ArtsBasedResearch Jagodzinski&Wallin

Arts-Based Research
Arts-Based Research
A Critique and a Proposal
jan jagodzinski | Jason Wallin

University of Alberta, Canada
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6209-183-2 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-94-6209-184-9 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6209-185-6 (e-book)
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DEDICATION
jan
This book is dedicated to my teacher
Harry Garfinkle
on his 90th birthday
Jason
This book is dedicated to Petrina
for her love and support
v
To do what I have done here has been an act
of prolonged precision in cold blood
beyond anything that I have ever written
–Raymond Pettibon
ENDORSEMENT
Approaching the creative impulse in the arts from the philosophical perspectives
of Deleuze + Guattari, 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.
Charles R. Garoian, Professor of Art Education, Penn State University,
author of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Ethics of Betrayal 1

Ethics of Betrayal 3
The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to Logos 4
Aphorism One 6
The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to “Common Sense” 6
Aphorism Two 10
Rise of the Traitor Prophets 10
Aphorism Three 13
The Symbiotic Force of Betrayal 13
Aphorism Four 16
Chapter I: The Contemporary Image of Thought 19

Milieux 19
De-subjectivation 22
Representation 25
Contemporaneity 29
Machinic Vitalism 31
Experimentation 33
Neuropolitics 42
Perception 45
Chapter II: Contemporary Currents 53

Quantitative|Qualitative 53
Cognition 58
Digitalization 61
Phenomenology 66
Poststructuralism 71
Performance 76
Book Reviews 80
Commentary 83
Chapter III: Questioning the Radical Edge: ABER’s Mirror Games 85

Praxis and Poeisis 85
Praxis is not Poeisis 86
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Augaries of the Actus Purus 87

The Threat of the Impersonal 88
Reterritorializing the Image of the World on the Praxis of
the Subject 89
ABER’s Unintended Rhizome 90
How Open Can One Be? 91
Graphical Spasms of Modernity 94
Manifestation 95
Mirror Games 96
Dialectics 98
Resistance Reaction 99
Gift | Counter-Gift 100
Holism | Molecularity 101
Third Space Under Threat 101
Smooth Space Territorialization 102
A/r/tography’s Empty Signifier 103
Rethinking the Powers of Production 104
Amor Fati 106
The Non-Primacy of Praxis 108
Future Directions? 109
Chapter IV: Arts-based Research Otherwise 111

Arts Research as a Machinic Diagram 111
Diagrams of Affective Sensation: The Time-Machine of Skin in
Contemporary Art 117
Diagrams/Diagrammatics 122
Sinthome 123
Inter-mission I: The Affective Turn, or Getting under
the Skin Nerves 126
Stelarc: Flesh Games in the Virtual Real 129
Diagrammatic Phases 131
Inter-mission II: Body Ego 133
Orlan: Skin Games of the Virtual Imaginary 136
Orlan as Probe Head 139
Waffa Bilal Videogaming beyond the Skin, or Staring
Back at the Gaze 141
A Concluding Note 149
x
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter V: Distributing the Sensible 159

A New Idiot 162
Art is Monumental 166
Provocation 1: Ask: What does my rhizome do? 172
Provocation 2: Mutate 174
Provocation 3: Do Nothing 175
Provocation 4: Steal and Cheat 177
Provocation 5: Become Inhuman 179
Provocation 6: Lose Face 182
Provocation 7: To Betray Well 186
And So It Goes On 189

The Inequality of Equality Based Educational Research 189
A Most Radical Proposal: Ruining Representation 190
Bibliography 197
Index 211
xi
Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal
jan jagodzinski, Jason Wallin (auth.), jan jagodzinski, Jason Wallin (eds.)
Year: 2013; Publisher: SensePublishers; Language: english; Pages:225
ISBN 13:978-94-6209-185-6
INTRODUCTION
THE ETHICS OF BETRAYAL
“I write for a species that does not yet exist.”

– Nietzsche (958)
What does it mean to betray Arts-Based Research by offering a critique of its
fundamental tenants? Why betray it in the first place? There are a number of ways
betrayal might be thought more favorably than the one that most readily comes to
mind: to be disloyal to friends by acting in the interests of enemies. And, of course,
in the Christian world, Judas immediately comes to the lips. What form does his
particular betrayal take? In the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Three Version
of Judas,” the most extreme version is where Judas premeditates his sins and violates
trust. There is no virtue in his act. But then there is the Judas who alone, amongst
the apostles intuits the necessity of the divine plan: the Word has to be made flesh
through a sacrifice on the cross to assure a political rebellion and movement. Judas
in some way reflects Jesus in his own sacrifice, willing to deliberately self-destruct.
In this view Jesus needs Judas’ betrayal to assure that the divine plan would be
accomplished. If Jesus’ aestheticism degrades and mortifies the flesh for the greater
glory of God, Judas’ equally renounced honor, good, peace, and the Kingdom of
Heaven in order that these very possibilities will be achieved. Pushed even further,
Borges speaking through Nils Runeberg, one assumes a monastic scholar who is
writing this account in 1904, blasphemously concludes that God only becomes
Man, not through Jesus alone, but through Judas, to display the culpability of such
a reprehensible act. Runeberg publishes his thesis, but riddled with guilt for having
discovered this dark secret, or at the very least for even having thought such a
possibility, is accused as a heretic, and dies of an aneurysm on the first day of March,
1912. This is his sacrifice for having a counter-factual claim released into the public
world.
Slavoj Žižek (2003), alluding to Borges story, presents Judas as a hero, but a
hero in a very specific way, a hero that betrays out of love. “I respect you for your
universal features, but I love you for an X beyond these features, and the only way
to discern this X is betrayal. I betray you and then, when you are down, destroyed by
my betrayal, we exchange glances—if you understand my act of betrayal, and only
if you do, you are a true hero” (16). Said in an equally strange Lacanian (1978) way:
“I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you — the
objet a— I mutilate you” (268). Betrayal becomes the absolute form of fidelity, or
is it that fidelity is the absolute form of betrayal? And, so it is the betrayal directed
at Arts-based Research. Our betrayal is both to see where the ‘divine’ plan might be
1
INTRODUCTION
heading, but stopping at a certain point, not following any further, as an act of love
and in the belief that another direction is required to continue to make its promises
possible. In this sense this work is a ‘betrayal’ for it can only go so far in its support
of arts-based research, but in no way does it reject the general aspirations of many
of its intentions—especially critical ones. This is not to say that it does not support
the ‘divine’ plan of redeeming the arts to have their own ‘special’ forms of acting
in the world, but to cut ties with a number of its directions for specific ethical,
aesthetical and political reasons when it comes to furthering that trajectory along
epistemological claims, and with a self-serving representational aesthetic.
Our proposal is therefore a critique as well as a direction. The arts-based research
directions we critique and the people who have written these directions are friends,
and therefore we love them in a particular way. So, if we ‘betray’ them in particular
ways, arguing and defending why there are limitations to the in-roads they have made,
it is done with love and respect. This, of course, should be part of academic life, yet
critique is never easy, and needs to be reexamined. This agonistic|antagonistic side
of the Academy performs a certain dialectic that persists as a sign of rigor to assure
quality control. But critique should no longer be critique in the traditional sense;
it strives to ask what each direction of an arts-based education is doing and what
the limitations of its ‘doing’ entails. Hence, we would expect the same ‘betrayal’
of the proposed direction that we developed throughout the book to be questioned
in the same way. To take ‘seriously’ the collegial directions taken to arts-based
research is therefore this paradoxical position of “betrayed love” or “love betrayed.”
Deleuze put it another way regarding his ‘mediators’ (intercesseurs), “Creation’s
all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. […] Whether they are real or
imaginary (fictifs), animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. […]
I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without
me: you’re always working in group, even when you seem to be on your own”
(1995, 125).
Our arguments will concern themselves with the practice of arts, however not as
orthodox research, if research is continually enfolded into forms of epistemology,
which is what some directions of arts-based research tries currently to do to ensure
university legitimacy. Rather, it is an ethics as ontology to generate a ”belief in
the world” as Deleuze (1989, 166) would say. “[To] say that ‘truth is created’
implies that the production of truth involves a series of operations that amount
to working on a material—strictly speaking, a series of falsifications” (Deleuze
1995, 126). In section 2, Contemporary Currents, we will argue that qualitative
research, from where some claim arts-based research has its roots, is simply too
conservative, repeating the technicity of science already forewarned by Heidegger.
The claims to connoisseurship models and the like are the other side of the coin to
quantitative research, and that this direction merely will continue to preserve the
false dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative research, which science as a
leviathan in its own right has surpassed through the paradigm of complexity. In
this section we also raise issues with arts-based research that calls itself cognitive,
2
arguing that the processes of art making should be limited in its use. We are better
served grasping these artistic processes as various forms of simulacra, as the
‘powers of the false, which create new worlds and new experiences informed by
the serialization of the information-digital age. This is “ becoming “ in a digital
age by following fabulation as Deleuze|Guattari developed it. We also worry the
variety of arts-based research that purport themselves to be phenomenological and
poststructuralist that are hegemonic in the field. There seems to be two directions
here: one direction tries to dismantle the humanist notion of self through forms
of radical autoethnography; the other marshals complexity theory that erases the
subject, often placed into the (post)structuralist collective ‘we’ of processes. We
argue that both these directions are well suited to maintain the complementarity of
arts-based research in the academy, but at the expense of repeating a subjectivity
that serves current neo-liberal and capitalist ends. Our direction is machinic. We
also put forward the thesis that various performance arts-based research are on
the right track, but are not radical enough for the posthuman condition we find
ourselves in, and that critical theory requires another level of subjectivity—that is
an understanding of the unconscious as theorized by both Lacan and Deleuze and
Guattari that problematizes a semiotic analysis. Finally, we try 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.
What art can ‘do’ is our focus. This project is Dada-like in its attempt to develop
a new ‘subjective’ research position of arts education, which laughingly might be
called Dada-sein (as a playful critique of Heidegger’s notion and claims of truth
as alethia as unconcealing). It is our contention that Deleuze|Guattari ‘complete’
the Heideggerian project of a ‘people to come’ as adumbrated by the Nietzschean
quote that opens our introduction. The imaginary self that informs so much of the
embodied arts-based research needs to be grasped for the fantasy structures that
emerge and that the “force” of art requires an understanding, not as a form of
epistemology, but from the position of the first philosophy, ethics with a particular
politics of the middle voice. As an ‘event’ it becomes a transversal transformative
act that escapes productionist logic of modern power that designer capitalism puts
into play. Politics in this regime looks very different when witnessing is taken into
account.
Ethics of Betrayal
As it pertains to the state of art education, this book is then intimately concerned
with the image. Specifically, our interest herein is in part oriented to the reception of
the image into educational research, including how this reception has functioned to
advance, limit, and disappear the pedagogical potential of the image itself. What is
the relationship between art and research anyway? This approach necessitates that
we not simply begin with the problem of how the visual is brought into relation with
3
INTRODUCTION
systems of academic thinking and action. This would be to commence our enquiry at
the point of a synthesis that might already be called arts-based research. Instead, we
would like to begin with the consideration of a different kind of image dubbed the
image of thought (Deleuze 1994; Deleuze 2000). It is via the consideration of such
an image that we aim to evoke new problems for the field of arts-based research.
In address to these problems, we will argue that contemporary arts-based research
requires the fabulation of a new ethics. More specifically, we will herein advocate
four aphorisms for an ethics of betrayal functioning as an abstract-machine
throughout this book. This will unfold due course. For now it will suffice to begin by
asking what is meant by the image of thought?
The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to Logos
In Deleuzian terms, the image of thought refers to a particular territorialization that

effectively stops people from thinking. In an example that is germane to the field
of arts-based research, one such territorialization might be named “friendship”.
Perhaps necessarily, friends come to agree on the signification of words and things
(Deleuze, 2000). They come to share conventions that support the ease with which
they can communicate and in terms of which such communication might proceed
under the banner of mutual goodwill. The recognition of a truth between friends
becomes easier for having the conventions of signification and communication
upon which to found it. Yet, there is a problem that accompanies friendship, and
in particular, the kinds of truth that friendship is capable of founding. Proust, for
whom the fidelity and agreement shared between friends can only ever lead to
conventions of thought, evokes such a problematic. This image of friendship is a
corollary to a particular image of thought Proust detects in classical philosophy. For
Proust, the founding of philosophy is drawn from the presupposition that thinking
is naturally oriented to seek the truth. It is in this way that classical philosophy
presumes the implicit friendship between thought and truth. For Proust, this moment
of philosophy’s founding already proceeds from the discovery and organization
of ideas according to an “order of thought…that would assure agreement between
minds” (Deleuze, 2000, 94). Akin to the conventions upon which a friendship
might be founded, Proust charges that the search for truth conducted in philosophy
commences upon an image that restricts thought to already possible orders of
signification. Yet, in Proustian terms, this has yet to think that which makes thought
necessary in the first place. Such necessity, he avers, is obfuscated by the goodwill of
friendship.
Like philosophy, Deleuze writes, “friendship…is ignorant of the dark regions
in which are elaborated the effective forces that act on thought” (95). In other
words, the goodwill shared between friends is insufficient to apprehend a radical
“outside thought” that forces us to think. For Proust, what is summoned in this
critique of the friend is the very thing that makes thought necessary. Put differently,
the enjoinment of thinking and truth founded in classical philosophy does not yet
4
explain what necessitates thinking, nor does it apprehend truth of an order other than
that presupposed by the possible. More important than an image of thought through
which agreement can be founded is that which leads to thought in the first place.
In a word, we might call that which necessitates such thought violence. Deleuze
(2000) writes, “thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence
to it” (96). Violence forces us to recommence thinking in ways subtracted from
the necessity of the possible and the stupor of a priori agreement. Yet, we must
be careful to avoid falling into an image of thought that is already intolerant of
violence, for only in this way might we recommence its question as it pertains to
the necessity of truth. Toward this, Deleuze advances a postulate germane to the
conceptualization of art. Via what Deleuze dubs the secret pressures of art, we might
once again encounter a violence that forces us to think: “There is no Logos; there
are only hieroglyphs” (101). This is not simply an appeal to the absence of truth,
but rather, the necessity that truth be commenced by an encounter that demands
explication, deciphering, and translation. This is the impulse that lies at the heart of
a good detective who, necessitated by the singular case, must always be forced to
think anew.
It is only via an encounter with that which does violence to thought that the act of
thinking itself is recommenced. Within the field of art for example, it is via a particular
style no longer obsessed with recognizable objects that such a shock to thought might
be forged. That is, only once the signs of art become capable of betraying the truth
might they release thinking from an a priori image of thought. “The truth is [never]
revealed” Deleuze writes, “it is betrayed” (95). This conceptualization is itself a
betrayal of classical philosophical thinking, insofar as it suggests that thinking is
not, in itself, naturally inclined to the discovery of the truth. What is necessary to the
truth, Deleuze counterposes, is an outside thought, an unrecognizable sign, or “secret
pressure” that does violence to thought, or more adequately, violates an image of
thought that would attempt to think on our behalf. Thought can never come before
the sign of art, since the sign appeals to a style of thinking that must necessarily come
after. We might otherwise name this conceptualization “the pedagogy of the image”
insofar as it commences thinking in ways not yet attributed particular contents. This
is, of course, to assault a kind of representational lethargy by which signs are always-
already distributed within a semiotic field. However, such representational fidelity is
not yet to encounter thinking, lest a form of education (educare) capable of “leading
out”, or otherwise, of creating a pedagogical encounter with an outside thought that
might once again force us to think. This is, perhaps the most unique contribution of
art to education insofar as it demands of teaching and learning 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. This is the beginning
of an ethics of betrayal.
5
INTRODUCTION
APHORISM ONE
Betrayal is not the destruction of truth, but the condition whereupon the
necessity of truth might be thought anew.
The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to “Common Sense”
The image of thought in relation to which we have begun to situate an ethics of

betrayal is a corollary of common sense (Deleuze, 1994). Yet, by all means, we
must be cautious to avoid treating the common as banal. As Deleuze develops, the
character of common sense can be detected throughout the history of philosophy
and specifically, in the categorical philosophizing of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel.
More contemporarily, the fabulation of common sense has become the domain of
marketing firms and mainstream media outlets that depend on representational
thought in their aspiration to recognizablity. Briefly put, common sense is that which
assures the harmonious resemblance between the act of judgment and the reality of
its object. Deleuze (2004a) writes that “[c]ommon sense [is] defined subjectively
by the supposed identity of a Self which provided the unity and ground of all the
faculties, and objectively by the identity of whatever object served as a focus for all
the faculties” (226). As such, common sense is an act of coordination between self and
object that, in turn, forms the image of world composed of stable correspondences.
Such correspondence carries a supreme power. As anyone who has spent any time
in an early childhood classroom knows, pedagogies of correspondence have come to
form the marrow of the educational project.
Common sense is one of the first senses to be cultivated in the subject and
perhaps necessarily so. After all, it is via the coordinating power of common
sense that our world might be recognized, and further, that we might communicate
about the world with relative ease and understanding. Herein, we might begin to
once again detect the image of friendship and the conditions of agreement upon
which it is founded. That is, the very notion of agreement relies on the creation of
categories through which agreement might itself be coordinated. Supporting such
coordination, common sense “contributes the form of the Same”, that is, “the norm
of identity…and the essential aspect of recognition – namely, the model itself”
(169–170). While the conditions of common sense by which the thinking faculties
are brought into correspondence with the world found the ease with which we might
recognize things, such ease of recognition comes at a cost. That is, the fidelity to
recognition instantiated by the idea of common sense requires the conformism of
thought. Simply, it requires that thought seek its fulmination in representation.
The problem that Deleuze detects in philosophy’s history of representation is
that philosophy has left us virtually no tools to break with that which everyone
already knows. It is in this way that Deleuze advocates for the emergence of
“someone – if only one – with the necessary modesty [of] not managing to know
what everybody [already] knows” (Deleuze, 1994, 130). In short, who might go
6
against common sense in order to break from those a priori correspondences already
familiar to us?
Today, what is increasingly required is a figure capable of warring against
common sense. But we must necessarily take caution here, for such a task must
avoid locating its ideal in the gamesmanship of purposeful obfuscation. Rather, what
becomes increasingly necessitated in an age wrought by the vicissitudes of common
sense is a form of betrayal capable of making the representational solutions available
to us inadequate to the problems they are made to contain. This is not simply an
appeal to the slippage of signification. Rather, the challenge herein necessitates the
introduction of new problems unequal to their a priori solutions. To put this another
way, the mirror resemblance of the possible and the real must be opened upon a new
dimension of potential. Those artists concerned with the fabulation of subjectivities
(Matthew Barney and Motohiko Odani), times (Todd Hayes), and places (Öyvind
Fahlström and Robert Smithson) not yet anticipated by representational thinking
have already begun this project. In a style particular to the problems upon which
they work, each betray a commitment to common sense, short-circuiting the habitual
reterritorialization of the unthought upon a prior image. This tactic marks three
aspects significant to composition of an ethics of betrayal.
First, insofar as art becomes capable of palpating the false, it functions to
compose a plane from which different kinds of actualities might be selected.
For example, the counter-mythologies of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle
are impossible to apprehend via the representational categories available to us
contemporarily. As O’Sullivan (2006) writes, “[W]e might say that the [Cremaster]
films are addressed less to an already existing audience, who is familiar with an
already existing narrative, but to a future audience, a people-yet-to-come, who as
such require specifically new narratives, specifically contemporary myths” (150).
In the Cremaster cycle, the radical potential for instantiating a future people born
of a different relationship between biology, mythology, and geology is premised on
a fundamental betrayal of common sense. Put simply, in order that life be relinked
to its powers of becoming, the dogmatic image of thought presupposed by common
sense must be double-crossed. In turn, the notion of the double-cross suggests that
the act of betrayal emerge from within common sense. In arts-based research, such a
betrayal would entail stuttering 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.
Unfettered from the edicts of common sense, 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.
Second, by breaking with the edicts of common sense, art assumes its most non-
representational force. Art is no longer a reflection of the world, but as Deleuze
and Guattari aver, monumental. The work of art stands alone and is autonomous
from already constituted traditions and experiences. What is unleashed in art’s
monumental autonomy is a sensation no longer born of modernism’s clock-time, or
rather, that image of time premised upon personal or historical memory. Breaking
7
INTRODUCTION
from the common sense notion that art is located in a time commensurate with
the traditions of the present, or rather, that art is the reflection of distinctly human
leitmotifs, art mobilizes an irrational sheet of time that is radically futural. This is
not simply to represent a human image of the future but, as in the work of Paul Klee,
to render the invisible relationship between chaos and rhythm visible. Palpating that
which is obfuscated by common sense, the rendering of invisible forces unleash
sensations that do not yet circulate within orthodox registers of semiotic meaning.
More interestingly, it is via the irrational or untimely force of art that sensation is
opened to what has not yet been thought. Such a style of thought is intimate to the
works of Cézanne, who challenged the painter to look beyond the landscape and
into its chaos. As Smith (2002) writes, Cézanne “spoke of the need to always paint
at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself
in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms
or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities…[t]his is what [he] called the
world before humanity” (xxi).
Insofar as art productively fails to aspire to the reflection of the world, or rather,
betrays the orthodox organization of sense into aesthetic judgment, it becomes a
tactic for desedimenting the habits of relation and recognition Deleuze and Guattari
(1987) dub “territory”. For arts-based research, the betrayal of such ‘territories’
might constitute the relaunch of our collective project. Specifically, by breaking from
common sense, we might become better prepared to survey the unthought or virtual
force of art. This is not simply an appeal to a kind of impoverished deconstruction
that would critique an artwork in terms of what it leaves out. Rather, our interest
here is oriented toward an analysis of art in terms of the sensations it is capable of
composing and modulating. Detached from the edicts of common sense, we can
begin to imagine new terms of expression irreducible to narrative, illustration, or the
genius of the artist. Instead, we might begin to think of art in terms of what desists,
or rather, in terms of what it is in art that precedes and yet invisibly inheres within
the territories of codes and subjects (Rajchman, 2000). In Bacon for example, it
is the violence of meat sensations that precedes the face, in Klee, the movement
between chaos and rhythm that precedes the landscape (Deleuze, 2002). Surveying
the singular and original sensations that both compose and flow through the work
of art, arts-based research might hence overturn a culture of consensus born from an
overdose of common sense. In its place, we might begin to take seriously a way of
thinking art that does not begin with form, but rather, with force. Put differently, an
ethics of betrayal in arts-based research would be less interested in the interpretation
of art forms (conventions of artistic appearance) than in an analysis of art forces, or
rather, the expressive potential of materials (colors, lines, marks) in the process of
becoming-art.
An emphasis on sensation concomitantly suggests the undoing of communication.
This third principle of an ethics of betrayal begins to intervene with an art
reduced to pure communication, to the ubiquitous sign-exchange of information
society, or to the automatic interpretation machines of representational thinking
8
(Deleuze, 1995). This is not to say that art does not communicate, only that the
contemporary moment suffers from too much communication. As a symptom of
contemporary marketing for example, the reduction of art to a matter of communication
has already reterritorialized art forces within the structures of narrative, recognizable
pictorial codes, and popular aesthetic tastes. Yet, this dangerous scenario is not
reserved for the marketing firms of the West. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994)
write, “the painter does not paint on a virgin canvas, the writer does not write on a
blank page, but the page or the canvas are already covered over with pre-existing,
preestablished clichés” (192). One such cliché begins with the attempt to frame
art as a form of representation, to reterritorialize it upon the orthodoxies (doxa) of
the socius or image of creative genius. It is against such readymade corridors of
interpretation and communicability that art must be relaunched. Such a relaunch is
not a petition to continually defer meaning and hence to fall into complicity with the
automatism of neo-liberal broadcasting. Nor is it to think in terms of an alternative
world beyond this one. Rather, the betrayal we would like to advance for arts-based
research can be posited via the problem of how we might believe in this world, or
rather, will a belief capable of unleashing the potentials of a life. This might not
seem like an issue of communication. Yet, insofar as communication functions as the
handmaiden of representational thought and the automatic interpretation machines
of the Western socius, it works to effectively limit what might be thought and what
might yet become.
The problem of believing in this world is one addressed by Deleuze in his second
book on cinema, The Time-Image (1989). As Deleuze argued, the postwar period
would be marked by the question of how life might continue in the shadow of wartime
violence and mass murder. Put differently, the postwar period was fundamentally
concerned with the problem of how one might believe in a world capable of such
extensive and far-reaching brutality. As Adorno in 1949 famously pronounced, “To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This pronouncement is less an augury on
the end of poetry however, than a challenge to ask how art might instantiate new
forces for believing in the world, or rather, for believing in the potential for the
world’s becoming. As Adorno (1973) retracts, “it may have been wrong to say that
after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems…[b]ut it is not wrong to raise
the…question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living” (362–363). Adorno’s
question on how one might continue to live is representationally unanswerable,
since the popular imagery of the postwar period had become intractably associated
with the wartime assemblage. The old forms had become inadequate to the shift
in perspective required for a postwar world. In is along this problem that Deleuze
(1989) documents the radical perceptual shift produced through the technical
creation of a new kind of thought he dubs the time-image. While prewar cinema was
overwhelmingly organized in terms of narrative continuity and the addition of events
toward their rational culmination, postwar cinema’s developments with editing and
camera technologies enabled the emergence of a new image of life, one capable of
performing a radically irrational break with the tropes of continuity and narratology
9
INTRODUCTION
that had come to dominate the phenomenology of film. Irreducible to communication,

the time-image was able to produce an interval freed from sensori-motor habit.
Simply, the cinematic time-image began to register the nomadic mind unlinked from
clichéd movements of thought and action. It was in this artistic innovation that a
new means for believing in the world was founded. Specifically, it was via the new
relationship to time palpated by the time-image that transpersonal, transtemporal,
and non-chronological ways of thinking were engendered. In short, the time-image
allowed for a style of thinking unfettered from representation. Instead, it was through
the image of difference born from the time-image that a new reason to believe in the
world was created. If arts-based researchers take this problem seriously, it behooves
us to rethink the connection between art and the future, or rather, the ways in which
art can become cause to believe in the world. Such a task necessitates betraying the
conceit of communication that might otherwise be called the will to representation
(Roy, 2003; Roy, 2004). In its place, we must begin to survey new images capable of
releasing potentials in the world without necessitating that they conform to an image
of the world as it is given. More importantly, by breaking from the conceptualization
of art as communication, arts-based researchers might more adequately address the
ways in which art becomes capable of linking heterogeneous social machines for a
future people. Such futural becomings are being palpated today in such diverse areas
as the counter-gaming revolution, transgenic art experimentation, and in the guerilla
art events perpetrated by Prou, Rhodia, Powderly, and Roth.
APHORISM TWO
Betrayal is an enemy to common sense - as what is most common marks a will

to representation. Betrayal is hence what unleashes from common form those
forces through which the world might be thought with difference.
Rise of the Traitor Prophets
If art-based education were to risk betraying its fidelities to representation and

communication, it might begin to mobilize approaches distinguishable from the
artistic conceptualism of the 1980’s and semio-analytic fetishism of the early
1990’s. Detached from the theorization of art as either conceptually meaningful or
as a “slippery” object to be read, arts-based research might habilitate a political
aesthetics. Yet, this is already to presume the non-political character of both
conceptual and semio-analytic approaches to arts-based theorizing, a claim that first
requires explanation. Such an explanation begins with a shift we are detecting in the
style of contemporary art. Departing from the retroactive memory of interpretation,
the resemblance of metaphor, and the drive for sprawling semiotic production
that characterized contemporary art in the 1980’s and 1990’s, this new approach
increasingly focuses on what might be called a “machinic arts” and its operative
question: what can be created capable of constructing a new type of reality?.
10
As this operative question suggests, the style of contemporary art we are today
detecting takes as its task the creation of singularities no longer reflected by
majoritarian semiotic regimes. Deviating from the question of what an artwork is,
the “machinic arts” instead survey what art might do, how it might connect to and
create a plane upon which social revolution might be thought. In its most political
configuration, this is a question of what new kinds of social assemblages might
be created in manner out of joint with the habits of social memory, metaphorical
resemblance, and the automatic explanatory machines of the interpretive discourses.
Such “machinic arts” might be seen via the rise of turntablism, in which the function
of the turntable as a mechanism of reproduction was effectively reterritorialized
as a musical instrument. Yet, the “machinic arts” of the turntable extend beyond
this repurposing, giving rise to a minoritarian semiotic regime capable of directly
intervening with corporate taste manipulation and copyright usemonopolies. While
the hands of African American workers were being displaced from industrial
manufacturing through outsourcing and automation, the turntable became a
creative phylum for a new interface between bios and techne predicated upon
such new ways of thinking as scratching, cutting, mixing, and beat juggling. As
Guins and Cruz (2005) argue, this creative phylum would become concomitant to
a form of desire-engineering severed from both the habitual conceptualization of
the turntable’s expressive capabilities and majoritarian semiotics. In this vein, the
reterritorialization of the turntable would become a machine for a people-yet-to-
come, or rather, a micro political revolution marked by new enunciative practices,
forms of collective assemblage, and subjective production. Deflecting the question
of what the “machinic arts” of turntablism might mean, we want to recommence
the question of what they are capable of doing. This is to say that for arts-based
research, the emerging “machinic-arts” must be thought in terms of their capacities
to transform art forms in situ to art forces in socius (Alliez, 2010). It is in terms of its
capacity to release life from under its powers of limitation that the “machinic arts”
habilitate a political aesthetic of another kind altogether.
Of course, the “machinic arts” must necessarily rely on an ethics of betrayal
insofar as they necessarily betray the orthodoxy of the actual. For example, Alan
Kaprow’s Happenings drew from such everyday actions such as brushing one’s teeth
in a manner to make them strangely non-habitual. Through performative expression,
Kaprow released the passive habits that compose our lives by modultating their
durations, their connections to specific contexts, and the alteration of their presumed
utility. Briefly, what we are calling a “machinic arts” begins by betraying what
is already given and in particular, the given as it functions as a passive sensori-
motor responsivity to the world. One might think here of Cage’s event-composition
4’33”, which betrays both the utilitarian function of musical performativity and
the presumed enunciative possibility of musical composition. In another example,
the “machinic art” of Archangel functions by betraying the algorithmic code of
contemporary video games by short-circuiting and rerouting their hardware, creating
in turn an anti-game composed of hacked percepts and glitched video affects.
11
INTRODUCTION
The betrayal perpetrated by the “machinic arts” is one that releases difference from
under its orthodox expressions, hence enabling new constellations of reference
(Guattari, 1995). In this vein, the “machinic arts” demonstrate a political aesthetic
insofar as they detect molecular affects operative within molar territories of form and
orthodoxies of expression. Simply, via an ethico-aesthetics of betrayal, the machinic
arts palpate practices not yet thought and concomitant to which a new people
might be fabulated. Yet, the betrayal of the given is not, in itself, adequate for the
creation of a new style of living. As we see in an emerging style of contemporary art
however, betrayal must be thought in relation to a secondary movement: affirmation
(O’Sullivan, 2008).
As O’Sullivan (2010a) avers, contemporary art is marked by an approach that
both deviates and affirms, or put differently, criticizes and creates. Such a tactic
might be seen in the work of Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures concomitantly
criticize the aristocratic and commodified air of the gallery while reterritorializing
the concept of art for a people in becoming (neo-dadaists, fluxus, and Situationists).
In this way, a work such as Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) functions as an art force,
betraying the orthodoxies and good sensibilities of the field while creating an
experimental plane for thinking the question of what art can do. It is this process of
deviation and affirmation that are linked in an ethics of betrayal. That is, betrayal
marks both a deviation from what is and the potentially affirmative reterritorialization
of referential terms along which a thing might be rethought. A case in point extends
from the anti-biopic films of director Todd Haynes, whose features on David Bowie
(Velvet Goldmine) and Bob Dylan (I’m Not There) radically betray the terms along
which life is conventionally thought. Specifically, Haynes composes an image of
Bowie and Haynes through an experiment in depersonalization, deviating from the
conventions of autobiography particular to the self-reflectivity of the movement-
image. In other words, Haynes steals the image of a life from under the image of
unity and synthesis, rethinking it as a multiplicity of influences, impulses, and schizo-
desires. In short, Haynes’ filmic style practices a betrayal that affirms another way
of thinking a life no longer indebted to genealogy, continuity, or representational
thought. The ethics of such a betrayal extends from Haynes’ approach to delinking
life from the tyranny of representational thought. Instead, Haynes’ relaunches
ontology as a practical matter for material creation not anticipated by prior images of
who or what we might become. This is a challenge to create an original life – one not
yet captured within preexistent identity formations. The ethics of betrayal practiced
by Haynes is in this way marked by both a deviation from the tyranny of what is and
the affirmation of what might become.
This posed, an ethics of betrayal requires one who is prepared to betray what is
held most dear to thought. Put differently, what is today required is the emergence of
the traitor prophet (O’Sullivan, 2010a). Yet, we must be careful to distinguish such
a figure from the banal binary-machine friend or foe. This limited conceptualization
remains dangerously cathected to State thought insofar as it requires this binary
in order to fuel its mechanisms of surveillance and paranoiac productivity.
12
If thought is constrained to this binary machine, this is to already fall back upon the
representational terms of the State. Surely, this would mark a stupidity to be avoided.
Alternatively, we would like to advance the notion of the traitor prophet as a figure
that betrays so that we might think again. Such a tactic is intimate to the force
of art which, at its best, steals away the comforts of thought in order promulgate
new questions, kinds of expression, or terms of subjectivity. In this manner, the
traitor betrays given conditions of meaning and aesthetic taste in order to advance
a traitor object. Such an object might be apprehended in the becoming art of Lewis
Carroll’s nonsensical writing, the self-destructive non-art of Jean Tinguely, or the
supplementation of the artistic signature by such urban taggers TAKI 183 and
FRIENDLY FREDDIE. In this vein, the traitor object might be taken up as a tool
for thinking art’s becoming. It is via the creation of traitor objects that arts-based
research thought might be relaunched toward the creation of a political aesthetic
capable of forging new passages irreducible to prior semiotic systems or interpretive
mechanisms. The tendency to reterritorialize the event of betrayal upon some prior
semiotic matrix, moral edict, or identitarian image is the greatest danger to the traitor
object. Perhaps the highest power of an political arts-based research is the creation
of traitor objects through which thought might thrust into the future. The art force of
the traitor object might change everything.
APHORISM THREE
Betrayal inheres a machinic quality that exposes the non-essential organization

of object-relations. This quality of betrayal is marked by both deviation and
affirmation, instantiating a plane upon which the creation of traitor objects
might be forged.
The Symbiotic Force of Betrayal
What we are calling an ethics of betrayal might be characterized as a corollary

of the parasite. The event of betrayal is never born ex nihilo, but draws its energy
from a particular being. Net.art stands as a instructive example of an affirmative
parasitivism insofar as it tactically draws organized codes and established networks
into relation with an outside thought. In the work of Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk
Paesmans) for example, such video game interfaces as Quake and Wolfenstein 3-D
are brought into resonance with an artistic machine that draws preestablished systems
of function into material relation with an alien aesthetic. The result of Jodi’s parasitic
tactic is a machine of another kind - a deconstructed art game that exposes the non-
unitary and machinic potential of computer’s creative phylum. Yet, Jodi’s tactic is
not reducible to video games per se. Demonstrating the metamorphic potential of
material connection, Jodi’s parasitical betrayal provides us with a practical way
of thinking the renewal of expressive form. Simply, Jodi commences a practical
parasitism through which a thing might become what it is not yet. In Jodi’s art games,
13
INTRODUCTION
this practical parasitism is operationalized by connecting the game’s algorithm with

