012). Thinking images: The essay film as a dialogic form in European Cinema. Peter Lang. O’Donoghue, D. (2009). Are we asking the wrong questions in arts-based research? Studies in Art Education, 50(4), 352–368. Papazian, E., & Eades, C. (2016).The essay film: Dialogue, politics, Utopia. Wallflower. Rascaroli, L. (2008). The essay film: Problems, definitions, textual commitments. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 49(2): 24–47. Rascaroli, L. (2014). The personal camera: Subjective cinema and the essay film. Wallflower. Richardson, J. (2017a). Folding pedagogy: Thinking between spaces. In j. jagodzinski (Ed.),What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 93– 110. Richardson, J. (2017b). What art thinks. In j. jagodzinski (Ed.), What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 93–110. Roosevelt, T. (1913). A Layman’s view of an art exhibition. In J. W. McCoubrey (Ed.), American Art (pp. 1700–1960). Prentice Hall. Shields, D. (2010). Reality hunger: A manifesto. Vintage. Smith, H., & Dean, R. T. (2009). Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh University Press. Springgay, S., & Irwin, R. L. (2008). Being with A/r/tography. Sense Publishers. Sullivan, G. (2010). Art practice as research: Inquiry in visual arts (Second Edition). Sage. Tomlinson, H., & Galeta, R. (1989). Translator’s introduction. Cinema II: The time-image. University of Minnesota Press. Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

CHAPTER 6

Filmmakers Intermingled

Left Bank Auteurs Chris Marker is best known for his 1962 short film La Jetée, which many consider to be the greatest short film ever made but only know it because it was remade as 12 Monkeys (1995) by Terry Gilliam. The main reason Marker is little known is because he wanted it that way. He could never sit still in a genre long enough to be known as a purveyor of something. He went ahead of the curve, inventing the essay film (with the “generous, confident opening of his work to quotation and citation,” says Gross, 2012, p. 13), wowing critics with La Jetée, and then making one of the first CD-ROM artworks in the ’90s. But he didn’t leave behind the essay film. In fact, he created what many people consider to be the greatest essay film (a lot of superlatives here), Sans Soleil (1983), in which he left his own obsession (time) to consider Resnais’s obsession (memory). The two would reunite in the ’60s to collaborate with Godard and others on Far from Vietnam (1967). According to Gross (2012), the film “boldly explicated the logic of Marker’s whole oeuvre, what had been and what was to come, in proclaiming that the problem of History could not be defined or expressed apart from the problem of memory” (p. 12). Gross goes further to say that anyone working today is working on the problems raised by Marker (p. 13).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_6

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Agnes Varda, the only female director associated with the French New Wave and one of the three Left Bank auteurs, was still, until her recent death, making significant contributions to experimental essay films, such as with The Beaches of Agnès (2008), a memoir told through recollections of movies and people. Varda became associated with the French New Wave in part due to the success of her feature, Cleo from Five to Seven (1962). In fact, though, her films have much more in common with Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, both film essayists, than with Godard and Francois Truffaut. While Marker questioned reality and Resnais questioned memory, Varda questioned the self and the impossibility of ever knowing other people. Varda should not be dismissed in favor of the other two Left Bankers. Varda’s first film, La Point Courte (1954), released one year before Resnais’s Night and Fog (and edited by Resnais), blended documentary realism with narrative fiction. She described her work as “cinécriture,” meaning “writing with film.” Cinécriture shows up as her role, next to director, in the credits to her 1985 film Vagabond. French film critic Alain Bergala calls her films “essay” in the true French sense of the word—meaning to attempt, to try (ctd. in Darke, 2008, p. 23). Part of the trick, says Varda, is to do away with subjects. For The Gleaners and I (2001), for instance, she wanted to pursue the questions “Who is eating my leftovers?” which led to the question “[W]hy will those people live and eat what we throw away, and can I meet them, can I speak to them?” (qtd. in Rigg, 2005, p. 183). In the middle of the project, though, she realized that the film was half about her: “My God,” she thinks, “I’m ageing, I’m still a gleaner, I’m still a filmmaker” (p. 184). The film becomes about her, the gleaner of images, the one who lives off the land of images, who lives off other people by taking their likenesses. Overall, though, Varda’s career as an essayist is best captured in her short films. Chris Darke (2008) points out that Varda has made fewer than 20 feature films but over 30 short films, many of them in the essay tradition (p. 22). Varda herself, in addition to coining a word for writing film, once called the short film format “a completely free form of filmic writing,” which holds “the capacity to move quickly between the moment of desire… and its realization” (qtd., Darke, p. 23). Darke calls attention to Varda’s eye and voice, some of which she borrowed from Resnais, e.g., the tracking shots that frame “disembodied expressions of curiosity” and “that work so well with voiceover commentaries” (p. 23). “I’ve always been working on the border,” says Varda (qtd. in

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Anderson, 2001, p. 27). “What I’m trying to do—what I’ve been trying to do all along—is to bridge the border of these two genres, documentary and fiction” (p. 27). She sees film writing like jazz—“a woman working with her intuition and trying to be intelligent… joy of discovering things. Finding beauty where it’s maybe not” (Meyer, 2013, p. 201). Though not the inventor of the essay film, Resnais surely did the most to advance it. Resnais started out by making documentary films about artists. His short documentary about Van Gogh won a 1949 Academy Award. He went from there to make films on Gaugin (1950), Guernica (1951), and Goya (as part of a longer, collaborative project). In the 50s he began to shift his focus from biographical documentaries to searching documentaries, finding his footing with the 1953 Chris Marker collaboration Statues Also Die, a film that was banned for its explicit commentary on the West’s appropriation of African culture. The censors’ job was made difficult because the sound and image track proved impossible to detach without completely erasing the film’s esthetic (Chamarette, 2009). Thus they couldn’t censor parts of the film; they had to ban the whole thing. And this intertwining of image and music and voiceover is precisely the key to Resnais’s essay films. Resnais’s questing hasn’t gone unnoticed by contemporary filmmakers, who wear his influence on their shirtsleeves. When interviewed about Night and Fog (1955), a great influence on him, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer (2016), best known for The Act of Killing (2012), focused not on the unasked questions that he called “a crucial feature of all essay films.” “The things that the film doesn’t ask create questions that haunt the film,” he says, adding “there’s things that you address explicitly, and there are questions that you let hang, and you allow the audience to contemplate by deliberately avoiding them.” The title Night and Fog takes its title from the Nazi directive (“Nacht un Nabel”) to bring enemies to face trial and sentencing under the obscurity of darkness, i.e., without it being known, which is itself a reference to Goethe who coined the term for less terrible—i.e., purely fictional—reasons. Furthermore, the title is a code for what the film is doing—obscuring any thesis beneath seemingly unmotivated sequence of images of concentration camps then (pre-1945) and now (1955). Essayists Phillip Lopate (1992) recalls seeing Night and Fog for the first time in college (Fig. 6.1): My first glimpse of the centaur—the essay-film—was Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955). While watching it in college I became aware of an

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Fig. 6.1 Auschwitz Extermination Camp aerial photograph held together with tape (Department of Defense. Defense Intelligence Agency. Central Imagery Processing and Reference Division. 1961-?)

elegance in Jean Cayrol’s screenplay language that was intriguingly at odds with the usual sledgehammer treatment of the Holocaust. “Sometimes a message flutters down, is picked up. Death makes its first pick, chooses again in the night and fog. Today, on the same track, the sun shines. Go slowly along with it… looking for what? Traces of the bodies that fell to the ground.” The voice on the soundtrack was worldly, tired, weighted down with the need to make fresh those horrors that had so quickly turned

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stale. It was a self-interrogatory voice, like a true essayist’s, dubious, ironical, wheeling and searching for the heart of its subject matter. Meanwhile Resnais’s refined tracking shots formed a visual analogue of this patient searching for historical meaning, in sites now emptied of their infamous activity. (p. 19)

