Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance

New Materialisms

Anna Hickey-Moody, Tara Page

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783484881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts practices. Each contribution synthesizes creative approaches to philosophy and new materialist understanding of practice to show how human-nonhuman interaction at the core of Arts practice is a critical post human pedagogy. Across fine art, dance, gallery education, film and philosophy, the book contends that certain kinds of Arts practice can be a critical pedagogy in which tactical engagements with community, space, place and materiality become means of not only disrupting dominant discourse but also of making new discourses come to matter. It demonstrates how embodied, located acts of making can materially disrupt cultural hegemony and suggest different ways the world might materialize. It argues that the practice of Arts making is a post human cultural pedagogy in which people become part of a broader assemblage of matter, and all aspects of this network are solidified in objects or processes that are themselves pedagogical. In doing so the book offers a fresh and theoretically engaged perspective on arts as pedagogy.

Chapter 1

Experimental Philosophy and Experimental Pedagogy

A Single Vision

Aislinn O’Donnell

In a short essay in MaHKUzine, Irit Rogoff (2010) writes of the emergence in the seventeenth century of a society for the study of ‘Experimental Philosophy’. Their commitment to ‘take nothing on authority’, combined with the value that they set upon ‘experimental philosophy’, constitutes, she argues, some of the features of ‘creative practices of knowledge’ that might serve to offer a form of resistance to the

endless pragmatic demands of knowledge protocols: outcomes, outputs, impact, constant monitoring of the exact usefulness of a particular knowledge or of its ability to follow the demands and imperatives of cognitive capitalism—demands to be portable, to be transferable, to be useful, to be flexible, to be applied, to be entrepreneurial and generally integrated within market economies at every level. (39)

Rogoff (2010) acknowledges that the legacy of the Enlightenment is one that seeks to verify through experiment or argument and suggests that it might be rather better to think of singularizing knowledge and the ways that creative practices of knowledge might enable the contestation of truth regimes. It is useful to reflect more deeply upon this idea of experimental philosophy, both in terms of its trajectory through the centuries and its subterranean potentials in the present. The experimental philosophers to whom Rogoff (2010) refers were indeed mavericks in many ways, engaged in collective forms of inquiry (often through necessity), passionately curious and truth-seeking. Yet the legacy of Francis Bacon and others was one which created experimental philosophy as a practice enabling mastery over nature, abstracting phenomena from their ‘natural’ environments, privileging replicability, generality, and even universalizabilty, over singularity, locality or context. These practices claimed the power to identify, classify and categorize. The complex relationship between truth-claims and power has been well documented, yet the co-imbrication of truth-regimes and power remains resistant to efforts to demystify and dismantle them. This essay acknowledges this and looks to uncouple truth and power through a more tentative, mischievous, oblique, joyous and experientially oriented ‘experimental philosophy’, resonant with the recent turn in research called ‘new materialism’. The refusal of the demand for explanatory force and the demand to give an account of itself, as is commonplace in practices framed as research in art, philosophy and pedagogy, is accompanied by resistance to both the imperialism of methodology and the hierarchy of theory. Experimental philosophy favours instead material encounters, the genesis of ideas, creative methodologies and new concepts that accompany and engender different more subtle sensibilities, patterns of thought and singular knowledges.

Suspicion of all forms of hegemony, intellectual and otherwise, led Paul Feyerabend (1993) to argue that science is an essentially anarchic enterprise. His position was that ‘the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes’ (5). In order to challenge the prescriptive notion that one first has an idea or a problem, and only thereafter one acts, Feyerabend (1993) pointed to the playful activity of young children as they explore the world. He believed that ‘general education should prepare citizens to choose between standards, or to find their way in a society that contains groups committed to various standards, but it must under no condition bend their minds so that they conform to the standards of one particular group’ (61). For the same reason, Feyerabend resisted the notion that ‘knowledge [should] be changed so that its presence can be checked by a single algorithm’ (218) and was critical of early philosophers saying that they ‘do not enrich existing concepts, but they void them of content, make them crude, and increase their influence by turning crudeness into a measure of truth’ (260). Moreover, Feyerabend argues that the scientific and philosophical commitments and beliefs that have shaped and informed the ‘rationalist’ imaginary, which offers an image of itself as both objective and tradition-independent, constitute a ‘secularised form of the belief in the power of the word of God’ (218). Such a rationalist imaginary is impoverished, and its claims to identify the essential are premised on the elimination of the immeasurable or the singular. The idea of objectivity as a form of secularization of theological belief is provocative, in particular given the performative force of much of the language that circulates in educational research, policy, corporations and institutions, academic and otherwise. One example of this is found in the KEA report Impact of Culture on Creativity (2009) commissioned by the European Commission. This report advocates for the development of a European Creativity Index (ECI) consisting of thirty-two indicators with six central pillars—human capital, institutional environment, technology, social environment, openness and diversity and creative outputs. It justifies the quest for creativity by arguing for its instrumental value in driving economic and social progress.

Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987) draw upon How to do Things with Words by John Austin (1962) as well as Michel Foucault’s (1973, 1984, 1986, 1991) corpus in order to locate different elaborations of performative speech. This informs their innovative concept of the order word. Unlike the examples given by Austin (1962) that embed particular utterances within social norms and practices, such as ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’, order words can include words or phrases that lack signification or content, while retaining the power both to command and to produce subjects and subjectivities. Examples today might include words like ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘excellence’. The material force of this pervasive though curiously empty, redundant, generic, abstract language that is encountered in many policy reports and reviews is resonant of both Orwell (1946, 1948) and Kafka (1989, 2009) as it aims to set standards, simplify, compare, effect outputs, designate outcomes, and design evaluations across a wide range of practice and activities of human existence, with little sense of the diversity of purposes or material practices of human activity across the long natural history of humankind. ‘“Is it not really strange”, asks Einstein, “that human beings are normally deaf to the strongest argument whilst they are always inclined to overestimate measuring accuracies?”’ (quoted in Feyerabend, 1993, 239). Instead of emphasizing operationalization and formalization of procedures across all spheres of existence, Feyerabend (1993) asserts that ‘there are many different maps of reality, from a variety of scientific viewpoints’ (245). Indeed, Ian Hacking (2000) writes in a review of his last book, a compilation of unfinished manuscripts, that what Feyerabend (1993) most resisted was what William Blake (1956) called ‘Single Vision—Newton’s Sleep’; the image of single vision is very different from an epistemological approach that values singularity, or is attuned to the specificity of diversity, capacities required to develop the acuity and sensitivity needed for conscious experimentation.

Singularity and Experimentum

In order to foster an imaginary premised upon ‘experimental philosophy’, points of affinity or connection might be developed between practices of philosophy, art and pedagogy. These might include the seventeenth-century society of experimental philosophers described by Rogoff (2010), and the image of life as experimentation found throughout all the writings of Nietzsche (1984), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Spinoza (1996). Nonetheless, Feyerabend’s (1999) remarks on the use of experiments in the search for ‘reality’ offer a useful note of caution:

But the search [for reality] has a strong negative component. It does not accept phenomena as they are, it changes them, either in thought (abstraction) or by actively interfering with them (experiment). Both types of changes involve simplifications. Abstractions remove the particulars that distinguish an object from another, together with some general properties such as color and smell. Experiments further remove or try to remove the links that tie every process to its surroundings—they create an artificial and somewhat impoverished environment and explore its peculiarities. In both cases, things are being taken away or ‘blocked off’ from the totality that surrounds us. (5)

The interference that Feyerabend (1993) outlines is only a symptom of the will to mastery guiding experimental science and he acknowledges that ‘understanding a subject means transforming it, lifting it out of natural habit and inserting it into a model or a theory or a poetic account of it. But one transformation may be better than another’ (12, original emphasis). As Henri Bergson argued in chapter 1 of Matter and Memory (2004), perception is always a subtractive enterprise—to be able to act, to choose and to move involves blocking off and ignoring much of the rich variety of life. However, a concerted effort to deploy a unidimensional and reductive method that seeks to simplify the abundance of life is a matter for concern that has existential, political, pedagogical and philosophical implications. It is not, says Feyerabend (1993), that we do not need scientists, poets or philosophers but rather that their interaction with their material of inquiry involves a complicated interplay ‘between an unknown and relatively pliable material and researchers who affect and are affected and changed by the material which, after all, is the material from which they have been shaped. It is not therefore easy to remove the results’ (146). These subjective elements create conditions of existence, animating the dynamics of the world rather than just registering ‘what is there’.

I am not averse to those practices of experimental philosophy and pedagogy that invite abstraction in thought or create artificial conditions, but with Hannah Arendt (1958), I resist equating experimentation with hypothesis testing. Arendt writes critically of the way the understanding of truth changed from theoria into the practical question of ‘what works?’ so theory became hypothesis, and the outcome of the hypothesis became ‘truth’, ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’. As she writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), her fear was that the experiment produces reality and thus guarantees its own success. I understand her reservations; however, I do not wholly agree with her suspicions of pragmatism. I am inspired by the subtle responsiveness of practices of empirical enquiry that are attuned to the matter or material of inquiry, and to the possibility of unexpected lines of enquiry and questions such as those opened up by Dada, Fluxus and contemporary art practitioners such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Seamus Nolan, and Fischli and Weiss. Rather than seeking the ‘single vision’ of truth, such an approach looks to create the conditions for new modalities of affective and existential engagement that can serve to punctuate habits of cynicism and ressentiment. Examples might include Suddenly an Overview, Fischli and Weiss’ tender series of tiny clay figurines rendering the monumental events of universal history or the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, or Thomas Hirschhorn’s (2009) collaborative intervention in an estate South-East of Amsterdam, which he creates because he is a ‘fan’ of philosophy. My interest is not in the new field of ‘experimental philosophy’ that generates ideas to be applied by empirical scientists, in particular cognitive psychologists, but rather in the way in which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) take up the functionalist and pragmatist commitment to ‘what works’. This, combined with their vision of experimentation, involves singular practices and situations, and a pluralistic approach to epistemology, entails the retrieval and assembling of an image of experimental philosophy that is more attuned to singularity and more open to rich descriptions of particulars, to practices of observation and to what Deleuze (1995) has called transcendental empiricism—an experimental approach that seeks to create the conditions for real, rather than possible, experience. This approach is both oriented by, and seeks out, passion, curiosity, interest and wonder in a manner redolent of early modern and medieval intellectuals. Thomas Hirschhorn’s (2009/10) description of himself as a ‘fan’ of philosophy, in an interview with Birrell, captures some of the naivety, enthusiasm and excitement that can help to dissolve what William Connolly (2011) has called ‘embers of resentment’ (293). In that interview, Hirschhorn (2009/10) says:

I am passionate about Spinoza because the lecture of Ethics had a real impact on me and I am passionate about Philosophy in general because I enjoy not understanding everything. I like the fact that, in Philosophy, things remain to be understood and that work still has to be done. (2009/10, 1) . . . Again, I am not illustrating Philosophy with my work. I am not reading Philosophy to do my Artwork and I am not reading Philosophy to justify my work. I need Philosophy for my life, to try to find responses to the big questions such as ‘Love’, to name one of the most important to me. For this, I need Philosophy—please believe it! But of course if connections, dynamics, influences or coincidences exist in my work—as you pointed out in ‘It’s Burning Everywhere’—I am absolutely happy. I want to be touched by grace, without belief in any correlation to genius or obscureness or that it has something to do with artistic ignorance. (4)

Such a sense of wonder, enthusiasm and fascination is vital to sustain and energize practices in philosophy, art and pedagogy. In Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s (1998) mapping of the histories of wonder, we are reminded that it was seen as a ‘cognitive passion, as much about knowing as feeling’ (14), and are told that the cognitive passions of wonder and curiosity ‘briefly meshed into a psychology of scientific enquiry in the seventeenth century’ (20). They describe the scepticism of natural philosophers in respect of the possibility of a ‘philosophy of particulars’ because such phenomena were of the order of chance, quoting De mirabilius mundi, whose author says:

‘One should not deny any marvelous thing because he lacks a reason for it, but rather should try it out [experiri]; for the causes of marvelous things are hidden, and follow from such diverse causes preceding them that human understanding, as Plato says, cannot apprehend them,’ observing that ‘thus natural wonders often overlapped with “secrets” and “experiments” (experimenta), another group of phenomena accessible only to experience; these craft formulas, or proven recipes for medical and magical preparations, often drew on the occult properties of natural substances, and they were excluded from natural philosophy for the same reasons’. (Daston and Parks, 1998, 129)

Openness to contingency and chance, as well as sharing of recipes, secrets, experiments and ideas, are key features of my re-envisioning of ‘experimental philosophy and pedagogy’ and in certain respects offer the possibility of what Sarat Maharaj (2009) calls a ‘lab without protocol’ following Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden’s (1999) exhibition/project Laboratorium.

An experimental philosophy lies outside the strict parameters of natural philosophy because of the value it places on the singular, in know-how, instructions, secrets and recipes. This interests me because it interrupts the image of knowledge, or what Deleuze (1994) calls the dogmatic image (or tribunal) of thought, that seeks to prove, show, identify, classify or justify. An experimental approach is more interested in creating opportunities for the sharing of ideas and practices that might enhance potentials for singularizing encounters and material engagement with and by students, situations, materials, disciplines, bodies, affects and ideas. This re-appropriates the mantra of ‘what works’ from its universalizing, ahistorical and foundational pretensions to the kind of toolbox methodology of ‘trying it out’, and thus seems to be more faithful to the nuanced responsiveness of pedagogy and the practices of inquiry of many scientists, artists and philosophers who try to cultivate fine attunements to the terrains of the materials and ideas that they are exploring. Wonder sustains attention and curiosity provokes questioning, yet these qualities are not mentioned in those learning outcomes detailed in course descriptors or funding proposals. Indeed, in my own university the word ‘explore’ is prohibited from learning outcomes. This is primarily because such forms of engagement are unpredictable, and thus their outcomes are not guaranteed.

Avicenna observed that ‘so to whatever object the eye first turns, the same is a wonder and full of wonder if only we examine it for a little’ (original italics, Daston and Parks, 1998, 136). Over two centuries from about 1370, many people engaging in philosophical inquiry were not academic philosophers, but were involved in practical fields of exploration like alchemy, materia medica (pharmacology) and magic. A taste for the particular was essential in such empirical investigation because particulars cannot be known through theory or deduction. Daston and Parks (1998) call this ‘preternatural philosophy’ as it ‘rehearsed new empirical ...