an anti-productive aesthetic machine that draws the coded body of the game into the
circulatory system of another (an)organism.
This posed, a parasitical approach to material transformation must be concerned
with an ethics of connection. Parasitism is not inherently disposed to the formation
of “good” connections or rather, to the enhancement of transformative subjective
or social potentials. Indeed, the rise of postmodern kitsch and the endless semiotic
referentiality of contemporary popular culture practice a form of parasitic
reorganization that has become knotted with a crippling cultural cynicism. Such
cynicism might be linked to the cooptation of parasitic thought by the neo-liberal
economic apparatus, which has produced an ally of the politically banal yet
ostensibly transgressive productions of such contemporary cultural producers as Fox
television and Death Row Records. Simply: parasitism is not, in itself, liberatory.
This contemporary appropriation of parasitism calls for an ethical form of betrayal
dispassionate of theft alone. It is in this vein that the tactic of parasitism might be
rethought in terms of an ethical symbiosis. Put differently, where the parasite might
degenerate its host, the symbiote enhances the potentials of that with which it enters
into relation. Via the concept of the symbiote, we might more adequately think the
qualities of relation capable of being formed through the connection of various
subjective and social machines. Herein, we might turn to the paintings of Francis
Bacon insofar as his work demonstrates the symbiosis of the figural body with a
machinic probe-head for surveying animal, alien, and other non-anthropomorphic
ontologies. It is in Bacon’s practical symbiosis of orthodox and alien machines that
art is most profoundly rethought as a force of radical difference, freeing the body from
the cul-de-sac of identitarian thought. Moreover, Bacon’s symbiotic figurations help
arts-based researchers to think about art as a practice of desire-engineering, or rather,
as a force for drawing heterogeneous machines into compositional assemblage.
This, of course, does not guarantee that such symbiosis will be good. Yet, where
guarantees are found to be lacking, we must become all the more ethically vigilant.
This is once again to dispense the question of what art is in order to advance the
question of what is does and might do.
Stealing away from the certitude of identity, symbiosis betrays two tropes
that are quickly becoming popular conceptual tools in arts-based research. The
first betrayal promulgated by symbiosis is levied against the popular notion of
autopoeisis, or rather, the image of creation as an effect of internal perturbation.
Symbiosis steals away from the image of the self-generating artist through its
machinic conceptualization of connection. Autopoeisis maintains the privileged
anthropocentric image of the closed and uncontaminated organism driven by a desire
for autonomy. However, as Ansell-Pearson (1999) warns, the purely autonomous
organism would ultimately become frozen within an evolutionary stalemate, unable
to produce connective relations with a material outside or virtual ‘outside thought’.
In this vein, the “highly restricted [transformational] economy” of autopoeisis leaves
two choices: “either entropy or perfect performance” (196). Either the organism is
14
thermodynamically broken down upon the body of other machines (a ‘turning toward’
outside contaminants) or remains a closed and ‘stable’ self-generating system. The
former image persists in the reactionary rejection of economic industrialization
and repudiation of emerging technologies, while the latter is evident in the vitalist,
student centered, and self-organizing image of arts-based research adopted from
the explosion of ‘pop’ complexity theory in the late 1980’s. Against this, symbiosis
provides a way of thinking in which creativity proper is always requisite upon an
outside thought. The creative act is, at least, always-already a symbiotic linkage of
the organism with technical tools of production through which it becomes. While
arts-based research has become preoccupied with autobiographic inquiry, to take
symbiosis seriously would necessitate a different form of analysis capable of thinking
the radical depersonalization of the artist via techne. This is to think along more
radicalized terms of relation - ones capable of destabilizing both the anthropomorphic
conceptualization of creativity or a style of thought that automatically aspires to
reflect a human agency. It is such a shift in artistic production that can be seen via
the organization of guerilla art movements via the machine-brain of the internet, or
otherwise, via the production of art forces from the automated spam of the computer
network.
The second betrayal performed by symbiotic thinking is raised against the popular
notion of hybridity. That is, the assumed radicality of hybrid thinking is marked
by a particular conservatism that has yet to take seriously the import of symbiosis.
Specifically, hybridic thought conserves the idea of originary elements prior to mixing
and further, the ostensibly uncontaminated status of these generative sources (Ansell-
Pearson, 1999). It is in this vein that hybridic thought only minimally deviates from
dialectical thinking insofar as it remains wed to structural points of origin rather than
facilitating a transversal exchange between such points. Such transversal exchange
marks the crystallization of originary points into an assemblage irreducible to given
generative or genetic elements. Against this modernist conceptualization, symbiosis
suggests that what a thing is is already traversed by symbiotic filiations. It is in this
way that hybridic thought can only erroneously be attributed to a creative human
agency, since what we might call “human” is already composed of a multiplicity of
alien intelligences that inhere the “self”. More adequately, the “self” is not a thing
that then enters into hybridic relation, but rather, is already a hybrid formation or
schizo-identity retroactively captured in an image of unity. Works such as Edgar
Lissel’s Myself, in which the skin of the “artist” is brought into contact a nutrient
agar that reveals symbiotic fungal and bacterial microorganisms, have begun to
illustrate the already hybrid composition of flesh. More broadly, by drawing upon
the conceptual tool of symbiosis, arts-based research might more adequately grapple
with the question of how things are already connected and traversed by unthought
modes of intelligence.
The particular tactic of betrayal enabled by symbiotic thought operationalizes the
question of how things are machined or connected in the first place. While occluded
by the popularity of autobiographic and representational research, this question
15
INTRODUCTION
remains crucial for arts-based researchers. Specifically, those features of arts-based

research that have become essential to the field need first to be explained. This is
not to advocate for an encyclopedic pedagogy, but rather, a mode of analysis that
inquires into the concept as a form of composition. Such a question implicates such
conceptualizations as creativity, artistic genius, and the “work” of art itself. This is
not to say that such terms require jettisoning, but rather, require understanding in
terms of how they are machined or organized in the first place. Approaching arts-
based research in such a manner enables three potentially transformative tactics.
First, it begins to approach our key points of reference as concepts that have been
composed, and hence, open to modification, decomposition, and linkage with other
conceptual machines. Second, it suggests an approach to the concept in terms of what
thought it makes possible, and alternatively, its limitation on what might be properly
thought in arts-based research. Finally, via an approach to the composition of those
key terms in the field, we might more adequately identify points of connection that
might be rerouted, blocked, or made to flow more freely. It is via such an act that
betrayal spills over into the affirmation of a future becoming capable of exceeding
what is.
APHORISM FOUR
An ethics of betrayal is a corollary of symbiosis insofar as its action draws what

is into unanticipated qualities of rearrangement. Since what is is already the
product of machined relations, the potential of betrayal is always immanent to
what might be called fundamental.
We wish finally to distinguish our mobilization of ethics from that of Alain Badiou
given that Badiou has pitted himself as the nemesis to Deleuzian development of
multiplicity. In his Ethics (2001) Badiou brings a vitriolic response to two positions
that he identifies as ‘ethical ideologies.’ The first is the concern for social and cultural
differences that champion various forms of multiculturalism and diversity, while
the second calls on the universalizing of human right and the idea of a general or
collective ‘good.’ Emmanuel Levinas is a representative of the first, where the ‘face’
of the Other calls for the respect of difference in the ‘last instance’ so to speak. The
Kantian notion of a universal transcendental forwards the second, where duty and
responsibility are placed within reasonable action that has universal applicability.
Badiou has his own particular claims as to why the Same1 and truth are much more
of a challenge to articulate within a global shrinking world since, for him there
are only differences to contend with. For the purposes of our arts-based research
exploration that draw primarily on Deleuze|Guattari, ‘differences’ are emerging and
vanishing depending on the specific situation. Differences are neither stable nor
given but emerge within a context, always becoming. This will become evident as
we proceed further. Ethics will be along the lines of ‘becoming’ and will be posed
throughout the book.
16
To reorientate arts-based research along posthuman lines as first charted by

Deleuze|Guattari, who stand in a long line of philosophers: Lucretius, Hume,
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Leibnitz and Foucault, it will be important to
introduce their orientation throughout our book. Our attempt is to shift research
from an information society to an in-form-ation society, from being to becoming,
from knowing the world to being in the world as one ‘object ‘amongst many, and
one species amongst many species: privileged certainly, but radically centered. Re-
animating thought as the ontology of lived life that rethinks the phenomenological
reduction “to the things themselves” since consciousness is a becoming with the
world—there is no subject/object divide for this assumes actor and acted upon.
Rather arts-based research that foregrounds ‘becoming’ does away with this
distinction altogether stressing the movement of things. Our sections explore what
arts-based research might be in relation to these considerations presented above.
NOTE
1
“The Same, in effect is not what is (i.e., the infinite multiplicity of difference) but what comes to be.
I have already named that in regard to which only the advent of the Same occurs: it is a truth. Only a
truth is, as such, indifferent to differences” (Ethics, 27, original emphasis).
17
CHAPTER I
THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGE OF THOUGHT
Milieux
It should be no surprise why arts-based research has grown in stature and popularity
over the last decade or so. Look around. We live in a culture of the image where even
the edifice of ‘science,’ that bastion of objectivity, has had to face its own ‘image’
crisis. The ‘visualization’ of science has become an important area of study as the
dovetailing between cognition and the imaginary is well on its way. The American
entrepreneur and president of the Edge Foundation, John Brockman (1995, 2006) has
called this merger a ‘third culture.’ Brockman’s ‘third culture’ meets the demands
of the information society where the visual and the literary have come together, i.e.,
image and text form the new ‘hieroglyphics’ today as company branding of logos
and the emergence of an ‘image’ culture makes it mandatory that an aesthetics of
the ‘glance’ becomes operational. By a ‘glance aesthetics,’ we mean that consumer
attention has to take place at the ’blink of an eye,’ so that the ‘eye’/I becomes
spellbound for that infinitesimal moment. The FCUK logo is an all too obvious
example. Its misspelling is a direct intervention of contemporary keyboarding that
generates all sorts of interesting errors and neologisms and the demand for rapid
text, like Twitter, where speed of the message can deliver its headline for maximum
effect. The organ of the eye/ I has been territorialized by the advertising industry.
This alone has consequences as to how we should think of arts-based research
today, especially when so much of design education is wedded to the entertainment
industries and the future of ‘edutainment’ through videogames1 (Gee, 2003;
Charsky, 2010).
Capitalist marketing strategies have also adapted to the outcry of ‘difference’
by adopting a superindividuated approach wherein ‘mass customization’ no longer
appears to be an oxymoron, but the way to do business and survive in tough
economic times. Bernd Schmitt’s (1999) Experiential Marketing is a primary
example in the way new forms of marketing have latched on to biopower. The
subtitle of his book is “ how to get customers to sense, feel, think, and relate,” which
covers all the basic human capacities. The flamboyance of entrepreneur Richard
Branson of Virgin airlines or Chris Anderson’s entrepreneurial innovative quests as
promoted through various TED talks, brilliantly capture the imagination and desire
to show what the ‘best’ can do. There is a reason why Rolex sponsors the TED
talks with commercials that follow. The ‘spiritual face’ of capitalism is carried by
the flamboyant performatives of such CEO executives like the late Steve Jobs of
Apple. It seems that ‘green capitalism’ and ‘green consumerism’ (Luke, 1999) are
19
CHAPTER I
the euphemisms for bio-capitalism, biogenetic capitalism and eco-capitalism have

become the only choice in town. Environmentalist discourses have been mobilized
to legitimate corporate profiteering (Littler, 2009, 50–69). Sustainability has become
the key buzzword within the trajectory of finitude (death) wherein an economics of
distributive ‘lack’ rather than ‘excess’ forms the ground floor. The ‘three ecological
registers’: the environmental, the social and the mental, what Guattari (1989)
identified as the complex assemblage of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), have
been calculated through cost effective measures since the Earth Summit of 1992
sponsored by the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development
(UNCED). The Anthropocene, if the anthropologists have it right, does not distinguish
between rich or poor. Capitalism, however, profits on disaster (Klein, 2008). New
schemas are already in place to take advantage of oil reserves in the Arctic and
Antarctic as the snow melts away. It ought be understood that globalized capitalism
needs to destroy the environment so as to continue its creative functioning. This has
always been the case and today’s environmental crisis is not any different.
Creativity is now theorized as a blend of art and science|engineering. The new
slogan is STEAM (Science, Technology, Art, Mathematics) (http://steam-notstem.
com/), which provides the new rationale for arts education. The husband and wife
research team of Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein (2001), who specialize in
‘creative’ practice, have shown that noble-prize winners are ‘artists’ as well. And,
of course, the new rhetoric of the image (Tufte, 1990, 2006; Hill & Helmers;
2004; Prelli, 2006) further show how quantitative and qualitative research findings
have imploded through an array of visual rhetorical displays. Graphs are read to
show how quantitative data (numbers), placed in visual form, manipulate public
perceptions so as to ‘picture’ a stabilized world. Alan G. Gross’ explorations on the
rhetoric of science (1990), and the continual importance that aesthetics plays in the
visualization of particle physics and string theory as developed by Murray Gell-
Mann, Garrett Lisi, and Brian Greene, provide little doubt as to the intimate relations
that intertwine mathematics, language and the imagination. There is now a website,
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE ), which enable peer reviewed biological
and medical research to be published via video. Performance and desire have become
the two key indicators of success.
Museum and art education have also turned toward exhibitions that now break
down the borders between art, technology and science; these fields have now become
more and more fluid and symbiotically engaged with each other. A neologism for
art should therefore be appropriate, something ridiculous like a non-sense signifier
artechnosci, a combination of all three signifies to form a new combinatorie. Art is
no longer just visual. It has become spectral, imbued once again with a spiritual
aura. Peter Weibel, an influential Austrian art critic who was the chairman and
CEO of the Zentrum für Kunst und Mediantechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany has
curated many exhibits where art and science come together to form a hybrid genre,
for example net_condition (Weibel and Druckrey, 2001) and Iconoclash (Latour and
Weibel, 2002). Not surprisingly, he too calls this a ‘third culture,’ which he maintains
20
is ‘beyond art’ as we know it. Jenseits von Kunst (1997) literally “the other side of
art” was translated into English as Beyond Art: A Third Culture (2005). This is a
thick compendium of the influences of technology on art in the 20th Century. In his
own essay, called “Logokultur” (1997, 732–733), he makes the point that we have
moved from the symbol to the logo where everything became commodified, the
condition that we call ‘designer capitalism’ (jagodzinski, 2010a). The globalization
of the marketplace though designer capitalism requires a shift in educational
curriculum and reform, and that is what is precisely taking place globally as new
flexible workers are needed; as Martin Heidegger (1993) once put it, this is the
creation of “standing reserve” (Bestand) (322) of laborers for the 21st century.
Arts-based research is very much a product of this Zeitgeist change and the standing
reserve has now moved into the realm of harnessing the imagination, cognitive
brain-workers. Eighty million YouTube video hours are watched globally everyday.
Within the next 4 years it is estimated that more than 90 % of the web’s data will be
video, most of it touch screen technology. What has emerged is a new dispositif or
‘apparatus2’—an inverted panopticon, which we refer to as a synopticon where the
many watch the few who are able to assert their influence through contagion and
imitation. On the other side of the synopticon there are the few that watch the many
through surveillance techniques and control demographics. Desire flows perversely
on both sides of this new emergent dispositif. Exhibitionism and narcissism of the
few is abetted by the voyeurism of the many who then satisfy their virtual screen
desires in any number of ways, from outright copying to total rejection. Pornography
is the leading screen genre. The many watching the few enjoy a perverse voyeurism
of control that shapes and designs the flow of mass movement. It is a soft totalitarian
position where technologies offer a sense of desubjectification in exchange for
attention and being tracked.3 Zombie films of the ‘walking dead’ critically speak
to the first side of the synopticon; brain dead, their bodies infected by a life force
that can only be identified as ‘evil’ mesmerized by spectacular entertainment. The
vampire genre addresses the second. Animal fangs come out to prey on the living, to
suck on the life force so they can perpetually live.
We are also living through what could be called a post-alphabetization,4 a shift
to another grammatization that has serious consequences for education, as well as
post-emotionalism, the phenomenon where screen media relieves the subject of his
or her emotional projections. The ‘canned laughter’ of television, the melodramatic
forms that offer easy solutions to difficult questions via good and evil characters,
the spectacular action flicks to keep us on the edge of our seats, the horror shows
to keep mystery alive, and so on. There has never been another historical period
like this one where the shift from the electric age to the electronic age to eventually
the nano-age will take place. Many teachers today are already recognizing the shift
in literacy; children cannot spell like they used to, neither can adults. A film like
Akeelah and the Bee sponsored by Starbucks is one of those ‘feel-good’ movies
where ‘minorities’ are given the gold stars to ‘make it’: African American, Mexican
American and even Japanese America are all now allowed to participate in what
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CHAPTER I
is becoming an eroded form of literacy. It is a fantasy that is no longer sustainable

as screen culture continually pervades and penetrates lives making the old form of
literacy no longer viable as a general strict undertaking. Many have written that a
multi-modal approach to literacy is needed (Kress, 2010), while others are rethinking
the entire status of this change as ‘intermediality’ where art and technology have
collapsed into one another. This is the position we take. Ars and techne, as discussed
above, no longer are separate spheres.
Contemporary discussions of art and technology continue to work on the assumption
that making entails the imposition of form upon the material world, by an agent with
a design in mind. What has held the field of art and its education is the hylomorphic
model stemming from Aristotelian heritage where bringing together form (morphe)
and matter (hyle) gives us the typical model of creation as the imposition of form
on matter by an agent with a particular design in mind. Form follows function has
been the leading principle. This is repeated, for example, in hegemonic forms of
anthropology as well as biology where the design of the genotype underwrites the
manifest form of the phenotype. In anthropology, culture becomes a construction, a
product of the representation of difference. Matter is passive and inert to the point
that its characteristics or qualities can be manipulated to produce the desirable
form. These are now given a genetic spin in consumerism as second, third, fourth
… nth generation products that have been modified through technical engineering
to improve the quality, durability, and strength no matter what is being referred
to: human beings (especially babies), vehicles, drugs, tools, software, computers
and so on. Primacy is placed on the improved product, which has ‘staying power’
and a ‘survival quotient’ based on turnover and use. As critics of the hylomorphic
model, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (designated as Deleuze|Guattari) maintain
that ‘life’ is vacated through the research practices of such a way of thinking
through a double reduction—materiality becomes objectified while life is without
agency.
De-subjectivation
Throughout this book we attempt to follow Deleuze|Guattari’s lead in identifying

art, its ‘education’ and ‘research’ as a ‘monumental’ undertaking, which is to say
the decentering of the humanistic phenomenological subject by radicalizing ‘life’ as
something more radical and inhuman (see Colebrook, 2010). In Deleuze|Guattari’s
What is Philosophy, it is architecture, which is the exemplary art whose aim is to
achieve affect that stands alone, radically cut out from its environment. Added to this
radical position is the place of the artist (as researcher) and the receiver| spectator|
participant| student. What does the artist/researcher risk? What does the student
gain? We shall come back to this, what seems, counter-intuitive position in relation
to the developments of arts-based education as they have thus far put in motion by
the field that prefers a humanist orientation and supports representation in both its
critical and neoliberalist forms.
22
The decentering of the artistic subject in art is uncomfortably presented in

machinic rather than humanistic terms. Jacques Lacan articulates this inhuman side
as he retheorizes Freud’s more biological understanding of the drives (Triebe) or
passions. Beyond the representational realms of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the
subject also participates in the realm of the “impossible Real.” These are the bodily
drives that cannot be reduced, nor tamed or represented by images and language.
The drives are described in machinic terms of a feedback circuit that is satisfied apart
from any biological function of ‘rational’ or coherent reactions. Lacan somewhat
famously provides a bizarre surrealist machinic collage and employs a phallic
metaphor when describing the drive. The drive, he said, operates like “a dynamo
connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a
pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful” (Lacan, 1978, 169). It is an
incoherent assemblage. Yet, apart from this phallic assemblage, there is the rhythmic
pulsation of the drives not subject to lack of the sexuated subject as Lacan theorizes
it in his early and middle periods (in his ‘late’ period he modifies his claims). Lacan’s
own myth of the lamella identifies this stratum as “immortal … irrepressible life”
(Lacan, 1978, 198). This drive energy we call zoë (as opposed to jouissance) as
life’s pure potential. Lacan refers to the lamella as the ‘organ’ of the libido that
presents the paradox of “life that has no need of no organ” (Lacan, 1978, 198). The
compatibility with Deleuze|Guattari’s Body-without-Organs (BwO) is obvious, but
Deleuze|Guattari go much further in developing the bodily drives (Triebe) through
what they call a “double articulation” (see Bell, 2007, 3–10) when it comes to creative
enfoldment that avoids Lacan’s succinct humanism and structuralism. This ‘double
articulation’ leads us to the porous boundaries between the inorganic (or anorganic)
and the organic (as both/and), the human and the nonhuman (as both/and). The body
becomes a mode, a swarm of agencies that address a posthuman ontology. Art and
its education need to recognize this ontological transformation.
Lacan’s lamella, as the pre-sexual and pre-subject substance, is expanded upon
by Deleuze|Guattari and theorized as a “preindividual” realm, relying on Gilbert
Simondon’s articulation of “individuation” (Deleuze, 2004b, 86–89), and this
is where the “double articulation” comes into play by what they call an “abstract
machine.” An “abstract machine” is characterized by a both/and logic, which is
its double articulation. The first articulation is the potential of the unstructured,
singular flows of the Body without Organs (Lacan’s lamella) that is drawn into a
plane of consistency, which is then actualized as a determinate identifiable entity
through the second articulation. In this schema, DNA as a set of potentials is not
simply a code that determines the nature of the individual; 90% of the human
genome is so called ‘junk DNA,’ a sort of virtual potential with no clear function.
The BwO can be envisioned as an emergent mode at the ‘molecular’ level. As a
set of processes, the DNA’s plane of consistency can unfold in various directions
that attain form only in the actual process of unfolding. This avoids any binarism
or dualism when it comes to theorizing this “double articulation.” Such processes
Simondon5 calls ‘individuation’ whereby an ‘individual’ is never given a form in
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CHAPTER I
advance, but is produced, and this is a never ending processes as there are always
untapped potentials for additional possibilities for metamorphosis. This is a shift of
thinking from “reality-made” to “reality as becoming,” from “being-individual” to
individuation. Individuation can happen to any individual, but also it can happen on
the level of a group or transindividually.
Simondon’s explorations of creativity form the basis of Deleuze|Guattari’s
understanding of the virtual and the actual. For arts-based research, the relationship
between them, as a ‘double articulation’, becomes more and more profound as the
movement image has penetrated all aspects of life in control societies. Simondon
posits a “preindividual nature,” like the Greek physis, from which individuals
are ‘actualized.’6 Nature is thus ‘transcendental’ concerning individual existence
but in no way should it be equated with any form of Romantic holism where
the preindividual plane already has the possibility of accounting for all probable
individuals. This is not a realm we return to, be it the death drive or Nirvana, heaven
or some transcendental level of all-knowing, Preindividual nature is radically a
constructivist idea which ‘produces’ individuals. It is here that Simondon introduces
the notion of preindividual singularity, which defy any representational description,
or rather they are always to be specified by their function since they refer to elements
that are able to ‘cause’ a transformation (or an individuation). We are tempted to
equate singularity with Lacan’s object a as the ‘cause’ of desire, which is equally
ephemeral and unspecifiable. Its conceptualization, it seems, also speaks to the
space of indeterminacy (the virtual Real) as a zone of preindividuations that are
connected in infinite ways. The relationships that an individual forms in this way
of thinking are extended to physical, biological, technical and social elements. All
are ‘transversed,’ forming ‘milieu’ within the individual itself as an event. They are
therefore immanent and singular. These relationships are simultaneous and, in effect,
like objet a, one cannot know prior as to which singularity can give rise to an effective
connection (territorialization, subjectification) or disconnection (deterritorialization,
or desubjectification) when it comes to a creative emergence or dissolvement.
This preindividual nature or plane of immanence, as Deleuze|Guattari named it,
is the virtual domain of what is “actually possible.” Simondon makes the distinction
between the potential and the actual. The potential consists of the preindividual
singularities that ‘cause’ an individuation; the actual is the individual that is produced
by this double articulation of individuation. The passage from the potential to the
actual, or from singularities to individuals is the processes of individuation. Arts-
based research therefore must dwell on the potentialities for actualization. Every
individual that emerges is an event. To reiterate, the individual can and does undergo
further individuation. There is no final phase. Rather, it is the virtual potential (or
what is ‘actually’ possible), what we have called the ‘virtual Real,’ that triggers
through singularities a transformation. Deleuze’s ontology, therefore, equates being
with creativity, or with inventive differenc/tiation — being is creating, or to ‘be’ is
to differ. Creation as becoming has less to do with creating a thing; rather creation
is an internal force (zoë). A “thing differs with itself first, immediately” through the
24
differential creative power that ‘animates’ it. As we latter point out, this animism is
not anthropocentric, it has nothing to do with essences as such but refers to impersonal
effects, crucial to rethinking arts-based research along Deleuze|Guattarian lines.
Lacan in our view underestimated the place of techne (technical objects as well
as the biological and physical processes) that mediate the Nature|Culture divide,
and ‘art’ in its forceful perfomative efficacy, is precisely where such a mediation
takes place, that is, its ethico-political impact when it comes to territorializtion,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These three geopolitical processes form
the flows of becoming. In What is Philosophy, Deleuze|Guattari (1994, 184–187)
maintain that art begins with the animal in the sense that a habitat, as a territory,
is characterized by pure sensory qualities that are the expressive features diffused
in life, which also include the body postures, colors, song and cries that the animal
makes within that territory. This is the first ‘ready-made.’7
Representation
One wonders whether art is ‘research,’ which is knowledge creation though an

epistemological methodology. Doesn’t art raise questions concerning ontology: the
way of the world? Perhaps the irony of methodology and research goes all the way
back to Descartes? The Discourse on Method was written after the scientific essays
of which it is the preface. Descartes’ ‘method’ appears after the fact. Koyré (1956)
pointed out that no single science has begun with a method treatise or a body of
knowledge that progresses based only on an abstract set of rules. This, of course,
is the great irony when it comes to Academia. When it comes to research grants
and support, academics have to learn the jargon of application language, the key
master signifiers that are required, which a university’s research office(er) helps
you with when filling out the bureaucracy of forms. There is the usual jargon of
commitments and declarations of intent that promise clear objectives so that the
knowledge will be practical and usable. When it comes to science, this is usually
for profit, ‘pure’ science is always problematic and requires risk. The ranking and
assessment measures are already in place as to what is the rationalization for the
dominant unspoken ideology. Hence the universities master research plans, like
the Bologna process in Europe, sets the agenda as to what areas will be supported.
Economic priorities, appropriability, and predictability of research assure that
control is maintained, and that research dollars are well spent to further a market
economy. Artists and art educators find themselves unable to compete against these
sorts of competitions and rely mostly on government ‘handouts’ to continue their
experimentation. This has all been well-documented by Henk Borgdorff (2012) in
his The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia.
Similarly, Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge’s (2006) in their Thinking Through Art:
Reflections on Art as Research gathered a group of artists, philosophers, art historians
and cultural theorists to present the case as to why art research can be considered
for PhD work, a position defended by James Elkins (2009), and adopted more and
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CHAPTER I
more by universities globally. This defense of art goes all the way back to Leonardo
and Lorenzo Ghilberti who maintained artistic knowledge was the equal of literati.
PhD recognition or not, creativity has already been hijacked by capitalism making
‘art’ useful again. The possibility of Nietzsche’s die fröhliche Wissenschaft has long
gone, and we would hope it’s picked up by a reorientation to arts-based research as
we advocate in this book that evades social control. Not an easy task.
Art and technology, perhaps more familiarly art&design, have to be rethought
once more within the context of arts-based research. The tensions between ‘art’
(Latin artem or ars) and ‘technology’ (Greek tekhne) have been well explored.8
For much of the 20th century the division between them has hardened. Art was the
realm of the imagination and free play, while technology became the application
of an objective system of productive forces—applied design, technicism in its
worst forms. Self-expressionism was confined to art, while applied design was
more limiting, more objective, less creative and so forth. Creativity was bestowed
on art while novelty was its second hand expression. One was governed by a gift
economy, the other by market economy. Schools reflected this division with separate
courses in both art and in design, the latter was always seen in more practical terms
closer to meeting the needs of the economy, what has emerged now into ‘career and
technology studies.’ The extreme division between body and mind as repeated by
skill and intellect lies between craft on one side of the dichotomy and conceptual
art on the other. For the 21st century this dichotomy has been conflated yet again to
comply with the shift from industrial manufacturing jobs where the body was still
‘in use’ to post-industrial cognitive jobs, the non-material labor of creating design
for consumerist ends. What activists like Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Maurizio
Lazzarato, ‘Bifo,’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called “immaterial labour.”
The body is now incorporated ‘interactively’ with software and wetware programs.
While modern architecture still maintained a ‘genotype,’ the pre-existent building
had plans, specifications drawings and maquettes, what does one do with a Gehry
building where computer software does much of the job to get at designs never
imagined before? Gehry’s buildings have become his algorithmic signatures.
One critical branch of arts-based research has continued to develop identity politics
on the bases of social praxis. Drawing from the Marxist and structural-Marxist or
neo-Marxist traditions, this approach remains the dominant leftist position and is
offered as the dichotomous alternative to the neoliberalist agenda. Paulo Freire’s
ghost continues to haunt such research, as do developments that Augusto Boal has
initiated in this same tradition that have deep roots in drama education. During the
‘reconceptualist movement ‘ in curriculum in North America in the 1980s, it was
the key oppositional direction for those of a critical mind to take. Praxis became
synonymous with cultural transformative change. There was a force within this
position that enabled the social justice agenda to make headway, raise awareness
concerning inequalities in mainly racism and feminism. Its success depended on (and
still depends on) the claim that identity is somehow identifiable and knowable, held
together through an allegiance to master signifiers and the assumption that identity
26
remains ‘somewhat’ stable within the symbolic order; or, rather the symbolic order
prescribes various identities that have fixed characteristics. Identity is most often
imposed when a person merely belongs to a set of entities named under the signifier.
Identity becomes formed around some ‘cause’ that defines allegiance and anchors
belief. Certainly it has been hybridity and multiculturalism, which have been seen
as progressive advances as ways to overcome difficulties of what often become
atemporal notions of identity. Today, identity has become a bit of a farce, like a
social costume to be worn and shedded depending upon the social context one finds
oneself in.
A praxiological approach to arts-based education as a strategy finds itself faced
with the continual cooptation by forces of the marketplace, which turn any form of
dissent and resistance into a commodity. ‘Concientization,’ as Freire once envisioned
it, finds little toe hold in classes where students are well-off and media saturated and
savvy. The irony is that in a commodified society the success of political counter-
resistance and controversy depends on how capital can use it and make it its own—as
in the cases of Madonna, Rage Against the Machine, Lady Gaga, Gangsta Rap, Fcuk
and so on. Criticism and resistance are needed to assert that we live in a democracy
where such ‘free’ expression is allowed, enabling the capitalist system to feed off
emergent rebellious energy, and so on it goes.
Praxis is intimately related to representation, and representation is tied closely to
perception and the imaginary of primary idealized and defining clusters of signifiers.
Race cannot escape its primary signifier ‘color,’ feminism remains burdened by the
signifier ‘woman,’ nationality by the purity of its ‘language.’ Islam as a religion
is often generalized with Arabian culture, or Islam becomes a culture rather than
a religion. What practices belong to the general culture and which are proper to
Islamic rituals and beliefs? Can one ever separate such nuances without freeze-
framing terms? The short answer is no, which is why pejorative claims are made
that the Diaspora cling onto cultural rituals that undergo fundamental changes in
their mother countries, or that ‘born again’ Muslims or ‘Christians’ practice a refined
traditional set of rituals and beliefs, more ‘pure than pure,’ escalating the iconic
representation to new impossible transcendental levels.
Representational differences are easily managed by the market forces through
what we call a Benetton approach to difference, a particularly insidious form of
post-racism that draws on the well-known taxonomic ‘tree’ of structuralism that
categorizes the animal kingdoms. Here what is different is cleverly conflated into
the same through a simple maneuver wherein the human species is identified as
a genus with the numerous phenotypes being its various variables of expression.
Phenotypic variation is due to the underlying heritable genetic variation of the
genotype as influenced by the environment. We are our genes according to Walter
Gilbert (Human Genome Map).
Benetton ads play on both sides of the fence to retain difference as sameness.
The first strategy (where the phenotypes are exploited) has a variety of hominoidea
(the superfamily) faces on poster display (several varieties of chimpanzees, gorillas,
27
CHAPTER I
orangutans, bonobo or pygmy chimp). Eight primate faces photographed by James