Lopate (2003) calls Night and Fog an “anti-documentary” because “we cannot ‘document’ this particular reality, it is too heinous, we would be defeated in advance.” What Resnais could and did do, says Lopate, was to “reflect, ask questions, examine the record, and interrogate our own responses. In short, offer up an essay.” Truffaut, who named it the best film of the year, says that it “makes every other film look trivial.” Part of what set Resnais apart was his unique take on the art. Resnais did not rely on screenwriters. In fact, he worked with poets (Chris Marker for Statues Also Die and Jean Cayrol for Night and Fog ) and avant-garde writers (Marguerite Duras for Hiroshima mon amour and Alain RobbeGrillet for Last Year at Marienbad). “I always ask the screenwriter to tape-record all the dialogue,” Resnais admitted to the Criterion Collection (2014), “without indicating the names of the characters. That helps me get the shot breakdown. It’s quite simple.” He then lies down on the sofa. “I put the tape in the tape recorder,” he continued, “and listen. That helps the images come to me and it’s much easier after that with that memory in mind to quickly draw up a shot breakdown.” The voices in Hiroshima mon amour are as Lopate says “worldly, tired, weighted down with the need to make fresh those horrors” of WWII—not only what happened in Germany but what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The voices are also “dubious, ironical, wheeling and searching for the heart of the subject matter.” In fact, most of the exchanges between the two protagonists—a French woman and a Japanese man—seem to be more about searching than communicating, making it more akin to poetry than dialogue. The goal does not seem to be communication. Deleuze (1989) says that films such as Hiroshima mon amour bring the supposed poles—objective/subjective; real/imaginary; physical/mental— “into continual contact,” which leads to a “point of indiscernibility (and not of confusion)” (p. 9). The writer, Marguerite Duras, says of the film that it is “Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima” (1961, p. 9). Deleuze (1989) was interested in Marienbad “since it replaces its own object, on the one hand it erases or destroys its reality which passes into

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the imaginary, but on the other hand it powerfully brings out all the reality which the imaginary or the mental create” (p. 7). Such is the essayistic film. In Night and Fog, for instance, as Deleuze argues, flashback is not flashback but the impossibility of flashback, a “sum” of all the ways flashback has and will and would, in the case of the Holocaust, fail us (1989, p. 122). For Deleuze, Night and Fog performs “pure recollection,” which is virtual, not “the recollection image,” which is forever tied to the present moment (p. 122). Using present-day tracking shots over the landscape where the camps were built, juxtaposed with historical footage of the camps in operation, and using a depersonalized voiceover in the present of the past, a past that is very much impossible to depersonalize, Resnais has shattered time. The sheets overlay each other. The past and the present are one. Resnais, like Deleuze, is interested in the brain, in the thinking mechanism, which must be turned on by the irreconcilable. Writing about Duras, one of Resnais’s collaborators, and other filmmakers, including Resnais, Deleuze (1989) defines “the tear” wherein “the visual and the sound do not reconstitute a whole,” the whole or Whole being impossible, “but enter into an ‘irrational’ relation according to two dissymmetrical trajectories” creating “a fusion of the tear” (p. 268). In Hiroshima mon amour, says Lopate, “Resnais’s tracking shots formed a visual analogue of this patient searching for historical meaning, in sites now emptied of their infamous activity” (Fig. 6.2). Resnais lies down on the sofa and lets the images come to him. The words do not dictate the images but rather evoke them. The French woman is an actress who has come to Hiroshima to make a film on peace. The Japanese man is an architect who lives in Hiroshima. His life has nothing to do with war. Her life has nothing to do with war. Yet the two are haunted by the war, by their inability to get past it. They are both in the war and after it, experiencing it (the real) and imagining it, and the two are not opposites but identical, with indiscernible borders. Hiroshima mon amour may be more capable of being essayistic than Resnais’s previous films because of its additional element—something Resnais did not have in Night and Fog—fiction. He took this one step further in Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The screenwriter, novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (1962), writes that the film is about creating reality by constructing a “purely mental space and time… without worrying too much about the traditional relations of cause and effect” (pp. 8–9). He points to the collaboration between Resnais, the director, and himself, the writer (p. 4). “What novelist worthy

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Fig. 6.2 Photograph of Hiroshima after atomic bombing (Department of Defense. Department of the Air Force. 9/26/1947)

of the name would be satisfied,” he writes, “to hand his story over to a ‘phraseologist’ who would write out the final version of the text for the reader?” (p. 4) On the other hand, what director would ask a writer to plan each scene. Robbe-Grillet praises Resnais’s ability to assemble a story in a new way—not in a linear fashion like the cinema of the “all-tooexpected” (p. 9) but something that captures the mind’s unpredictable, inconsistent speed—“much faster—or somethings slower” (p. 9). They captured “mental time with its peculiarities, its gaps, its obsessions, its obscure areas… Since it is the tempo of our lives” (p. 9). Unlike other, more cautious filmmakers, then, they forego exposition; they “decided to trust the spectator, to allow him, from start to finish, to come to terms with pure subjectivities” (p.14). The spectator, then, must give himself to the film to

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let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him, by the actors’ voices, by the sound track, by the music, by the rhythm of the cutting, by the passion of the characters... and to this spectator the film will seem the ‘easiest’ he has ever seen... (p. 14)

The film is about the impossibility of remembering anything at all, much like Resnais’s other films, and much like what Duras said of Hiroshima: it’s impossible to talk about; all we can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. It is impossible to recall the past; all we can do is talk about the impossibility of recalling the past, which is exactly what Deleuze picks up in Cinema II: The Time-Image. The result, says Robbe-Grillet, will seem the most realistic, the truest, the one that best corresponds to his daily emotional life, as soon as he agrees to abandon readymade ideas, psychological analysis, more or less clumsy systems of interpretation which machine made fiction or films grind out for him ad-naseum, and which are the worst kind of abstractions (p. 14).

Famously, Eric Rohmer of Cahiers du Cinema said, “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema” (qtd. in Jones, 2015). One of the first American reviews calls it “a brilliant, trying picture, at once sensitive and blunt, tender and savage, fleshy and spiritual, pacifist and politically realistic” (Holland, 1960, p. 593), which is to say it is everything and “has something for everybody.” Holland points to “some important new techniques of flashback” but really is talking about Resnais’s new way of presenting old ideas. Hiroshima mon amour is, after all, a film about the world after the second world war. The film is about Hiroshima after the bomb. The film was originally financed as a short documentary about the effects of a savage war, to be much like—hoped the producers—Night and Fog in its approach and product. Resnais said “I came to see that all you could do was suggest the horror, that if you tried to show something very real on screen, the horror disappeared; so I had to use every means possible to set the viewer’s imagination in motion.” Resnais was being “hailed everywhere as an innovator, a daring experimentalist, an avant-gardien” even though Resnais “made no such claim to be an innovator” (Kauffman, 1962, p. 27). In fact, thought Kauffmann,

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Marienbad was a throwback to the “free French films of the twenties— Delluc, Dulac, Jean, Espstein, early Rene Clair, Cocteau” (p. 27). But this definition fits quite well with the definition of originality, and Recklessness, that way of working toward originality. A work of Recklessness must look back as it simultaneously tries to slip the hold of mother and father. Recall Dean Young’s pronouncement that originality is not the denial of origins but rather “the acknowledgement of them, the exploration of that trace of history… while being in cantankerous, maybe competitive, objection and declaration otherwise.” To rebel against cliché—to embrace binary logic, for instance, wherein the opposite of cliché is success—is itself a cliché. A recent example from cinema is the shortlived “mumblecore” movement whose practitioners sought to depict real life verbatim. This “movement” (with quotation marks from critic Amy Taubin to represent the questionable title) “that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding” began in 2005 and died shortly thereafter (Taubin, 2007). The title has been traced back to a sound mixer on some of these films who purportedly could not hear the dialogue given the low quality of sound capture and later attributed to the nonprofessional actors “who tend to swallow their words (particularly at the end of their sentences) because they are uncomfortable speaking on camera” (Taubin). The result is not charm; the result is vapidity, what filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan (2016) once attributed to the lack of subtext, a lack of emotional depth that insults the viewers’ intelligence.