Mollison are given a proper name: James, Bonny, Jackson, Arron, Fizi, Shanga,
Tatango, Pumbu. A book, James and Other Apes, (rather purposefully named given
the attempt is to individualize each and every orphaned primate) was published
simultaneously with the exhibition of these photos. Each face is displayed separately
with the usual Benetton logo, but they also appear together on one poster. The intent
of Benetton’s campaign 2004 to ‘promote’ the awareness of the possible extinction
of our closest relatives, and to gain a “face to face” encounter through the sadness in
their eyes. We are told that these are orphaned primates, having witnessed violence.
In some cases poachers killed their mothers. With the endorsement of Jane Goodall
and the Natural History Museum in London, Benetton’s campaign drew only praise.
The anthropomorphization of primates is an old ploy. Here the gap between human
and nonhuman is meant to vanish. There is no difference between them: Chimps R
Us. A long series of ‘Planet of the Ape’ films forms the backdrop.
The second strategy is just as clever. Three slightly different, but certainly
identical heart organs are placed side by side in a row. On each heart are the words
white, black and yellow from left to right. This is very reminiscent of Lacan’s (1977,
152) famous example of washroom doors where the only way to differentiate the
toilets was by the signifier boy or girl written on them. For Lacan, the signifier is
‘barred’ from the signified as an inseparable and fundamental division. This bar (or
division) between the signifier and the signified functions as a barrier to transparent
meaning. The signifier does not refer to a signified but to another signifier in an
endless chain of signification; the chain of signification subject to a process of
incessant sliding. Benetton however presents the opposite scenario. The first glance
suggests that all the heart organs are alike, what is separating them is the signifiers.
‘Underneath’ we are all alike. We all have the same heart. It is the signifier that is
dominating—the typography is heavy black Helvetica. To eliminate difference, or to
tolerate difference, one needs only to recognize that ‘in essence’ we are all the same.
Two strategies that forward difference are thus subsumed into the same. The
first instance is where the inhuman is humanized, an important consideration as
we develop arts-based research within a posthuman context. In the second case,
what appears as a universalizing humanist gesture, raises as many questions as it
hides: why only ‘three’ colors? Why those and not red and brown as two other iconic
representations? Why is ‘white’ the ‘first’ signifier given that in western culture
we read left to write? What does eliminate difference if not money? If you can
afford Benetton you have already asserted a certain difference. But, above all else,
Benetton once again is capitalizing on what has become a return-to-nature approach,
an immediate access to nature and the biological, used here as a means to level
the species homo sapiens. What is not taken into account is that the ‘image’ of the
heart is itself a signifier—like Rene Magritte’s famous paining “This is not a pipe”
which can yield three ‘archaeological’ readings: 1] the demonstrative emphasis on
‘this’ places the image (the painting of the pipe) and signifier (the word ‘pipe’) as a
particular instance of not being equivalent: “This is not a pipe” emphatically means
28
that the image and signifier cannot be equated. 2) Then there is the straight-forward
claim that the image and the written are not equated, and 3) lastly, the physical realm
comes into play: any representation—be it an image or a linguistic one—cannot be
equated with a ‘real’ (material) pipe.
Representational difference is played off on both sides: right and left. Both need
each other to form a single coin. On the one side we have identity politics and social
justice that offers constant critique as to why the transcendental claims to social
justice and equality are not being met. On the other side the claims to meritocracy
and the forwarding of exemplary successful people who have ‘made it’ despite race,
sex and what have you, show that ‘anyone’ can make it. They have overcome all
odds confirming that the neoliberalist system still works. Melodramatic forms and
performative competition as exemplified by the glut of reality television shows
buttress such a ‘dream.’ At the same time, there is no escape from the gaze of
xenophobes, homophobes, racist bigots and so on. The Other is needed to affirm the
anxiety of identity. All forms of ethnographic research already assume this subject\
object split. The subtle introduction of power evokes itself when the researcher
claims to want to know the Other better and more thoroughly so as to have an
‘inside’ or emic understanding of their culture, lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and beliefs.
Yet, it is through the very structure of such well-intentioned research that the Other
is distanced, incorporated into concepts that are understandable to the researcher.
Outside this more formalized structure are the everyday transactions that continually
go in the megalopolises of the world where polycultural translation is continually
taking place. We have moved from the ‘melting pot’ through multiculturalism to
various claims of transculturalism where hybridity becomes the operative term. It is
the problem of the signifier ‘culture.’ As Guattari (2008) once argued, the concept
of ‘culture’ itself is the stumbling block. Culture cannot be divorced from mind
and nature.
While ethnographic research is far from ‘dead,’ death has also become the Other
of life when it comes to rethinking research that has already decentered the human
within the context of various complex networks, what is often referred to as post-
anthropocentism. Risk and insurance, medical and scientific research, by and large,
search out ways to prolong life given that death is that which is to be prevented,
immortal.
Contemporaneity
The above model of consumerism of a glance and logo aesthetic is paradigmatic

for industrialization and post-alphabetization. It appears ‘voluntary’ and ‘willful,’
as if a conscious self makes decisions as to what is being consumed. A critical
faculty (as Kant developed it) presupposes a particular structure of the message.
Within a grammaticized technology of the word, the sequentiality of writing and
the slowness of reading make it possible to judge the sequence of the truth or
falsity of statements. Hermes rules the day. Within video-electronic technologies,
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CHAPTER I
extended through digitalization, Hermes, as the hermeneutic messenger, is replaced

by ‘angels’ in Michel Serres’s (1995) account. The message bearing systems of
contemporary society is instantaneous and immaterial, subject to fluxes like that
of ‘angels,’ the mythological bearers of ambiguous messages. The information
networks have a myriad of potential connections in what appear as an endless
circuitry resembling the crisscrossed paths of ‘angels’ fluttering here and there,
disappearing and reappearing at will, so it seems. Sequentiality has been replaced by
simultaneity, and the capacity for mythologization now succeeds critical elaboration.
The fantasy structures of stories elaborated and hyped become the way of seduction.
A distinction might be made between story and narration, whereas the former has an
open structure compared to the latter, which is more closed and sequential. Art, if we
stay with Serresian thought, becomes a ‘quasi-object,’ which weaves social relations
together. Art seems to fit the call of a quasi-object for it remains ambiguous enough,
its properties change as it passes through a collective network; this is quite different
from the ‘agency’ claims of quasi-objects by Bruno Latour (e.g., like a speed bump
on a road). Serres is concerned with the flows of things, much like Deleuze |Guattari,
“This matter-flow can only be followed” (TP, 451). Art, in this sense is not an
‘object’ but an objectile that is continually being formed by interested parties within
an assemblage (or swarm). Within designer capitalism this objectile has become
spectral, shimmering and displaying itself during movement, capturing the attention
of the glance with each transformative change. Arts-based research needs to take this
change into account—the world of 2.0 culture: the ‘thingness’ or ‘thing power’ of art
in its ‘performative’ mode within an assemblage where efficacy, trajectory and an
emergent nonlinear causality are at play. This is far from a humanist accounting that
leaves out inhuman and nonhuman agency.
To attempt to ‘escape the overcode,’ as Brian Holmes (2009) puts it, of spectacular
commodity capitalism as the branded patterning of existence that already structures
the padules (patterns and schedules) of movement so that a particular perception is
conditioned, requires, in Brian Holmes’ projection for the 21st century, a thinking
on different scales: from the most intimate relationships of the subjectivated body
through to the national urban territories, from geopolitical trading blocks to the
global economy. Not all art research can engage on all scales at once. Strategic
research is in order. Holmes terms his own artistic activist project “affectivism,” art
activism that opens up and expands territories through constructivist decoding.
Perhaps one of the more cited claims for art based research follows Nicolas
Bourriaud’s ‘relational art’ project. Bourriaud, a well-known art curator, has now
a number of books (2002, 2005, 2009) to his credit that draw on Deleuze|Guattari
that are often cited by critics, art educators as well as other curators. Bourriaud
maintains that relational art refuses mass media standardization, rejects spectacle
society and instead dwells on the diversity of the everyday; the scale is at the level
of intimacy in Holmes’s tripartite agenda. The relational object is valued in the way
it can serve as a catalyst for free interaction, knowledge exchange, and conversation
between artist and viewer|participant| interactor. The question emerges is whether 1)
30
the relational object can ever escape the institutional market, with its populist
demands; or the art market with its call for a continuous stream of commodities,
and 2) whether the event that is generated by the performativity of the installation
is intercorporeal or incorporeal? The former is phenomenological and empirically
experimental, the latter radically ‘experimental and transcendental.’ They appear
alike yet are radically at odds. To dispel the first is to call on the critiques that have
already been made regarding relational aesthetic, both pro and con.9 In a nutshell,
performativity of installations in gallery spaces never escape the institutionalized
art market. Art business interests already control (post)Situationist interventions
and social practices. To claim a Situationist heritage, as Nicolas Bourriaud does,
seems disingenuous. The gallery space can be escaped by finding sites/sights/cites
outside its influence. We have identified artists who have found other venues outside
the gallery institution who are more rightfully considered post-Situationist than the
‘relational aesthetic’ artists Bourriaud solicits.10 Bourriaud has emerged as the new
style of curator who is a ‘broker of artistic knowledge,’ shaping the direction of the
fundamental problematic of the 21st century art: the reworking of the postmodern
legacy. For Bourriaud this rests with what he calls “altermodernity” that explores the
themes of travel, exile and borders. Bourriaud maintains that geography and history
as time form the unknown continent to be explored by artists in the 21st century.
While we are sympathetic to his Deleuze|Guattarian rhetorical leanings, we remain
nervous that his program is simply inadvertently yet another form of molarization of
the global art market economy.
Machinic Vitalism
As artists and art educators we are better off theorizing creativity and art as emerging
from the ‘gap’ or chiasm between nature and culture following a material vitalist
or vibrant agency, such as proposed by contemporary theorists who continue to
explore Deleuze|Guattari’s machinic materialism, and further their political and
ethical concerns such as Claire Colebrook (2010), William E. Connolly (2002, 2005,
201l), Karen Barad (2007), Jane Bennett’s (2004, 2010, 2011) ‘vital materialism’
or ‘vibrant matter,’ Tim Ingold’s (2007, 2008, 2011) anthropological musings over
line, earth, sky and animism, Tim Morton’s (2010) ‘ecology without Nature,’ Peter
Schwenger’s (2005) recounting of the life of ‘things,’ and those philosophers who
are developing what has been called object-orientated ontology (notably Graham
Harman (2005, 2010), Levi Bryant (2011); Ian Bogost (2012). While there are many
nuances between the authors we have listed, in general they support an object-
oriented ontology (OOO), which maintains that the world is made out of autonomous
objects, be it humans, hammers, or ghosts. These ’objects’ are unable to make full
contact with each other; they can only meet indirectly in an encounter that is always
mediated by another one that acts as a proxy. Such an orientation would reanimate
the world that is already considered somewhat lifeless—but not to simply repeat
a Pinocchio fantasy, rather it is to revisit that fantasy to come to grips with our
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CHAPTER I
hominid ecology that shapes and is shaped by the materiality of ‘things’ as they
inter-communicate between each other by means that is beyond our comprehension,
and how is it that we intervene in that communication (intentionally and non-
intentionally) via our own invented technologies—techne as such.
What remains controversial is to what extent do OOO philosophers remain caught
by the trap of phenomenology where the object is not simply a differential set of
relations, that is pure difference, which is the Deleuze|Guattarian position, but remains
a ‘thing-in-itself,’ a discrete unit. Deleuze|Guattari’s most basic claim is that there are
no objects. This was their response to philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Rather, it is relationality that is ontogenetic. Intelligibility is a relational structure,
and relations in-themselves are simply multiplicities that have “neither subject
nor object” (TP, 8). These intensive multiplicities cannot be enumerated without
being translated into extensive relations (objects) that are necessarily reductive.
We are sort of caught between an oscillation between thinking of art in terms of
multiplicities of intensive mutuality and differencing—as ‘diagrams’ of thought and
also as extensive objects of representation. Yet, no representation can exhaust the
intensive multiplicity of its own possibility. Yet another object can be always be
produced that then denies any form of mimesis. To think this way is to recognize the
creative process of thought and the unthought. It remains paradoxical. The stakes
are not immediately evident how these theoretical stances will play themselves out
in the artistic field. Heidegger remains the dividing line between philosophers like
Graham Harman who still see the usefulness of his heritage if only to work beyond
him, versus Deleuze|Guattari who dismiss any subject|object distinction. OOO
has yet to produce a consistent stance concerning the question concerning ‘art.’
We think of the tension between Kandinsky and Klee in this regard. A significant
phenomenological philosopher of the pathos of life like Michel Henry (2009) is able
to write an extraordinary account of Kandinsky’s basic premise concerning ‘abstract
art’ that evolves from Kandinsky’s fundamental claim that every phenomena can
be experienced in two ways: internally and externally given that all phenomena are
characterized by two characteristics: External|Internal. The subject|object distinction
is maintained. In contrast Deleuze turns to Paul Klee’s exploration of line in his
Leibniz book (1993) on the fold (as variable curvature) to develop the concept of
“inflection,” which does away with the subject|object distinction. A surface has
to be desquamated to make curves and exfoliations perceptible. “Inflection,” as a
folding point, turns out to be that (metaphysical) elastic ‘point’ where the radius
(the radial line from the focus to any point of a curve) appears to ‘jump’ or ‘become’
from the inside to outside. The misperception is the emergence of ‘becoming’ in its
commonsense understanding of ‘between’ rather than as Fold, or Zweifalt.11 A line is
a path of a point that changes direction at a point of inflection. Such a ‘line of flight’
is where the ‘eternal return’ of difference occurs. Paul Klee defined “inflection”
as the genetic element of the active line. It was the locus of “cosmogenesis” for it
was precisely at this ‘indiscernible’ point that the pure event of the line took place
seemingly in a non-dimensional space (the jump between inside|outside). The point
32
of inflection was therefore virtual. It was where the tangent touched and crossed
the curve (or point-fold). This is what gave line its ‘life,’ and was in opposition to
Kandinsky who was closer to Descartes by basing his abstraction more on geometric
angles, points and contained shapes of colors that could only be moved by external
force.
Experimentation
Deleuze|Guattari do not return us to animism, it is however a recognition of an

immanent or ‘passive vitalism’ (see Colebrook 2010) as opposed to an anthropocentric
transcendental animism12. It is when the object ‘looks’ back, that the extraordinary
event happens for Deleuze at the point of ‘indiscernment’ or ‘inflection.’ This is
not to say a simple ‘reversal’ happens between subject and object, rather something
opens up to an Outside, what we call the ‘virtual Real,’ an impersonal plane of
subjectivity that is populated with object processes and physical phenomena that
constitute their own subjectivities.
This is where OOO appears to gain some ground, but only briefly as the ‘textures’
of the world are explored much differently by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning
(2010; Massumi, 2008). Massumi (2008) calls this approach “thinking-feeling of
what happens,” which expands perception into “affective co-motion” that enables
us to be affected so that we increase our own power to affect in return. Indeed, there
is an entire journal for research-creation Inflexions (http://www.inflexions.org) that
is highly influenced by Deleuze|Guattarian point of view. Epistemology as method
has no play here; rather the research exploration is much more artistic: to generate
‘newness’ through participation, contact, transduction and relation. The journal’s
emphasis is for transformation as a creative in-between, at the intersections of
philosophy, art and technology. If there is a method, it follows Henri Bergson’s idea
of ‘intuition’ where the ‘researcher’ becomes aware of other durations beyond his|her
own. “Research-creation explores becoming, which more than any object is what art
is, is what concepts do—it puts the movement back into thought” (Thain, 2008, 3).
The journal emerges from the Sense Lab at Concordia University, Montreal, run
by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. The emphasis is on the “relational potential”
of becoming. The body becomes a locus of research-creation through a double
becoming of affecting and being affected. Massumi (2011) maintains that art needs
to be rethought in terms of ‘dynamic form.’ “There is no such thing as fixed form—
another way of saying that the object of vision is virtual. […] Art is the technique
of the technique of living life—experiencing the virtuality of it more fully, living it
more intensely” (2008, 7). Individuals have become zones of resonance due to the
so-called ‘interactive arts’ of digitalization that are caught within the loop of action-
reaction. Another approach is required to break this loop via a turn to aesthetics (or
aisthetics for us).
This turn to ‘aisthetics’ can easily fall into traditional thinking concerning aesthetics
if Massumi|Manning’s (in their attempt to repeat the multiplicity of pairing that is
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CHAPTER I
Deleuze|Guattari) call to “thinking-feeling” or their “techniques of relation” miss the

mark and fall into a phenomenology. Their claim is that this approach to the object is
to see it as an event; to be able to grasp the virtual relationships of objects. To break
with habituated forms of perception has been a long- standing endeavor in art|research
and its education. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky (1965) maintained that
“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel
things, to make the stone stony” (12, original emphasis). This goal was attained
through techniques of defamiliarization so as to turn the ‘object’ into the strangeness
of a ‘thing.’ To recall Heidegger (1971) here, “the ordinary is not ordinary; it is
extra-ordinary, uncanny” (54). How does Manning|Massumi’s initiative differ from
this well-known development? Seems to be on the same path as when Massumi
(2008) says, “there’s a sense of aliveness that accompanies every perception. We
don’t just look, we sense ourselves alive. Every perception comes with its own
‘vitality affect’ (to use a term of Daniel Stern’s)” (5). Massumi|Manning forward a
double-looking, of thinking perception while engaged in the act of perception so as
to involve movement in looking.13 The value of such ‘useless’ experience is that it
allows for the potential of life to be felt.
Masssumi’s view seems to repeat Heidegger’s approach to art as a ‘truth-event.’
He seems to play with the useful (equipment-tool) and useless (art) distinction that
makes art for Heidegger. “Seeing an object is seeing through its qualities,” says
Massumi (4), or its qualities as Earth in Heideggerian terms, which are radiant and
mysterious but resistant to full exposure. Art, for Heidegger is therefore ‘animistic,’
it opens up a world when it moves into the Open or clearing (Lichtung) to reveal
Being and the cosmos. What is concealed becomes unconcealed during that event—
truth as alethia emerges. The Open is the becoming of truth, but only glimpses
are made available. The entire Truth is not possible. Art in this sense is sublime
and mythological in the sense that myth itself presents us with what can be said
through the mouth in terms of intelligibility and yet it is also paradoxically mute,
withholding and withdrawing from us its full truth. World (intelligibility, meaning)
and Earth (qualities, resistance) are put in tension within a work of art. In the Open
such ‘objects’ are in dialogue with spectators and questioners so that Being might
be revealed. It is fair to say this Open is a place of wonder, existing at the vanishing
point where knowledge and belief become indiscernible.14 For Heidegger, the artist
was the mediator between the Word and the Earth, between ‘man’ and the ‘gods,’
helping us in the revelation of Being, a sort of an alchemist of the spirit, releasing
the essences of things.
Art as ‘research’ in this view is therefore not strictly an epistemological affair;
rather it becomes an ontological one with modification. Intelligibility (knowledge)
and intuition are not dismissed, only limited as to their potentiality. Axiology
supplants both epistemology and ontology in the way the limitation of revealed truth
must, nevertheless, call on action that has no precedence, raising the specter of issues
of judgment and ‘taste.’ Taste is now elevated from the simple sense of pleasure in
the mouth, as in a vulgar sense of aesthetics, to aisthesis,15 which brings back the
34
body|mind together as the general perception of the senses that constitute both the
tactile and visual. Perception is extended to the intellect as well as the sense where
discernment becomes an ethical mater. The dichotomous pair beauty|ugly take on
ethico-political concerns, not as a ‘logic of sensation’ that refers to the subjective
feelings of individuals (the art of expression and so on) but always to the ‘pre-
individual,’ the larval subject.
The art ‘research’ of Paul Harris (2009) along Deleuzian lines closely touches
the thrust of Heidegger’s musings on art. But Harris and Massumi|Manning we
argue, displace and complete the Heideggerian account of art (poetry in particular)
and a ‘people-yet-to come,’ which was Deleuze’s call to go ‘beyond’ the human.16
Deleuze radicalized Heidegger’s key concept of event, ontological difference and
the transformative power of art. Art does not reveal Truth for Deleuze, but is a being
of the sensible, as an aggregate of sensation, which is a genetic positive concept
of difference. The ‘becoming’ implicated in concealment and unconcealment of
alethia is in every element of reality. The concept of Earth, as that which is hidden
and resistant, is maintained by Deleuze|Guattari by way of a ‘plane of immanence.’
It remains as the realm of the unthought. The Earth as a deterritorialized plenum
is a plane of forces, speeds, intensities and potentials that are real but virtual and
yet to be actualized. What is perceptible to consciousness is but a section of the
plane of immanence, which is always in movement. Thinking the unthought is the
concern for both philosophers to overcome the world of representational thought
and to think a people-to-come, but they diverge as to what this program should be.
The world forces us to think, says Deleuze, when an object is no longer recognized
but encountered (see DR, 139–140). Such an encounter should not be thought as
meeting between two constituted identities or wholes in dialogue or communicable
exchange; rather as a field of effects from which the creation of something new and
unforeseen has yet to be determined. These encounters produce nonsense, which is
not the opposite of sense as it is commonly thought. Rather nonsense has something
to do with the encounter as a particular affect, such as love, hatred, suffering or
wonder. It is precisely this nonsense within sense that has to be thought. Nonsense
is precisely that which can only be sensed. It is opposed to recognition where the
object that is sensed can be recalled, imagined and conceived representationally.
Paradoxically, then Deleuze can write about the sensible as: “It is not a sensible being
but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but by which the given is given. It is
therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]” (176; DR-1, 140, original
emphasis). Common sense limits the specific contribution of sensibility. Thinking is
always a process of becoming and the artwork for Deleuze brings the imperceptible
into this realm of thinking. Artworks ‘preserve’ the event of becoming, the encounter
with Earth; they capture the virtual forces as the movement of Being. They reveal
the conditions of the Real at the molecular level of becoming. They too engage
with the unheimlich, as did Heidegger, however whereas Heidegger remained
caught by a question of origins, a return to the Greek, calling on a repetition of
history17, Deleuze|Guattari call on the making of a “cosmic people,” an open future
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CHAPTER I
where the people are always ‘coming’ and always unpredictable with no national
ties to identity or group think, a development we turn to at the conclusion of this
book. Following their work, research will be envisioned as a ‘war machine,’ that is
research as ‘invention’ that abets deterritorialization within a minoritarian politics, a
form of schizonanalysis.
Harris’s quest for the ‘spiritual’ within a Deleuzian context leads him to develop
a procedure of experiential self-engagement (much like that of Massumi| Manning)
that leads him to an empiricist form of wonderment when ‘awe’ struck by a sublime
event that produces a productive discord of the faculties. For Harris (2005, 2009),
this is most often the experience of architecture (e.g. Hall of the Two Sisters in the
Court of Lions at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers
in Los Angeles). Harris follows the Deleuzian encounter that poses a problematic
idea when the sign ’perplexes’ or moves the soul that can only be resolved through
an apprenticeship as a learning process. Wonder defines this encounter, which
unfolds in stages and can extend into various durations. The attempt is to grasp this
experience of wonder, which situates the experience of the event in a zone between
thought and the unthinkable. Knowledge and belief become indiscernible. We are
placed in the presence of something greater than us that stirs the spirit within us,
like children looking into the night sky of twinkling stars. Harris’s particular twist
to this experience of wonder is to maintain that the struggle for comprehension is
not overcome through Kantian rationality, nor is it comparable to learning to swim
in the ocean (Deleuze’s own example), rather it is to apprehend the mystical sense
of fusion between the inside and outside, the moment of delirious joy. It is Harris’s
quest for the mystical side of art, especially architecture, which connects us to the
wonder of the cosmos. It presents the dream of many science-fiction writers. We are
reminded of Carl Sagan here, especially his science fiction novel Contact that charts
his cosmological fabulation.
Harris presents an approach to self-refleXion, in our terms, that goes through a
number of phases of duration or ‘circuits,’ which begin by a ‘flashback’ that attempts
to explore the ‘sheets of the past’ in an attempt to understand the object of wonder.
Harris works through five circuits in all, but this must be an arbitrary count. The
‘first circuit,’ Harris names ‘watching on instant replay.’ Here Harris offers some
self-reflective descriptions of his experience, which then leads to a ‘second circuit’
termed ‘crystalline chaos.’ In this duration Harris attempts to capture a glimpse of
the primordial chaos. For Deleuze|Guattari chaos is defined in terms of quantum
theory where particles appear and disappear at infinite speeds in what is a virtual
realm (WP, 118–119). Harris’s strategy here is to remark that the smallest circuit that
tries to capture this appearance and disappearance of the chaos via a screen or sieve
as a passing event is referred to as a ‘crystal’ of time. The third circuit as ‘the fall
into representation’ tries to articulate the signification of the event as an encountered
sign on two levels. The first level grapples with how to translate a religious mystical
experience into transcendental empiricism where the cosmology of ‘nomadic
spirituality’ can be grasped in its historical mediation of a people’s earthly experience,
36
while the second level grapples with the mediated physics and metaphysics that are
revealed. The fourth circuit works with the metaphysics of light that holds the key to
working out the spiritual vocabulary, which is then articulated in the fifth and final
circuit. Harris’s ‘method’ or strategy is to push beyond the actual as the demands of
the immediate material so as to strive for the virtual, or the spiritual. It is the artist as
mystic “who plays with the whole of creation [or universe]” (Deleuze, 1988, 112). In
this way it may be possible to generate a “belief in the world,” as Deleuze says (WP,
74), and on which we have much to say in the conclusion of our book.
A contrast, or rather an extension, elaboration or a problematization, to Harris’s
approach might be made by calling on Simone Brott’s (2011) approach to architecture
from a Deleuzian perspective that has interesting importance for research when it
comes to the question of “impersonal effects” and personal (subjective) effects as in
the distinction we have accepted between aisthetics and aesthetics. Their separation
as well as their relation forms a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in Deleuze|Guattari’s
terms.18 Its pedagogical value emerges since the move is once more removed from
phenomenology where the minimal gap between subject|object is posited through
conscious intent via the epoché that suspends the ‘natural attitude.’ This has been
a staple approach to aesthetic education and pervades arts-based research as a
well-trodden strand. Brott’s approach, as we see it, has affinities with OOO, and
yet worries it as well. In the OOO of Graham Harman, “intentionality” is taken to
be an ontological feature of objects in general, not just confined to human beings.
Objects relate to one another not directly, but through “vicarious causation” wherein
“aesthetics becomes first philosophy” (Harman, 2008, 221). Objects have intentional
relations to one another, yet neither object is completed, defined nor exhausted by
this relationship alone. It is their “allure” (Harman, 2005, 141–144) that catches us
and that identifies an object’s quality. “This term [allure] pinpoints the bewitching
emotional effect that often accompanies this event for humans, and also suggests
the related term ‘allusion,’ since allure merely alludes to the object without making
its inner life directly present” (2008, 215). The “withdrawal” of objects behind all
relations was an insight of Heidegger, which he termed Earth as discussed above.
OOO rediscovers the object|subject problematic all over again and offers another
‘solution,’ wherein “intentionality” becomes the ‘third,’ or in-between, interval,
chasm, Real, fold and so on, which takes on a relationality between objects.19
For Harman there are five distinct sorts of relations between things: containment,
contiguity, sincerity, connection and no relation at all (2008, 199–200).20 There is
of course an entire theoretical edifice around the Lacanian objet a that addresses
this question far better than OOO, and objet a can be thought of an indistinct affect,
which retrospectively is the cause of desire—that which stands out. Whereas Lacan
wishes to keep the objet a empty or ephemeral in a pre-individual, preformed state,
Harman is already turning it into an ‘object,’ whereas affect for Deleuze is power or
quality, something expressed (2005, C1-1, 99) that has an independent impersonal
existence, equated with Charles Sanders Peirce’s ‘firstness.’ While affect does
not exist independently of something that expresses it, affect remains completely
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CHAPTER I
distinct from the object of expression. Cowardice is an entity, a ‘feeling-thing’

distinct form the face that ‘expresses’ cowardice. The shift from affect to emotion,
or from the affect-image to the action-image, or from the affect of cowardice as an
entity free of spatio-temporal coordinates to the face displaying cowardice marks the
virtual|actual divide where place in situ is now specified. Lacan is closer to Deleuze
than Graham here as objet a is virtual entity, although it is not specified. What
Deleuze| Guattari do is turn objet a into a process of becoming that takes place in a
relational field of the internal or fold. ‘That’ which ‘sticks out’ for Lacan becomes
a singularity within an assemblage, imbued with a quality and power that takes on
force when individuated or actualized. As ‘that’ which ‘stick out,’ as objet a can both
territorialize and deterritorialize.
While Harris dwells on the phenomenon of wonder, there are other states of aisthetic
exchange that produce an assortment of aesthetic emotions.21 It is perhaps here that
Brott (2011) offers yet another ‘becoming’ besides wonder. Brott contrasts Deleuze’s
approach to architecture by differentiating it from both the phenomenological
subjective approach as developed by Norberg-Schulz’s (1979) genius loci and
the Derrida-Eisenmann approach to deconstructive architecture as text where
desubjectification takes place by positing an absent center, the lost object. Here the
primary example is Tschumi. In the first instance, phenomenology is modernism’s
endgame where space is still perceived subjectively, if not to dominate or capture
it, then to know what it is uniquely “like,” which is the distinct character of a site
(genius loci). In the second instance, the poststructuralist subject is decentered: space
becomes a symbolic surface where fantasies, memories and anxieties are projected.
Brott develops a “subjectivity of architecture” that is radically composed of
“impersonal effects” that form an assemblage as a particular series, which confers on
the ‘inhabitant’ the accumulation of effects that condition perceptions and experience
that is unique for each person as there are unconscious selections involved in the
experiencing of the ‘building.’ This is what constitutes the “real” of architecture. So
architectural “impersonal effect or part-subjects constitute subjectivity directly and
not through the circuit of representational orders” (47, original emphasis). Brott goes
further and develops what she calls an “effects-image” of architecture by drawing
on the Deleuzian cinema books to distinguish this approach from two typologies of
images in contemporary architectural discourse: image as photograph and the image
as sign. This is also a move away from the emphasis on architecture as a time-image
by Stanford Kwinter (2001) by Brott taking the affective-image as close-up, which
Deleuze develops in Cinema 1 regarding the face, and applying it to the way there
is an affective merging of subject-object through it. Her examples are drawn from a
number of films (Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, Cohen Brother’s Barton Fink
and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion) to show how in each case there is a ‘becoming’
with the wallpaper by the protagonists. The architectural close-up demonstrates in
these three films an affective merging of matter and subject via the haptic touch of
the wallpaper where the architectural subjectivation as a Real event takes place.
The body of the protagonist is colonized, as if the wallpaper deindividuates or
38
deterritorializes corporally the protagonist differently in each case. In the case of

Bergman’s Karin, the close-up of the wallpaper takes on subjectivity as she touches
it and hears voices that emanate from inside it as her schizophrenic delirium
increases; for Barton Fink, the affective-image close-up of peeled wallpaper that he
desperately tries to fix overwhelms him as the sticky and tacky wall-sweat covers
his hands, ‘disgust’ seems to cling to them. In Repulsion, Carol’s handprints on
the wall, which begin with a crack, seem to move by themselves as her madness
ensues. This visceral merging of subject|object through the asignifying attributes
that are at play in an affectual close-up is extended to a point where the subject is
completely absorbed by the object. Here Brott calls on the explosion in Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point to make the case for the dissolvement of the subject. Here the object
in question is withdrawn and concealed in the very process as the absorbed subject
is thrown into “any-space-whatever,” (espace quelconque) as Deleuze developed
it. In each architectural close-up there is affective transition in power, which has
affinities with Graham’s OOO and his ‘vicarious causation’ thesis in the way objects
relate to each other in a relational field. Speculative realism proposes that the world
of objects is withdrawn into a realm that is beyond human thought, the position of
Heidegger. If all objects are given ‘intentionality,’ then a form of vitalism arises that
is independent of human beings. This is a ‘passive vitalism’ that Deleuze favored
(Colebook 2010).
Brott’s exploration between cinema and architecture through the affective close-
up has strong affinities with the ‘vibrant matter’ explorations of Jane Bennett. In
her latest research explorations, Bennett (2011) has interviewed what are called
‘hoarders’ of material. Rather than examining their pathology (as psychoanalysis
might), she too identifies the way the horded material overwhelms and thereby
desubjectivizes the ‘hoarder’ as if they are completely at the mercy of the hoarded
material. The pull of the material is such that a powerful feeling of being absorbed
is generated. There is almost a complete deterritorialization of subjectivity. Brott
attempts to extend these insights into the experience of architectural materials and
their specificity for each viewer in the way such material acts in the subject|object
divide. This is a different project than the Arcades project Walter Benjamin developed
as he chartered the movement of the flâneur wherein the subject is caught by the
display behind the vitrines. It deals with the pre-space|time development, more with
the question of ontogenesis than ontology. If a schizoanalysis as arts-based research
is to be entertained, the recognition of this primary process that continues to co-exist
with the secondary processes of representation must be taken into account.
As we have argued above and elsewhere (jagodzinski, 2010a; Wallin, 2010), designer
capitalism has already captured ‘attention.’ It knows full well the game of affect.22
The pre-individuated realm of the unconscious raises all sorts of problematics for
arts-based research that wishes to free itself of the capitalist lure. Perhaps it can’t. The
renewed emphasis on affect in cultural studies raises once more commodity fetishism
and what has been termed ‘capitalist animism’ in some circles, where the conception
of a commodity is endowed with a soul and an agency of sorts (Holert, 2012). It is
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CHAPTER I
what Christian Marazzi (2010) calls an “anthropogenetic model” of capitalism where

the biopolitical production of various forms of life (“the production of man by man”)
become the basis of added surplus value. There is no ‘vacational’ break away from
work as we are all networked together to keep on ‘working.’ Capitalism in this sense
is machinic, an alien monstrosity that sustains itself indefinitely through continuous
cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Moreno 2012a,b). Its animistic
agency is manifested through ecophagic practices, which harbor a Freudian death
drive to the point where everything will be used up, a drive to the inorganic as our
species is liquidated by its own narcissism. This was the thesis developed by Nick
Land (1993) and queried by Reza Negarestani (2011) who demonstrates how the
wedding of science with capital provides the paradoxical account of its being both
seemingly emancipatory and liberatory at the same time our death knell.23 Some feel
that the illusion of art’s autonomy, which escapes commodification since a price
can’t be put on it, forms capitalism’s alibi to keep the art markets booming since
the human labor that goes into them appears to vanish. When art becomes such a
useless plaything it becomes a non-alienated product of human labour, supporting
once again capitalism’s alibi that not all is for sale, that there is refuge from the
marketplace. Sotirios Bahtsetzis (2012) calls this the economy of “intensified fetish”,
what he refers to as an acheiropoieton, an icon seeming freed of the toil of labor.
However, as Martin Stewart (2011) rightly argues, and shows by meditating on three
terms: work, life, and death, that questions concerning art as a form of commodity
and labor power cannot escape the binary frames of capitalism and communism.
He concludes by what can be read as an aphorism. “Art is not capitalism, and it
is not communism. Art is the opposition of communism and capitalism. Which is
to say that art is constituted by this opposition and by its own opposition to this
opposition” (147).
To question art as an intensified fetish and to avoid its fall into ‘uselessness’ as
unalienated human labor requires an axial change. Art, its education and research,
becomes something much more alien in this perspective. Art is not for individual
‘self-expression,’ the defining modernist tenet, nor is it defined by its corollary:
contextualism, namely, art is what others make of it once it is released into the
world. We have here the subjective|objective positions that are overcome by OOO
(object-orientated ontology), the ‘gap’ between these two positions is explored by
these philosophers relationally as we have briefly mentioned in the case of Graham
Harman. However, OOO still heavily relies on the notion of the object, which is
categorically dismissed by Deleuze|Guattari. “I have, it’s true, spent lot of time
writing about this notion of event: you see, I don’t believe in things” (Deleuze,
1995, 160). Massumi’s (2011) “activist philosophy,” where emphasis is placed on
“occurrence” (becoming) and “semblance” (virtuality) “makes it fundamentally
nonobject philosophy […] and noncognitive […]. The world is not an aggregate of
objects […]. To ‘not believe in things’ is to believe that objects are derivatives of
process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive
activity” (6, original emphasis). Massumi does not dismiss the subject|object divide.
40
“Activist philosophy does not deny that there is a duplicity in process between
subjective and objective. It accepts the reality of both. Rather than denying them,
activist philosophy affirms them otherwise, reinterpreting them in terms of events
and their taking-effect” (8). Art, it’s research and education, 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’ where the subject is formed in
the becoming of the event, as subjective self-creation, which is not autopoetic, but
very much part of assemblage in the way it ‘works’ as a symptomatic complex of
generating an affect. This is the way that desire needs to be thought: as always being
assembled through the relationships within a field.
It is then, the pre-subjective chiasm or interval as fold that subject|object opens
up the way nonhuman ‘objects’ or ‘things’ look and interact at/with us and us at/
with them at the unconscious level of machinic assemblages. This is where the
attributes of ‘thing’ as partial objects combine to impact us as ‘signs.’ It is thus a
radically deanthropomorphized view. Subjectivity becomes a differential concept,
spread throughout an assemblage or haecceity. The aisthetic paradigm, for Guattari
(1995, see O’Sullivan, 2010a), is a transversal concept, meaning that it crosses all
levels of life, transforming any open structural system through desire. Transversality
is the production of subjectivity that includes the technological, artistic, cultural
and institutional dimensions, as well as the nature|nuture of biology. In general
transversality is the mapping and occupation of subjective territory and going
beyond it. In TP (1987, 349), Deleuze|Guattari refer this as a ‘readymade.’ This is
not the readymade of Marcel Duchamp but the readymade of a humble bower bird
that builds its territory from the surrounding environment. Art and ‘Nature’ are no
longer so easily distinguishable.
This gap or chiasm as a ‘relational field’ is not somehow wedged ‘between’
Nature and Culture (capitalized here to affirm the usual divide that is established)
as if these were two entirely different substances. Rather than a ‘space’ in-between,
as is so often the case, the void, gap or chasm is best envisioned as micro-processes
teeming with the potential of creative ‘life,’ existing not in chronological time, but
in the time of Aion—a virtual time of continuous becoming that leaves us only
traces of the movements taken. So as to not mislead what this entails, Ingold (2006)
puts it this way: “The animacy of the lifeworld […] is not the result of an infusion
of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically
prior to their differentiation” (10, emphasis added). This is a radical notion of life,
which we take as zoë in distinction to bios. Ingold just as well might be referring
to the Deleuze|Guattarian ‘plane of immanence,’ an ontological field without any
unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral. Such a
view is inconsistent with OOO realist speculations. We have flows, not objects.
Affect—or life itself (zoë) is experienced by the ‘subject’ in the gap between
cause (sensation, movement, material nature) and effect (perception, reaction) as
actualized culture. The chiasm or void between nature|culture can be thought of as
the complexity of the conjunctive and disjunctive syntheses that Deleuze|Guattari
41
CHAPTER I
identify as the three synthesis of unconscious desire (connective, disjunctive and