Vigo Jean Vigo was the French precursor to the essay film from whom the Left Bank Auteurs descended. He turned cinéma vérité on its head before it had a head to stand on; and he played with what counts as documentary “truth” way before Errol Morris and Reality TV came along. Sadly, though, Vigo died at the tender age of 29 of tuberculosis, effectively ending his (perhaps inappropriately named) “social documentary” genre that would find its uptake in Night and Fog (1955) and then in the fictions of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), and Agnès Varda’s Chloe from 5 to 7 (1962), among others. According to Vigo, the “aim of the social documentary,” which was the style of his first film, A propos de Nice, “is achieved when it succeeds in revealing the hidden meaning of a gesture, when it shows up the hidden beauty or the grotesqueness of an ordinary-looking individual…

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And it must do this so forcefully that the world we once looked at with such indifference now appears to us in its essence, stripped of its falsehoods. The social documentary must rip the blinkers from our eyes” (qtd. in Polito, 2011, p. 24). Vigo meant this in the broadest possible sense, because his first film was a documentary (though experimental, complete with a woman’s disappearing outfit and a man’s disappearing shoe) but others of his films were fictions. Vigo reportedly called Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) “true social cinema… a very important work… a marvelous confrontation between the rational world and the subconscious” (qtd. in Polito, p. 20). The way that Vigo achieved his original style—which was in part shaped by co-director and cinematographer Boris Kaufman (who would later DP such Hollywood successes as 12 Angry Men and On the Waterfront )—was a mix of premeditation and improvisation further enhanced by the editing process, which allowed for “parallel montage,” as for example when the statue of the mother tearing at her hair in the cemetery is juxtaposed with the living on the Promenades d’Anglais. Vigo died too young to continue his experimentations in the documentary, but he did make one 9-min biographical film about the French swimmer Jean Taris called simply Taris (1931) in which he pushed the boundaries for what counted as documentary footage. In one shot, the camera appears to be underwater, though in reality Vigo was filming through a porthole window in the side of the tank. In another, Vigo plays with time, showing Taris dive into the water and then reverse out along the same arc. The film becomes not about Taris but about the filmmaker’s trying to capture something about swimming—mainly movement, water, etc. In Cinema II, Deleuze puts a lot of meaning in time, or the post-silent filmmaker’s ability to manipulate time, to show time as virtual Real. In Taris, Vigo does his best to erase time’s hold on the cinema of his time. Documentaries—especially documentaries about people—rely on time to establish meaning: when did she do X; when did she do Y. We learn nothing about Taris in Taris except what he looks like when he swims, dives, smiles. Vigo instead calls attention to the camera and editing, the tropes of cinema, not the time of Taris’s life or routine. The editor can reverse a shot; the cinematographer can capture an underwater shot (without telling you how, which only intensifies the this-is-not-what-I-am-used-to feeling in the viewer).

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Morris Errol Morris is a contemporary American filmmaker who is making essay films that, as The Believer magazine (Poppy, 2004) says, “are so marvelously strange, and so strangely alluring, they hardly deserve the D-word tag, with its faint-praise whiff of well-intentioned public television and the Discovery Channel.” Roger Ebert once said “I haven’t found another filmmaker who intrigues me more,” comparing Morris to a magician and “as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini” (qtd. in Morris, n.d.). The documentary has become conflated with reality television, with sensationalism and poorly written “real” life scenes. Morris is doing something else, as he doubtless knows, telling The Believer: “I don’t think that anybody really makes films quite like mine… I like to think that I have invented a different style of documentary” (qtd. in Poppy, 2004). Morris works in the in-between. Morris is working within the field, of course, and he knows it, saying when we speak about documentary, it should be clear that we’re talking about many things. We’re talking about different styles, from vérité to the collage films of Chris Marker and Dziga Vertov. Even vérité, itself, is diverse… It’s not one thing, it’s many, many, many things. (Morris, 2004, qtd. in Poppy, 2004)

Morris’s “documentary” style captures, says Poppy, “the workings of the mind—idiosyncratic personal philosophies, irrational rationalizations, private obsessions—as if some kind of cinematic truth serum were at work.” Plus “Morris pairs this talk with the kinds of images we are not accustomed to seeing in ‘nonfiction’ film: reenactments, visual puns, objects floating in space. What emerges is almost always addictively compelling, and surprising, and odd.” For Morris, as for most film essayists, “finding truth involves some kind of activity.” His friend and nearcollaborator—they nearly exhumed the body of a famous serial killer’s mother on one cold Minnesota night—Werner Herzog has expressed similar sentiments. In a 1999 proclamation nicknamed the “Minnesota Manifesto” by Morris, Herzog (1999) lays out 12 “lessons of darkness,” including “(1) By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants”; “(3) Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones”; “(4) Fact creates norms, and truth illumination”; “(5)

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There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization”; and number nine, which says it all: “The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.” In that same 2004 interview with The Believer, Morris expresses a similar sentiment, saying “truth isn’t handed to you on a platter. It’s not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It’s a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.” Truth is found by essaying. This is the hard work that during the filming of The Thin Blue Line (1988) led Morris incidentally onto evidence that led to the release of Randall Adam, who had been wrongfully convicted of murdering a police officer. Like his predecessors in the French Left Bank, Morris provides the slant. In The Thin Blue Line, Morris uses reenactments to show what interviewees say. He was aware, however, that what people say is not necessarily “truth”: “They’re illustrations of what people claimed had happened but which didn’t happen,” he says adding, “they’re ironic. They make you think about the relationship of images to the world. About the nature of seeing and believing. About our capacity for belief, for credulity, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The Unknown Known is Morris’s most Deleuzian film. In a press conference during the Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld defined the “unknown knowns” as “things that you think you know that it turns out you did not” (qtd. in Morris, 2004). In trying to cover his tracks, Rumsfeld hit upon one of the most interesting public displays of rhetoric from a powerful government official. Here is his entire response to the reporter’s question, which was “In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction?”: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. (qtd. in Morris, 2004)

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Rumsfeld later said that he learned about that distinction from William Graham in the 1990s, but actually he was pulling on a much longer legacy, a legacy attached to none other than John Keats, the man who coined the term Negative Capability, and who set the stage, without quite knowing it, for this book tangentially about the cliché, a conversation that is really about the truth and facts, about the search, about essaying. Keats, in Endymion, writes “O known unknown! from whom my being sips / such darling essence…” (qtd. in Morris, 2004). Fifty years later, Robert Browning wrote “our known unknown, our God revealed to man?” (qtd. in Morris, 2004). As Morris points out, Rumsfeld, unlike these poets, was talking about what did or did not match his agenda, his preconceived notions of what he was supposed to find within the evidence, which is to say the known knowns to him might just as well mean: that to which I subscribe. Unlike Keats, who wished to stay within mysteries and doubts, Rumsfeld wished to have a knowledge right now that he could put to work toward his and his President’s agenda; whether or not it turned out that his “knowledge” was true or false was irrelevant.

Maddin In 2002 the Wexner Center for the Arts presented a retrospective of Guy Maddin’s work, including Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990), Careful (1992), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), along with a selection of others’ films selected by Maddin, including those with the Maddin-esque titles The Devil-Doll (Tod Browning, 1936) and The Devil’s Cleavage (George Kuchar, 1973). In the series introduction, curator Bill Horrigan (2002) writes that he “can’t think of any other director who inhabits film history” like Maddin (p. 6). Horrigan is reminded of this fact while watching Fugitive Lovers (1934), a film that Leonard Maltin describes as a “Genially preposterous tale” that is “shot with ‘arty’ camera angles” and “Moves like lightning to even more preposterous climax in snowbound Colorado” (qtd. in Horrigan, p. 4). For the record, that is two preposterouses to describe one film. Horrigan’s comment is meant to be a compliment to Maddin’s style, which is both in and out of time. “His films have the texture and the aura of handmade objects,” adds Horrigan, “painstakingly fabricated, as though each were individually rendered, a mildly ironic achievement given cinema’s aspirations to global reproducibility” (p. 6). Maddin’s unique style is a mixture of “artisanal traditions of stagecraft to pitch-perfect use of the film stocks,