conjunctive).24 Virtual life becomes complexly screened as body-schema-image
and then actualized. Immanent life progressively becomes more and more allusive
and mysterious to grasp, drawing, it seems on elements of both alchemic and
Gnostic traditions, as well as Toaist and other indigenous wisdom philosophies,
but transcendent as distinct from transcendental vitalism needs to be maintained.
While both are ‘immanent’ in their animating force, the assemblages that emerge
with the former transcendent position is generated by the production of forces by the
multitude rather than by essences that are inherent in the substance. Differentiated
combinations are foremost. The vital materialist position “points out that culture is
not of our own making, infused as it is by biological, geological, and climatic forces.
(There is … a life of metal as well as a life of men)” (Bennett 2010, 115, original
emphasis). The ‘life’ of metal, however, has more to do with attributes and qualities
rather than a spirit that has been infused within a pantheistic cosmology of a ‘grand
design.’ Accident, fate, contingency as the general turbulence of ‘nature’ needs to be
recognized as well.
The shift is to the flows of matter and force is advocated by Deleuze|Guattari
in the early 70s. But this direction has already been somewhat co-opted by the
biopolitics of networked research. Capital is spectral; xenomoney has replaced any
semblance of ‘real’ cash as a debt society closes down a possible open future. One
is ‘locked-in’ to pay off the debt, a form of soft enslavement to pay off the ‘goods.’
What is art research within the context of spectral art, an art that is ephemeral and
virtual?
Neuropolitics
The transversal force of art is much more alienating and strange since it acts on
us in ways that are unforeseeable. It ‘retards’ perception, or ‘speeds’ it up, twists
it, and disables ‘normative’ perception. What this means is that the production of
subjectivity as a structure between art research and ‘science’ raises questions of
neuropolitics, as modes of perception. Just what is ‘normative’ perception, and just
why is the ‘human’ privileged; further, why is ‘human’ defined by a neurotypical
norm? Both questions raise questions of disability as being flawed and non-human.
Autism is the paradigm case here, as there is so much evidence to show that a portion
of those who are diagnosed as autistic have extraordinary imaginary and drawing
abilities as famously developed by the case study of Nadia (Selfe, 1977). But this
also applies to such phenomena as synaesthetia (Munster, 2006), which forms
another potential of the ontogenetic field of perception. Many artists are said to have
had this ability, especially Kandinsky.
Sacks (1995), a well-known neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine, reported about a successful New York artist, a certain Mr. I., who became
colorblind after a car accident at the age of 65. The world became “grey,” “leaden”
and a “dirty white” as all he could “see” were objects in their tonal intensities.
42
These were the closest words he could think of to describe the perceptual qualities of
things he saw. But language was inadequate to describe his newly found condition.
His condition was identified as minute damage to the V4 layer of the visual cortex
that processes color. Mr. I was “seeing” the world with his cones, seeing with the
wavelength-sensitive cells of V1. Interesting enough, after two years of adjusting
and hoping that the colored world would be restored, a revisioning of the world
occurred as the memory of his former colored world began to fade. Sacks also
relates his neurological observations and friendship with Franco Magnani, an Italian
immigrant who came to San Franscico shortly after the Second World War. Franco
seemed to posses an eidetic (iconic) memory of his childhood memories of Pontito,
the little Tuscan hill town where he had grown up before the war. He was obsessed
by the need to paint every building, every street of Pontito with almost photographic
accuracy from every possible angle, including imaginary aerial views fifty or five
hundred feet above the ground. By that time he had painted more than a thousand
images of Pontito. It seemed that Franco had “experiential seizures”25 (cf. Penfield),
which presented literal memories that made him re-experience Pontito as he had
experienced it from a child’s eye vision. These flashes of memory, rather than being
dynamic recreations of past events as is often thought, were scenic photographic
views, which he could actually scan and ‘see’ several directions by physically
reorientating his body to see a different perspective.
Artistic prodigies and “idiot savants” present further insights into the question
of neuropolitics. When it comes to the neuroplasticity (the brain’s constant relation
of neurological formation with its milieu) the ‘human’ variation stretches itself out
differentially. This is an entirely different issue from the bogus findings extrapolated
from fMRI brain scans, which attempt to extrapolate cause and effect claims between
media and violence. Art research here should be suspect. The best known prodigies,
like Nadia whose developmental psychologist Lorna Selfe (1977) had minutely
documented, and Stephen Wiltshire, interviewed and examined by Oliver Sacks,
were both autistic and spoke very little. Nadia, for example, grew out of her autism
when she began talking. Her “artistic” ability began to fade and left her. Nadia
and Stephen’s artistic output seem to confirm an ability to artistically “capture”
the “literalness” of reality by rendering objects as they were perceived rather than
conceived at a very early age. But perception here can no longer be identifiably
normative despite the resemblance of ‘realistic’ drawing, the rendering of the world
‘accurately,’ since a particular convention of perspective is being employed. Their
representations are not a ‘primitivism,’ nor does it present ‘naïve’ visual solutions
as does folk art. There is a feeling among psychologists of perception, that icons
lie outside the science of semiotics, that they may be “other” to language, linked
to instinct, the unconscious, the body, or other pre-or nonlinguistic domains. Icons
are said to be symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form
(Alexander 2010). Jonathan Culler (1975), whose contribution to semiotics has
been immense, admitted (quite some time ago) that “the study of the way in which
a drawing of a horse represents a horse is perhaps more properly the concern of
43
CHAPTER I
a philosophical theory of representation than of a linguistically based semiology”

(16–17).
Cognitive neuroscience of perception cannot contribute much to how artworks
‘work’ either. The normative claim of ‘neuroaesthetics’ by Semir Zeki (1999) seems
to be that art and the function of vision are synonymous, i.e., the visual cortex is
turned to the formal structures of art. The formal structure of an artwork is there to
provide cues sufficient enough to be able to recognize its representational content.
Seeley (2006) reviews Zeki’s claims, questioning this simplistic causality. Jennifer
McMahon (2007) makes an extended claim: viewers who experience a resonance
between an artwork and their perceptual facilities sense satisfaction and pleasure.
McMahon’s reliance on neuroscience develops a biological theory of aesthetics,
especially beauty that is said to update Kant. Unfortunately, virtually all perceptual
cognitive constructivist theories as applied to art fail to account for the non-perceptual
events that determine its meaning or engender its affective force. The virtuality of
the event, as in Deleuze|Guattari, is entirely absent. Much more interesting when it
comes to neuroscience is the cross-modality that occurs amongst the various senses.
This is dramatically illustrated by fMRI brain imaging scans that are ‘performative’
portraits, more of an acoustic mirror than a visual image, which is capable of bearing
a ‘look’ and ‘looking back’ at the onlooker (Casini 2011, 76). The idea that fMRI
images are a transparent window into the inner self should be vigorously disputed,
yet as art and science research come together, this is approaching a standard way to
receive grants and become legitimated in the Academy.
Going back to autism as the ‘other’ form of perception that raises the specter of
neuropolitics opens up other insights. Amanda Baggs, an activist from Vermont,
posted a video on YouTube entitled “My Language” (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=qn70gPukdtY). Her case has become both a form of protest and fraud;
protest as part of the Autistic Liberation Front (ALF) who desists any form of
medication for autism and champions Baggs’ efforts, and called a fraud by other
members of the autistic community, feigning autism when she has another form
of social disorder. On the other hand, someone like Temple Grandin appears to be
genuinely sensitive to animals, especially cattle. In Sack’s study, Stephen had a
penchant for architecture, while for Nadia it was farm animals, especially horses
which she enjoyed drawing. Both seemed to bypass “normal” artistic development.
Nadia had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows, and
constantly experimented with different angles and perspectives. Stephen seemed to
be able to reproduce buildings he saw only at a glance weeks and even months
later. Such exceptional cases, which are littered throughout history, offer a number
of speculations concerning the perception and rendering of reality “realistically”
by artists. “Realism,” often referred to as a “naturalistic” stage of adolescent art,
remains a strong impulse in Western art development that seem to go back to Pliny
and the staging of a contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis as to who could render
reality ‘more’ realistically. The trajectory leads us to virtual reality environments
today such as CAVE environments.
44
Autistic artistic savants present a hypertrophied account of mimesis. They seem

to have a perceptual genius for concreteness; an ability for catching the formal
features of things, i.e., the structural logic or “thisness” of things, as if they could
capture its haecceity. It is characteristic of the savant’s eidetic memory (be it visual,
musical, lexical) to be prodigiously retentive of particulars, yet there is no sense
of generalizability, only an immovable connection of content and context in their
drawing. Theirs is a concrete-situational or episodic memory—each moment stands
out distinctly and almost unconnected with others. Such hypertrophication of
perception provides the worry that ‘art’ becomes boxed in as again representational.
It is well-known through the psychological study of children’s drawings during
the pre-schematic stage by Goodnow (1977), the time of holophrastic speech
development when children as yet have not yet fully entered into the symbolic
order of language, but begin to mimic and sound out words which begin to stand
for things, that a “concrete” atomistic perception is characteristic of this age. Each
“thing” has its unique individual existence in the world. It is present and then gone,
which causes anxiety, frustration and rage for the child. It cries and demands its
return. Only when a child completes the circuit of a “thing” being gone and can
begin to control it coming back (Freud’s fort/da game) does certain constancy for
a word and the “thing” begin to form.26 This absence|presence is what begins to
structure perception. Eventually a “baby-talked” word begins to stand in for the
absent “thing” which the mother repeats and tries to modify so that the child will
be able to say the word “properly” in the mother’s tongue. The sound of a word and
the precept for which it stands for undergoes this process of modification, which art
educators refer to as the transition from the pre-schema to the schema stage. It is
precisely in this interval where the most open dimension of imaginative exploration
is available. Children in the pre-schema age as yet cannot understand how it is
possible that two objects could occupy the same “space” through overlapping since
a patterned signifying chain has not yet been formed. This only occurs when certain
schemas become established for each child, when eventually children begin to “talk”
and narrate stories with their unique schemas, which is a sure indicator that they
have entered more fully into the symbolic order of language and can begin to relate
socially to their parents, i.e., they can “talk back.”
Perception
Much of the talk concerning perception remains caught by an anthropocentrism

that cognitive approaches are unable to shake. The mediation of technology seems
to forgotten or transparent. Scribbling and drawing with a pencil, or ink pen or a
ballpoint make all the differences as to the affects and effects rendered and made
possible. We seem to forget that it was only with the advent of the cinema that
a mode of seeing that breaks with the human eye becomes possible. We should
think this way when it comes to the digitalized image as well. In what way does it
transform thought into modes that are as yet unforeseen. A wonderful research study
45
CHAPTER I
in this regard, utilizing Deleuzian framework is Liselott Mariett Olsson (2009).

Olsson illustrates how subjectivity and learning occur in a relational field when it
comes to pre-school children. Cooperative work leads to strategies that are picked
up, stolen and exchanged. When it comes to art, teachers look at what takes place
between children; their interests are treated like a contagious trend that does not
reside in each individual. This is where the ‘lines of flight’ emerge, the transversality
of creativity generated that is continuous, productive and in movement. Research
as transcendental empiricism in Deleuzian sense means to collectively invent rather
than discovering something at a distance. Again, artistic research is an invention
rather than a discovery. Something new is added to the world, a new assemblage of
desire formed. In this perspective, theory cannot be put into practice; rather it is an
encounter between theory and practice. They are both ‘practices’ but of a different
sort. We use the term aisthetic, rather than aesthetics27 for this force of art in its
shaping of invented worlds in arts-based ‘research.’
Art, in general, does not measure up to positivistic neurotypical criteria, nor does
it perform to what might be thought as neurotypical standards. It is the ability to go
beyond perceptual standards that forms the core of artistic desire. Henri Bergson
(1911, 7) theorized the concept of perception with the idea of images being a
subtractive process wherein we focus on what is at hand, and in our own interests
and desires. Perception is primarily instrumental. Intelligence is a ready-made reality
that simplifies the complexity that is at hand. Hence, a blind spot is always there that
frames vision. “Instead of attaching ourselves to inner becoming of things, we place
ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take
snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality […]. We may therefore sum up […] that the
mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind” (1911, 332,
added emphasis). Image becomes identical with movement: ‘image=movement.’ It is
the blindness to the Outside, to the ‘x’ that remains outside the frames of perception,
which distinguishes an ‘object’ from a Thing, the ‘thing-in-itself’ [Heidegger’s
Ding an sich] that is not exhausted by perception. Knowledge, in this view, remains
caught by the ‘human’ mode of representation, by a phenomenology that established
the subject from the object as described in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
perception and Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetics. This ‘x’ however can
be extended in two posthuman directions—towards the Outside through non-human
and inhuman (AI) means. These are the two directions art research as invention can
deterritorialize sedimented ways of being in the world.
Deleuze (1986, 1988) was to ‘rescue’ Bergson’s failure to recognize that cinema
as the ‘moving image’ could estrange perception28, it is precisely this ability of
art through or as techne, which bridges the Nature|Culture divide making them
categorically ambiguous.29 Art becomes an ‘object’ (process, perfomative, objectile)
of perception itself that has a force about it, which acts on us as a body ‘thing’ as well,
especially at the neuronal level. We use the term self-refleXivity for this possibility
that attempts to leave the realm of anthropocentrism behind: the grapheme (the
capitalized ‘X’) stands for this very possible invented worlds of speculation. It has
46
nothing to do with self-reflection proper as the idea of thinking and reflection as an

inner mental activity inside a human subject. Rather, the X marks the incorporeal
event: that which happens to us from the Outside (the virtual Real), the encounter with
an object as the place of becoming or learning. While self-refleXivity has affinities
with notions of inter-connectivity with things in an assemblage (agencement), and
with Latour’s (2005) well-known concept of “intra-reflection” that takes place
within a complex network where a wide variety of forces are at play, we wish to use
self-refleXivity (as an extension of the Cartesian notions of self-reflection and post-
structuralist views of self-reflexion) to preserve the specificity of human agency,
which has certainly been further decentered in its distribution within an assemblage.
However, as an object the ‘human’ remains a highly encephalized complex ‘object’
comparatively speaking30, so that the question of desire (as affect and relationality)
does not simply drop out. This I believe is the limitation of Latour’s ANT theory,
which is weak on the question of desire (desiring-production in Deleuze|Guattrian
terms) at the micro-level: objects are given equal footing through intra-activity in
the networks where nature|culture are blurred, but this is theorized at the constitutive
level of the corporate body.31 So, Deleuze|Guattari’s position is not a ‘celebration’
of the ‘death of the subject.’ More so a recognition, when it comes to art, of modes
of consciousness that are excluded from dominant forms of reason: dream states,
pathological processes (autism, attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD), anorexia
and so on), esoteric experiences, rapture and excess. Guattari clarifies this issue
when he speaks that thinking on subjectivity for them was not a question of anti-
humanism. “Rather it’s a question of being aware of the existence of machines
of subjectification” (Guattari 1995, 9). Solely internal faculties such as the soul,
impersonal relations, and intra-familial complexes do not produce subjectivity. It
also produced via nonhuman machines, such as social, cultural, environmental, or
technological assemblages, which enter into the very production of subjectivity
itself. Within OOO the human possesses no special place within being. Humans are
not at the center of being but are among beings; but in what capacity do they act is
the question within these networks of non-human and inhuman beings? The question
applies to art as well. What sort of ‘agency’ does an objectile art have as a ‘relational
performative’ within an assemblage? Obviously this requires the articulation of a
singularity. Art objects in OOO terms can become a ‘guerrilla metaphysics’ (Harman
2005)— forms of thought that enable speculation on the strangeness or “weirdness”
of the world and its objects. All objects, in this sense for Harman are works of art,
and it appears phenomenology is thus smuggled in.
To think of perception as machinic or autonomous that forms its own
‘individuating capacity,’ be it cinema, television, video, printmaking, painting, and
so on, leads us into a rather different realm of possibility as these then becomes
‘forms of thinking.’ In Deleuze’s (1986) terms, their individuating capacity is a
‘time-crystallizing engine,’ or a spiritual automaton that has a temporal agency of
its own, forming the basis of an impersonal theory of subjectivity. This machinic
understanding of perception can only be grasped if it is understood that, for Deleuze,
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CHAPTER I
perception has nothing to do with representation. Perception is co-terminus with

matter. It is substantive rather than referring to something outside itself. Perception
and matter differ only in ‘degree, they are the same ’kind.’ There is no negotiation
between an inside/outside, a phenomenal interior and a empirical exterior, rather
perception “puts us at once into matter, is impersonal, and coincides with the
perceived object” (Deleuze, 1988, 25). Subjectivity is a production of perception
that incorporates perceptual, psychological and corporeal levels. Perception
does not mediate between subject|object; it take place in a third register—as an
absolute exteriority or Outside. In Logic of Sense (1990a) he calls this “ a zone of
objective indetermination” (113). This productive sense of perception is referred to
as a ‘singularity.’ Singularity refers to the emergence of a connected assemblage.
These singularities exist within series, and there is a potential that vibrates across
all series. Deleuze calls such an arrangement of singularities “non-personal
individuation.” As a pure Outside this forms an impersonal field, which exits
independent of any ‘subject.’ Personal identity is then a working effect of the
repetition of a particular set of pre-personal singularities. “I” is a machinic part. Its
‘habit’ crystallizes personal identity. Deleuze is very much the empiricist here. The
principles of the mind are defined by what they do and what is their function. Personal
identity is an effect, one effect of many possible effects. A subject does, to a degree,
choose which effects to embody. For example, the ‘voice-effect’ is compelling and
impersonal.
NOTES
1
See the article by jagodzinski “Between War and Edutainment: The Prosthetics of Video Games,”
(2012a). This article was written in 2009 but only recently published in Cultural Formations after a
three and a half year delay.
2
For a succinct exposé of the term dispositif as used in French theory see Agamben (2009)
3
The body is electronically tracked willing or not as when it was discovered that the i-phone user’s
whereabouts and movement were automatically stored in the phone’s system.
4
Perhaps Godzich (1994) fingers this when he writes, “The problem is that a dissonance is now
manifesting itself: images are scrambling the functions of language, which must operate out of the
imaginary in order to function optimally. Images are parasitical noises on language at first—and then
they supplant it: it must be recalled that the technology of images operates at the speed of light, as does
the world. Language could slow down the world, thanks to its tremendous negative capability, but it
cannot slow down images, for they operate out of the very imaginary that language would have to be
able to organize in the first place”(370).
5
For a graspable introduction of Simondon’s thought into English, see the essays developed in the
journal, Inflexions 5
6
See the essay by Didier Debaise in Inflexions 5 (March 2012).
7
Zepke (2008) maintains that Deleuze|Guattari ‘ready-made’ is contra to Duchamp’s readymade.
Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 198) reject Conceptual art as being devoid of affect and relying on
‘information’ within a capitalist system. This seems to us as being too harsh a judgment. Conceptual
art, through its critique of aesthetics and skill or refinement provides plenty of affect, but in a form
where irony and indifference can have impact.
8
We maintain that the ‘fundamental antagonism’ between them becomes firmly established during the
eighteenth century when ‘art’ becomes a separate sphere (see jagodzinski, 2010a). The Royal Academy
in England already blocked the entrance of engravers in the eighteenth century. It was reserved for
48
painting, drawing and sculpture only (Williams, 1976, 33), thus repeating what became well-established
binaries: mind/body, creativity/repetition, art/artifact, freedom/determination, useless/useful and so
forth.
9
For the contra side Claire Bishop (2004) convincingly shows the difficulty of making the gallery
space work for transformative change, whether its for ‘shock’ political effects like Santiago Sierra
or in the case of Rirkrit Tiravanija, for the creation of ‘microutopias’ that become little more than
convivial practices for sociability. For a fairly comprehensive examination of relational art’s claims
see Economy Artbiscuit (2010) where the genealogy of the term is traced to Conceptualism rather than
to the Situationists as Bourriaud maintains. It seems that as a signifier \relational aesthetics\ is taken
by many artists who assume a social interactive dimension to their art. The term thereby loses any
specificity that Bourriaud has tried to sustain.
10
In jagodzinski (2010a) three such possibilities are developed within the post-Situationist context.
11
“[T]his difference is not ‘between’ in the ordinary sense […] it is the Fold. Zweifalt. It is constitutive
of Being and of the man in which Being constitutes being, in the double movement of the ‘clearing’
and ‘veiling’ “(DR, 65). Deleuze clearly is referring to Heidegger here.
12
This is the humanist theological view advocated for instance by Thomas Berry (1999), who, in the
tradition of the catholic cosmologist Teilhard de Chardin, advocates ‘ecospirituality’ along deep
ecological lines.
13
“The sense of relational aliveness disappears into the living. The ‘uncanniness’ of the way in which
the object appears as the object it is – as if it doubled itself with the aura of its own qualitative nature
– disappears into a chain of action. We live out the perception, rather than living it in. We forget
that a chair for example, isn’t just a chair. In addition to being one it looks like one. The “likeness”
of an object to itself, its immediate doubleness, gives every perception a hint of déjà vu. That’s the
uncanniness. […]Art brings that vitality affect to the fore” (Massumi, 2008, 6).
14
See Harris (2009) on the development of wonder.
15
In DR-1 Deleuze offers the Greek rather than the Latin roots: “It is not an aisthëton [aesthetics] but an
aisthëteon” (176, 2004a). Deleuze calls it a sign.
16
This idea is glossed by Boundas (1996) who writes, “[Deleuze’s] project of difference and repetition
is, with respect to Heidegger’s meditations on being and time, a completion and simultaneously a
displacement “ (90). We draw on the amazing, as yet unpublished thesis by Sholtz (2009) that develops
this account in a rich and resourceful manner. Heidegger and Deleuze are placed in proximity through
the figure of Nietzsche in order to resolve the question of a ‘people-to-come.’
17
Deleuze|Guattari are critical of Heidegger, although they recognize his contribution. “He got the
wrong people, earth, and blood. For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not one that
claims to be pure but oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic and irremediably minor race
(WP, 109).
18
As Buchanan and Lambert (2005) point out, Heidegger’s Dasein is an example of this problematic.
Mistakenly translated as ‘Man’ the “being-there” means that our species is a “place-being” and not a
being in a place. This has consequences for arts-based research that continually plays up the specificity
of place as the be all and end all of research where the influence of literature strongly infiltrates it as
a text based endeavor.
19
To clarify, Deleuze’s in-between is a line that has its own existence apart from any two points that it
joins. The in-between is a conjunction for Deleuze—the AND, which is a relation that is ‘becoming.’
20
Briefly, containment contains both subject and object. For Deleuze|Guattari this is a symbiotic
heterogeneous coupling; contiguity- subject|object lie side by side not affecting one another, but
sometimes they fuse and mix within certain limits; sincerity –refers to the absorption or fascination on
the side of the subject side in relation to the object; connection- refers to a connection of real object
in an indirect way, but this is partial interior intention (unlike containment which is a full intention)
that is connected with other real objects; no relation at all is the usual state of things. Causation for
Graham is always vicarious, asymmetrical and buffered as played out in one of these five relations.
What Graham seems to be doing is working out relations of actualized objects in Deleuze’s sense,
whereas Deleuze|Guatarri develop an ontogenesis rather than an ontology where we have only flows
and intensities in the originary state of chaos. They do not present a dualism of virtual|actual but a
tertiary structure: the original chaos forms the virtual.
49
CHAPTER I
21
Perhaps it is important to note that Deleuze (C1-1, 238 n16) mentions the phenomenological writings
of Mikel Dufrenne, especially his notion of the material or affective apriori as having infinitives with
Peirce’s ‘firstness.’
22
Brott (2011) cites the contemporary designer Rem Koolhaus on the ‘psychological’ functions of his
projects for Prada stores. “Museums are popular, not for their content, but for their lack of … you go,
you look, you leave. No decisions, no pressure. Our ambition is to capture attention and the, once we
have it, to hand it back to the consumer” (61). One should add that the exchange for the ‘attention’ is
the seduction of surfaces that translate into profit.
23
There is no agreement as to what the status of Freud’s death drive as equated with capitalism as
first developed by Nick Land amongst ‘speculative realist’ philosophers. Negarestani’s tortuous essay
takes to task Ray Brassier’s ‘accelerated capitalism ‘thesis as coined by Benjamin Noys and begun
by Land, while Žižek (2011) will have no truck with any of them defending his particular brand of
Hegelian|Lacanianism.
24
Eugene Holland explains such complexity (2001, 26–36).
25
Apparently artists like Giorgio De Chirico suffered from such “spiritual fevers” (his term). Sacks
footnotes a long list of creative artist and writers who are said to have had such seizures: van Gogh,
Dostoevsky, Poe, Tennyson, Flaubert, Maupassant, Kierkegaard, Lewis Carol, and Phillip Dick.
26
This is extremely important for the psychoanalytic paradigm of Jacques Lacan, who reinterprets
Freud’s fort/da game as the moment when the “being” of a child begins to separate from its
m(other). This usually happens at 6 months when the child is weaned off the breast and liquid food is
supplemented by solids.
27
See jagodzinski (2010b).
28
The movement-image is not part of the sphere of consciousness; it is not intentional in terms of
subjective agency, yet it has no agency of its own. It not ‘representational,’ the image does not
represent the characteristic of the material world as movement. As Deleuze (1986) writes the image
is a “state of things that is constantly changing, a stream of material, in which no anchoring point or
center of reference could be indicated” (86).
29
Simondon overcomes any intuition/intelligence dichotomy, which is still part of Bergson by
positing the techne of ‘know how,’ which is close to Michael Polanyi’s “tacit knowing.” This is still
‘intelligence’ but intuitive intelligence in the sense that they are found in ‘technical operations’ and in
‘immanent intelligence.’
30
We engage in Deleuze’s notion that the ‘brain is a screen’ in other parts of this book.
31
The co-evolution of humans and plants as developed by Michael Polanyi (2001) offers a thought
experiment, where corn for example is a “cultigen.” This is a plant incapable of seeding itself, and
requires a relationship with humans to ‘survive.’ Their intra-dependency raises many questions
regarding agency in relation to power and desire to sustain this dependency. Can any quantitative
and qualitative account on either side settle the issue? The farm might be thought of as an intra-
active assemblage of co-dependency where the ampersand is certainly in conjunctive play holding
the heterogeneous objects (animals, machines, technological apparati, humans, plants and weather)
together, but wouldn’t the ‘farmer’ have upper hand in the political and ethical (power and desire)
differentiated distribution within this network, even when we recognize its decentering: the tractor
breaks down, the weather does not ‘cooperate,’ the animals become sick, and so on? To ‘sustain’ the
farm as a collectif (to use Latour’s word here) of humans, animals, plants, machines, still requires the
‘will to power’ of the farmer as a main object amongst these other objects that supplants them to some
degree in terms of encephalized sapienization when it comes to the desire to hold the territory together.
While the agency of action cannot be located in one particular source, it is distributed throughout the
network, (i.e., the weather (drought) can initiate change, in that sense it is an agent of change), it is
still he farmer who responds to the challenge. Or rather, must supplant them in terms of quantitative
power in order to maintain ‘the’ farm. If this were not so then the question of agency is continually
displaced into an infinite regression, another limitation of ANT. Certainly if there is a drought, even
that ‘will’ can be broken and lost without the reassemblage of irrigation. But it is the farmer who
produces the material ‘reality’ of the farm by desiring-production as a concept and as a territory to
sustain a particular form of life that equally shapes the farmer’s body depending on the particular
50
assemblage that is produced. The farm is not something that is desired as an object of lack, rather it is
an object of affirmative production. But it is also an ontological object: a farm could not exist were it
not a constituted relation within a given reality. The farm as a constituted object ‘makes’ the actors do
what they do. So, it is at this institutional level that its deterritorialization would change ‘reality.’ Do
we then call this ‘soft’ anthropomorphcentrism?
51
CHAPTER II
CONTEMPORARY CURRENTS
Quantitative|Qualitative
There are now a number of books out that cover arts-based research; some try to
give the field its due by covering the various approaches (Cahnmann-Taylor and
Siegesmund, 2008; Leavy, 2009; Macleod and Holdridge, 2006). The posthuman is
the absent conversation. Humanism and representation dominate. In this section we
interrogate the arts-based research of a number of authors that effectively claimed
the field for art education through the publication of a special journal dedicated
to its articulation.1 Studies in Art Education, the flagship journal of the National
Art Education Association (NAEA) put out a special issue in fall of 2006 on Arts-
Based Research in Art Education under the editorship of Tom Barone, who once
edited an online journal, International Journal of Education & The Arts and had
established himself as a leader in this field. He has since retired. The date, 2006 is
indicative of just how recent arts-based research has become paradigmatic to the
field of education and to research in general.
In his editorial, Barone (2006), a student of Elliot Eisner in the 1970s pays Oedipal
homage by claiming arts-based research under Eisner’s proper name. Oddly, nothing
is mentioned of the enormous gulf in research paradigms that once existed between
North America and Europe, what was considered the gulf between positivist-analytical
Anglo-Saxon sciences and Continental phenomenological-hermeneutic Sciences,
qualitative research emerging from the later development (see Radnitzky, 1968).
Eisner did not ‘invent’ arts-based research. He was however influential in launching
qualitative research in art education. According to Barone, the forms that have sprung
forth as represented in this special issue—named variously as aesthetically-based
research, a/r/tography2, arts-inspired research and arts practice as research— are
merely hybrids within the established gen(i)us of Eisner. While such a genealogical
conceit should be disputed and the revolutionary heroic script questioned, the intent
of this section of the book is to argue that the entire enterprise is entirely misdirected,
still caught up in humanism and enlightenment forms of representation that continue
to perpetuate ’sameness’ under the guise of difference. Eisner’s humanist emphasis
appears obvious just by the titles of the books he has written: The Educational
Imagination, Cognition and Curriculum, the Enlightened Eye, and The Arts and the
Creation of Mind. The concepts developed within this oeuvre are based on educational
connoisseurship (appreciation) and educational criticism (disclosure).
Arts-based research has often claimed a quality vs. quantity dichotomy (Barone
& Eisner, 1997), so much so that doctoral students in visual art education are often
53
CHAPTER II
encouraged to have a mixture of both so as to appease both sides of this bifurcated

research paradigm. Quantitative research is continually erected as its differential
foe. However, this paradigm itself has long since undergone a self-reflexive critique
by such philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and literary theorists such as
Katherine Hayles. The relationship between numbers and images is extraordinary
complicated for it opens the door to topological thought, a shift from depth to
surface, which is much more in line with the posthuman condition, a turn away
from representational axiomatic mathematics to ‘minor’ mathematics like that of
Bernhard Riemann. The relationship of such a shift has yet to be grappled by arts-
based research.
The leading essay of the Studies special is by the self-acclaimed founder, Elliot
Eisner (2006). Delivered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 2005, it is entitled
“Does Arts-Based Research Have a Future?” This is a rhetorical question since,
as its self-acclaimed founder notes, such research is already alive and well, being
practiced in various way by those influential enough to have it institutionally
legitimated. The essay begins with what might be reminiscent of C.P. Snow’s 1959
Rede lecture on the two-culture hypothesis: there is “science” and then there is “art.”
One deals with the ‘rational self,’ the other with ‘feelings.’ Given this established
taken-for-granted dichotomy, arts-based research becomes an oxymoron. It is
explained as a form of knowledge, different in kind and intent from science, but
nevertheless “intended to enlarge human experience” (9). So, to lay bare Eisner’s
stance in all its certainty—arts-based research is a form of epistemology, and not
simply a form of inquiry (10). If it were, then it would not be research and would not
“count” as such in venerable universities such as Stanford, for instance. Politically,
it would have no toehold. Further, such knowledge, more broadly defined as “art
as experience” (following Dewey), should be specifically directed at the broader
category of aesthetic experience and not confined just to fine arts. With this move the
dichotomies between science and art collapse by naming their common denominator
as aesthetic experience. Science, science education and aesthetics have become
increasingly important, as it has come to the attention of the field that the fascination
with experimentation has close associations with visuality and judgment. Wickman
(2006) for example, draws on both Wittgenstein and Deweyian aesthetics to advance
laboratory student experimentation. “Aesthetic judgment [is] operationally identified
as utterances or expressions that either deal with feelings or emotions related to
experiences of pleasure or displeasure, or deal with qualities of things, events, or
actions that cannot be defined as qualities of the objects themselves, but rather are
evaluations of taste—for example what is beautiful or ugly” (original emphasis, 9).
This Kantian representational notion of aesthetics is precisely what we question
throughout this book from a Deleuze|Guattarian perspective.
Eisner maintains that as a form of knowledge arts-based research could “push
the boundaries of method and explore alternative ways of knowing” (11). The
assumption is made that such research can challenge “the hegemony of traditional
scientific methods in the social sciences as the sole legitimate means through which
54
the educational world can be revealed” (11, emphasis added), which is claimed to be
hegemonic. The question arises as what to do with the already existing ‘traditional’
arts-based research, which is equally hegemonic? Qualitative research already sets
itself up in its very difference to quantitative research. The issue here is the nature
of knowledge. Should research based on the arts ‘still’ be designated as ‘research’
or placed into an entirely different ‘line of flight’? Claims to knowledge bring with
them issues of interpretation; art becomes a cultural object that gives rise to any
number of discourses that lend themselves to anthropological data collection and
museum archiving. Should this ‘frame’ define arts-based research? In the final
section of this book we argue that such a direction that continues humanistic thought
needs to be betrayed. It is therefore, difficult to fully agree with what seems to be at
first glance an obviously innocuous statement. Eisner’s writes, “The arts capitalize
on the emotions and use them to make vivid what has been obscured by the habits
of ordinary life” (11). Such an instrumentalist notion of art can be just as easily
applied to consumerist advertisements in general. Isn’t that what ads do: vivify
aspects of existence by playing on our emotions so that the humdrum of life is given
excitement? But, perhaps this is not the aesthetic experience Eisner has in mind.
It requires a much higher elevated status, a certain “perceptual attitude” that is a
“choice” (12).
Eisner draws on one of Getty’s Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE)
videotapes, produced in 1995, to illustrate the thrust of his argument as to what
“is” at stake in arts-based research when it comes to an aesthetic experience. Eisner
describes in detail the art lesson of the teacher without providing the context or the
setting. One is given the impression that this is the ideal that is being sought after and
demonstrated. It happens to be the pottery art classroom of Harmes whose lesson
illustrates one of DBAE’s four strands: aesthetics (the other three being production,
history, criticism). We have watched this tape numerous times with pre-service art
teachers, hence Eisner’s reading is particularly interesting in light of what has been
said concerning this carefully staged production by them over the many years. It
should be said that Harmes is the type of heroic teacher that is continually featured
in the Hollywood movies, that long parade from To Sir with Love to the latest
blockbuster hits, such as Erin Gruwell’s Freedom Writers where the self-sacrifice
and dedication of the teacher to his or her students is given priority regardless of
the cost of health and family. Harmes tells his interviewer that he could “live” at
the school if he could, actually wash up in the sink that he uses for ceramics. His
passion for his job is beyond reproach. He sees himself the savior of these American-
Hispanic dropouts in this low income Los Angeles suburb. Be that as it may, Harmes
is teaching these student’s how to have an aesthetic experience that would “make
vivid what has been obscured by the habits of ordinary life” (11), to see the beauty
in the ghetto, for as Eisner maintains “perceptual attitude is a choice” (12). Shit
can become gold—you only have to look at the object differently. And, there is
a certain “truth” to such a claim. All one need is to instill desire, and shit does
become gold, but just as quickly it can be drained of its preciousness to become shit
55
CHAPTER II
yet again. Isn’t that just how consumerism works? Like that string of ab-machine
advertisements that keep coming at you on the sports television channel, demonstrated
by fit young women who obviously use them to get their magic abs to look just
right!
In Harmes’s class, students are asked to poetically describe what they “see” when
a drop of red dye forms a cloud in a cup of water. As Eisner rightly says this invites
“projection” and “becomes a Rorschach-like experience” (14). And then he singles
out a young American-Hispanic girl who writes an absolutely stunning paragraph
in the way the native Indians are infected and contaminated by Columbus. All pre-
service art education students, when they listen to her reading, are absolutely moved
by it, which rightly confirms Eisner’s point that “the arts capitalize on the emotions
and use them to make vivid what has been obscured by the habits of ordinary life”
(11). But, isn’t that precisely where we should question such affect? It is in these
moments that an ‘event’ has taken place. It’s what art ‘does,’ it is its force that should
be at the forefront of arts-based research where an ethical and political problematic
emerges.
Amazingly, what fascinates Eisner is not the content but the form of the writing,
its “powerful expressive quality” and “more precisely, the forms her images take”.
There is no questioning how “we are moved by her words” (14). How are we to come
to terms with such contradictory psychic struggles of her identity as an American-
Hispanic who dis-identifies with Columbus, often thought more as a Spaniard than
an Italian because that country, as being an evil person, financed his voyages? Does
this arise from a sense of guilt told to her by parents, or her teachers? Further, how
does one come to grips with a Romanticized view of the noble savage that is being
projected in her “poetic form”? From where did this idealization come from? And
how is it that red is projected as a viral metaphor, rather than one of life? This is her
ideological representation engendered by the affect of the form. Now that we have
raised these questions, here is what she wrote:
The clear crystal water looks to me like the landscape the native Indians love to
live in, the land that was given to them from the Great Spirit. As the dye drops,
Columbus lands. The Europeans not only destroy it, but pollute their beautiful
land with diseases. The red dye spreads throughout the pure souls of innocent
Native Americans. The red dye destroys their people, their tribes, their culture,
their beliefs. In good hearts, these beliefs will never die. (in Eisner, 13–14)
What is worrying is the very last sentence, which for Eisner, as a coda, provides a
perfect form to imagine, whereas it could be interpreted just the opposite way: as
ideology because its form and image are so tightly bound together—symbolically,
form a belief that cannot be changed. The noble savage, the dichotomous opposition
between Europeans and Native Americans will stubbornly persist in the name of
“good form” and aesthetic experience for this student. No one calls her on this.
Harmes praises her for her “sensitivity.” Because the exercise was projective, it
baldly exposes and reveals the way ‘good’ form works to insure the ideology of
56
beliefs that transfer ideology. Ideology persists precisely in the fantasy that she
created. As Žižek (1989) argues, fantasy is the seat of ideology. Like my students and
Eisner, we want so much to praise this young student because we too feel “guilty” of
somehow being implicated in the destruction of Native culture, when the situation is
far more complex than that.
The idea that arts-based research is knowledge is again picked up on in Eisner’s
discussion regarding “objectivity, validity, and generalization” (14). To confer
generalization on arts-based research, Eisner plays a familiar ruse: the universal
emerges from the particular, although it is not stated in this way. What is not
discussed is how the universal can be elevated to the status of blind ideology, or
how “canonical images” (15) as forms of fantasy become hegemonic as to what is
“reality.” Rather, for Eisner “canonical images” and “great play[s]” […] “perform
important cognitive functions” (15). They act in the form of democratic pluralism
so that we “gain insights that can guide our perception and influence our course of
action” (15). This restated instrumentality of the arts seems to contradict Eisner’s
earlier claim that “perceptual attitude is a choice” (12). So it would seem we have
an array of possible canonical images that give us insight into “life” (“art not only
imitates life, life often imitates art,” 15), and we have a choice as to which one
we believe is canonical. Ideology is slipped in again under the pretence of free
democratic choice. We choose which canonical image and which great work of art
confirms our belief system.
This instrumentalism (“utility”) of arts-based research comes out into the open
when Eisner discusses validity that is confirmed through referential adequacy (15).
Here the critic becomes the bearer of authorial ideology pure and simple—the
connoisseur model, for the aim of criticism (following Dewey) “is the reeducation
of the perception of the work of art” (15). ‘See’ as I ‘see’ because I am making an
argument as to what is empirical ‘there’ in the work of art. A structural corroboration
becomes necessary. If you, the student, see something else, something that is absent
rather than present, you are either making it up, or you have no proof, there is no
validity, no referential adequacy. Stay within the frame and don’t ask the absent
question as to how that frame came about in the first place for that would begin
to ruin the structures that make the judgment believable. Authority would begin to
wane and the research becomes questionable. What is disavowed is that there is a
fundamental antagonism of beliefs, that harmony amongst researches is an academic
hoax. Consensual validation, Eisner third term “to secure believability” (16) hides
the ideological formations of belief the form power blocs in the Academy, which
determine often what works of art are forwarded as canonical, which research is to
be awarded with grant money and so on.
Eisner closes his talk by answering his own rhetorical question. Here his
ideological intentions are laid out clearly on the table. First, one needs “a cadre
of scholars committed” (16) to the exploration of arts-based research. Thus, to
have a consensual validation you need young people in university positions that
can make that happen. Secondly, you need to assure this consensual validation
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CHAPTER II
of the network of arts-based researchers by not alienating those already in power