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the toning and tinting effects, and the ‘primitive’ sound-recording effects of cinema in the years immediately preceding and following the coming of sound”1 (p. 6). Often the result is that we cannot tell if the films were made in the preceding decade or century. He uses title cards—the stuff of silent films—to insert little jokes along the way, such as when one says 1 This same conclusion was drawn by Maltin’s contemporary Roger Ebert in a review of the film My Winnipeg (2007). Ebert (2008), who sees Maddin differently, calls the film, and all of Maddin’s films really, forays “into the mind of a man who thinks in the images of old silent films, disreputable documentaries, movies that never were, from eras beyond comprehension,” adding that Maddin “rewrites history; when that fails, he creates it.” Maddin’s esthetic is a throwback to the silent era, and to found and archival footage, described in the language of film by Ebert as “iris shots, breathless titles, shock cutting, staged poses, melodramatic acting, recycled footage, camera angles not merely dramatic but startling”. a. My Winnipeg (Maddin, 2007) is ostensibly a documentary about the city Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Or rather that is what was commissioned by the Documentary Channel. What Maddin delivered, however, is not a documentary in the traditional sense. The film is shaped around a guy named Guy Maddin who is on a train leaving the city but who is ravaged by sleep. The film is also shaped around the real Maddin’s renting of his childhood home where he has actors act out moments from his life. All of this is supposed to free Maddin from the tyrannical hold the city has on him, allowing him to finally leave it forever and settle someplace else. But there is a glitch: Winnipeg is “the sleepwalking capital of the world” and this sleepiness, this liminal space between the real and the dream, keeps Maddin drowsy and the train can’t seem to, as the title cards remind us in a refrain, “ESCAPE!” It is stuck in an eternal circuit. The film unfolds from there as a series of scenes, or vignettes, of Guy Maddin’s life and city, some of them real (in the sense that they come from archival footage), though the narration is suspect, and some of them virtual (in the sense that they come from Maddin’s camera), though they are indistinguishable from each other given Maddin’s keen ability to mimic movies from the past through black and white film and camera tricks. All of this is happening in a city that is the geographical dead center of the continent, a city with “The Forks,” a place where two rivers—the Red and Assinboine—come together, and the place, according to the aboriginal stories (according to the narrator), where a third river runs beneath those rivers. Just minutes into the film, the splitting, the AND, has taken over. The stories within My Winnipeg include important historical events, such as “If Day” when the city’s administrators dressed up actors in Nazi uniforms rented from Hollywood, and had those actors patrol the streets as if the city was being occupied by German forces, thereby encouraging the sale of war bonds (it worked!); the 1919 strike; and the city’s propensity for tearing down historic buildings such as the old Eaton’s department store. “Demolition,” we learn, “is one of our cities few growth industries.” But “the real tragedy,” (“BLASPHEMY!!!!”), we learn from the narrator, is that the city built a corporate “thrift” hockey arena on the Eaton’s site and then (“Myths!”), shockingly, condemned and then began to demolish the

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“Flapjacks!” during a scene in The Forbidden Room (2015) when the characters are indeed eating flapjacks. The film magazine Cinephile (2008) has marveled at Maddin’s success, given his lack of filmmaking knowledge or institutional affiliation at all. The result is

beloved Winnipeg Arena, where the Jets and Maroons had played. “This building was my male parent and everything male in my childhood I picked up here,” he tells us. (“Fabled!”). This is where we learn that Maddin was born in the arena in the dressing room during a game and later was breastfed in the women’s quarters. But even in all this chicanery, the personal emerges. Maddin’s dad, we learn, worked for the Maroons “behind the bench” in this very arena. And then, jolted from the sentimental, we are told that a team of former players, now in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond, a team called “The Black Tuesdays,” still play in the arena despite the debris and ongoing demolition. Other things we learn in the film include a local, long-running TV production called Ledge Man, starring Guy Maddin’s mother, a tyrannical landlord who coaxes a suicidal man from the ledge of a building by insulting him. Other myths and legends and stories passed down include the day a stable fire caused several of the city’s horses to seek shelter in the river, where they were then frozen in place and return every winter, a series of frozen heads just above the ice. In all of the above (and more), whether deemed true or false, historical or hagiograpical, we see it. Maddin leaves no footage unturned, including that of his birth among the hockey sticks, the arena’s demolition, his mother acting on Ledge Man, If Day, horse heads frozen on the icy river, the city’s “Golden Boy” pageant, Maddin’s boyhood home (a beauty salon where his mother worked), and so on. The footage of one is indistinguishable from the footage of the other. The result is that a permanent circuit is created between the material Winnipeg and the virtual Winnipeg, the contradicted, displaced, and modified city of the filmmaker’s experiences, memories, jokes, and half-truths. The resultant city cannot be seriously called “false” even though the history seems at times to have been rewritten or overwritten. At the geographical dead center of the film, a city slightly elongated and at times reverent, emerges from the chaosmos. Maddin’s point, or one of them, is that his city is a result of the connections forged during his time there. But as surely Keats would have said, and maybe Deleuze, too, nothing is gained from deciding what is true and what is made up, those are one and the same, stuck are they are in a circuit, so we enter the movie and enter Maddin’s Winnipeg. In this way the city is not a matter of function, it is a matter of connection—between the truth and lies, between what we suspect are the truths and lies (about which, Maddin has said, we are often wrong), between the real history and the fake, the latter of which charms its way into the history books. Recall what May (2005) says: “Cities are not matters of function” but rather “they are matters of connection. They are rhizomes, not trees” (p. 165). The city depicted in Winnipeg represents those “actualizations of a virtual difference” which “brings out aspects of people and of the neighborhood that could not have been foreseen, and that were not there in advance” (p. 165). Essentially, the film is a condensing of swarms of difference.

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simultaneously aesthetically sophisticated and technically primitive. One of the several unique things about him as an artist (or at least as a successful artist) was his attempt to do quite ambitious, elaborate and sophisticated things with essentially no materials and no technical expertise. (Beard, 2008).

Far from showing Winnipeg, says film scholar Ian Robinson (2014), Maddin makes Winnipeg, which is why the film is called My Winnipeg, not Your Winnipeg, or Winnipeg As It Is Broadly Understood. According to Robinson, “Maddin’s film operates in a register of poetic truth rather than historical accuracy”; therefore, “the film’s account of Winnipeg’s social and cultural history is beside the point” (p. 96). Despite the “urban legends, myths, apocryphal stories and half-truths” says Robinson, “this is still a film about Winnipeg” that amounts to “a subtle yet profound rumination on what constitutes a place” (p. 96). As if calling directly on Jane Jacobs, Robinson says that places like this Winnipeg exist as “temporary and fleeting points of coalescence and consensus, always permeable to challenge, renewal and rearticulation” (p. 97), rather like swarms of difference, processes that Maddin manages to capture. In an interview with Cineaste, Maddin was asked if the film was a documentary. He said that it was, adding, “Sometimes you have to dream to get out the facts. Or, if not the facts, your true feelings. The facts of your feelings” (Horsley, 2008, p. 48). Maddin understands the non-univocity of the city, and the Winnipeg to which Guy Maddin, the character, cannot escape, is not at all the Winnipeg of history books, or even the Winnipeg of a map. Maddin has called the film “100% poetically true” and admits that episodes that seem made up, such as the show Ledgeman and “If Day” are literally true (Semley, 2009, p. 68), serving only to further grease the circuit. At the Toronto International Film Festival (2015), Maddin admits: “I may gotten details wrong here and there because I am terrible at research.” But this is research in the academic sense. Maddin excels at another kind of research. In My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin effectively turns the city from striated to smooth and back again, replacing a singular city (singularity) with a multiplicity (multiplecity), the Winnipeg of a map (identity) with the Winnipeg of connections (machinic), placing the smooth and the striated in a closed circuit. Fellow essay film filmmaker Robert Persons (2009), narrating his General Orders No. 9, called the city “a thing,” adding: “It has none of the marks of a place, but all of those of a machine.” Maddin manages to turn or rather return Winnipeg in/to a machine, forcing the viewer to think about how history is in constant communication with mythology, half-truths, and memory. In addition to the staged archival footage, the black and white, lomographic quality that has always been part of his esthetic, Maddin incorporates title cards from the silent film era. “Escape!” is the refrain as the narrator begs Guy Maddin to leave Winnipeg forever. He cannot escape a series of connections that like a net have been thrown over him in the guise of a train car and we cannot escape Negative Capability. Maddin challenges the viewers to enter into the mysteries and doubts without reaching after fact or reason, which is to say trying to distinguish the ground from the figure or to assign prominence to either. A documentary about a city, one like Winnipeg, that endeavors to show the

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In the same retrospective pamphlet—for it is not a book, not a program— Maddin presents a “review” for each of his films. He calls Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) a “primitive first feature” (2002, p. 11). “Setting out to be, not juvenile, but willfully childish,” he says, “Maddin shot the movie in the vernacular spoken by film in the year of its own glorious viewer the streets, neighborhoods, and people, will show only Winnipeg, the identity. But a documentary like Maddin’s that understands a city as a machine and that endeavors thusly to show the machine making connections renders a clear portrait of the city as it is, was, and could have been, without distinguishing between them, is a documentary that most aligns with the concept of becoming over being and the tensions created by the smooth and the striated and maybe as close a portrait of a city as is possible. The connection to learning, like a coin in between couch cushions, is in the liminal space where thinking (not to be confused with “critical thinking,” that great boon of neoliberalism) occurs. According to Jack Richardson (2017), art is not a way of explaining the world; it is a way of coming to know the world, more specifically, a world that does not yet exist. It follows a conception of novelty and originality that does not simply present something we have not seen, but rather a novelty that opens us to something we have not yet thought. (p. 95) The novelty of My Winnipeg —the smoothing of a striated city that reverses and striates the film, which is itself a series of striations running from left to right presumably through a projector (more likely through an editing software), and streets running this way and that, planned at times, and the improbability of reconciling the actual and the virtual on Maddin’s terms, of separating truth from fiction, which if done would render the film and our behavior meaningless, and would upend any thinking that otherwise might have occurred, might be occurring, might soon occur—serves to show us a city that does not yet exist in order to stir us into an active process of thinking that which we have not yet thought, the city as it is, was, or could be. Deleuze spent much of his career on nooology, the history of the dogmatic image of thought, and a quest to unearth a new image of thought, which ultimately became the rhizome. To Deleuze, we live suspended in a solution of “anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the others in the world which surrounds him” (1986, pp. 208–209). As such, “thought” means nothing but representations of cliché. A new word—“creation”—emerged for Deleuze to describe the rare moments when we unwittingly encounter “demons” and “powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant” that force us into thinking within thought (1994, p. 145). Unsurprisingly, this process, for Deleuze, “requires the explosion of the clear and distinct” because the clear and distinct “is inseparable from the model of recognition which serves as the instrument of every orthodoxy” (p. 146).

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second childhood—namely 1929” (p. 11). Maddin points out the tropes: “b&w with toned sequences, mime with talking, locked down expositional tableaux with bumpily fluid musical numbers” (p. 11). He calls his “moral sensibility” “strictly precode” (p. 11). All joking aside—of perhaps all joking inside—Maddin’s review highlights what makes his first film so him—including the mono soundtrack that “drones and hums out a comfy wool blanket of ambience” and the innovative structure that “dismisses the literal-mindedness of continuity” in order to capture dreaming2 (p. 12). “The fluency with which Maddin speaks a dead movie-language,” says Maddin, “suggests he suffers from a most plangent nostalgia, that he has spent more of his life looking backward through misty eyes, and without absolutely no idea where he is going”: (pp. 11–12). He calls this “the delirious glee of a finger-painting preschooler” (p. 11), but I call it Recklessness—getting better at being oneself by getting better at not knowing what is supposed to be known and done. His “reviews” of his other films are equally irreverent and laughingly self-critical. He calls his second film, Archangel (1990), “a full-blown amnesia melodrama” in “the last war designed exclusively for the pleasure of children” (p. 14). Maddin refers to it as “a Goya painting etched upon a child’s windowpane in frost” (p. 14). For Careful (1992), the filmmaker used two-strip technicolor to invoke the year 1929—very specific The lesson here—if there is one, if there even could be—might be, then, that films like My Winnipeg possess sufficient demons to explode the clear and distinct and that out of the experience of watching the film and creating art as such, we and the world that surround us may become if only for an instant not a cliché. What we have here is a pedagogy of the permanent circuit, a way of education by what poet Dean Young (2010) calls “Recklessness”: a “perpetual negotiation” between intensity and contradiction (pp. 37–39), “getting better at not knowing what one is doing” (p. 89). “Theories about art,” says Young, “aren’t art any more than a description of an aphid is an aphid” (p. 79). A documentary about a city that is a description of the city is not art (though it may be informative); on the other hand, a documentary about a city that codifies various polarizations of the city, allowing difference itself to emerge, allowing many formerly virtual moments to be momentarily actualized, may not only be art but it may be closer to a living city. “Certainty,” as Louis Aragon reminded us, “is not reality” (p. 68). “WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES.” (p. 47) 2 André Breton: “The waking state, I have no reason but to consider it a phenomenon of interference” (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 115).

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(p. 15). By Maddin’s own admission, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) “drifts away from the familiar confines of the archaic film” with which his previous works had been obsessed. The film, according to Maddin, was “shot in 35 mm full colour with a contemporary aspect ratio and nary an intertitle” (p. 16), the latter being one of the director’s enduring obsessions. Maddin achieves the film’s unique language by mixing dialogue from Knut Hamsen’s Pan and “dollops of prosper Merrimee” (p. 16). About his six-minute short The Heart of the World (2000), Maddin says cheekily: Some have described this frenzied feature-compressed-into-a-short as a call to arms meant to topple the complaisantly flaccid cinema of today, a plea to reinvent movies from scratch, or a reverent myth which finally places film at the very center of the universe where it belongs. Maybe Guy Maddin, that great lava-sprite, has been expressing all these impassioned sentiments since the very beginning of his career. Who am I to say? (p. 17)

Vertov In 1926 Vertov documented his esthetic as “Film-Factory of Facts,3 ” which includes and basically is this list:

3 The Lifespan of a Fact a. (2012), written by John D’Agata, is a mixture of “real” essay (which was originally published in The Believer) and a fabricated, tense e-mail conversation between the essay’s author (“John”) and its fact-checker (“Jim”). Within the book, the essay takes up the middle square of each page. The e-mail conversation adorns each page in the margins, slipping around and over, on the right, left, top, and bottom, referring to questions about authenticity and the public’s obsession with facts. John’s character argues over and over that what he is doing is creative nonfiction, not journalism. What he is doing is essaying. Alice Gregory (2012) sums it up quite well in her review:

The Lifespan of a Fact doesn’t really even look like a book: The font alternates between black and red ink; the text is broken into irregular columns. For almost every proposed clause or sentence of John’s (“It’s estimated that only 40 percent of suicides are the result of chemical imbalance”), we get a caption from Jim (“No source for this, and I couldn’t find anything that says this.”). Often, John responds, spitefully, in turn…. In the end, John’s original essay—and his highfalutin theories about what he’s trying to accomplish—comes across as the epitome of literary hubris. And Jim’s loss of reverence for so-called reality—after he uncovers a discrepancy in the coroner’s report that is largely the basis for John’s piece—

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• the FACTORY OF FACTS • Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with facts. Propaganda with Facts. Fists made of facts. • Lightning flashes of facts. • Mountain of facts. • Hurricane of facts. • And individual little factlets. • Against film-sorcery. • Against film-mystification. (1978, pp. 112–113) Guy Maddin is among Vertov’s fans, some may say progeny. Godard, too, who created a film group in Paris named after Vertov. For the 2011 Dgiza Vertov retrospective at the MoMA, Maddin was one of the filmmakers to offer a contemporary perspective on the kino-eye (the nonactor film). Also not surprising, also a connection, a line of flight, is the fact that poet and essayist Susan Howe (2012), having nothing to do with film culture, wrote a 2012 essay on Chris Marker. Howe was asked to write the essay for an issue of Frameworks, and did so, she says, because of her “wish to find a way to document” her late husband’s life and work (p. 380). And that she does. Her husband, David, becomes one part of a braided4 (multi-topic, criss-cross) essay; other parts are Dziga Vertov, poet Vladmir Mayakovsky (who either committed suicide or lost seems an apt casualty of the rhetorical contretemps. For all its absurdity, John and Jim’s war of words is a sick thrill to read—even if the fact-challenged essayist and his persnickety, one-man truth squad never land a gig again. a. I used to own this book. I leant it to a friend of mine, who I lived with briefly in a townhouse on the edge of Ohio State’s campus in Columbus, Ohio, where it, along with a few other books, including two by Anne Carson, was stolen from his green Subaru Forester. We lived next door to a gay bar, across from a hookah lounge, adjacent to a college bar, a block from two hardcore metal music venues, and the length of a townhouse away from an abandoned, sprawling house in which lived a handful of comers and goers. Hard to know which of those subcultures would go so far to get its hands on experimental literature. I would have quoted directly from the book, but I don’t have it anymore. 4 While not the inventor of the braided essay (I don’t know who is, but I imagine it was centuries ago), Eula Biss wrote some of the most widely distributed and appreciated braided essays before turning to braided books and other endeavors. I was introduced to her through “Time and Distance Overcome,” an essay about telephone poles, Edison,