and of existing university faculty. There has to be a way that the threat of the new
(arts-based research) is lessened and mitigated. Thirdly, you need the goods. Top
quality exemplars can sell the product. Inferior goods simply weaken the position of
establishing the paradigm. Fourthly, since the digital world can no longer be ignored,
Eisner is quick to harness its potentials, but has no clear clue just how they are to be
tapped. But he intuitively knows that this is a direction that has to be pursued. Eisner
ends in a heroic burst, reciting Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” dreaming
that he is giving courage to his “old buddies to join him” (18) on “a revolution in
awareness, epistemology, and in method” (17).
Cognition
In “Research Acts in Art Practice,” Graeme Sullivan (2006) presents a more refined
perspective than that of Eisner, which somewhat unnerved Barone in his editorial
comments about it. In our view, Sullivan’s approach is squarely in the cognitive
understanding of art research and practice. His approach, along with art/tography
has become central to art educational research. Formerly professor of art education
at Teachers College, Columbia University, Sullivan is now the chair of the art
education department at Penn State School of Visual Arts University. He remains
influential in the field of art education. Sullivan begins his essay by questioning the
nature of knowledge. The first paragraph identifies an obvious shift in epistemology
from its long-standing position of defined inductive and deductive methodologies to
more open forms of inquiry explicated by philosophers of science like Feyerabend
and more recently Bruno Latour. While Eisner remained trying to box arts-based
research into the former position and avoiding the side into the later (10), Sullivan is
willing to suggest that knowledge of the “possible” characterize arts-based research.
In other words, Sullivan identifies creativity, a nebulous concept that begins to include
the unknown and the “yet” to be materialized, certainly a different understanding
of the “future” than Eisner’s, as well as “complexity of the imaginative intellect”
as important characteristics of research methodology. So, to “create and critique”
characterizes research that is “well suited to arts practitioners” (20).
Sullivan attempts to sort out the various developments in higher education by
designating the research interests that each seeks, opting out on the side of artistic
practice. For Barone, all of these developments (aesthetically-based research, a/r/
tography, arts-inspired research and arts practice as research) are simply variations
on Eisner’s qualitative thematic, but Sullivan focuses on the one that provides
the most interest for his particular concern: practice-based research “where the
challenge is to define studio-based teaching and art learning practices as scholarly
inquiry” (21). Sullivan, who hails from Australia, is interested in the processes of
artistic creation, having served as a lecture in the College of Fine Arts, University of
New South Wales early in his career. “Therefore approaches to visual arts research
need to be positioned within existing frameworks but not be enslaved by them “ (26).
58
To stave off this threat, Sullivan identifies self-reflexivity, what he terms research
as “a transformative act that has an impact on the researcher and researched” (22),
as a common denominator between educational and art studio research, and then
explores the responses provided by arts-based research.
What counts as transformative and when and how can one identify this
transformation is not discussed in the article. Sullivan’s point is to finger the
hegemony of qualitative social science research as simply the modernist mirror
to quantitative research which the majority of arts-based research has undertaken
through “constructivism, interpretation, and contextualism” (24), raising somewhat
the ire of Barone in his editorial since this summarizes his and Eisner’s positions.
We could not agree more with Sullivan since capitalism uses arts-based research in
this vain quite effectively to develop market desire for its products—hardly critical
or transformative.
In distinction, Sullivan then turns his attention to praise “arts-informed research”
where the focus is “on the perceptive educational practitioner as the locus of inquiry”
who “more consciously deploy a range of creative processes as part of the ensemble
of research practices” (24). A/r/tography is singled out as being exemplary in its
self-refexivity and its garnishing of multiple artistic forms to get at “insightful use of
the creative and critical features of artistic knowing” (25), where the divide between
“artist, viewer and the community” (26) is dislodged. (Our concerns with this
position will be left hanging for now, picked up when we approach this particular
development in a separate section addressing the essay by Irwin et al. in the special
issue of Studies in Art Education). Sullivan’s praise for this approach supports
his transformative emphasis of arts-based research in the sense that the inherent
instrumentalism of research is somewhat softened and re-directed away from merely
“serving only educational ends” (26) towards “institutional currency and relevance
… within communities and cultures” (26).
Sullivan positions himself in the decentered studio, and asks the question “what
[are] artists do[ing]?” Such a position aligns him with practice-based research.
Broader educational curricular concerns are bracketed for his interest is not on the
object of art but in the practice of art. Of course, immediately, one must raise the
question whether ‘practice’ is defined as yet another guise for method, or is there
something ‘more’ at stake, since there are many artistic practices both historically
and in the contemporary art scene. “Practical knowledge” and “intelligence of
creativity” are the first indication of this ‘more.’ It is a “transcognitive and reflexive
response to the impulse of creativity,” which is Sullivan’s core thesis developed over
the years (see 2001, 2005). Arts-based knowledge is derived from the processes that
go into making art. Of course, one immediately identifies such processes with various
‘techniques’ and ways to manipulate materials. But, there is also the vexing problem
of the thought processes themselves that vary depending on what is being produced,
unless of course, one wishes again to structure such process into a general theory?
And, indeed this is what Sullivan offers us as a “ ‘create to critique’ mode of inquiry”
(28) that is a condensation of his major thesis (2005). Creativity in this research,
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CHAPTER II
oddly is not theorized as emerging ex nihilo, rather such a research strategy seems
incremental, working within an established paradigm, which unfolds “in connecting
what is revealed in relation to what is already known, for this is in keeping with the
rigor o[f] research, irrespective of the paradigm preferred” (28). Although, Sullivan
recognizes that this may be shortsighted when he states that action research “will
require moving in beyond the comfort of prescribed discipline knowledge” (32).
Sullivan’s vision of such research supports the reflexive turn of nonlinear
postmodernity that is already developed in the sciences through Popperian falsifiability
theory, Bruno Latour’s ANT (actor-network theory) and so on. Such research fits
well with neoliberalist understanding of the subject. In this way, Sullivan is updating
arts-based research which is (was) still stuck in the old paradigm (Eisner, Barone
et al.) and trying to lift it over into the new self-refexive structuralist universe that is
already present in general scientific research. Sullivan’s particular translation of this
paradigm revolves around an equilateral triangle formed by the interaction between
three of its points: “structure, agency and action” (29). “Art practice involves giving
form to thought in a purposeful way that embodies meaning” that is “negotiated in
many contexts” (29). This sums up the thrust of such practice. Contemporary artists
think in a medium, language or context, emphasizing one over the other(s). Studio
processes as theory manifest themselves as forms, ideas and actions (31). Working
within a medium, artistic knowledge is generated. Visual problem solving is likened
to “observation and empirical confirmation” (31) of “traditional grounded strategies
of research.” For those involved with interpretative interest Sullivan seems to uphold
Arthur Danto’s early position where “the limits of knowledge are the limits of
interpretation” (32), thus dismissing a negative understanding of knowledge as that
which is unsaid and absent. Lastly, Sullivan embraces the broader shift of enactivism
in the broader educational literature where doing triumphs as a form of understanding
through social action research that intertwine the personal with the public.
Eric Andersson (2009) has attempted to compare the practice-based research
in art that had an ‘product’ or ‘object’ at its goal with a social scientific approach
that began with a “research question,” the “hypothesis” or “research problem.”
Andersson concludes that art and science research approaches cannot be reconciled.
However, he maintains that the mode of production in relation to the work of art can
be made “methodologically transparent, theoretically positioned and assessable.”
The concerns of such an approach to arts-based research are stated by Andersson
himself: The mysteriousness of the auteur and the fantasy of his or her life led fuels
the art market, positioning the romantic notion of the artist as being fundamentally
different from academia. But this is not entirely the case. The hype of the ‘brilliant’
genius or eccentric academic is also at play, tied to politics and capital via academic
copyright.
The journal Art & Research began in 2006, the same time as the Studies special
emerged, and has in many respects shifted its orientation away from the ‘cognitive’
emphasis of ‘practice based research’ towards the posthuman, exploring the artistic
encounter as ‘event,’ coming to terms with notions of ‘becoming animal,” focusing
60
on special on Spinoza and the precarity in contemporary art, and exploring the
redistribution of the sensible (a section we develop in this book). Their editorial
emphasis is closest to our own position.
Digitalization
Folkvine.org is an ‘early’ example of arts-based research where art educators

embrace the ‘digital world.’ It may well indeed present the ‘future’ of arts-based
research and hence requires serious attention and critique. What Eisner dimly
comprehends concerning digital technologies, and what Sullivan remains silent
on (at least in the essay which appeared in Studies), Congdon et al. (2006) have
materialized as an arts-based “object,” a website that “represents” seven folk artist
in central Florida. We say this may well be the ‘future’ of arts-based research on the
grounds that universities are quick to sanction and provide money and support staff
to develop technology (especially digital web-sites and e-learning being the state of
the art) as forms of collaborative team research that cut across disciplines. It was
after all a suggestion of a dean to start this particular initiative. The essay is written
with great sensitivity and self-reflexion, raising vexing issues that are not so much
disavowed as left open to ponder and question. It is with this open invitation of the
author, Kristin Congdon, whom we personally know and whose integrity we highly
respect that we undertake the following concerns and worries. The questions that
dance around the text, we hope to address in terms of what it means for arts-based
research should it continue down this path—which it surely no doubt will.
There is an up-front admission by Congdon et al. that their team-based project, the
creation of a virtual website, raises fundamental questions concerning representation
of others and that admittedly, the team, by writing themselves into the narrative, is
constructing “a new culture” (48) by doing so. As Congdon rightly argues, this is
the new form of postmodern ethnography that leaves the old issues of “authenticity”
and “truth” (47) behind, what we would deem as grappling with the posthuman
subject where technology redefines subjectivity. What are the ethical consequences
of this technological move, and what does it mean for the practice of arts-based
research? In the German there are two terms for representation: Darstellung and
Vorstellung, which were first introduced by Kant’s modernism. The first term can be
translated as “presentation,” which is used just once in the text when Congon writes:
“the Folkvine team has attempted to do is present each artist’s site in a manner that
reflects his or her particular way of understanding and living in the world” (37). The
subtitle also has “presentational issues” in it. This may have been a slip on her part
since the team is interpreting and actually (re)presenting the artists. Darstellung as
presentation slips in Derrida’s long-standing critique of “presence,” which of course
ethnography for such a long time claimed, but—thanks to deconstruction—has
had to relinquish (authenticity, the truth, objective description etc.). This brings up
Vorstellung—representation. If we say everything is simply representation then we
become caught in a constructivist world, and if that is the case then the “new culture”
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that is being constructed as folkvine.org, is a virtual world that belongs neither to

the empirical world of the artists (as lived experience, Erlebnis) nor to empirical
world of the team who constructed it (with the artist’s input). It becomes another
entity in-and-of itself offering “what,” becomes a question, since such websites
have sprung out over the Internet as museums and galleries promote their wares?
One response is to point out this is a fantasy landscape, like any online videogame,
which can be explored interactively by a visitor to the site—to achieve what? To
peak the interest and desire to know and learn about these “seven” (+n) folk artists,
or more forcefully after James Traub whom they quote, to “exploit enthusiasm
about an idea or an object” (49). The website acts as a lure to draw in a public to
be exposed to constructed virtual artistic subjectivities abetted by a virtual team
represented by their bobble head avatars. So, what wrong with that? Isn’t everyone
happy with the results? Artists are satisfied, the team is satisfied and the university is
satisfied.
One of the vexing problems since Kant is the spatial-temporal gap or abyss
that exists between Darstellung and Vorstellung—a non-representational gap
between presentation and representation that is continually being sidestepped. It
raises the problem of the physical limits to human cognition. By taking the side of
presentation, research immediately falls into various forms of naïve realism. Taking
the other side of representation, research falls into naïve forms of structuralism, with
constructivism as endorsed by Congdon et al. (“The Construction of Learning,” 44)
becoming a particular paradigm of cognitive science of education that has gained
ascendancy. It should be no surprise that this direction supports technological
innovation when it comes to learning, ideologically suited to the digital capitalist
world of information. We are not far from the excesses of edutainment.
When it comes to technologically arts-based research, it is the loss of this “gap”
that concerns me. This “abyss of representation” is the ground of subjectivity itself.
The non-representability of the subject, his or her singularity within an assemblage
is the position we endorse. For now, we shall explore the consequences of this
“gap” in relation to Baudrillard’s position. Congdon refers to Baudrillard (49),
acknowledges his critique, but then “hopes” that folkvine.org somehow escapes it,
thereby disavowing its import. But, we’re afraid, she along with the team cannot
escape. The anxiety associated with her constant questioning of the project is surely
related to his numerous expositions. Baudrillard is best known for his theory of
the simulacrum, and folkvine.org is an obvious example of simulacrum. It exists
in cyberspace. It is not a copy of the “real” artists and their work, but exists in its
own right as hyperreal, as an aestheticized enhancement to make these artists appear
“more real than real,” as the image of Ruby Williams’ produce stand on her splash
page evidentially shows (46). Framing the website as a “tour guide” with postcards
becoming the fantasy portholes through which one escapes through to enter into
each unique artist’s environment simply enhances the Disneyfication of culture
rather than addresses pressing questions Congdon asks at the end of her essay, the
“need to find ways to understand other cultures” (50). The tourism metaphor points
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in the direction of recreation and the simulacra of theme park mentality, enhancing
artificiality, which is its intent. While this is a negative view of simulacra, there is
also a positive view of it that Deleuze develops as the ‘powers of the false,’ which
we take up in section V, Distributing the Sensible. However, we now turn to the
implications of the gap or abyss, the non-representable side of subjectivity that
Baudillard’s critique also raises for us.
Postmodern simulacra such as folkvine.org, like so many other interactive
cybernet websites initiated by museums and galleries around the world, aim to draw
patrons in to view the ‘virtual’ art in an instance. Yet a contradiction persists that is
presented within Congdon’s essay by her approving a quote from James Traub, a
New York Times journalist that appears just before her disavowal of Baudrillard’s
thesis. “The object world has been disembodied and uploaded so that we may access
it without standing in its presence” [still] “we will stand in line to see the paintings
that we could just as well see online … we still feel the magic of the particular”
(49). This observation reveals the intervention of the gap, the missing aura that is
trying to be recreated in the cyber environments. It was discussed quite rigorously
when John Berger’s Ways of Seeing appeared in the mid-70s. But are we then simply
falling into the Platonic trap of saying something like: it’s only the original and not
the copy that makes a “true” impact, which is precisely what Deleuze railed against?
For Deleuze there is no transcendental only immanent life; there is nothing outside
the life we have. Images have internal (immanent) qualities that have certain effects
on us. They are not representations of Ideas or some ‘original’ model. Images are
what surround us. They live in us and us in them, enabling us to be affected by
them as well as enabling us to think. In this sense animation and digital imagery
are intimately connected (Manovich, 2001). Cell-animation and computer generated
imagery are very much alike in many ways, taking us past the notions of analogue
and indexical images where the referent assures the documented ‘realism.’ In an odd
way, the animated image is the most ‘truthful’ image of all in the sense that there is
no pretense of representation. It is completely ‘fabulated.’ Yet CGI technology seems
to move us away from this claim. Such technological animation drifts towards the
‘realistic’ end of the spectrum, although we intuitively know these are simply created
and fabulated worlds. Nevertheless, they affect us. In what Baudrillard (1988) calls
“the ecstasy of communication” “[t]here is no longer any transcendence or depth,
but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional
surface of communication” (12). In such an experience spatial and temporal distances
evaporate, shrink, disappear and the interactive viewer is consigned to total presence.
This is our screen culture. Is this such a bad thing? There are a number of responses
here.
With such instant accessibility where nothing is off-limits, all values seem to
flatten out. No one particular artist is highlighted, rather an attempt is to make
them all uniquely special and if possible extend the archive to include as may
representations (less well known and peripheral artists) as possible in the name
of democratic equality, regardless of quality. Taken to the limit this logic leads to
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universal communication (all folk artists become known and given their artistic
postcards), which like universal commodification, reduces even the most valuable
object to just another object in a series. Objects derive their value, their desire from
inaccessibility. We are left without a transcendent gap that is the gap that enables a
distancing to take place, as recognition of inaccessibility and irreducibility. This gap
indicates what cannot be symbolized, what Lacan called the Real of subjectivity—
the unconscious that resists symbolization. Bobble heads that ‘speak’ for the
viewer are constantly filling in the gap for the viewer. Oddly, the transcendent
position of art (its magic) that the website attempts to capture it is evacuated—its
illusion gone. You have to patiently “stand in line … to feel the magic.” Is this
then so bad?
Hypertexts like folkvine.org illustrate the loss of the gap—the Real. Janet
Murray is only mentioned once in the essay in defense of the problems that the
team had encountered (48). Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) defends the
beneficial interactivity of the cybernarrative as an open text, marshaling the usual
claims to flexibility and freedom. The question remains to what extend the gap
persists. In short, the virtual tourism of the website takes away the journey of the
“traveler,” the traveler who is trying to understand culture on another level—the
level of its non-representability, its uncanniness, its sublimity. Too romantic a view?
Perhaps? The days of travel and the journey may well be over for now the image
comes to you via the screen, an insight John Berger had already pointed out in the
early 70s .
What would persuade the visitor to folkvine.org to travel to these sites rather
than remain engrossed in the virtual artistic worlds presented in all their seduction?
Does learning become a disembodied structural experience despite the interactivity
of doing? Something that only emerges because the team has had personal contact
with these artists, revealed at the bottom of pg. 45. This is precisely the non-
representable Real of each artist: Zimmerman’s wartime trauma that results in the
belief of parallel universes where humans and animals are accepted because they
have been prematurely and brutally killed; they, like Zimmerman exist in such a
netherworld—half alive, half dead. Ginger LaVoie’s quilts are spiritual blankets
derived from her Polynesian ancestry, an obvious way to keep her identity alive.
As objects of passionate attachment, without them she would be exposed and lost.
Taft Richardson’s spiritualism is embedded in his sculptural works embodying his
self-sustained narrative of healing and resurrection, which he attempts to share
with neighborhood children. The making of clown shoes by the Scott family,
a sign of resistance when they could no longer move with their children due to
OSHA rules. Each artist’s output comes from the virtual Real of their subjectivity.
Could any visitor to the folkvine.org have those embodied feelings that obvious
Congdon, with her great sensitivity has? It was precisely the non-representability
of their subjectivity, the transcendent space that each possessed through their art,
which gave the team their élan vital to create this website in the first place. But, by
doing so, they could not “capture” their virtual Real leaving an ethical question:
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just how much exposure of secrecy, knowability and intrusion should go on in the
name of enjoyment and entertainment for the interactive visitor under the guise of
learning? So the ugly question emerges, is difference once again swept up under
Sameness? Perhaps the most difficult case scenario are those art educators who have
involved themselves with Second Life, which would be the contemporary upgrade to
Folkville.org.
One last note: In a contemporary world of images where repetition has become
the norm, the problem of simulacrum arises: namely the image having internalized
its own repetition raises issues about its representation and hence calls into question
its own authority and the legitimacy of its model. We have the strange juxtaposition
between high and low culture; that is to say, the repeated and reproduced image
butts up against the so-called one-of-a-kind image. This is our condition. The
collective experience, the coherent narratives of collective community experience
are (perhaps) over, perhaps caught by a nostalgia of the past. Individual reception
of such a state, therefore, requires rethinking. For Deleuze, following Bergson, all
movement is image. Cinema is not a spatial representation but a movement in time.
Eisenstein, fascinated by Disney animation called animation a form of ecstasy. It
was the experiencing of the primal ‘omnipotence,’ or the ‘protoplasmaticness’ of
the image. From this ‘plasmaticness of existence,’ anything could arise. It was like
a ‘pure sensation.’ Animation as elasticity, the poly-formic capabilities of an object,
is very close to topologics where shapes are able to morph into one another. Taken
this way animation makes it difficult, if not impossible to tell who imitates who
when it comes to anthropomorphising objects and animals such as in the brilliant
Pixar productions. When the model and the copy become undecidable, which
is Baudrillard’s final stage of the simulacra as hyperreal, then there is a crisis
in ‘truth.’
The simulacrum along Baudrillardian lines is a negative notion. It presents up
with the usual Platonic notion of a copy of a copy. This produces an identity effect
where there is no original referent. With the absence of the original the simulacrum
as an ungrounded copy simply stands in relation to other copies. So, one form of this
is that there is an inaccessible ideal (icon, Idea), which is an inaccessible original,
or there is an original of which the rest are copies. One might think of a lithographic
stone with a print run of X number of copies, each a certain distance from the master
plate. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze celebrates this as the ‘powers of the false’
as an “original will to art,” which then has to be evaluated on different grounds
than representational logic where there are clear ideals to be reached. The potential
of the simulacrum is to test the limits of the reigning discourses and narratives.
Baudrillard on the other hand remained despondent that something of the human
was lost. Folkvine.org becomes problematic if it pretends to be something else than
what it is: a cartoon exemplifying what is at stake when art as we know it becomes
embraced by the new technologies where the silicon-image begins to disorientate the
frame, making us wonder if there is any ‘Outside,’ so well illustrated by the Cube
film series, which illustrates the loss of the transcendental realm and the need for us
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to descend into as incarnated flesh, a question that we take up implicitly in the next
two sections IV and V.
Phenomenology
Liora Bresler’s (2006) contribution to the journal, “Toward Connectedness:

Aesthetically Based Research,” seems to echo Eisner; rather, she seems to reinforce
his voice, making it louder. Barone seems to concur (5). The fact that she studied in
Stanford with Eisner clears up the sound. So, what does she add, especially to ethics,
which is the question where we left off when addressing Eisner’s development?
Bresler is interested in the interrelationship between aesthetically based research
(53) and qualitative research informed by Verstehen—emphatic understanding (as
opposed to Erklären), which she mistakenly assumes became prominent in the “60s
and 70s in the educational scene” (52). The so-called “reconceptualist movement”
never really made its mark until the mid-70s, and even then it was not widespread,
while Max van Manen’s phenomenology was in its infancy. However, this is a
point to quibble on and not germane to questioning the thrust of her argumentation.
Qualitative research informed by aesthetics is dialogical “mediating back and forth
between the personal and the public” (53) forming a tri-directional relationship
between the object (artwork or phenomena), artist (or researcher) and audience.
Bresler makes some odd remarks regarding a “cognitive revolution” (54) credited
to Broudy, Eisner and Langer where the affect/cognitive dichotomy “has been
deconstructed.” We say odd, because none of the three supported references had
any clue of “deconstruction” as employed by Derrida, yet another quibble, but more
to the point, she then states that the relationship of affect and cognition “have not
been addressed as a methodological issue.” Affect, it should be pointed out, does not
equate to the affect in the Deleuze|Guattarian sense, but refers to feeling, which is
why the phenomenology of Susan Langer is mentioned. She intends to demonstrate
that this relationship (affect\cognition) is an emphatic understanding characterized
as “explicitly rational, at the same time highly affective” (54). This turns out to be a
“contemplative, concentrated state, [where] thinking and feeling support each other,
occurring in accord” (56). We will argue that such a state is precisely the creation of
fantasy space, which, as we argued concerning Eisner, is a source of worry for the
ideological suppositions it hides.
Despite her “word of caution” (54), an anxiety indicator of what is to come,
to assure and forewarn her readers that a “commitment to the old, to tradition” is
necessary for the new to emerge, the reader is plunged into an explanatory section
of perception and aesthetic distance which is dated, belonging to a former organicist
canon with Kantian (as well as Schiller and Hegelian) roots (via John Armstrong’s
(2000)) five processes of perceptual contemplation and reverie that fit the Old
Masters that he studies at the University of London, and the classic Italian sports car
that he drives that stylistically go along with his elegant Latin titles of the process
of looking: animadversion, concursus, hololepsis, catalepsis and lingering caress)
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wherein perception is theorized as a harmonious form—“good of the whole” (55),

a refinement of the connoisseurship model confined to works of privilege. The only
“transformative” effect such perceptual exploration is allowed is the act of re-seeing
(55, 57) based on philosophical territory (Gadamer, Bullough) that has undergone
serious critique for its short comings, but obviously not for everyone. It seems
that art should not disturb in other ways that shatter the harmony of “move[ing]
closer” (56)!
Bresler seizes on two of the five procedures: lingering caress and mutual absorption
(catalepsies), to be the heart of the I-Thou relationship, Martin Buber’s trump card,
in the way the dialogical exchange between artist-researcher and his or her creation
(art, phenomena of study) should ideally take place as transformative re-seeing.
Gadamer’s familiar notion of horizons of understanding (57) (Verständnishorizont),
and later his fusion of horizons (58) (Horizontverschmelzung) is called on to provide
the ideal aesthetic distance (58). “It is located at a midpoint between excessive
distance [too far] … and insufficient distance [too close]” (58). We would agree:
only at this idealized fantasy space (the midpoint) can one fall in love with the object
at the level of the Imaginary to initiate the “lingering caress” where “the object
looks back at you from the place you see it” (Lacan) so that the It now becomes a
Thou. That is what a fantasy experience is: the inside/outside dichotomy disappears
at the level of the imagination. This is ideology at its purest. If there is mystery,
it is not engaged by Bresler.3 The other perceptual possibilities —as excesses of
being “too close” and “too far” can generate estrangement, anxiety, uncanniness
and ruin the harmony of the frame so neatly erected by a perception that balances
affect with cognition. These other forms of perceptual transformation, which so
many artists attempt to initiate with their audiences are dismissed because “empathic
understanding” would be ruined questioning other forms of research—for example,
the provocative ethnomethodologies undertaken by Harold Garfinkel. In the same
manner over-distancing and under distancing (61) that characterizes a lack of
connection and sentimentality respectively.
Bresler’s arts-based proposal rests squarely on the psychology of the ego, updated
to its more current reflexive and recursive status. Biography or autobiography of
the artist/researcher is perceived as a narrative, which would refer “to allegiances,
professional commitments, values, and passions of the self” (59), as if these could
be listed and identified. This is referred to as the “researcher’s presence” that
shapes and is shaped by the research as a “process of change” (59) occurs. It all
sounds very incremental, “unfolding” and civilized, this process of “creating and
communicating” “personal understanding.” This is the great progress of research
narrative where “cultural knowledge …serves as a shoulder for the next batch of
researchers and artists to stand upon” (59). Oddly, she mentions the work of Thomas
Kuhn (ft. 10, 60) who showed that the history of science developed as a series of
revolutionary gaps or jumps. The footnote supports the very opposite of what it
is meant to support: science as a “knowing about” where “the scientific aim [is]
to question and refute” (60). Kuhn’s thesis deconstructed the “unity of science”
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supposition. Scientific breakthroughs come ex nihilo and cannot be explained. What

can be explained are the treachery of scientific communities that suppress new
knowledge as extraordinary science for various personal and political reasons as
Diane Crane (1972) showed soon after Kuhn’s book was published.
We would reverse Bresler’s emphasis on making rather than doing that she borrows
from Marilyn Zurmuehlen (59–60). This reversal sets up our questioning of her final
claims concerning the obstacles to dialogue, enabling empathy and ethics. Whereas
doing for her is “mere busyness or activity” while making becomes the more relevant
activity since it “imposes order on matter” and “names” the world, we would argue
that making places the artist/researcher/child as knower-maker with art being a tool to
know (name)—the realm of epistemology. Doing is far more important, for it is the
place of becoming and play, a realm of contingency and error, the assurances of failure
or success remain ambiguous as the ground of certainty gives way. Doing is first and
foremost a bodily activity of the senses, which brings up ethics as its first philosophy
for Deleuze in the way that sensibility confronts an unknowable Other—be it organic
or inorganic, sentient or non-sentient being as an event. By maintaining the emphasis
on making, Bresler repeats the epistemological arrogance of research that she is trying
to soften through “negotiation” and “caring” (52). Her fingering “living presence”
(after Stout, 61) is misplaced. It is not that such an entity does not exist, rather it
is to be found at the level of doing rather than making. It is precisely there that the
imperceptibility of “life” can be felt. In the making it is already gone, caught by the
signifier—the naming, categorizing of epistemological knowledge, and so on.
While “the combination of knowledge about and knowledge of, essentially
juxtaposing aesthetic distance and connectedness” (60) sound so reassuring as a
methodological approach in its claims to dialogical caring and negotiation, they
harbor another “truth” or side that has characterized western occularism since the
Enlightenment in the way the Other has been approached with seeming sincerity
of ethical exchange only to be appropriated by the Same. Indeed, this has been the
critique of ethnography by postcolonial scholars in general, no matter how much
it claims to sugar-coat itself. The Other is approached in “good-faith,” as a Thou,
with the best of intentions for dialogical caring exchange where the “rhythm of [the]
building relationship” (61) has taken time to build, and so on. How? The idealism
of this research situation, which seems so well-intentioned with obvious religious
overtones in its claims to be reaching the “goodness” quotient overlooks, dismisses,
or is blind to the impossibility of ever achieving this due to inherent issues of power
differentials, obvious transferences of authority, claims that the Other’s resistance
to the open hand is a form of bad faith, the resistance being an effect of power as
Foucault has shown, and so on. This was the same criticism levied at Habermas
for his” ideal speech situation.” Now one can either disavow all this ‘other stuff,’
which make negotiations much more messy, not so harmonious, and (yes) political,
or continue to strive for this “ideal” as presented by Buber, Gadamer, Bullough. And,
one can go about maintaining the conceit of university privilege oblivious to this
more “ugly” side of life.
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There is a belief by Bresler that audience participation, which intensifies the