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a game of Russian roulette, depending on who you ask), Chris Marker (the supposed subject, although an essay has multiple subjects, including, always, the I writing it), Jean-Luc Godard, and Walt Whitman, among others. The FACTORY OF FACTS against film-sorcery! Chris Marker “was a poet first,” she says (p. 382). “We who work in documentary poetic film,” wrote Vertov once, “are dying for work” (qtd., p. 384). “Some of my earliest memories are confused with facts,” Howe writes (p. 392). Vertov saw the filmmaker not as an artist but as a machine, “a conduit for capturing (and shaping) reality,” which is likely why he chose the pseudonym Dziga Vertov, a wildly spinning top (Silver, 2010). In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov solves a problem of silent film: how to show what a radio says. Music is an accordion image and a piano overlayed upon the speaker along with a disembodied ear, for what else would it be?

and racism, in the collection Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essay. The history of the telephone and its place in America, such as described in this passage— “Time and dist. overcome,” read an early advertisement for the telephone. Rutherford B. Hayes pronounced the installation of a telephone in the White House “one of the greatest events since creation.” The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.” (2009, p. 5) —are assembled carefully as blocs of language next to passages like this (Fig. 6.3): In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets. In Danville, Illinois, a black man’s throat was slit, and his dead body was strung up on a telephone pole. Two black men were hanged from a telephone pole in Lewisburg, West Virginia. And two in Hempstead, Texas, where one man was dragged out of the courtroom by a mob, and another was dragged out of jail. (p. 5)

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Fig. 6.3 Still from Man with a Movie Camera

References Anderson, M. (2001). The modest gesture of the filmmaker: An interview with Agnès Varda. Cineaste, 26(4), 24–27. Beard, W. (2008). Guy Maddin and cinematography: An interview. Cinephile. http://cinephile.ca/archives/volume-5-no-1-far-from-hollywoodalternative-world-cinema/guy-maddin-and-cinematography-an-interview/ Chamarette, J. (2009). Les Statues meurant aussi [blog]. Senses of Cinema. http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/les-statues-meurent-aussi/ Criterion Collection. (2014). Alain Resnais on the script for Last Year at Marienbad [video]. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3092-rem embering-alain-resnais D’Agata, J., & Fingal, J. (2012). The lifespan of a fact. W.W. Norton. Darke, C. (2008). First personal singular: Agnès Varda’s parallel career as a shortfilm essayist. Film Comment, 44(1), 22–23. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image, H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam (Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema II: The time-image, H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition, P. Patton (Trans.). Duras, M. (1961). Hiroshima mon amour [screenplay], R. Seaver (Trans.). Grove Press. Ebert, R. (2008, 26 June). O Canada! A reverie on a frozen city. RogerEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/my-winnipeg-2008 Gregory, A. (2012, 7 March). ‘Lifespan Of A Fact’: Truth and consequences. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2012/03/07/147725796/lifespan-ofa-fact-truth-and-consequences Gross, L. (2012). Time Traveler. Film Comment, 48(5), 12–13. Herzog, W. (1999). Minnesota declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema. Walker Arts Center. http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/1999/min nesota-declaration-truth-and-fact-in-docum Holland, N. N. (1960). Two films on flesh [review of Hiroshima mon amour by A. Resnais]. Hudson Review, 13(4), 592–597. Horrigan, B. (2002). Introduction. Guy Maddin. Wexner Center for the Arts, pp. 4–7. Horsley, J. (2008). Obsessions into light. Cineaste, 33(4), 47–49. Howe, S. (2012). sorting facts; or, nineteen ways of looking at marker. Frameworks, 52(2), 380–420. Jones, K. (2015, July 13). Hiroshima mon amour: Time indefinite. The Criterion Collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/291-hirosh ima-mon-aour-time-indefinite Kauffmann, S. (1962). Torment and time [review of Last Year at Marienbad by A. Resnais]. The New Republic, 146(13), 26–27. Lopate, P. (1992). In search of the centaur: The essay-film. The Threepenny Review, 48, 19–22. Lopate, P. (2003). Night and fog. The Criterion Collection. https://www.criter ion.com/current/posts/288-night-and-fog Lonergan, K. (2016, November 30). “Manchester By The Sea” Director Probes The Drama And Humor Of Grief. Fresh Air with Terry Gross [interview]. http://www.npr.org/2016/11/30/503865472/manchester-bythe-sea-director-probes-the-drama-and-humor-of-grief Maddin, G. (2002). Both violent and cozy: Very lush and full of ostriches. Retrospective: Guy Maddin [program]. Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, pp. 8–17. Maddin, G. (2007). My Winnipeg [motion picture]. IFC. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Meyer, A. (2013). Gleaning the passion of Agnès Varda. In T. J. Kline, Agnès Varda: Interviews, (pp. 198–202). University of Mississippi Press. Morris, E. (2004). The certainty of Donald Rumsfeld. The New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/the-certainty-of-don ald-rumsfeld-part

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Morris, E. (n.d.). Biography. Errol Morris. http://errolmorris.com/biography. html Negative Capability. (n.d.). The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfounda tion.org/resources/learning/glossary-terms/detail/negative-capability Oppenheimer, J. (2016, July 13). Joshua Oppenheimer on Hiroshima mon amour [video]. The criterion collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/4145-joshua-oppenheimer-on-alain-resnais-s-night-and-fog Persons, R. (Dir.). (2009). General Orders no. 9 [motion picture]. Variance Films. Polito, R. (2011). A Propos de Jean and Boris. The Complete Jean Vigo [booklet] (pp. 18–25). The Criterion Collection. Poppy, N. (April 2004). Errol Morris [Filmmaker]. The Believer. http://www.bel ievermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris Resnais, A. (Dir.). (1955). Night and fog [motion picture]. Argos Films. Resnais, A. (Dir.). (1959). Hiroshima mon amour [motion picture]. Pathe Films. Richardson, J. (2017). What art thinks. j. jagodzinski (Ed.), What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 93–110. Rigg, J. (2005). The Gleaners and I by Agnès Varda [interview]. In T. J. Kline (Ed.), Agnès Varda: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1962). Last Year at Marienbad [screenplay]. Grove Press. Robinson, I. (2014). The critical cinematic cartography of My Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 23(2), 96–114. Semley, J. (2009). Still Mining His Winnipeg. Cineaction, 78, 66–72. Taubin, A. (2007). Mumblebore: All talk? Film Comment. http://www.filmco mment.com/article/all-talk-mumblecore/ Toronto International Film Festival. (2015). Guy Maddin on My Winnipeg, 21 May. https://www.tiff.net/the-review/guy-maddin-on-my-winnipeg/. Accessed 30 August 2020. Vertov, D. (1978). The factory of facts and other writings. K. O’Brian (Trans). October, 7: 109–128. Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

CHAPTER 7

Customary Conclusion

For all the ABERs’ talk about art, and of reaching wide audiences, we have yet to see an artwork within the movement that could be labeled an artwork in itself or that could reach a wide audience beyond the academy, which explains why jagodzinski and Wallin discuss three artists not associated with the Academy (Bilal, Orlan, and Sterlac), and why Barone and Eisner (2012), too, name several artists, including writers Dave Eggers and Truman Capote, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, and playwrights Tony Kushner and Arthur Miller, whose work they say represents “qualitative research texts that are useful in the same way that all good art can be” (p. 56), but they fail to mention any academics on the list. Whether outside or inside the academy, whether called this or that, they say “each is an example of good arts based research that ‘makes new worlds’” (p. 56). ABER through Deleuze and Young could make new worlds, think the world otherwise, makes birds instead of birdcages. We should worry when scholars must resort to naming “certified fresh” artists who have nothing to do with arts-based research as exemplars of arts-based research. But, in their defense, they have nothing within the field to celebrate. They have no choice. Great art, even good art, does not have to be “fact” (a slippery term at best) to ring “true” (another slippery term), which is why novels and films hold great appeal and are often discussed in terms of their connections to real-world-ness. We learn © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_7

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about humanity through fiction and often identify with fictional characters. Werner Herzog (1999) once said “there are deeper strata of truth in [art], and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Not surprisingly, though, and importantly, Barone and Eisner do not list arts-based researchers on that list and others like jagodzinski are forced to look elsewhere, too. If we want to bring a kind of thinking scholarship into arts education (beyond ABER, beyond what we are perhaps capable of doing today), we should turn our attention toward Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), which has been producing the kind of high-quality art AND scholarship to which ABER scholars should aspire. SEL works stand on their own as art but also have the academic rigor of their discipline’s (anthropology’s) research. ABERS should take notice. The Sensory Ethnography Lab is the highest achievement of academic anthropological work in the nation. The products emerging from the lab have won recognition at film festivals across the world, including in Berlin (at Berlinale), Cannes, Copenhagen (at CPH:DOX), and New York (at NYFF), among other places, and exhibited as artworks at the Centre Pompidou, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Berlin Kunsthalle, MoMA, Tate Museum, etc. So, too, the films from the SEL have been on countless “best of the year” lists, which is to say they are reaching a wide audience, all things ABERists claim to want to do. The SEL is a PhD program in “media anthropology,” for which students are trained in and faculty work and re-work the connections between media (video and sound) and anthropology. Arguably, the SEL is the first academic program to achieve what jagodzinski and Wallin (and Deleuze and Guattari before them) have argued for. “The idea is not to show you a way of life,” one description of the SEL goes, “but to show you how that way of life might feel” (Pinkerton, 2020). The program’s director, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, had this to say about the program: It’s a little lab, as in an experimental laboratory, but not really scientific. We are not conducting experiments with controlled variables. It’s experimental since we don’t know what we are doing. There are a bunch of us working there. We are trying to do things with audio visual media—with photography, sound, film and video, to do things that can’t ordinarily be

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done or aren’t ordinarily done either within anthropology or within film, especially documentary or within art. (Chang, 2013)

Take notice: “we don’t know what we are doing.” They are, he says, “recovering anthropologists” who are not interested in reducing that magnitude of that lived-in experience to sound bites or to discuss formulations or linguistic propositions that would summarize a culture or human existence in ways that are reducible to meanings that can be transcribed in language or written words.

Castaing-Taylor adds that they don’t want to discuss the world, in the way that many documentaries do, but rather to experience it. One film from the SEL, Leviathan (2012), follows a fishing trawler off the coast of New Bedford,1 Massachusetts, a fact we are told in text only after bearing 80 minutes of non-stop brutality in the name of industry (because the film isn’t much for explaining).2 Because the large cinematic camera they wanted to use was lost overboard, like much of the fish blood and scraps, Leviathan was necessarily filmed with GoPro cameras in waterproof cases attached to bodies—the fishermen’s as they traverse the deck, often soaked by rough water, in rubber overalls, and the directors’ (Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel). With no time to frame a shot, the directors rushed around “without anyone looking through the viewfinder of the camera to see what was being shot,” capturing images and sounds, mostly noises. At times, the GoPros, mounted on sticks, say the directors, take us under the water. We swim with the fish. Even onboard, though, the wet chaos delivers the feel of being submerged. The result is “wave-lashed from beginning to end, the lens often bejeweled with beads of seawater,” as Pinkerton says. Other times we’re lashed to a fisherman. We gut the fish and move the chains. We run and fall. We slide. “The result,” according to critic Philip Hoare (2013), is “a dialogue-free 1 Yes, this is the very same New Bedford from where Ishmael embarked on his journey in Moby Dick (Melville, 2017). He had a slight obsession with disparaging the place. “New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping,” says Ishmael. “In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.” He calls it “a queer place” where “fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.” 2 Dean Young: “I wasn’t put on this planet to explain myself” (2010, p. 30).

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90-minute tumult of long takes and jump-cut editing, throws the viewer into a nausea-making, overturned world so vivid that it’s hard to believe its scenes are real and not a clever CGI construction.” The soundtrack is visceral, all diegetic, water over boards, chains on metal, forceful and alive in a way a score could never be. Pinkerton sums up the film like this: “Sea lives meet amphibious cameras meet a hulking devastation war machine in this wave-lashed vision.” Pat Dowell (2013), in his review, calls it “a documentary—and yet not a documentary. It’s a near-wordless, almost abstract depiction of an 80-foot groundfishing boat heading out of New Bedford, Mass.” He accurately describes the experience as a series of flashes: “You hear metal groaning and rasping, see fish, gloves and tools tossed about on a boat that’s pitching and rolling in a roaring wind.” And that is not all, he says, adding: You see strange upside-down images of birds scrambling to get the chunks of dismembered fish that have been thrown off a deck awash in blood. You see creatures of the deep maimed and seemingly dazed by the killing pressure of the fishing nets as they roll out onto that deck. But there’s no explanation—no captioning, no voice-over—to orient the viewer to the sights and sounds of industrial fishing.

Like Dowell’s, Hoare’s descriptions (like those in most of the reviews) of the film’s various moments take on a pure viscerality: Shrieking gulls plunge up from the dawn-slashed sky in vertiginous, inverted scenes as the cameras tumble upside-down. Starfish float beneath the surface like coral-coloured confetti. On deck, scarred, tattooed men eviscerate fish dragged up from the depths. In one shocking sequence, a skate dangles from a chain as its wings, the only edible parts, are excised— a scene not far from the notorious trade in definned sharks. Meanwhile, an indeterminate heavy-metal track grinds out from a radio, sounding more like the knell of an aquatic apocalypse.

Plunge! Slash! Eviscerate! Excise! Grind! Scramble! Dismember! Repeat. The water has weight. The film is pure physicality. We have no idea, as the viewers, that the cameras are on bodies or on sticks; the camera doesn’t break the fourth wall, turn around, and show us to what it is attached. Instead, we are the subject-less, identity-less, an eye unchained to any substance that exists within the film, as far as we know. We are attached to the violence of force.

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ABER must find the ideal vehicle for delivering what it wishes to deliver in the way the SEL has done for anthropology. ABERists must slash and grind and eviscerate the current trends that are tried to the strata and learn from what Pareval and Castaing-Taylor are doing, tied as they are to the mast. The war machine trawls. The image machine gobbles up images and spits out blood. Perhaps the essay—the in-between, the test, the attempt, the try; not the certain—is a way forward, if not the ideal vehicle. We must move beyond an ABER whose primary use, as Finley (2008) says, lies “in addressing social inequities” and “postmodern ethics of participative, action-oriented, and politically situated perspectives… to facilitate critical race, indigenous, queer, feminist, and border theories and research methodologies”3 (p. 72). Barone and Eisner (2012) say that this is the time “to provide methodological permission for people to innovate with the methods they use” (p. 2). Let us not mistake communication for innovation. jan jagodzinski (2017), in “Betraying Further: Arts-Based Education at the ‘End of the World,’” revisits his critique of ABER that he began with Wallin. He begins by calling his and Wallin’s original challenge “forcework” (p. 267). jagodzinski responds to notable retorts from the a/r/tography crowd—one from Adrienne Boulton-Funke, a prominent practitioner of the “method,” and one from Carl Leggo, an academic and self-styled “poet” who practices within the school; and other general additions from the group’s co-founder, Rita Irwin. jagodzinski’s goal is to respond to those retorts. jagodzinski says that his and Wallin’s main goal was to claim that ABER is “representational and anthropocentric” (p.268). jagodzinski says that they want not to rethink the “subject” but to disintegrate it “by a field of forces where identity no longer survives” (p. 269), a Deleuzian practice articulated, he says, in Negotiations (but also remember one of the keys of Difference and Repetition). “Becoming is always a deterritorialization, an un-becoming,” says jagodzinski, “the undoing givenness of the given” (p. 269). jagodzinski 3 The poet Russell Edson (1975) says nothing is more terrible than a self-serious poet “whose poems are gradually decaying into sermons of righteous anger; no longer able to tell the difference between the external abstraction and the inner desperation; the inner life is no longer lived or explored, but converted into public anger… Beware of serious people, for their reality is flat; and they have come to think of themselves as merely flat paste-ons. Their rage at the flatness of their lives knows no end; and they keep all their little imitators scared to death…. And they are meddlers, they try to create others in their own image because theirs is failing” (p. 39).