dialogue through “zooming out,” “taking in” and “broadening out” (62) acts as a
heightened if not corrective force (by the so-called well-known triangulated theories)
to this ‘other stuff’ we mention that could be classified as further “obstacles to
dialogical connection” (60) than the ones she mentions. Thus the “hard boundaries”
(ft. note 13) become soft boundaries (53) and border crossing (53) by opening up
audience participation. The premise of research triangulation is rather simple and
seemingly democratic: the third force of the intended audience makes “a lone (and
often lonely) act into a social one, a part of belonging” (62). In other words, it is
a legitimating function that is being played out here. Triangulation in research to
enhance the social milieu “normally” refers to the combination of multiple observers,
theories, methods, empirical material and so on to overcome the weaknesses that are
caught by “between two people, a person and artwork, or a person and data” (62).
But here, the evocation of audience is rather ambivalent as to what exactly Bresler is
advocating their role to be. Audience research is a major area of research in cultural
studies. It has to be for capitalist marketing purposes. The democratic semblance of
participatory voice as an input from audiences varies from people voting for their
favorite “stars” on television, to debriefings to social action possibilities like that of
people’s theatre (Augusto Boal). Bresler does not explore the degree of “investment”
of the audience, nor how the research itself is changed as a result of such investment.
She suggests (65) that qualitative researchers have divided loyalties—to their
participants as well as to their readership. But which prevails and does one reconcile
the ethics—harmoniously by doing the “right thing”? Isn’t this precisely what
happens in capitalist market research based on qualitative participant analysis? Isn’t
a caring intent engendered here as well? In order to sell their “goods” they must be
ethical in their approach to the “participants” they solicit and the audience they are
responsible to. These are the same “two sets” of ethical concerns advocated in her
arts-based research (65).
This takes us to her comment more fully on her section: research ethics. Of
course, much for what passes for ethical behavior is consciously intentional knowing
that ethics belongs to the realm of the unforeseeable. But that isn’t our point: it is
what is unconscious—like the psychoanalytic notion of transference—and what is
unstated (like power differentials and gender) that concerns us. Bresler draws on
the worn-out and well-tracked territory of Aristotelian eudaimonia based on social
“good” where depending on context “one does the right thing, at the right time,
toward the right person, in the right company, the right way, and with right intent”
(64). Anyone know such a person? It is an impossible ideal. It is the essence of the
tragic character not do the “right” thing. Life is full of tragedy, and unfortunately,
an evil person can also do the “right thing” for the wrong reasons—for example, a
jihadist suicide bomber. There is also a strange slippage in Bresler’s text between
ethics and morality. A “caring morality” (64) is mentioned but also Steve Toulmin’s
conservative moral theory that divides strangers from intimates. Toulmin’s (1972)
evolutionary position with his direct attack of Thomas Khun, for example, is in
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keeping with Bresler’s own research as “re-seeing” as a transformative process of

innovation and selection. In the name of harmony the idea is to turn these “strangers
[in]to being close associates” (65). To win them over, so to speak, by getting to know
them.
The ethics of “good” and “caring” as embracing as they sound, fit neatly into
the contemporary contextualism required for the capitalist system’s demand for
happiness in a political context where happiness and harmony have come to function
as a “good” (64). It is a utilitarian ethics that pervades her work. While it does
take us away from Bresler’s text, we cannot avoid invoking Lacan’s relationship
of the good and the beautiful in his Ethics (1992) seminar since he too brings
aesthetics into the picture with ethics. The text is complicated, but to start with a
quote:
The domain of the good is the birth of power […] It was Freud, not me who
took upon himself the task of unmasking what this has effectively meant
historically. To exercise control over one’s goods, as everyone knows, entails a
certain disorder, that reveals its true nature, i.e., to exercise control over one’s
goods is to have the right to deprive others of them […] For this function of the
good engenders, of course, a dialectic. I mean the power to deprive others is a
very solid link from which will emerge the other as such (222).
This relational aspect of the good flies in the face of Aristotelian (and western) ethics
and the whole tradition of moral thought that gives the Good a positive valence.
For Lacan, the good as a relation of one human to another falls short of the ethical.
“The true nature of the good, its profound duplicity, has to do with the fact that it
isn’t purely and simply a natural good, the response to a need. But possible power,
the power to satisfy. As a result, the whole relation of man to the real of goods is
organized relative to the power of the other, the imaginary other, to deprive him of
it” (234). The virtue of the good, as conflated with the sphere of commodity goods,
is perceived innocently enough as relationally helpful, ends up shaping and creating
the very concept of the other as another person who is in a relation of power to
me. This is why postcolonial theory (again) is skeptical of the “good” and why the
move of “strangers to being close associates” (64) not only masks power through
the good, but creates the inequality in the first place. Beauty, in this same seminar
as directed to the figure of Antigone, is also turned on its head. While we cannot go
into detail here to fully explicate this move, rather than harmony beauty is associated
with violence, blindness, transgression, and especially death. Of course, this reads
as anathema to arts enthusiasts where just the opposite is the case. Lacan defines
what is beautiful with the ethical only when the very limit of the symbolic Law
is reached, when a certain sacrifice of the self is made for an ethical Cause that
can result in death. It is an inhuman attribute, raising uncomfortably the question
surrounding the evil beauty of the suicide bomber, or the act of “murder” that of
Robert Latimer, a Saskatchewan farmer committed by poisoning his 12 year-old
cerebral palsy stricken daughter with carbon dioxide out of love, knowing full well
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that he would go to jail. These are radical acts of evil done for the “right” thing. Like
dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Poststructuralism
It is of course difficult to betray Canadian colleagues whom we know very, very well,
but…it is our death drive. As Rita once said to me in answering a colleague who had
given me some praise: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Indeed it is. As Lacan
maintains above, it has two sides, the other side being ugly. What is beautiful can
quickly become ugly and visa versa. The ambivalence of perception has to do with
unconscious desire. With that, we begin. Besides, no matter how strong and forceful
the critique may be, it will not defer those who embrace it; it may, indeed, just do
the opposite. Enable them to dig in deeper since identity is at stake. People belong
to different political parties. Rita Irwin et al. have developed a research direction
referred to as A/r/tography. It has already been referred to or mentioned by other
researchers in this special journal (Sullivan, 25; Bresler, 53). With a critical mass of
graduate doctoral students who have embraced this way of approaching arts-based
research, a/r/tography has grown as a force to be reckoned with. UBC graduates
have been active in their publications, have found academic positions both in Canada
and the United States and have continued to develop its potentialities. Rita and her
close colleague and companion, Kit Grauer have admirably done what is expected of
professors: established a research direction that they call their own, much like Max
van Manen has been given credit for his phenomenological research. So, what’s it
about? And, why should we (yet again) question its premises?
The signifier works, it stands out. It is a poststructuralist construction: a conflation
of multiple selves under one roof, all nestled in the ego, relationally waiting to be
used. It (inadvertently perhaps) speaks to its posthuman roots, as a Net signifier ready
for its website. The eye immediately catches its oddness—a/r/tography so that one
immediately asks: what does it stand for? Sullivan gave us the preliminary picture.
“[I]t references the multiple roles of Artist, Researcher and Teacher, as the frame of
reference through which art practice is explored as a site of inquiry. […] the Artist as
someone who en-acts and embodies creative and critical inquiry; the Researcher acts
in relation to the culture of the research community; and the Teacher re-acts in ways
that involve others in artistic inquiry and educational outcomes” (25). Seems like all
the bases are covered? Has a home run been hit? “The acts of inquiry and the three
identities” are “post-structural conceptualizations of practice” (70), and one can add
that they are an open system: “rhizomatic relations do not seek conclusions and
therefore, neither will this account” (abstract, 70). In these rhiziomatic relationships
identity is determined by context in good old-fashioned poststructuralist terms. One
puts on a different hat (artist, researcher, educator) and performs a different function
(art, research, education). So we have basically a (post)structuralism at work where
the combination of possibilities amongst the six elements are, while not unlimited,
complex enough to make the system seem open-ended. It skirts the Derridean
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accusation of centered narratives (mentioned in relation to Sullivan’s work), and

overcomes both my complaints of the loss of traveling (“journeying,” 74) and a
postcolonial critique that we maintain can be levied against Bresler. The explication
in this article as to just what a/r/tograhy as a method is, is far superior to the book
version that came out in 2004 where the theory was underdeveloped and thin (see
the review of the book’s review at the end of this section). It centered more on an
autobiographical approach. We suspect writing a SSHRC grant had a lot to do with
that, but we are uncertain.
Let us tackle the “fragmented subjectivities” of a/r/tography, which draws on a
poststructuralist strategy. While a/r/tography in its 2004 version does not have a
refined sense of this approach, by that we maintain that there are many slippages
back to the humanist subject of the Imaginary, there is, however, a wanting to
problematize the taken-for-granted humanist notions of the subject as capable of
self-knowledge and self-articulation while, at the same time, providing a rationale
for incorporating the personal into research. As Bronwyn Davies and Susanne
Gannon succinctly put it, “The self both is and is not a fiction : is unified and
transcendent and fragmented and always in process of being constituted, can be
spoken of in realist ways and cannot; its voice can be claimed as authentic and there
is no guarantee of authenticity” (2009, 95). This passage is important because it does
two things: the paradox, we will argue, shows the limitation of postructuralist notion
of the subject, and 2) the use of “and” in the paragraph harkens to Deleuzian forms
of conjunctive logic that forms the rhizome.
Now, Irwin et al. latch on to Deleuze|Guattari’s concept of rhizomatics, utilizing
it in its most commonsensical way possible, stripping it of its radicalness that only
emerges if Deleuze| Guattari’s entire oeuvre is taken into account (more on this
later). This is their selected borrowing. In the context of its use here it pretty much
goes along with nonlinearity conferred to the scientific biological paradigm of
complexity theory where autopoesis and emergence (Valera, Maturana, et al.) have
become common fare of the “new” cybernetic science. This is echoed in the claim
that “their inquires [are] emergent, generative, reflexive and responsive” (71). It
should be pointed out that a/r/tography’s structure, while certainly not centered, is
not decentered either, as the radicalism of Deleuze|Guattari’s concept of rhizomatics
suggest. Rather, we would strongly argue that a/r/tography’s complexity is a
“distributed transient network,” more formalized than their descriptive claims of
saying it isn’t. The methodology of “situations” (more commonly theorized as nodes)
become specifically linked as the process develops—some nodes (situations) drop
in, others drop out, some are discovered, others vanish. This (post)structure sums up
their “way of understanding experience. As we traced some of these pathways, we
came upon visible and invisible ruptures and connections” (83). No doubt this more
nuanced structuralism revealed itself even more (as a nonlinear “map,” 82) when
the final research report had to formalized, written down, exhibits photographed
and sent to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that
specified the parameters of their Research Creation grant.
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Irwin et al. are also collaborative team players (like Congdon et al.) but whereas
that poststructuralist object (folkvine.org) is created in cyberspace, this team creates
their poststructuralist cybernetic object in the environment through the “methodology
of situations” (71) that a/r/tography enables. Its empiricism has the advantage over the
simulacra of cyberspace by tapping potentially into the vast explosion of the discipline
of geography, which is no longer sees itself simply mapping terrains, but have now
opened up the territory to the flows and ebbs of the city. We would put Marcus Doel’s
Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science on the forefront
here. It remains to be seen, however, how Situationist a/r/tography is, and how much
of the poststructuralist script they adhere to by following queer theorists like Grosz,
Britzman, and Ellsworth (71, 74). Their practice is all determining as to the particular
“hat” worn and the task the “hat” in the flow situation is called upon to do. This
becomes muddled in its own complexity. One of the very interesting aspects to note
in the first few opening pages is the bulk of the references center on a very small
cadre of a/r/tography practioners. The method is as good as the hats and tasks that this
cadre can perform. So let’s examine one performance highlighted as the exemplar, the
SSHRC funded project called “The City of Richgate.”
The project is about a theme that blends itself easily to imaginary landscapes,
site specific community art, and to a pressing problem of postmodernity, which a
generation of social scientist have, since the early 90’s developed into its very own
field of studies: the Diaspora consciousness of the City of Richmond (74). This art-
based problem, with a twist, could just as easily fit in with cultural anthropology,
sociology, certainly cultural geography, urban studies, and even political studies of
diasporic experiences. The specificity of art is only one “hat,” emerging as “what
artistic products might be created through a community-engaged process examining
the Chinese-Canadian experience in the City of Richmond?” (74). A/r/tography
borrows the familiar “emergent” model of research that comes from the complexity
sciences, the multiplicity that arises once the simple interactions begin (74–75).
This, by the way, is now standard fare in market research and videogame theory as
well. It is called “Emergence Marketing” and uses chaos theory as it theoretical base.
In their candid attempt to explain their project and a/r/tography as a method,
it becomes very apparent that a familial exclusivity develops with the way the six
families “emerged” who wanted to be part of what at first became recognized as
a “community project ” (79), and then as a crisis developed concerning that very
exclusivity, the “community project” re-emerged (upon reading Miwon Kwon and
I suspect Claire Doherty’s entire edited book) as an “invented community through
the collective artistic and educational praxis known as a/r/tography” (79). The team
finally realized that they had (let’s use Kwon’s term here) a projective imagined
community constituted by the project itself. Of course, Kwon is simply drawing
on the well-known philosophical developments of Jean-Luc Nancy who has been
rethinking community for the past decade or more by standing it on its head: “the
being of community” becomes “the community of being.” The decentering of
community finally arrives to art education! But, now a key question emerges for us.
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Just this recognition is not enough. Are the differences that exist within the community
that Nancy is attempting to articulate (like the philosophy of difference Deleuze in
particular championed) vindicated by a/r/tograhy? Or, does it become another cover-
up of difference in the name of the Same? How radical is the methodology? The
frame of the Research Creation Grant Program (SSHRC), the source of the money,
already establishes much of the answer in its objectival expectations.
We are left in middle of page 79 knowing that “large image based gates …[each
with] an individual banner” (78) have been erected to represent these families.
The metaphor of the gate repeats the emphasis of the post(structure) intent of the
methodology to “represent openings and closings, transitions and transformations”
(84). This tiny group now represents the diasporic consciousness, and one asks
where then is the “difference” to be found? What seemed to have been accomplished
is a sense of pride and a witnessing by members of their extended families (84)
as to the success of their new lives. Everyone seemed satisfied as the next phase
to add more gates continues in the spirit of representational democracy to keep
exclusivity as bay. The question of the educational import of the project was not
discussed, but we imagine that this was easily justified and filled out by claiming
cross-cultural exchange and so on. But, what has been the result of this complex
undertaking? Have we not arrived at a more elaborate and complex form of
artistic representation, simply a more complex cognition of understanding of these
diasporic families? The researchers seem to acknowledge this themselves through
the anxiety of a concluding “tentative postlude” (85) where their dissatisfaction
is addressed by a search of the horizon of missing possibilities. There is, for us,
an entire dimension that simply escapes a/r/tography as a methodology, inherent
to poststructuralism in general, and that is the level of the unconscious Real.
The method remains on the imaginary and symbolic level despite its claim of
complexity.
Throughout my (jan) own work since the early 90s I also use the term “site” as
part of a homology site/sight/cite. Kwon’s (2002) radical shift of site can be further
radicalized since her dissolvement of its geographical specificity “as predominately
an intertextually coordinated, multiply located, discursive field of operation” (159)
remains, for me, at the projective imaginary level. While it is now “open” rather
than closed system, surpassing Benedict Anderson’s former ground breaking (in
some circles) discussion of national imagined communities, it is undertheorized at
the level of desire. Unconscious desire is the place of “site” for me. This is why
our complaint that Deleuze|Guattari’s radicalness is vacant from a/r/tography’s
methodology despite a nod in their direction towards Deleuze|Guattari’s mobilization
of unconscious desire in their work—the site of the unconscious virtual Real, which
is the unsymbolized and unimagined kernel that “structures” the projective imaginary
site in the first place—the sense-event. This is where difference is to be found that
is not followed by a signifier to mark identity, or rather it is the site of the unknown
known. The subject begins not in presence but in difference. This “site” of the
virtual Real is precisely the unconscious quasi-cause of the “system of movement”
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(84) Kwon alludes to. The families only give reasons (83) for their immigration to
Canada. It’s what they consciously “think” brought them to Canada. However, their
desire, and a/r/tography’s methodology to address this unconscious desire remains
absent. The unknown known (Real) of the familial reasons for movement, the secrets
that are part of the familiar identity, but they don’t know that they know them is the
place of becoming that is constantly overlooked by the method, despite the strong
conscious desire not to do so. There is endless repetition that reassures the reader
that this is a relational work in progress. The familial secrets remain repressed as
unconscious prejudices and fantasies, as the quasi-cause of their unconscious desire.
And, what it is that the family does not know that it knows controls them but they
don’t control it.
Analysis of familial memory work, their dreams and traumatizations are missing.
The vitual Real of the diasporic imagination is not approached. This would have
given some indication as to why the idealization of Canada emerged in their
imaginary, not as cognitive rationalizations, but as how their symbolic order in
China itself shaped by fundamental antagonisms, affected and prompted their
journey. And, why it becomes important to journey back to confirm the originary
trauma of leaving. But of course: “Some families were reticent to share some
experiences of difficult issues” (84). The gaps where unconscious desire persists
in their represented photographic narratives (from the images provided, they seem
stereotypical) is voided to present their idealized “story.” The team recognizes the
virtual imaginary of their own “stereotypical views” (84), but there is no way for
them to grasp unconscious desire. Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic (80)
remains attached to the official familial narratives. What is missing is the obscene
underside of the official narratives, the affect of life, the microminutial ‘writing’ that
supports those initial four volunteered families who had to some degree realized
their idealization of the promised land, already felt comfortable in it, settled, and
were willing to share their version. The uncanny (unheimlich) of their story and the
affect that supports it is missing artistically.
The difference of approach which recognizes the virtual Real of the unconscious rests
on the difference between a split-subject as opposed to the decentred poststructuralist
subject of information capitalism, a cybernetic model of subjectivity, which I would
maintain, is being mobilized in a/r/tographic methodology. If Deleuze|Guattari had
been called on, the created imaginary fabulation of the families would have been
developed. Kwon, herself, is thin in this development as well. The Situationists’ unitary
urbanism (which brings in the desire as the site of the virtual Real) receives no mention
and Smithson’s concept of site/nonsite dialectic, which also raises unconscious desire
when it comes to the tension between galley and the ‘outside’ receives little discussion.
For diasporic studies one would have to look to the pioneering work in urban geography
by Steven Pile (1996), whose The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and
Subjectivity opened up the dimension the Real lived body.
When an academic alone practices arts-based research under a/r/tography label,
without the cadre of a team, problems begin to arise. The cache of name of the method
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a/r/tography no longer holds up, although it is always used as a sign of belonging.

The autobiography remains at the level of the imaginary, that is fantasy level. The
structure falls down by the weight of the hats and tasks consigned to one individual
can wear rather than its distribution as a team. Our personal experience reading such
research is that it begins to fall into narcissism and subjectivism that inadvertently
perhaps, evoke connoisseurship models. No names will be mentioned here out of
politeness but not respect.
Our quarrel with a/r/tography 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. The virtual Real of
desire, Deleuze| Guattari ‘s contribution is missing. It mobilizes the poststructuralist
subject, which as argued in the Congdon piece, is precisely suited for the team
projects that the Academy is after in an age of capitalist globalization of the
information age. Poststructuralist cybernetics is the updated scientific theory that
passes as knowledge. But, isn’t that what is precisely wanted: an arts-based research
methodology that is up to “speed” with the rest of the scientific hubris around the
campuses attaining grant money?
Performance
Jim Sanders (2006) attempts a queer perspective (as Baudrillard once said, we are all
transgendered beings today) of ABER in a one-act drama that has seven scenes. His
narratological structure attempts to display and describe its multiple performances
to flesh ABER out “unavoidably […] as a fixed and stable concept, when it might
be better to considered a process, or an emerging tendency” (89). Significantly,
Sanders is trying to resignify the field of ABER by drawing on a different ‘line of
flight’ than the one Barone wished to institutionalize. No Oedipal homage here. The
move is from qualitative research to the performative arts which has the advantage
of specificity of the endeavor we would call “art-ing” (jagodzinski 2007), at the
same time making it even more difficult to box and package ABER as a form of
epistemology. This is certainly not a fault, but an opening to keep the field open.
Sanders overview confines itself to the U.S. One might qualify that this is the United
States ABER scene according to Sanders and it emphasizes a critical and social
constructive approach. With that said: The curtain goes up to reveal scene one which
starts with a complaint, a legitimate one at that which reveals a particular “truth.”
Via direct experience of ABER presentations at conferences it becomes evident
that there are many “bad” performances, not unlike the complaint with a/r/tography
performed by a single researcher lost in wearing hats and tasks. The arts conceived
as a performative discipline “demand careful study and attentive application of an
arts media technology to pertinent research problems and settings” (92). If you are a
poor practitioner of at least one of the traditional arts (dance, drama, music, art) the
DIY approach does not cut it as research. Even arts metaphorical use (the structure of
weaving as research) needs rigor, drawing on the tradition that supports a particular
art form.
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The limit case, or rather the art form, which challenges the entire edifice of
ABER is dance, which already arises in the first scene. Why dance? The body’s
ways of knowing raise the fundamental question of the failure of epistemology; i.e.,
how does it signify? Dance (creative, avant-garde, traditional) already suggests a
gestural language of expression with its own phenomenology of inner affect, and a
cultural tradition where discourses have written on the body in a particular way—
especially the queer body. Is there any way to avoid the Eisner pit of falling into
connoisseurship if DIY is not an option? Is knowledge in ABER (if we want to
call it that) simply refining, innovating, and pushing the performative possibilities
of a medium that exists in each discipline or sub-discipline? This is too much of a
closed-system, which does lend itself to connoisseurship and refinement. Sander’s
maintains that “disrupting the notion that only expert trained dancer is authorized to
think in, and through, the body” (95). But just where do you draw the line between
DIY and expert if the former is “bad” performance and the later is just too refined?
The second scene attempts to show what acceptable ABER performances are;
what has been sanctioned within the cadre of ABER practioners among themselves
that does not raise the ire of “bad” performances. Well, there’s the accepted denizen
of ABER, Norman Denzin, who provides a five form way to jazz up and dramatize
texts to make them more performatively appealing; then there is reader’s theatre
that “re-creates” both “imaginary” and “primary” documents to “raise new research
questions and produce new subject positions” (93) through “participant-performer[s]”
(an audience) who engage in “post-performance reflections [to] produce new ways
of viewing and thinking about data” (94). The Verfremdung techniques of Brecht and
Beuysian-like performances, although disturbing and enigmatic, certainly avant-
garde during their day are given a nod. In this regard Slattery’s performance and
installation, 10,000 Ejaculations, which “through sexual innuendo troubled those
short prayers Catholics offer as penance” (ft. 2, 94) is considered worthwhile for
its “disruptive intention,” as are two other performances that reveal racial curatorial
practices and artistic practices. ABER’s aim thus becomes “to disclose those
technologies producing, contextualizing, and camouflaging a problem” (94). The
idea is to disperse the interpretation of data through repetition and re-interpretive
presentation but “not developing definitive claims regarding a singular final truth”
(94). In brief, the idea is to open a system up and expose it, and to leave it that way.
Left wanting, then, is what a spectator/participant does with this exposure at the
interpretive level faced with disruptive assault or democratic multi-possibilities. In
good-old neo-liberalist fashion, the work is “completed” by the recipient. I produce
and/or expose a text … you the viewer/participant interpret it. Take it or leave it. In
these later sanctioned examples, ABER escapes responsibility.
The dancer’s body emerges again and confronts the fall into an imaginary ego that
is referred to as the “researcher’s body” of “embodied knowing” which “poetically”
is supposed to movingly engage audience/spectators in research. “Their texts call
attention to the ways our bodies enable, shape, or discount understandings of
research” (95). This is not enough since the body is the site/sight/cite of difference
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from which a variety of theoretical positions embodied in arts practice determine its
trajectories. In what way is body and voice theorized in these performances? From a
psychoanalytical point of view, both body and voice (as lalangue) open up the ‘other’
side of the signifier, where transferences and countertransferences between self and
Other (artist and audience/participants) can open up the awareness of a voice’s
queerness and change movement. But how this is to be packaged as “research”
within the Academy remains a mystery. It’s not clear if music (96) (or voice, or
body) in the performances mentioned does anything more than reconfirm aesthetic
“presence.” And, if there are performances where the abject is revealed (bodily,
the uncanniness of the voice, the discordance of music), they are not described.
Sander’s does mention Charles Garoian’s (1999) attempt to provide a critical ABER
perspective, commendable in his calling on Artaud, Boal and Freire. However, this
project suffers again from the missing level of the unconscious. The complaint, like
that of a/r/tography, is not that it is not a radical undertaking when compared to the
broader field, but it is not radical enough. Artaud’s “body without organs” as further
developed by Deleuze|Guattari is missing; Boal and Freire who have introduced
critical thought to drama and general education do not go far enough either. Paulo
Freire in his famous, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970, 60) recognized the need for
psychoanalysis but did not explore it; while Boal’s (1995) excellent book, Rainbow
of Desire where the Joker really emerges as a voice of devilish conscience, just
falls short of radicalizing desire beyond its imaginary psychological level, moving
hesitantly, at times into psychopathology of everyday life.
So far in this scene, Sanders is not judging these accepted performances that
pass as ABER in conferences, but is giving the lay of the land. But, judgment as
to where he stands cannot be escaped. There is, however, no doubt emerging from
queer studies, a strong support of performances that “provoke and intervene” (96).
How these performance are “research” has yet to be articulated in his essay. The
silence indicates they can’t under the current Academic roof.
In scene three, Sander’s re-signifies the field of ABER by inventing his own
performative genealogy. Why not? For him, ABER belongs closer to the provocative
side of performance as offered by feminists and queer theorists, musicians and
conceptualists whose productions serve as “social commentaries and challenges to
established disciplinary forms” (97). A wide ranging of heterogeneous social action
artists who are accompanied by civil rights activists (Civil Rights March, Dadaists’,
ACT-UP, Fluxus) fall under the signifier of “social research arts performance” (97).
Sanders ideal ABER artists are the ones who “interact with those who construct new
meanings from their exhibited work” (97). In this way there is a shift from “artist-
as-object maker to artist-as-(re)searching guide” (97). Taken to the limit such artists
would be socially committed to their production. The question is when can they
let their artwork go? Sanders maintains that such a gesture leads to “indifference,”
objectification of their performance,” and an abandonment of the “works’ continued
relevance” (97).Quite a responsibility is shouldered. An odd paragraph follows that
again throws together a mish-mash of artist performers—from the introspective
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Buddhist perspective of her body through dance by Deborah Hay (how is she
socially critical?) to dancer Liz Lehrman who has an entirely different agenda
exploring numerous existential themes. If the Canadian Celeste Snowber’s spiritual-
psychological dances were to be included (99) here, the heterogeneity of the mix
can only be subsumed under the gerund danc-ing. They are claimed to precursors
for ABER scholars. We can say that Sander’s recognizes paradigm shifts (as in
Kuhnian science) that might be likened to “edge work” in the arts, which he praises
as research.
Scene four examines ABER as community art. It appears that the usual
understanding of community is offered. Museums are taken as research sites but
their political function is noted, as well as their ideological function that has been
questioned so profoundly. The re-institutionalization of museums and galleries as
places for critical installations is also mentioned. Oral history projects, community-
based craft and arts learning institutions are thrown in the mix, as are certain social
change agencies (Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy) and social justice groups (CLAGS,
Media Watch, SPLC) as exemplars of transformative power. Sanders sweeps into his
‘net’ pre-service teaching programs where ABER “address psychological and social
impacts of artmaking on students and researching educator” (99).
In the next scene, five, Sanders addresses “obstacles” as they pertain to the
emergent ABER paradigm. The return to quantitative and qualitative positivist
research, the limits of “methodological demands and technological habits of
educational institutions,” (100), the cost of technological equipment and issues
of space at large conferences (AERA, NAEA), the continued emphasis on print
material, lack of editorial support, and the time allotment to be freed up to learn
technologies necessary for ABER are not provided. Hence, performative action of
ABER remains undervalued. With this state of address in mind Sanders moves to
“possibilities” in scene six, which is an expansion of his concern that the academy
remains within the “alphanumeric text” (102) and his desire to see ABER formats
become more acceptable and the opportunity to learn the performative visual
technologies (television, cinema, video, pod-casts) become a reality given that
“visual culture and art” (102) have become hegemonic to the field.
Sanders concludes with his final seventh scene “potentialities” where he calls
for interdisciplinary inquiry (like cultural studies benefited from), more recognition
by professional associations of this movement, a potential gathering and pooling
together of “multiple arts’ technologies” (103) and methodologies already in place
and utilized by ABER colleagues. Until this happens, Sanders maintains, “there
will be little opportunity to rigorously debate, discuss, or determine what it means
to be doing ‘quality’ arts-based education research” (103). The visual arts must be
“willing to imagine researching as a process (103) […] then the field might be able
to overcome its boundaries to allow a tide “of new epistemological explorations and
technological innovations” to “freely flow” (103). In the last three scenes, which
belong tightly together, Sanders makes it obviously clear that for him the Academy
is dragging its heels, that the new world is already here, and that it has to wake up to
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the innovations that are already in place but not recognized enough within what the
Academy values as research.
Book Reviews
For the special arts-based addition of Studies, three influential books were reviewed
and a commentary provided by emerging scholars in the field. The cover art also
conveyed a particular statement. Let us address each review, commentary and cover
so as to make this journey through the journal complete, the betrayal taken to its end,
so to speak.
Charles Garoian (2006), the author of a very thoughtful and influential book,
Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics, reviews Graeme Sullivan’s, Art
Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (2005). Beginning with a political
statement, the continued degradation of visual arts in education, due to US government
policies and the like, Garoian identifies Sullivan’s “research-on-art-as-research”
(108) being a way to “establish the visual arts as a significant form of creative and
intellectual inquiry …in knowledge acquisition” (108). In other words, Sullivan is
justifying the “complementary relationship [of arts-based research] with other forms
of research” (110), notably science. Garoian identifies “Sullivan’s positioning of arts
research in a complementary relationship with scientific research” (110) evoking
Thomas Kuhn’s applicability to such research as well. This complementarity, of
course, is extended to social research as well. Sullivan has attempted to provide a
general (post)structuralist theory of such research as a mapped object with a series
of triangulations, each of which enables a certain dynamism to occur within three
elements that are contained within each. The entire structure revolves around three
triangulated domains: research, knowing, and practice that reiterate the broader
field of epistemology. Such an edifice is useful to compete with the established
epistemologies through such a (post)structuralist description. It is a remarkable
achievement. Sullivan has made arts-based research paradigmatic in Kuhn’s terms:
that is, his system seems to sew up all the loose ends and dares to be challenged
since it can absorb anything thrown at it, a categorization can be found and usefully
exploited for arts-based research ends. The complex “braided” structure creates
“domains of theory” and “domains of inquiry” (98–99, 111), “enabling a network
of perspectives and understanding to occur” (111). Sullivan’s complexity theory
is in full force “as complex and dynamic systems, self-same structures, scale-free
networks, and perspectivalism” (104, 111). Politically, then Sullivan’s work is able to
stand up to the Academy’s research agendas in the social and scientific communities.
Its edifice, a solid equilateral triangle, is strong enough to answer complaints against
even those “wishy-washy” artists, like those dancers prancing around claiming
spirituality in the name of Buddhism. It is not likely to be toppled or budged resting
on such a base. Or can it?
Charles R. Garoian’s (1999), Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics
would find a place aboard Sullivan’s Borg ship that can accommodate and assimilate
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anyone practicing arts-based research, even though his book is an anomaly in art
education. Garoian dared to state the politicization of art, and (as Sanders has
reiterated) forward performance, which ”is” an ephemeral art, always suffers
from impermanence. Representation always becomes an issue, which Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty first began to problematize with his site/nonsite dialectic already in the
mid-60s. John Howell White (2006) reviewed his work for this special edition of
studies. Garoian (1999) maintains that “students learn the curriculum of academic
culture from the perspective of their personal memories and cultural histories.
[…] performance art represents the praxis of postmodern theories in art education”
(1, 113, added emphasis). Performance most “fully utilizes embodiment, placing
artists and viewers on the line corporeally, psychologically, and socially, provides
the fullest range of resistance sites for education to take place” (114). Sanders could
not agree more.
Garoian hangs his hat on constructivism …fair to say of the social kind, as “a
form of intervention” (115). Performance art and its education “rests on a critical
engagement with personal experience providing sites of resistance to consumer and
mainstream culture” (115). Spectacle, dialogue and civil engagement are three of
its major expressions as are the body, liminality and criticality its three conceptual
sites. It asks that students and teachers engage in critical negotiations informed by
“linguistic, political, technological, ecstatic, and ethnographic dimensions of our
lives” (116). It is a very “noisy” endeavor aboard Sullivan’s Borg ship, always
wanting to be heard and rattling the structural foundations. Garoian even explores
his own self-identity as an artist and offers a way of constructing a performance art
pedagogy. From our perspective, how can we possibly betray this line of flight?
Only by maintaining it is not radical enough.
Barbara Bickel (2006), one of the a/r/tography’s graduates and enthusiastic
practitioners, offers an equally enthusiastic review of Rita Irwin and Alex de Cosson
book, A/r/tography: Rendering Self Through Arts-Based Living Inquiry, the “early”
statement of this approach published by a small press in Vancouver. Its distribution
has grown as the “movement” around the approach spreads through UBC grads.
The website statement by Rita Irwin is broad enough, generalizable enough, and
encompassing enough to call anything in its grasp—arts-based research—another
Borg ship ready to do its signifying duty. Bickel begins by highlighting Bill Pinar’s
(a major curriculum player) support for the project in the foreword, along with key
curriculum theorists (Green, Huebner, Eisner, Grumet, Aoki) whom she sees as part
of its legitimating genealogy of “understanding curriculum as an aesthetic text”
(118). With such a prestigious list, should any one dare to speak against or find fault
with this direction? Aoki’s “in-between” space is evoked as well. Irwin’s theoretical
acumen in the introduction is played up (recall: “Beauty in the eye of the beholder.”).
Knowing/doing/making come together in “an aesthetic experience found in an
elegance of flows between intellect, feeling, practice” (p. 28, 118). Between Sullivan
and Irwin there seems to be this “multilectical” fixation on threes. This methodology
appears to harness “perceptual practices that reveal what was once hidden, creat[ing]
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what has never been known, and imagin[ing] what [they] hope to achieve” (36, 118).
From this one gathers that this method “reveals” what is “hidden.” Hence, the Derrida
quote from the Studies essay seems to fit when she refers to the “as yet unnamable
which begins to proclaim itself” (293, 85). The quibble is that this (in-depth)
hermeneutic exercise in 2004 has now migrated as an “emergent” (post)structuralist
tenet in 2006. The hermeneutic enterprise that stresses “action research” and
“autoethnography” raises a different foundation from the team’s (post)structuralism
of the SSHRC grant, although the six elements remain in place (like the points of
Sullivan’s equilateral triangles). The “graphy” part of the method confirms that
writing is given equal weight to the creation of “art” in keeping with contemporary
capitalist society where postmodernity has made this a mainstay. Significantly, the
theory of a/r/tography is articulated as being the reorganization of experience (art),
the enhancement of meaning (research) and (teaching) the “performative knowing
in meaningful relationships with learners” (21, 119). The presupposition is made
that all three can coalesce together in some sort of harmony—for example, the
artist researcher who teaches, or the teacher who artistically researches. It appears
to be a question of emphasis—those “habits” of mind that we have been reading,
or simply a question of “attitude,” or perception. The contradictions between these
subjectivities are not at issue—for instance the longstanding debate “am I first an
artist then a teacher, or visa versa?” “When do I put on the hat of a researcher?” “Do
I then shadow the other two?” The autoethnographies turn out to be existential self-
reflexions on such questions. (Allegiance is given to Pinar & Grumet’s 1976 concept
of currere (121), which is given a revival by someone in the field and reworked, it
seems every decade). In part One where the emphasis is on the Self (Explorations of
Self: Fragments and Meanings) ends up conflicted. One narrative serves as spiritual
practice, another forwards “always being an artist,” while the third foregrounds the
teacher/teaching role. In part two, where the emphasis is placed on teaching (Self
Process: Learning and Praxis) it seems which role one takes isn’t that crucial, one
can even “shuffle them like a deck of cards.” Or, one can take a risk and wear a
different hat (of the three) than the one, one is used to.
Part of the difficulty is that the self as ego continually deludes itself. It misrepresents
itself continually. One is never sure what is the independent check by the Other in
these existential experiments of hat wearing. It consequently often sounds solipsistic
and self-serving. There are many forms of autoethnographies. If one were to read the
early autoethnography of Valerie Walkerdine (1985), as developed back in 1980s, it
would be possible to see how her unconscious is being interrogated by questioning
her imaginary with a certain form of memory work. This is the missing dimension
of the unconscious Real in a/r/tography. One representative in the book is said to
“integrate the coherent whole of her self that Irwin [and not the Greek philosophers!]
calls ‘theoria, praxis, and poesis’ “(28, 121). Becoming is confined to the imaginary
level. Aoki has either been misunderstood, or he did not push becoming far enough.
Secondly, the transferences by the Other (students, colleagues, other researchers)
are never raised, which would determine the contextual symbolic role that position
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an a/r/tographer as either teacher, artist, or researcher. Who is doing the conferring?