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believes that a/r/tography, despite all the rhetoric, could be situated comfortably within ethnography, as a form of action research, tied to representation (p. 270). He calls their work “democratically conservative and pluralist” (p. 270) in part because of what “this research actually does” (p. 271) (as opposed to what it claims to do). A/r/tographers misinterpret Deleuze|Guattari’s AND. They use the term “contiguous”— touching multiple points along shared corridors—when in fact they should use the AND—that transversal movement Deleuze |Guattari call “sweeping one way and another” (qtd., p. 270). The AND is absent. In other words, the a/r/tographers mistake /conflate bulbous with singularity. They mistakenly define “in-between” as a physicality (an object?) situated between other physicalities when in fact it means the AND. In addition, says jagodzinski, a/r/tographic research remains obsessed with the self who operates within a community of practitioners that use reflection/reflexion as a major method of understanding, which remains tied, if indirectly, to phenomenology. The filmmakers and essayists above privilege the event and force. Without seeking to be, they are more aligned with Deleuze|Guattari than many a/r/tographers. “The event,” says jagodzinski, “always offers the unthought as its arrival; time is always out of joint, offering the glimpse of the third synthesis of time: the eternal return of renewal” (p. 290). Perhaps no other medium but cinema is best suited to enact the “cracked” I, the multiple which is also (but how?) the singular. Perhaps a/r/tography, because it situates itself firmly within the Academy and wishes to “say something,” which means communicating with friends, clear distinctions between subjects and objects (with special emphasis on art as object), will be stuck in perpetuity within forms instead of forces, homework instead of forcework. We must, as John Cage (1981) once said, climb out of the fetishism of aestheticism. Of music he says it “imposes nothing” and “can effectively change our manner of seeing, making us view everything around us as art. But that is not the goal. Sounds have no goal! They are, and that’s all. They live” (p. 87). Let us return to the living. Let us begin the doing.

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Fig. 7.1 The bloody runoff from many dismembered fish in Leviathan (Courtesy of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

References Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts based research. Sage. Cage, J. (1981). For the birds. University of Michigan. Chang, D. (2013, February 26). Interview: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel on LEVIATHAN and the possibilities of Cinema. Screen Anarchy. https://screenanarchy.com/2013/02/lucien-castaing-taylor-verenaparavel-interview.html Dowell, P. (2013, March 16). “Leviathan”: The fishing life, from 360 degrees. NPR. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/174404938?storyId=174 404938&storyId=174404938 Edson, R. (1975). Portrait of the writer as a fat man: Some subjective ideas or notions on the care and feeding of prose poems. In S. Friebert, D. Walker, & D. Young (Eds.), A field guide to contemporary poetry and poetics. Oberlin College Press. Finley, S. (2008). Arts-based Research. In G. Knowles & A. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. Sage. Herzog, W. (1999). Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema. Walker Arts Center. Retrieved at http://www.walkerart.org/mag azine/1999/minnesota-declaration-truth-and-fact-in-docum

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Hoare, P. (2013). Leviathan: The film that lays bare the apocalyptic world of fishing. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/18/ leviathan-fishing-film-moby-dick jagodzinski, j. (2017). Betraying further: Arts-based education at the “end of the world.” In j. jagodzinski (Ed.), What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari (pp. 267–309). Palgrave Macmillan. Melville, H. (2017). Mody Dick; or, The Whale. Project Gutenberg. https://www. gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm Paravel, V., & Castaing-Taylor, L. (2012). Leviathan [film]. The Cinema Guild. Pinkerton, N. (2020, January 30). Leviathan review: A wet and wild documentary like nothing you’ve seen (or felt). Sight & Sound. https://www2. bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/ film-week-leviathan Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

Index

A Adorno, Theodor, 120, 124 Artography, 108, 111 Arts-based educational research (ABER), 17–19, 65, 66, 72, 73, 85, 91, 104, 107, 109, 112, 115–118, 159, 160, 163 Arts-based research, 18, 19, 50, 66, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119 B Barone, Tom, 107, 109, 159, 160, 163 Barrett, Terry, 15, 31 C Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, 60, 160, 161, 163, 165 Cliché, 15, 17, 40, 41, 43, 82, 88, 89, 94, 98, 114, 126, 129, 143, 147, 151, 152

Concept, 1, 4, 11, 14–16, 26, 29, 33, 37, 39, 45, 49, 51, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71–73, 77, 83, 85, 88, 90–94, 99, 100, 104, 110, 111, 114, 130, 131, 151 Corrigan, Timothy, 123, 124 Critical thinking, 25, 26, 29–31, 151 D D’Agata, John, 118–120, 122, 124, 153 Deleuze, Gilles, 2–4, 6–9, 11, 13–18, 31, 39–43, 45–51, 56–59, 61, 66–74, 76–78, 82–95, 97–99, 102, 104, 107, 110, 114–117, 119, 121–123, 126–131, 139, 140, 142, 144, 149, 151, 159, 160, 164 E Eisner, Eliot, 18, 31, 103, 107–109, 159, 160, 163

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2021 S. M. Morrow, Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0

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INDEX

Essay, 65, 66, 109, 114, 118–127, 129, 130, 136, 139, 153–155, 163 Essay film, 65, 122–130, 135–137, 143, 145

F Foucault, Michel, 14, 78, 85

G Godard, Jean-Luc, 57, 122–124, 129, 135, 136, 154, 155 Guattari, Felix, 2, 4, 11, 14–17, 31, 39, 56–59, 61, 66–74, 76–78, 82, 84, 86–93, 97, 98, 102, 104, 110, 114, 117, 160, 164

H Herzog, Werner, 125, 132, 145, 160

I Irwin, Rita, 107, 108, 110, 111, 163

J jagodzinski, jan, 31, 32, 45, 50, 51, 57, 66, 92, 107, 110, 114–119, 159, 160, 163, 164

K Keats, John, 4, 5, 37, 68, 131, 147, 149

L Lather, Patti, 3, 7, 92 Lopate, Phillip, 124, 125, 137, 139, 140

M Maddin, Guy, 68, 147–154 Marker, Chris, 123–125, 135–137, 139, 145, 154, 155 Massumi, Brian, 4, 11, 16, 56 Montaigne, Michel de, 118, 123, 124 Morris, Errol, 123, 125, 130, 132, 143, 145–147 N Negative Capability, 4, 37, 58, 68, 131, 147, 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 15, 18, 28, 38, 45, 47, 48, 71, 72, 82, 84, 102–104, 118 No-ology, 45, 151 P Paravel, Verena, 60, 161, 165 Persons, Robert, 39, 78, 80, 130, 150 R Rajchman, John, 7, 45 Rascaroli, Laura, 120, 123–125, 128, 129 Recklessness, 17, 33, 37–39, 57, 58, 82, 100, 143, 152 Resnais, Alain, 80, 123–127, 130, 135–137, 139–143 Rhizome, 8, 9, 13, 45, 56, 58, 61, 65, 70, 71, 78, 85, 87–92, 94, 99, 110, 149, 151 Richardson, Jack, 29, 119, 121, 151 S Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), 160, 161, 163 Shields, David, 8, 121 Smooth and striated, 39, 58–61, 121, 150, 151

INDEX

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St. Pierre, Elizabeth, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 29, 73, 91–93 Sullivan, Graeme, 7, 107–111

W Wallin, Jason, 50, 66, 107, 115–119, 159, 160, 163

V Varda, Agnes, 123, 125, 130, 136, 143 Vertov, D., 145, 153–155 Vigo, Jean, 143, 144

Y Young, Dean, 1, 3, 11, 14, 15, 17–19, 34, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47, 50, 56, 58, 82, 97, 100–102, 112, 113, 132, 143, 152, 159, 161