How is the “subject-who-is-supposed-to-know emerging”? And, is that subject
conferred as a teacher, an artist, a researcher, for not only is the context important,
but the determination of symbolic discursive space becomes crucial. As it stands,
these are merely Imaginary roles, not symbolic ones. One may “think” one is an
artist, but that legitimation of desire comes from the Other, not the self. Ditto for
all these roles. One is not a researcher until one is conferred so, symbolically. This
Other that confers is not simply a cadre of art researchers who get together amongst
themselves in a feel-good way and go about “drawing” out the artistic self. Such
gestures are empty. Unfortunately, it is an institution that represents this big Other
which confirms a symbolic role. How many art teachers have had to “prove” that
they are “artists” through their portfolio work to be conferred this status? This has
been a continuous battle, but it works the other way around as well. How many
artists are not considered teachers? If one plays the piano badly, should they be
conferred a musician—a pianist? Once a PhD is conferred the freshly minted
confirmation is only a driver’s license. He or she is “still” not a professor until he or
she has been hired, started teaching, researching and so on. Otherwise, it’s possible
to spend the rest of the time driving a taxi with the paper in your pocket as an
Imaginary professor. Do you then say: I have two roles taxi-professor? You can, but
it’s empty. Part Three (History and the Self: Temporal Spaces) raises more questions:
“To absorb the viewer into the eternal present” (120) seems an odd turn of phrase
because of its impossibility, or its metaphorical imaginary. I can imagine that an
“eternal present” exists today when history is evacuated, when space/time become
instantaneous as theorized by Virilio’s thesis on speed in postmodernity. Hence, the
intertwining of personal history seems at odds with the “eternal present.” Be as it
may, it is unclear how the other two represented members opening up “history for
the self to enter” do so other than artists (rather than teacher or researcher … or both/
and). The closing paragraph is a heroic statement, a testament to these “nomads
of the academy” (120). Bickel ends by giving her own genealogical send-off by
claiming that Kenneth Beittel was the first nomad, before these nomads so to speak,
who integrated the artist/researcher/teacher practice as mind/body/spirit/emotions.
They have merely picked up his haunt. This is certainly not the nomadology of
Deleuze|Guattari.
Commentary
Upon reading the opening page we wonder in what way our betrayal rehearses what
the field detests or defends itself against: ”charges of flagrant narcissism, fears of
questionable artistic quality, and accusations of invalidity and irresponsibility” (123).
What field can escape these charges? Anthropology is full of charlatans; positive
research data has been forged, doctored up, skewed over the years; medical research
skewed by pharmaceuticals; tobacco companies hired their own research labs to
counter-spin evidence, and so on. Arts-based educational research is no exception.
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We are probably being treated to the best the field has to offer in the journal. Should
we be complaining!
The two assistant professors, Kathleen Keys and Annina Suominen (2006)
provide the reader with their personal struggles to do ABER-like dissertations. They
do not go into detail what these were, aside that some involved poetry and visuals,
however, they speak of the warnings by professors as to the difficulties that surround
being artist educators where the emphasis is clearly more on the former, which is
of concern than the latter in terms of identity bearing signifiers. Both speak of the
harsh treatment received along their journey, either at presentations or during job
interviews. Both have found positions and both maintain that they are engaged in
some forms of ABER. Both can take solace in the claim that often the new is crude
and poorly developed and conceived, but worth the risk. In this sense both believe
that ABER provides a way for “individual thinking, critical pedagogy and human
rights” (127). One might end this part of the review off by maintaining that Eisner’s
political realism has been realized as there is an “evolution of a reflexive network
of communication regarding” (127) ABER methodologies. As any emergent field,
these are the players who are vying to hegemonize the field. Currently, it exits as a
hodgepodge.
NOTES
1
A descriptive account of various approaches to arts-based research has been compiled by Rollings
(2010) who specifically refers to this special issue.
2
The chapter that follows takes a closer look at a/r/tography, which has flourished as a research
methodology for ABER.
3
The renewal of interpreting beauty and sublimity that push beyond the Kantian development have
been taken up by a number of scholars that have rethought these conceptualizations by drawing on
Alfred Whitehead. Shavio (2009), Massumi (2011) and Stengers and Chase (2011) are the exemplars
here.
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QUESTIONING THE RADICAL EDGE: ABER’S

MIRROR GAMES
Praxis and Poeisis
It is not hyperbole to suggest that the contemporary character of arts-based research

shares a common fidelity regarding the hybridic conflation of praxis and poiesis.
While commonplace in much arts-based research, this knotting constitutes a recent and
largely unexamined historical development, obfuscating a radical aporia persisting
at the ‘heart’ of the arts-based project. Poised to challenge the preoccupation of arts-
based research with practices of self-exploration and self-rendering, the difference
between praxis and poiesis might relaunch the way in which arts-based researchers
have conceptualized the function of creativity itself. Returning to the difference
between praxis from poiesis will hence provide us a vantage on an internal limit
persisting in arts-based research. Concomitantly, the differentiation of praxis from
poiesis will support the operationalization of an approach to art that productively
fails to become equal to either the will of the artist or the metaphysics of life and
creativity that continue to found much contemporary arts-based research.
In its Greek conceptualization, praxis (prattein) refers to the act of “doing”, or
rather, the expressive power of the will. In clear distinction, poiesis (poiein) refers
to “pro-duction”, hence intimating the passage of something from concealment into
being (Agamben, 1999a). In distinction to man’s doing (praxis), poiesis refers to
the unveiling of truth connected to neither practical consideration or willing intent.
Herein, poeisis is classically linked to a very different conceptualization of pro-
duction. Specifically, beyond reference to a thing coming to being, poiesis might
more adequately be thought as a becoming that dilates what is upon the virtual
field of what might be. Perhaps this difference in pro-duction might be appended
in the work of Oliver Messiaen, whose musical compositions are marked by the
affectative alien semiotics of bird songs. Pro-ducing hitherto unthought musical
expressions, Messiaen’s compositional becoming-birdsong not only ushers a
different compositional style into being, it further functions to dilate the ways in
which one might think music. In this manner, poiesis marks the dilation of the world
so that a world might emerge. Put differently, Messiaen becoming-birdsong pro-
duces a singular style of compositional thinking that is not-yet-representational,
since it has no prior image toward which it aspires to correspond. Clearly, Messiaen’s
compositions are not birdsongs, nor are birdsongs the work of Messiaen. Rather, it is
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more adequate to say that birdsong pro-duces certain potentials for thinking rhythm,
vibration, harmony, and refrain in the field of musical composition.
In this brief example however, it is crucial that we not forget the potential danger
of poeitic becomings, the power of which Plato was keenly aware when he banned
poetry from the city. We do not yet know what poeitic pro-duction might do, or
rather, we do not yet know what will become. As Plato affirmed of the power of
poiesis, pro-duction can be dangerous. It is the forgetting of this affirmation that has
come to characterize the contemporary conflation of praxis and poiesis in arts-based
research. Art education has forgotten that knowing, doing, and making were once
distanced by a chasm now reconciled via the rhetorics of hybridity, hyphenation,
and intertextuality.
Praxis is not Poeisis
Before we engage with what such forgetting does in arts-based research, it is

necessary to begin by asking how the kind of pro-duction classically attributed
to poiesis differs from the contemporary conflation of praxis and production. In
this vein, we might more adequately survey the metaphysical preoccupations and
representational limits that persist at the heart of arts-based research, hence curtailing
what might be properly thought in its name. Western metaphysics, Agamben (1999a)
writes, begins with a fundamental rethinking of classical poeisis. What was for the
Greeks an involuntary pro-duction designating an ontological coming-to-being
became, via Christian theological thought, an actus purus: the interpretation of
being as an effect of actuality and action. This, Agamben avers, is the foundation
of the Western metaphysical project. The actus purus of Christianity’s supreme
Being becomes correlative to man’s active doing, “whose worth is appreciated
with respect to the will expressed in it, that is, with respect to its freedom and
creativity” (70).
Under this conceptualization, the pro-ductive space of truth originally attributed
to poiesis becomes collapsed with the concept of praxis as a willing action. In this
collapse, poeisis becomes re-rendered as making, henceforth reterritorializing it
upon the notions of creative activity and vitality with which it was once radically
differentiated. Indistinguishable under the Western metaphysical project, the pro-
ductive force of poiesis as a bringing-into-being becomes conflated with praxis as
the creative impetus of mankind. What becomes lost in this metaphysical shift is
the very notion of pro-duction as the non-representational opening of what is in a
manner unequal to the creative impulse or willing action of the artist. As Agamben
develops, Western aesthetics commences with this forgetting insofar as aesthetics
becomes possible only once art absents pro-duction in lieu of praxis. Furthermore,
it is in the metaphysical tradition of actus purus that art as the expression of creative
vitality and artistic will is convened. It is in this metaphysical tradition that the
contemporary ground of much arts-based research conflates praxis with life, or
rather, upholds the creative impetus and vital will of the artist as the foundation of
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QUESTIONING THE RADICAL EDGE: ABER’S MIRROR GAMES
artistic inquiry. This is to forget the classical understanding of poiesis as a passive

pro-duction without content (Agamben, 1999b).
Augaries of the Actus Purus
The metaphysical founding of art in the actus purus of praxis has led to the
emergence of particular forms of arts-based theorizing. Perhaps the most prevalent
of these persists in the upsurge of self-ethnographic and self-exploratory arts-
research linking the artist’s doing (praxis) to their personal vitality or creative will.
As we see in the work of many researchers laboring under the banner of a/r/tographic
inquiry for example, praxis has become inseparable from the metaphysics of actus
purus, wherein the will of the artist-researcher to explore the intimate details of
their emotionality and pathology is knotted to their creative vitality and often, to the
spirit of life in general (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). Put differently, the a/r/tographic
approach implicitly tethers the life of the artist to their creative doing, self-fashioning
action, and self-reflective reportage. While many arts-based researchers have been
quick to laud this emerging area of inquiry as a beachhead against the impoverished
episteme of the academy, there has concomitantly been a generalized avoidance
pertaining to the analysis of why such modes of performative self-ethnography, self-
rendering, and artistic self-study have been embraced with such enthusiasm. More
specifically, while arts-based research has proliferated its modes of praxis, these
modes do not yet address the particular symptom that their praxis implicitly enjoys.
Ostensibly, one such symptom extends from the modern reterritorialization
of poiesis onto praxis. With the modern founding of the metaphysics of will, art
becomes the corollary of the artist’s creative action. Such action in turn serves as
confirmation of the artist’s vitality and creative impetus, hence mirroring a modern
metaphysical commitment equating the vitality of life to doing. However, insofar
as the function of art is tethered to the creative will of the artist, arts-based research
becomes caught in an implicit impasse. As Agamben avers, in the absence of pro-
duction, the creative will of the artist circulates in a loop of self-desire. Involuntary
[unwillkurlich] pro-duction is made willful [willkurlich], or rather, is meaningfully
mobilized in the image of the artist’s creative impulse. It is in this way that such arts-
based approaches as a/r/tography share a particular affinity with the hermeneutics
of meaning making, pattern recognition, and representation (de Cosson, 2004).
In a classical sense however, this orientation has yet to think in terms of a non-
representational pro-duction. Reinforcing a style of praxis in which the artist’s
vitalism becomes produced via their doing, contemporary aesthetics marries the
formation of the world [Bildung] with human activity. And so it is with a particular
form of self-study in which the artist seeks to everywhere impart his story, to reshape
the world in her image, or transform the world via their vital willing. Yet, while arts-
based research posits itself as a transformational praxis, such praxis “brings only
itself into presence” (Agamben, 1999a, 76). That is, the praxis of self-rendering
serves to continually bring the creative will of the artist into light.
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Caught in the cul-de-sac of self-willing, the artist reterritorializes the world in

the image of their egoic activities. Ostensibly, this symptomology fails to affront the
moribund epistemologies or methods impelled by the academy, falling into fidelity
with both the metaphysics of will and a privileged philosophy of life defined as
praxis. The claim that a/r/tography marks a break from the foundations of modernity
is hence only a partial truth. Specifically, in order to carry out its projects of self-
study, self-rendering, and subjective transformation, a/r/tography appears to rely
upon an unabashedly modern metaphysics. It might be ventured that this is, in part,
the logos of its project. In the legacy of Kant, the human subject comes to usurp
God’s place on the transcendent plane. Philosophy is henceforth oriented to the
attribution of creation to a pure subjectivity rather than a transcendent God (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1994). “Kant discovers the modern way of saving transcendence: this
is no longer the transcendence of a Something, or of a One higher than everything
(contemplation), but that of a subject to which the field of immanence is only
attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself
(reflection)” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994, 46).
The Threat of the Impersonal
If vital activity has indeed become knotted to our contemporary thinking on the
quality of existence, it is hence not surprising to observe that arts-based research
has embraced an aesthetics of incompletion. If willing action produces the means
whereby the artist is produced as a vital, living being, then the sublimation or
absence of will constitutes a problematic. We need look no further than to popular
conceptualizations of the zombie to grasp the denigrated status of the unwilling,
unthinking thing (Wallin, 2012). To willingly act is to live. Where movement is
central to the contemporary philosophy of life, standing still is tantamount to death.
It is in this vein that the interminability associated with much contemporary arts-
based research might be understood in relation to the metaphysics of will. That is,
while the notion of interminability has been linked to the post-structural refutation of
stable subjectivities and teleology (Irwin, et al., 2006), interminability concomitantly
functions as the positive condition for the persistence of the artist as both creator
and object of creation. In other words, the artist as a vital being becomes possible
only once (s)he is situated in relation to an interminable praxis through which
artistic vitality might be continually affirmed. In the particular confessional mode
of a/r/tography, for example, the arts-based researcher draws upon various modes
of self-disclosure implicitly oriented to the question of whether one is alive or dead.
Emerging in numerous narratives (see, for example, Porter, 2004; Lymburner, 2004)
oriented to the threat of personal entropy, this implicit question might be understood
as a positive response to the metaphysics of will, in fidelity to which the arts-
based researcher continuously surveys, archives, and maps their personal narrative.
Preoccupation with the vitality of artist might be seen as a response to the threat of
the impersonal [unwillkurlich]. This threat is, in turn, continually warded off through
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a/r/tography’s focus on interminable semiosis. As we observe, a common trait in the

definition of a/r/tography pertains to its interminable production of meaning (Irwin,
2003, 2004; Springgay et al., 2005).
Reterritorializing the Image of the World on the Praxis of the Subject
In the specter of Marx, Agamben (1999a) writes, the philosophy of life becomes
firmly situated in doing. In this vein, a/r/tography’s conceptualization of the artist/
researcher/ teacher might be thought in a manner different than its positive rendering
as a complex, hybrid, or borderland subjectivity (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). That
is, in the image of vitality particular to the contemporary philosophy of life, the
a/r/tographer becomes a subject ostensibly capable of everything. That is, the a/r/
tographer becomes not only an interminable subjectivity, but further, a subjectivity
availed of interminable means for praxis. While such a conceptualization accords
with the image of multiple subjectivities promulgated in post-structuralism, it also
reterritorializes on an image in which the complex subject continues to be founded
as an epicenter of action. Put differently, where the vitality of the artist is tethered to
her/his creative impulse, the life of the self-fashioning subject becomes the primary
orientation of arts-research. As its opening gambit for example, a/r/tography poses
the question of who the artist, researcher, or educator might be (Irwin, et al., 2006). It
is in this way that many of its practitioners continue to labor under the shelter of the
vital subject as a unifying concept. Averting the threat of mortality, the a/r/tographic
subject is continually reconstituted within its vital complex of relations. That is, the
a/r/tographic subject becomes mirrored in its world – a world that while complicated
is never indifferent or asignifying. Although the arts-based researcher might very
well be conceptualized as a complex subjectivity, we must continue to ask what such
complexity serves.
Reterritorializing the image of the world upon the praxis of the subject, a/r/
tography bears strange fidelity to the legacy of anthropocentrism in Western thought.
Insofar as it continually recuperates the metaphysics of will at the heart of life, the a/r/
tographic project espouses a profoundly human metaphysics at the heart of nature.
Perhaps this is nowhere as apparent as in the artist’s appropriation of nature as a
metaphor for her struggle, his liberation, or their spiritual vitality. As McNiff (1998)
articulates on the educational import of imagination, the alien becomes relevant
insofar as it yields something valuable to the inquiring subject. This sentiment
marks a fundamental desire upon which the encounter with difference is organized
in arts-based research. In this familiar conceptualization, the alien is reterritorialized
upon a Western image of praxis correspondent to the vitalism of the artist. Herein,
the profound ambivalence of nature becomes enfolded with the desire of the artist,
negating its radical inhumanity and absolute difference (Herzog, 1982). Yet, perhaps
this should not be surprising. Under the Western metaphysics of will, Agamben
writes, mankind becomes the central being [Zentralwesen] mediating between the
transcendent world and nature. The artist becomes, in this historical moment “the
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redeemer of nature toward whom all its archetypes strive” (von Schelling cited in
Agamben, 1999a, 77).
A growing body of arts-based research (Hurren, 1998; Beers, 1999; Pryer, 2004)
has become oriented to an image of nature deeply resonant with the vitalism of
the artist. In this image, nature becomes spiritual, erotic, and sentimental. That is,
nature is seen to inhere the sentiment of the artist, in whose image of the world the
inhuman ostensibly conforms. Further, the relationship between human and nature
is imagined dialectically, negating inhumanity by capturing its difference within the
model of praxis in which it is put to work under the will of the artist. As a corollary
to the legacy of anthropocentrism in Western thought, nature becomes an extended
organ recast via the action of the artist, in whose image and desire nature comes to
resemble. In this act of resemblance, or rather, of representation extensive to the will
of the artist, nature is spiritualized, rendered into a vital medium for the artist’s will.
Bearing uncanny similarity to the metaphysical foundations of anthropocentrism,
the becoming-praxis of nature does not yet encounter the profoundly inhuman or
transhuman twilight of contemporary humanism. In a predominant number of a/r/
tographic inquiries oriented to the spiritual life of the subject, what it means to live
retains profoundly humanist values and aspirations. Today, arts-based researchers
must begin to take seriously those artings that productively fail to reterritorialize in
the privileged image of uncontaminated humanity (see Chapters II and V for further
developments on this idea).
ABER’s Unintended Rhizome
Yet, such latent humanism is not the only clandestine fidelity to which contemporary
arts-based practices ostensibly remain beholden. Specifically, the praxis of the
self-rendering subject in a/r/tographic practice orbits the contemporary emergence
of the neo-liberal designer subject, who practices a similar commitment to the
explorations of novel subject formations. Extending from the post-structural
impulse to multiply subjectivity, the a/r/tographic attempt to think the subject as
an always-multiple borderline vagabond (Pryer, 2004; Springgay, 2004) falls into
an unintended affinity with a mode of being that is increasingly evacuated of
its liberatory force. Today, the forces of market economy do not fear difference.
Rather, insofar as it marks the entropy of flows upon which neo-liberalism is
necessarily parasitical, contemporary market economy fears the cessation of
difference (Deleuze, 2004). While post-structuralism’s complex subject attempts
to stem dogmatic identity formation, it is this complex schizo-identity that has
come to constitute the optimal neo-liberal subject. Perfectly adaptable to the tide of
market forces continually unleashed upon the body, the hyphenated schizo-identity
lauded as the goal of much a/r/tographic praxis is the consummate figure desired
by both market economy and the new politio-economic demands of academe.
As Gregoriou argues (2008), the rhizome “has already been at work in corporate
capitalism, in modulations of control in human resource management, in education’s
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corporative modulations in order to produce graduates with flexible market

skills” (102).
Positioned to absorb and reterritorialize upon the schizo impulses of the market, the
post-structural subject envisioned as the theoretical gambit of a/r/tography effectively
communicates across lines of disciplinarity, craft, and textuality, creating an image
of communication no longer beset by the radical impasse of misunderstanding, non-
communicability, or outright failure. It is such that within the a/r/tographic project,
everything is rendered into a communicative praxis. While the hybrid intertextualities
promulgated in a/r/tography serve as an image key to the composition of its creative
phylum, it is this very image of interminable connectivity and communicability that
is today characterized by the deterritorializing logic of global capitalism (Guattari,
1995). It is in this vein that a/r/tography’s particular lionization of nomadism1 (Pryer,
2004) requires renewed critical attention, since contemporarily, the exertion of bio-
power has become increasingly organized around the ubiquitous movements of the
subject within and between social spaces. That is, while many a/r/tographers have
continued to conceptualize power in terms of its identitarian, epistemological, and
discursive functions of confinement, the contemporary function of power analyzed
by Deleuze (2004a) and Guattari (1995) operates by freeing the subject to circulate
along lines divested of a priori social codification. One such line is of course that
of the designer subject, who is contemporarily freed to enjoy their particular self-
fashioning, taking as their object of labor identity itself. It is not even that this figure
need be made profitable in order to be nascently neo-liberal, but more insidiously,
that it simply be made to accord with the image “proving” the reality principle of
neo-liberal logic in the world. While this shift in the function of power has been
detected in a/r/tographic scholarship (see, for example, Triggs & Irwin, et al.,
2009), the question of interminable subjectivity, subject-object relationality, and
unquestioned commitment to semiosis as a corollary to the historical developments
of neo-liberalism requires further analysis in order to avoid falling back upon the
pseudo-creative appetites of global capitalism. Toward this, we must begin to ask
what weapons a/r/tography is capable of creating for dissimulating the kind of
apolitical nomadism of neo-liberalism?
How Open Can One Be?
It is along the lines of interminable self-fashioning and productive modulation that the
experimental potential of the a/r/tographer is conceived as a vital being. Significant
to such vitalism is the a/r/tographer’s characterization as an open being. More
specifically, throughout a myriad of a/r/tographic works, the signifier of openness
assumes special status. As it is conceptualized in the a/r/tographic literature, openness
becomes the positive condition upon which both the experimental transformation of
the subject and the composition of complex social assemblages becomes possible
(see, for example, the synoptic work of A. Sinner, 2008). Indeed, in eating, digestion
and defecation for example, the organism itself is always-already an open machine
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with particular dispositions for flow. But this is only in part what a/r/tographic
inquiry dubs openness. As a/r/tography argues, openness is an integral aspect of its
method (Sinner, 2008). More specifically, the artist-teacher-researcher’s disposition
of openness marks a commitment to emergence and generativity in artistic inquiry.
In this way, openness is the possibility of drawing upon artistic approaches germane
to the inquiry and representation of the artist’s study. Yet, insofar as openness marks
a master signifier particular to the a/r/tographic project, it is one that omits the
question of how open one can be?
While a/r/tography is replete with references to borderline conflicts (Irwin, 2004),
ruptures, and abjections (Springgay, 2004), its inquiry seems open to pursuing
such disruptions only insofar as the will of the artist and semiotic productivity
can be maintained. In this way, artistic will once again emerges as a transcendent
commitment in a/r/tography, tethering its horizon to actus purus, or rather, the
vital action of the artist. Put differently, while a/r/tography is marked by claims
of transgressivity and transformation, such claims appear tethered to an occluded
limit, since its practitioners do not seem to risk either the self-annihilation or radical
monstrosity courted in a commitment to absolute openness. Such absolute openness
might be thought as a corollary to Deleuze|Guattari’s (1987) body without organs, or
rather, a non-representational anorgamism undifferentiated from the virtual. To enter
into such openness, as the schizophrenic, the symbiote, or the pack does, is to court
the deterritorialization of the artistic “I”. Against its rhetoric of transgressivity, the
question must be posed as to where a/r/tography begins to risk becomings that are
radically extensive, pushing the artist to deterritorialize along techno-teratological,
impersonal interventionist, or imperceptible becomings?
Yet, perhaps such a question is moot, since such becomings risk undercutting
the very possibility for self-reflexivity, self-transformation and willing action that
are ostensibly central to the a/r/tographic project. While a/r/tography maintains a
commitment to intensive inquiry, it largely evades extensive symbiosis with the
machinic phylum (as with Stahl Stenslie’s Cyber S&M Project), anomal perform-
ativity (such as the imperfect becoming-grass of Yang Zhichao), or nonhuman
assemblages (such as Theo Jansen’s autonomous art)2. Absenting the dangers of the
empty (marked by complete dis-organization and interminable, non-directed flow)
or cancerous (marked by patterns of repetitive production) body without organs
articulated by Deleuze|Guattari (1987), a/r/tographic openness always works in
the favor of the artist as an active subject. This implicitly favorable theorization
of openness begs another question largely obfuscated in a/r/tographic literature.
Specifically, how does desire function in the artistic willing of a/r/tographer3? Or
put differently, what becomes, in a/r/tographic praxis, the object-cause of desire?
Perhaps this question has already been anticipated however, since the definition of
desire in a/r/tography has been defined. As Springgay, Irwin, and Kind (2005) aver,
the desire of a/r/tography is response itself, or put differently, the ability of the artist
to act. Given this conceptualization of desire, the limits of unsettling are already
evident. That is, what is possible for a/r/tographic inquiry is already caught in the
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representational image of artistic self-willing. At the limit of a/r/tographic inquiry

perseveres the self-defining and self-determining activity of the artist.
This image of artistic desire orbits three presuppositions. In the first, desire
becomes secondary to the image of the active artist. Rather than thinking the subject
as a territory cut from the flow of desire, the subject is organized as desire’s germinal
locus. Following this first presupposition, desire is mobilized as the benign affective
medium of the artistic subject. Herein, desire is dialectically domesticated and
brought into alignment with the artistic praxis it ostensibly serves. Third, in much a/r/
tographic action, desire assumes a benign quality, circulating as a positive signifier
for the artist’s willing. Even with the increasing attempt to strain Deleuze|Guattarian
philosophy for a/r/tographic methodology, the notion of desire assumes a relatively
uncomplicated rendering. While the case has been made that desire is always social
(see Springgay, 2008a), this has yet to grapple with the Deleuze|Guattarian notion
of desire as capable of both paranoid/fascist (tribal and imperial) and schizophrenic
(decoded) formations. Where a/r/tography has lauded the decoding of desire from
under the axioms of pop psychology and institutional governmentality, it largely
evades connecting such decoding to the deterritorializing power of late capitalism.
And while schizophrenic desiring-production presses beyond the reterritorializations
of State capitalism, a/r/tography continues to resituate its inquiry on pathic images
of the family, on the confessional mode, or in the image of borderline transgression
where capitalism already envisions none.
The commitment to praxis lauded throughout the a/r/tographic literature marks
another important conceptualization by which we might better understand the
limits of its project. Specifically, while committed to openness, interminability,
and transformation, a primary impulse of a/r/tography might be detected in its
will-to-representation. Extending from its theoretical fidelity to hermeneutics, the
question a/r/tography mobilizes for the artistic encounter asks: “What does this
meaning?” Drawing from the interpretive traditions, a/r/tographic praxis becomes a
corollary of meaning making insofar as it focuses on both the artistic and graphical
communication of the artistic event. This impulse is explicitly articulated in the
early a/r/tography literature (see Irwin & de Cosson, 2004), wherein a/r/tographic
practice is brought to fulminate upon the task of making phenomenon communicate.
In later articulations (see Irwin, 2008), the representation of artistic phenomenon
is situated upon the multiple subject positions of the artist-teacher-researcher her/
himself. Amidst this complexity however, the commitment to meaning-making is
maintained as a central feature of its living inquiry. For example, the commitment to
representational meaning making is maintained via the focus on self-reflexivity that
serves as an organizing signifier in a/r/tography. That is, reflexivity requires first a
representational image toward which to orient itself. In the case of self-reflexivity
for example, some semblance of a representational self must first be apprehended in
order that self-transformation be rendered detectable.
The edict of transformation over time articulated in a/r/tographic research hence
performs a particular fidelity to representation correlative to what Deleuze (1986) has
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dubbed the movement-image, or rather, the dialectical activity of self-remembrance

and the synthesis of memory. While more recent disseminations in a/r/tography
have attempted to draw upon Deleuze|Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome as
an anti-model for thinking an ethics of relationality (see, for example, Irwin, 2008;
Springgay, 2008b; Irwin et al., 2006), the artistic creations and exemplars deployed
in a/r/tography continue to carry a representational impulse. While framed in vogue
theoretical terminology, such series as Side by Side (see Irwin, et al., 2009) fall
short of their assumed radicalism. More specifically, the photographic juxtapositions
created in Side by Side attempt to articulate time-as-becoming in terms of ‘the time
it takes for change to occur’. Yet, the conceptualization of time explored in Side-
by-Side continues to be the time of the personal, or otherwise, time submitted to the
movement of change. Oriented in this way, Side-by-Side does not yet encounter the
irrational cut or impersonal time of the Deleuzian time-image that is the implicit
touchstone of the work’s theoretical rationale (Irwin, et al., 2009). Put differently,
the conceptualization of time in Side by Side continues to labor under the dialectical
movement of personal and social memory by which time is measured. Remaining in
step with the representational metaphysics of modernism, time is reduced to the time
it takes for change to occur. This is not yet to encounter a time that is radically out
of joint with the genealogical and memorial markers of our time.
Graphical Spasms of Modernity
Emerging in the early a/r/tographic literature, there has been a sustained focus on
the interweaving of image and text (Irwin, 2004; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). Indeed,
the a/r/tographic signifier is itself marked by the commitment to writing (graphy) in
its effort to instantiate a style of language adequate to its project of living-inquiry.
Particular to this style of language is an emphasis on metaphor (Irwin, 2004; Irwin
& Springgay, 2008), the function of which has been linked up to the contiguous
subject-positions occupied by the a/r/tographer. In Irwin (2004) for example, the
bilingualism of metissage is deployed as a metaphor for the in-between enunciative
space assumed by the artist-teacher-researcher. Elsewhere, a/r/tography’s focus on
metaphor has been associated to the instantiation of alternate realities, the emergence
of productive ambiguity, and the conceptualization of a/r/tography’s hybridic third
space (Barone, 2001; Lymburner, 2004; Wilson, 2004). For a/r/tographers, metaphor
constitutes the language of border-dwellers, or rather, those complex subjectivities
that continually communicate across semiotic codes. Intertwined with a/r/tography’s
emphasis on metaphor is its focus on metonymy as a tactic for collapsing the subject/
object binary (see Irwin and Springgay, 2008). In turn, the use of metaphor and
metonymy are articulated as a “natural” orientation to the task of writing living-
inquiry (see Irwin and Springgay, 2008). Following, it might be posed that the
privileged functions of metaphor and metonymy within a/r/tographic praxis are
entwined to their ability to open possibilities for meaning-making and existential
struggle.
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While metaphor and metonymy constitute important strategies for the production
of enunciative novelty, the question of what difference such strategies are able to
promulgate remains to be adequately surveyed in a/r/tographic research. While a/r/
tography begins with the assumption that metaphor and metonymy constitute radical
strategies for meaning making, its practitioners have generally evaded an inquiry
into the structure and function of language itself. Such a task is relevant insofar as
language constitutes the primary form of representation advanced in a/r/tographic
publication. Further, it is via an understanding of the function of language as it is
theorized and deployed in a/r/tography that we might better detect the limits of its
project for opening new potentials of thought. Toward this, it is crucial that we take
seriously the caveat advanced by Deleuze|Guattari (1987) on the inadequacy of
metaphor and metonymy for understanding the expressive potential of language.
“The importance that some have accorded to metaphor and metonymy proves
disastrous for the study of language…metaphors and metonymies are merely effects”
(85). In Deleuze|Guattarian terms, what is primary to the study of language is not
to be found in the effort to communicate, or otherwise, to transfer meaning across
coded semiotic terrain. More to the point, Deleuze|Guattari (1983, 1987) refute the
use of metaphor insofar as it functions to transfer sense from primary to secondary
forms of signification. Not only does this conceptualization function to produce
hierarchies within the semiotic field, it clearly frames language as a tool already wed
to a logic of representation. While metaphor might very well aspire to complexity, it
continues to work as a function of ‘imperialism’, uniting differences into contiguous
“meta” formations. At the zenith of these meta formations is a/r/tography itself, born
as it is from the relatively undetectable transfer of theoretical, philosophical, and
educational images upon itself. In this manner, a/r/tography might be thought as a
“meta-metaphor” insofar as it reterritorializes the variated codes of postmodernity,
complexity theory, neo-spiritualism, wisdom traditions, and art education upon
its name. However, this metaphorical strategy neatly obfuscates the way in which
language is transported. As readers of a/r/tography, we often find ourselves arriving
after the transport of meaning is already complete. However, this observation has
yet to detect the representational commitments to which the language of a/r/tography
remains beholden.
Manifestation
Particular to its style of living-inquiry, a/r/tographers have relied upon a form of

representation that Deleuze dubs manifestation, or rather “the relation of the
proposition to the person who speaks and expresses himself” (13). Put differently,
the logic of manifestation reflectively cathects the enunciation to an originating
source. In this reflective turn, the proposition falls back upon its supposed origin
of emanation. The problematic herein is twofold, for if the manifest enunciation is
reflexively tethered to the “I” as its locus, we are presented with the image of an
ontologically primitive subject.4 The problem herein extends from the manner in
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which the conceptualization of the “I” as ontologically primitive synthesizes the

manifold forces of time and space from which the “I think” is extracted. The issue
of such synthesis extends from its assumption that the “I” is first, and not itself an
abstraction from a diversity of temporal and spatial differences from which a very
different image of life might emerge. This is to say that the language of a/r/tography
inheres an internal limit that reduces what might be properly thought. While the
a/r/tographic subject is articulated as a multiplicity (see de Cosson, 2004), it is a
multiplicity that remains overwhelmingly cathected to who speaks. This is to avoid
an impersonal encounter with what speaks, or rather, the ways in which language
forms a symbiotic contact point with the body. As Deleuze (1990b) argues, language
does not begin with the ideal of communication or symmetry assumed by metaphor.
Nor does it begin with an image of a manifestor who functions as a ground for
enunciation. Rather, language subtends an impersonal force that might otherwise be
dubbed its event-character.
Language does not describe the world, it does things to it. Further, language does
not emanate from a manifestor, but flows through it, attaches up with it, and forms
patterns upon it. While this nuance has been detected in the scholarship (see, for
example Sinner, 2008), it cannot be overlooked that a/r/tographic research continues
to privilege the position of a primary manifestor (the ubiquitous a/r/tographic “I”).
Further, while metaphor functions as a strategy of complication within the semiotic
field, this has yet to think the contact point or event-horizon that is neither self-
reflective or the reterritorialization of the body upon the semiotic register. As it
has yet to be fully detected in a/r/tography, language is not simply metaphoric or
metonymic. Rather, we might begin to think language metamorphically insofar as
it alters the performative potentials, expressive resources, or affects through which
a subject might become-indiscernible (Deleuze|Guattari, 1987). Language does not
function solely as a form of communication across semiotic registers, but produces
an asignifying excess (event) irreducible to the semiotic codes of either words or
images, what we have called the virtual Real. Of particular concern here is the way
in which the “I think” already limits a swarm of potential ways in which a life might
divide, intensify, and organize. In this dismissal, we are left with the impression that
there is but one life and that it is a distinctly human (egoic) one.5
Mirror Games
It is via the function of manifestion that readers of a/r/tography might begin to detect
a desire to preserve a representational fidelity. Despite the admonition of personal
interpretation and openness that pervades the a/r/tographic ideal, the pathos of
the reader is frequently captured by the logos of the a/r/tographer’s enunciations.
The desire of the reader is impelled into correspondence with the claims of the a/r/
tographer, who often assumes the position of thinking on our behalf – an act that is, of
course, deeply incommensurate with the definition of a/r/tography advanced within
the scholarship. Notwithstanding, readers of a/r/tography are frequently oriented to
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the a priori image of what a/r/tography is and does (See for example, the synoptic
statements on a/r/tography in Irwin and de Cosson, 2004; Irwin, et al., 2006; Sinner,
2008; Irwin, et al., 2008). A/r/tography, we learn, is a process of making the multiple,
of radical transformation, conflict, and rupture. It is often in representational
correspondence to these signifying terms that the work of individual a/r/tographers is
auto-articulated (See, for example, May, 2005). Extending this correspondence, the
desire of the reader is recurrently inscribed under the logos of the a/r/tographer, who
makes manifest the function of their artwork as the representational mirror of a/r/
tographic principles themselves. Hence, the art of a/r/tography already demonstrates
forms of rupture, disruption, and complexity – falling into perfect correspondence
with the overarching leitmotifs of a/r/tography itself.
While there is nothing inherently erroneous about this strategy of establishing the
‘reality’ of the (a/r/tographic) signifier, it is remarkable for several reasons. First,
this strategy of correspondence preserves the impression of a relatively stable truth
inhering a/r/tographic practice itself. This is not the kind of universal truth against
which a/r/tography is vehemently organized, but rather, truth surmised by the logic
of representation (a=a). Simply, a/r/tographic praxis routinely functions in a manner
equal to the image synoptically ascribed to a/r/tography “itself.” Thinking on our
behalf, this strategy suggests to the reader that principles of a/r/tography constitute
an underlying truth across a diversity of artistic production and the unfoldment of art
history itself. This strategy is, or course, not uncommon, and we remark on it only
insofar as it promulgates the kind of representational correspondence against which
a/r/tography is ostensibly oriented. Second, no matter the kinds of conservatism,
representational fidelity, aggrandizement, or internal conflicts a reader might detect
within a/r/tographic praxis, such sensations (senses) are frequently reterritorialized
under an image of radicalism and transgression interpreted in advance of the
connections, concepts, and artings that a/r/tographers create. Not only does this
tactic implicitly organize the desire of the reader, it wards against critique. While
hardly generalizable to the full range of a/r/tographic inquiry, this third instance
of representational correspondence in a/r/tography appears in a number of works
wherein the a/r/tographer informs the reader as to the way in which she/he should
understand the function of a particular artwork. This is already to skirt the importance
a/r/tography ascribes to relationality. Extending the logic of manifestation, the
pathos of the reader is reterritorialized in the logos of the artist-teacher-researcher.
Undoubtedly, the seductive rhetorical strategies employed in a/r/tography help to
fulminate this reterritorialization. Fourth, it is under the aforementioned functions of
representation in a/r/tography that art might more adequately be dubbed art. That is,
where the production of art is already overcoded by the judgment of the researcher, or
alternatively, where the signifier of the artistic work and the signified of its meaning
leap over the abyss of non-representation and asignification, art might better be
articulated via the formula art . In other words, where art is already rendered into a
signifier for self-reflection, social meaning, or critical judgment, it is not-yet an art
capable of being divorced from its modernist entwinement with non-art. Aesthetics
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“confronts us with the embarrassing paradox of an instrument that is indispensible to

us in knowing the work of art” Agamben (1999a) writes, “but also at the same time
points us toward something other than art and represent art’s reality to us as pure
and simple nothingness” (43). Modern aesthetics commences upon a form of anti-
production that locates the supreme significance of art elsewhere. Hence, we must
raise the question of whether arts-based autobiography, art-as-writing, or art as a
vehicle for meaning is not, in fact, art. This is not simply a question for a/r/tography’s
foundational knotting of art with non-art (research, pedagogy, writing, art-as-nature),
but for all arts-based research that begins by making non-art the content of art. Where
today might we begin to detect a different way of thinking about art when it is already
caught in mode of modern aesthetics that begins with the forgetting of art? It is in
redressing this question that art might be detached from representation via poeisis.
As Deleuze|Guattari (1994) suggest, art does not represent, but rather, functions to
pro-duce sensations unequal to the representational sensation of some thing. Art is
not simply object to be read, but a force of becoming that flees territories of use and
reference. The poeitic quality of art is autonomous from the artist, the teacher, or
researcher. It is, as Deleuze|Guattari (1994) suggest, monumental. Art stands alone.
This is to begin thinking art as neither imitative or resemblant, but rather, as a force
of becoming that palpates new worlds of sensation and perception.
Dialectics
It is at this juncture that we might posit one final representational commitment

inhering the a/r/tographic project. While a/r/tographers conceptualize their task as
that of making a rhizome, numerous deployments in a/r/tographic inquiry bear closer
fidelity to the anti-rhizomatic logic of dialectical thought (see Irwin, 2008; Gouzouasis
& LaMonde, 2005). The distinction is critical, for while the Deleuze|Guattarian
rhizome functions as an asignifying weapon, dialectics aspires to the inversion of
contradiction at higher levels of signifying synthesis. Against the mixed semiotics
composed in rhizomatic assemblage (the minimally striated organization of the
Internet being one example), the synthesis of thesis and antithesis within a more
potent contraction can function only via opposition. That is, if any kind of becoming
can be attributed to dialectics, it is one born of the negation of difference in the will-
to-representation (Roy, 2004). In much a/r/tographic literature, dialectical thought
has been used to conceptualize the in/between space of artist-teacher-researcher. In
this deployment, a/r/tography practices a weak hybridity that synthesizes heterodox
components into minimally differentiated, contiguous subjectivities (See Irwin &
Springgay, 2008). In other words, difference is reduced to difference by degree
from some prior image of being (artist/teacher/researcher). What this particular
conceptualization of hybridity fails to apprehend is the already hybrid character of
artists, teachers, and researchers. Asserting the necessity of forging a hybridic space
between artist-teacher-researcher (See Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind, 2005), a/r/
tography largely evades the detection of those profound differences inhering their
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germinal resources.6 In a/r/tographic terms, complexity commences by hybridizing

ostensibly monolithic signs. This presumes that hybridity is not ‘fundamental’,
but rather, a secondary and hence reactive movement (see Barone, 2001; Irwin &
Springgay, 2008; Springgay, 2008a,b).
Resistance Reaction
It is in regards to such reactivity that arts-based research must contemporarily

become cautious, insofar as this particular philosophical conceptualization might
suggest the primacy of structure. Drawing from post-structuralism, a major
theoretical deployment in a/r/tography points to the inherently dynamic nature
of reality. The world is in flux. In this alignment however, a/r/tography continues
to compose an inherently structuralist foil against which its project is deployed.
This structuralist presumption not only applies to the presumed primacy of fixed
disciplinary, ontological, and identitarian formations, but further, the assumed
dominance of method, scientism, and repressive powers inhering the educational
project. While there is little doubt that these powers contemporarily circulate in
ways that limit life, the potential error of this conceptualization lays in the way it
assumes resistance as a secondary movement. More specifically, if a/r/tography’s
particular forms of resistance are already deployed against a structural foil (as
method, scientism, repression), then its project is one premised upon a fundamental
reaction, constituting what O’Sullivan (2010a) dubs a melancholic echo chamber
- melancholic because it is continually caught in a mode of implicit reaction,
echoing because its project is continually linked to the illusion of a fundamental foil
around which its praxis orbits. Hence, the question must be raised as to whether a/r/
tography takes as its implicit foil such ostensible cultural certainties as structuralism,
method, and modern science as opposed to understanding these as specific regimes
of production. Perhaps more significantly, it does not appear in the a/r/tographic
literature that these foils are affirmed in terms of either the questions to which they
attend or the profound questions they summon for us contemporarily.
The potential that artists, teachers, and researchers engage in different modes
of production is similarly overcoded via the image of the a/r/tographic subject.
As it is conceptualized, the a/r/tographic subject always-already operates across
multiple, intertextual registers. What is ostensibly overlooked herein is the vast
differences between the production and functions of affects (body-mind states),
percepts (perceptions independent of perceivers), and concepts (constructions for
thought) (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994). In a conceptual bid to frame their project under
the banner of intertextually, a/r/tography treats these varied modes of production as
only minimally differentiated, hence overlooking the difference in kind implicit in
what such differentiated forces can do. It is in a similarly dialectical vein that a/r/
tography commences upon the unquestioned synthesis of praxis, poiesis, and theoria
(see Irwin & Springgay, 2008). What is obscured via the contiguous composition
of affect, percept, and concept is the way such forces are made contiguous in the
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first place. In other words, a/r/tographers must begin to account for their particular
form of colonization by which such diverse forces are ‘folded’ into contiguity. While
lauding heterogeneity, a/r/tography ironically opens by assembling heterodox forces
into equivalency, hence overdetermining the radical qualitative difference existent
in their powers of production. For example, by beginning with the assemblage
of poeisis and praxis, the immanence of pro-duction becomes entwined with the
possible through which it is already limited by its resemblance to the real (Agamben,
1999a). The impersonal becomes cathected to the personal while the autonomy of art
is reduced to the actus purus of the artist. In this case, what becomes overdetermined
is the potential for art to overcome subjectivity and instantiate modes of thinking
beyond the human.
Gift Counter-Gift
The question must hence be raised as to what extent a/r/tography has begun to detect
that which remains irreconcilable in its wedding of praxis, poeisis, and theoria7 –
and further, what excess persists capable of refusing its ostensibly “magical” ability
to render such excess into a positive condition for subjective transformation? More
specifically, while a/r/tography borrows liberally from the naturalistic mystique of
Bataille in its conceptualization of excess as a gift (See Irwin & Springgay, 2008), the
notion of the counter-gift as figured in the reversal of productivity, the rejection of
transformation, and suicidal sacrifice is largely disavowed. In lieu of the counter-gift,
a/r/tography performs a parody of sacrifice in which the artist-teacher-researcher
plays with destruction in order that the self might live again (See, for example,
Wiebe, 2008). Neutralized, sacrifice is rendered into a non-fatal game where death is
already linked to the rebirth of an enlightened subjectivity poised to act again. This
particular conceptualization of sacrifice marks a dialectical commitment to negate
the dangerous forces of the counter-gift.
The conceptualization of the gift within the a/r/tographic literature pertains, in
part, to the nature itself. Throughout its publications, images of treelines, beaches,
mountains, and rugged coastal terrain dominate. This is perhaps not surprising,
given the geopedagogical location (Canada’s West Coast) from which a/r/t/ography
emerges. Yet, it is in this geopedagogical sense that a/r/tography’s integration of a
very particularized social connection to the coastal environment becomes equally
apparent. Particular to the relational aesthetic that has come to frame Canadian
West Coast culture is the semiotic linkage between the environment and discourses
of balance, contemplation, and holism. Steeped in the counter-cultural remnants
of beatnik youth culture and the neo-spiritual values of self-awareness, sexual
expressivity, and consciousness expanding experience, this discursive character of
Canadian West Coast culture marks a relatively underanalyzed inheritance in a/r/
tographic scholarship. While undoubtedly crucial to its forms of artistic production
and metaphorical references, the conflation of holism and nature advanced in some
a/r/tographic scholarship today requires closer investigation (see Irwin et al., 2008;
100
Springgay et al., 2005; Irwin et al., 2006). More specifically, where a/r/tography speaks
of the whole being in relation to its becoming, an ontological error begins to emerge.
Holism Molecularity
The very notion of a whole being already presumes an image toward which becoming
aspires. As we learn, wholeness presumes an aesthetic, spiritual, cognitive, emotional,
and physical being. Undoubtedly, a/r/tography’s deployment of the holistic being
functions as a strategy to ward against modern education’s image of the atomistic
individual. Yet, the question remains as to what a/r/tography excludes from its image of
the holistic being. Is the holistic being not also the technological, the preindividual, the
molecular, or some perverse alliance for which the a priori terms of holism no longer
apply? Of course, these modes of being might be thought as subcategories of physicality,
spirituality, or aesthetic life. If this is the case, then a/r/tography has implicitly reached
its limit-point. If not, the focus on holism is inadequate for the conceptualization of a
radical rhizomatic becoming. To speak in terms of holism is concomitantly to deny
forms of existence apart from the totality. Against this conceptualization, becoming can
be thought only in terms of its most minimal capacity for differentiation, or rather,
difference by degree. Perhaps more significantly, a/r/tography presupposes the terms of
ontological individuation available to the body, installing an albeit complex teleological
image toward which development becomes ideally oriented. Such a conceptualization
forms a noteworthy stalemate with a/r/tography’s focus on liberatory forms of becoming
insofar as these becomings might require radically different practices of individuation.
If such radical becomings can indeed be thought within a/r/tographic praxis, then
they necessarily function to disrupt the a/r/tographic commitment to balance (see
Sameshima & Irwin, 2009; Springgay, Irwin and Kind, 2005; May, 2005). Since the
notion of balance must name in advance the terms to be brought into equilibrium, it is
necessarily disrupted by the disequilibriating movement of becoming through which
a thing becomes what it is not. Balance must necessarily be founded on a process of
exclusion insofar as it necessitates articulating what will be brought into balance in the
first place. For example, a/r/tography’s balanced being is one that attends to its physical,
emotional, cognitive, spiritual and aesthetic life. Yet, such balance is requisite upon the
disavowal of those modes of living and forms of life unanticipated by the dialectical
strategy by which the desire for balance might be otherwise known. Fundamentally,
both holism and balance are premised upon an essential negation. As such, arts-
based researchers must question whether these lauded concepts are still adequate for
the instantiation of life not yet anticipated by the a priori conditions of individuation
advanced in a/r/tographic scholarship.
Third Space Under Threat
We must wonder whether the modes of contradiction and negation anticipated by

the implicit commitments to dialectical thinking in a/r/tography are adequate to
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the creation of a radical arts-based theorizing. Insofar as dialectics aspire to a will-

to-representation born of contraction and negation, the production of difference is
under threat. Of course, it is this very threat that forms a central concern in the a/r/
tographic literature insofar as a/r/tography is articulated as a project of rupturing,
opening, and scrambling established meanings (see Irwin et al., 2008). Complicating
such an intent however is the charge that contemporary market capitalism easily
parasites (dialectical) crisis, the operative example being the promulgation of
high-tech neo-liberalism from within the social conflicts of the Fordist/Keyneian/
Welfare State system (Shaviro, 2007). Put simply, crisis and contradiction are not,
in themselves, liberatory. As Deleuze|Guattari (1987) caution, “[n]ever believe that
a smooth space will suffice to save us” (500). While this realization is tangentially
detected in the a/r/tographic literature (see Sinner, 2008; Springgay, 2008a,b), it
remains to be seen how a/r/tographic inquiry will interface with contemporary forms
of capital control that operate by the same rhizomatic logic as a/r/tography itself.
That is, while a/r/tography has sought to conceptualize a liminal in-between oriented
to overcoming dichotomous thought, it is this third space that is contemporarily
under the greatest threat. As a/r/tographers have detected, such a threat is figured
in the desire to territorialize third space as a knowledge-object rather than a matter
for practical composition. Yet, a/r/tographic arts-based researchers must also attend
to the ways in which the kinds of ‘smooth’ or decoded spaces synonymous with
the rhizome have become increasingly appropriated by both State and neoliberal
powers.
Smooth Space Territorialization
While the State has co-opted smooth space as an aspect of its military apparatus,
rendering liminal and ‘borderline’ space into a site of satellite surveillance,
neoliberal market economy has found fidelity with the image of the rhizome as a
means of registering the circulation of goods, people, and information within the
global marketplace (Conley, 2009). If it continues to be maintained as a central
concept to its project, a/r/tography must grapple with the operationalization of the
rhizome in ways that remain deeply oppressive and complicit in the reinsertion
of old ideals under the banner of progressivism. This caveat applies to a/r/
tography’s celebration of rhizomatic deterritorialization,8 against which we advise a
caution. As Deleuze|Guattari (1987) aver, sometimes more stability is what is
required, other times, more flow or escape is required to make an overly rigid
system tremble. The general dismissal of this nuance has lead to the general
misapprehension of the rhizome as the opposite of territorialization, leading to
the production of a dichotomy that would pit rhizomatics against the image of
homogeneity and totality Deleuze|Guattari dub ‘arborescence’. The effect herein
is the production of a new dichotomy that frames rhizomatics as the binary
opposite rather than the potential for difference inhering arboreal or stratified
systems.
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The production of this binary-machine points to several fundamental paradoxes

inhering the a/r/tographic project. Such paradox, of course, is quite possibly an
ineluctable effect of its openness. This said, the relatively nonproblematic fashion
with which a/r/tography draws upon the irreconcilable philosophical modes of
rhizomatics and Hegelian dialectics remains confounding. With some redundancy,9
a/r/tography lauds both the anti-genealogical concept of the rhizome as well as
the historico-interpretive value of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and meditative
practice (see Springgay, et al., 2008). While its productions appear implicitly
oriented to modes of representation, a/r/tography is articulated as rhizomatically
non-representational. It is concomitantly a non-methodological mode of inquiry
and a research methodology that inexplicably draws upon the anti-methodological
notion of the Deleuze|Guattarian rhizome. It is, in the same publication, both non-
interpretive and a passage for interpretive thinking (see Springgay, et al., 2008).
Finally, as readers of a/r/tography, we learn that its project is not a ‘how to’ but are
concomitantly oriented to this anti-method by learning via what it is not (static,
somnambulistic, rationalist, instrumental). The overwhelming problematic to
be raised on this final point stems from the question of a/r/tography’s theoretical
commitments.
A/r/tography’s Empty Signifier
While there is nothing to say that a/r/tography cannot avail itself of conflicting
theoretical tools, it must then confront its potential status as an empty signifier
capable of colonizing and rendering productive all forms of thought. However,
such a conceptualization fails to think a political arts-based research capable of
mobilizing minoritarian perspectives. That is, if a/r/tography is phenomenological,
hermeneutic, post-structural, postmodern, inquiry-based, methodological, dialectical
and rhizomatic, it might already be considered majoritarian – implicitly constituting
a strategic view from everywhere. It is against this very form of colonial conjugation
that the rhizomatic war-machine has historically functioned – figuring today in the
unassimilable cells of al-Queda, the anti-State forces of the Chiapas Zapatistas,
and such counter-aesthetic cells as the Institute for Applied Autonomy, O(rphan)
d(rift>), and corporate sabatours ®™ark. Perhaps the eclecticism of a/r/tography
will remain crucial to the future of arts-based research, but on this point, a/r/tography
must confront the failings of postmodernism to fabulate sustainable regimes of
countersignifying production. More specifically, if a/r/tography is synonymous
with the postmodern eclecticism of the 80’s and 90’s in its validation of continual
production, quotationalism, vertiginous rhizomania, and continually unsettled
movements, its adequacy to this contemporary moment, in which such thought
has become correlative to the demands of neo-liberal pop-culture, must be posed.
More importantly however is the question to what extent a/r/tography is capable of
instantiating a different form of thought when laboring under the discursive legacies
of its varied, conflicting, and sometimes incommensurate theoretical commitments?
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Rethinking the Powers of Production
In this final section, we will attempt to reclaim the classical notion of poiesis in
terms of its broader implications for a/r/tography’s research methodology. As it was
described at the outset of this chapter, the classical (Aristotelian) conceptualization
of poiesis refers to a birthing, or more accurately, a bringing into being. In
contradistinction to an aesthetic praxis of acting however, poeitic becoming does
not bring itself into presence in the work. That is, while praxis functions to bring the
action of the artist into the presence of the artistic act, poeitic pro-duction is not the
result of doing, but “something substantially other (επίθ) than…that [which] has pro-
duced it into presence” (Agamben, 1999a, 73). In its classical formulation, poiesis
is incommensurate with the expression of artistic willing via praxis, interpretation,
or the modern performance of self-study through which art is reterritorialized in the
image of the artist’s vitalism. Such reterritorialization might otherwise be dubbed the
metaphysics of the will.
As it pertains to art, Agamben (1999a) writes, the expression of the artists’ will
is in no way necessary. It is in this manner that poeisis refers to a way of thinking
art that is no longer cathected to either praxis or manifestation. As Agamben argues,
pro-duction refers to the bringing into being of something other than itself. Of course,
this particular approach to thinking art is nothing short of difficult insofar as modern
aesthetics commences within a hermeneutic circle tethering the creative vitality of the
artist to the confirmation of such vitality in the work of art. We continually become
caught by an inability to think beyond the limits of modern metaphysics. Carving out
a passage toward such limits, poiesis refers to the work of art as it appears without an
artist. This is not simply to reiterate the absent authority described by Barthes’ (1977)
death of the author. Rather, it is to think of art in terms of the prepersonal, where the
artistic subject is not yet. There is, in poiesis, only yet a body or, in Deleuze|Guattarian
(1987) terms, a faceless probe-head for surveying potential lines of flight and
connections. In simpler terms, poeisis is not commensurate with the desire to make
meaning, since it marks an opening of the world in which thought and action might be
recommenced differently. It productively fails as a vehicle of representation. In this
sense, the classical notion of poeisis shares fidelity to the Baroque wunderkammer,
Frenhoffer’s wall of paint, or the Speculum Majus. Such works could scarcely be said
to produce meaning or represent the aesthetic participation of an artist. As Agamben
(1999a) asserts, when “medieval man looked at [images of] the goat legged Satyr, the
Sciapodes who moves on one foot, the horse hoofed Hippopode…he had the aesthetic
impression that he was not observing a work of art but rather that he was measuring,
more concretely for him, the borders of his world” (34). Significantly, such images
might be also considered poeitic in terms of the worlds they commence and omens
they portend for a life that has yet to become. To begin to recommence art in this way
is to make an important turn from aesthetics to aisthesis (αισθησις), or rather, from
the ‘work of art’ to the sensation of a world that is not yet territorialized in the image
of the willing and vital artist. It is via aisthetics, Rajchman (2000) writes, that we
104
might begin sensing a world that is not yet our world. Connecting up to the beginning
of this essay, the alien compositions operationalized by Oliver Messiaen might be
an example of aisthetics insofar as they sense a new semiotic regime that might be
dubbed a becoming-birdsong.
Yet, what does it mean to sense in this particular deployment of poeisis, and
further, what is it that sense senses? To begin, we will link up with the challenge
waged in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 & 2 (1986, 1989). Specifically, drawing upon
tendencies in Kafka, Klee, and Godard, Deleuze argues that in contemporary art, the
people are missing. While this challenge has been interpreted in ways that support
the theorization of both the public and inter-subjective “public” formations, this
Deleuzian challenge might more adequately be understood as a critique of art as
communication. As Deleuze (1989) avers, within the contemporary milieu, there
is already too much communication. That is, in the contemporary aspiration to
communicate, desiring-production becomes fettered to the hermeneutic project of
meaning-making, the modern will-to-representation, and the interpretive impetus
to assign recognizable signs to what might otherwise be thought as a singularity.
Such is the case when a multiplicity of lumieres are captured under the sign of The
Enlightenment, or when the multiple powers and styles of territorialization are
dubbed structural. Such a desire might also be detected in phenomenology, which
relies equally upon the arts to disclose the world, coinciding the “flesh of the world”
with the sensual flesh of the body (Olkowski, 1999; Rajchman, 2000, 131).
It is against these edicts of contemporary communication that Deleuze advances
a will-to-art. Yet, this concept must be carefully distinguished from the notion of
praxis. As a prepersonal conceptualization, the will-to-art refers neither to the labor
of the artist or the reflection of the artist’s vital willing. In Deleuzian terms, the
will-to-art does not refer at all. Rather, what Deleuze dubs the will-to-art marks
the emergence of a singularity that requires us to invent ourselves as another
people (Rajchman, 2000). Herein, we might think of Deleuze’s (1989) analysis
of the cinematic time-image10 insofar as it purports a radically different brain than
that advanced in conventional autobiography, dialectical theorizing, or traditional
narrative.11 As Crockett (2005) and Widder (2006) suggest, the time-image senses
the emergence of a people no longer positioned in terms of identity, genealogy, or
unity. In this manner, the time-image marks distinctly political sensation that affirms
a joyful experiment in depersonalization for a-people-yet-to-come. Elsewhere in
Deleuze, it is via Bacon’s effaced12 paintings that an apersonal, non-narratological,
and not-yet-figural making-visible of what cannot yet be seen is sensed. In both the
Deleuzian (1989) time-image and Bacon’s paintings of immanent violence, sense
does not begin with either a magical ‘theology of rupture’ or a platform upon which
the revelation or uncovering of Being might magically transpire (Rajchman, 2000).
Sensation, as Deleuze conceptualizes it, has nothing to do with the enunciation
of a life-world, but rather, what is ‘to come’ (Land, 2006). To sense is not to
apprehend via the eye, ear, mouth, or skin, but to will an event. Herein, the concept
of the event might otherwise be named poeitic insofar as they each refer to the
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coming-to-being of unthought forces. Following, sense might be thought as the

affirmation (yes, yes!) of the future of the future, or rather, as an impersonal singularity
that detaches from life in general. It is alongside the affirmation of pro-duction – of
saying “yes!” to the event that one’s belief in this world might be founded. Yet, to
think in this way necessitates that arts research begin by first scraping away the
clichés that already populate the canvas, the musical score, or the performative space
(Deleuze, 1990a).
Such a challenge requires that we begin to survey the ways in which our approach
to research might function to limit the force of art. That is, where art is already
reflected in the face of the human or posited as a vehicle of rupture, the always
already inhuman force of art is limited by the organization of art as a will-to-
representation, or otherwise, a will-to-counterrepresentational semiosis. Laboring
under the question of meaning, arts researchers fail to address that which is inhuman
in art, hence limiting the consideration of art as a force of composition capable of
linking up non-human species (Eduardo Kac), promulgating non-human durations
(Bio Graffiti), or fabulating a life capable of escaping identitarian thought (Plastique
Fantastique). This is not to mistake praxis for poeisis. Rather, it is to affirm the
inhuman forces of art in order to survey a world that is not yet ours. Put differently,
if arts research begins in the image of self-reflexion, semiotic production, or along
the contours of such ‘magic’ words as interdisciplinarity and holism, the limits of
what it can do are already marked. Ultimately, this will lead to a betrayal of art,
which, in the service of such habits as the clockwork of personal construction, the
production of artistic vitalism and the will-to-representation, will be rerendered
as art. This is one of the most germane problems that face the task of arts-based
research today, necessitating a way of thinking art that does not fall back upon the
vital praxis of the artist. Rather, for arts research to remain politically charged, it
must begin to orient its task to the creation of a probe-head capable of detecting
the poeitic event without reterritorializing it within an a priori image of thought.
Rather, arts research must extract from poeitic pro-duction those unthought
forces capable of thinking a people yet to come, or rather, a people without
image.
Amor Fati
This will not happen by magic, nor will it be brought about through the “magical”
order words of interdisciplinarity, transformation, or rupture replete in the field
today. Rather, as O’Sullivan (2010a) avers, those forces that we have herein
dubbed pro-ductive might be thought in relation to Nietzsche’s notion of the
eternal return. That is, in Nietzschean terms, the concept of the eternal return
suggests the cycling back of the same things over time. Art educators know this
well. In the studio, the same materials and tools continually recur while in the
field of visual studies, increasingly familiar political, economic, and social issues
appear time and again. Yet, the eternal return is not the “same”, but “a thought of
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the absolutely different” (Deleuze, 2006, 46). As Deleuze remarks, “return is the
being of that which becomes” (24). Open to the multiplicity of the future, being
is no longer simply itself, but a differentiating potential for becoming. In other
words, the eternal return is the affirmative and constitutive power of the future.
The challenge of the eternal return lies in the willing affirmation of the future as a
multiplicity. Hence, to affirm the eternal return is to repudiate both the image of
identitarian thought and the will-to-representation. It gives up on the faithful attempt
to represent an already-actualized image of the world. Instead, the eternal return
embraces the power of life to differ in the creation of new passages for thinking
and action. This is to suggest that the task of arts-based research entail warding
against the will-to-representation in lieu of affirming and making perceptible the
absolute difference of the future. This task would involve unleashing art from
the habits of self-reference, readymade semiotic matrices, and vitalist images
of artistic praxis in order that art’s poeitic event character be unleashed into the
social field.
Such a movement might be seen in the case of Red Army Faction (RAF)13, whose
anti-State machinations mobilized graffiti art, collective happenings and street
theater in order to effectuate a break with previous forms of political action and
revolutionary aesthetics (O’Sullivan, 2006). As O’Sullivan documents, the RAF
transpired through a multiplicity of social upheavals pertaining to youth alienation,
State sponsored terrorism in Vietnam, and the so-called peace-time announced
by 1960’s American consumerism (85). Drawing the micropolitical revolutionary
movements occurring across the social milieu of the late 1960’s into what might be
called a minoritarian aesthetics, the RAF assembled a new machinery for collective
and subject formation, composing the figure of an abstract14 urban guerilla or
proletariat revolutionary. Throughout the period during which the RAF was active,
this urban guerrilla would fail to coalesce into a specific image. Indeed, the RAF
was alert to the ease with which the State apparatus might capture and control a
body attributed an image. Ironically, the trials at Stammheim would accomplish
this very form of capture, isolating RAF’s ‘ringleaders’ as a means of rendering
them subject to the law (O’Sullivan, 2010). It is in this way that the guerilla art
forms of living theater (the counter-State art of self-starvation and suicide, for
example), minoritarian sloganism, and fluxus events productively failed to become
personal, historical15, or praxical. Instead, it is more adequate to think of the RAF
as a screen for the impersonal micropolitical forces emerging in the late 1960’s. Put
differently, the minoritarian aesthetics of the RAF were not yet personal, nor was
it an exemplification of personal engagements within a community of belonging.16
That is, the RAF’s engagement with the leaking social flows of the 1960’s was not
subject to representational limitation via the hermeneutic task of meaning-making
communities. Rather, the RAF might more adequately be thought as mobilizing
a probe-head capable of surveying the new forms of collective and subjective
production such social flows might pro-duce. This is to release the event for the
creation of a world that is not already ours.
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The Non-Primacy of Praxis
What might the poietic pro-duction of the RAF have to say about the pedagogical
work of arts-based researchers, and further, an arts-based research that is oriented
to neither the actus perusus of the artist-researcher or the rupturing of an ostensible
stable image of life? Ostensibly, the lesson of the RAF suggests that praxis is not
primary, but rather, already traversed by flows that make particular forms of praxis
possible. As O’Sullivan (2006) argues in regards to the poeitic event-character of
art, “it is never just a question of saying ‘I’” (88). If we can relink to the art of Oliver
Messiaen at this juncture, we might begin to apprehend the significance of this claim.
Specifically, it is via the flows and refrains pro-duced by birdsong that the territory
of the musical composition is opened to its potential for becoming-birdsong. This
is not simply recourse to think the in-between space of birdsong and musical score.
Rather, this transversal relation marks a potential for affirming the eternal return of
compositional thought, and further, the extensive force of difference that might be
detected in repetition. As birdsong reshapes the abstract borders of the landscape,
designating territorial zones, so too might musical composition unleash its poietic
event character to alter the social landscape in affirmation of new kinds of alien
aesthetics.17
Both the extreme example of the RAF and Messiaen’s birdsong suggest a very
different approach to what it might mean to conduct arts-based research. That is, the
guerilla aesthetics of the Red Army Faction and the compositions of Oliver Messiaen
each unleash different qualities of art’s poeitic event character into the social sphere.
In each case, what becomes detectable are the deterritorializing movements already
leaking within it. What both the RAF and Messiaen affirm of such movements is
their potential to instantiate other organizations, durations, and styles of life not
yet anticipated imagistically nor naturally oriented to meaning. Rather, in place of
meaning, we might begin to affirm metamorphoses, or rather, the material differences
affected by the poeitic character of art. Toward this, arts-researchers might mobilize
the question of how the event character of artistic pro-duction is capable of altering
what is. As the mythical beings of the Medieval period functioned to survey the
limits of thought, so too might arts-research begin to approach art as a matter of
expanding the contours of thought so as to open being to new subjective formations
and styles of living. This is not simply to ask the anthropocentric question of “who
works” but rather, to detect the impersonal force of “what works.” Put differently, the
task of arts-based research must become capable of surveying both the impersonal
force of art and its interface with the material organization of the social field. This is,
of course, to shift from the anthropocentric question of “whose life?” to an analysis
of forces that are not yet attributable to the actus purus of praxis. Only here can
art eclipse the shackles of resemblance and be rethought as a portal to a world in
becoming (O’Sullivan, 2006). Art must not simply remap our lives differently,
but more profoundly, must become capable to remapping life in a manner capable
of intensifying what it might mean to think and act. Opposed to colonizing the
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eternal return upon a readymade image of life or reflecting it upon a minimally

differentiated subject then, arts-based research must begin to ask what art can do
once representation becomes insufficient to the project of freeing subjectivity from
the constraints of cliché, sentimentalism, and the habitual spasms of modernity.
Future Directions?
Perhaps a/r/tography is already undergoing a revolution, rendering certain aspects

of this critique asynchronous with developments already underway in the field.
Increasingly, it seems as if those founding collaborators who labored under a/r/
tography’s banner are already on the move elsewhere, forging new theoretical and
political alliances that ostensibly no longer require or of necessity require a betrayal
of its founding affiliations and precepts. Certainly, it would be dangerous to suppose
a/r/tography as a limit point for any of the scholars associated to the signifier herein.
Our intent is not to indelibly link names and moments. At the time of this book’s
writing however, the a/r/tographic signifier continues to carry momentum within
the field, with an upcoming special issue of Visual Arts Research (VAR) planned for
publication in 2012. How such work will attempt to fulminate new commitments
and trajectories in response to the emerging non-humanist and anti-representational
challenges of posthumanism, new materialisms, object oriented ontology and this
book will be crucial to a/r/tography’s viability as a tool for the future of arts-based
research. The time for a rehearsal of what a/r/tography ‘is’ is over. Ultimately, this
might necessitate a/r/tography’s becoming in a manner that no longer speaks in its
name.
NOTES
1
It is worth noting that this image has nothing to do with the conceptualization of nomadism in the
work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), as various a/r/tographers have erroneously suggested. As
Deleuze|Guattari aver, “Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he
who does not move…the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart” (420).
2
Stahl Stenslie’s experimentations on the machinic phylum include the creation of a tele-technological
body that makes possible virtual sexual encounters across time and space. Performance artist Yang
Zhichao’s experimentations with hybridity have involved the failed surgical implantation of grass into
his shoulder, resulting in serious infection. Artistic polymath Theo Jansen produces kinetic sculptures
that take on autonomous existence through their relationship with such non-personal forces as wind
and intensive air pressure.
3
While the topic of desire (as a corollary of will) figures in Pryer (2009) the topic of a/r/tographic desire
remains largely unarticulated within its own scholarship.
4
It should be noted that the works of Deleuze|Guattari undermine the position of the author. Throughout
their collaboration, the Deleuze|Guattarian machine continuously warded against the presumption of a
single manifestor, mobilizing in its place a plague of collaborating voices.
5
As a notable exception, see Kedrick James’ (2009) incisive work on modes of post-personal or
impersonal writing.
6
For an interesting foil to the hyphenated subjectivities suggested in a/r/tography, see Sinner (2008).
7
A/r/tography, as suggested by Irwin and Springgay (2008) begins by fettering theory-as-practice-as-
process-as-complication.
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8
One imagines that if a/r/tographers were to unleash flows of desire to the extent they suggest necessary
that they would make for anarchists of the highest degree.
9
In the a/r/tographic literature, certain textual fragments are frequently repeated. This, in itself
constitutes a curious act of representation insofar as they mark the duplication of principles, analogies,
and diagrams for thinking a/r/tography itself.
10
The movement-image is the “first sign of the cinema” (Crockett, 2005, 179). Its function is based
solely on the speed of the image, forming movement-linkages that instantiate the impression of
chronological causality. Crockett contends that much of contemporary cinema, particularly the
action genre, continues to be dominated by the movement-image, producing habitual sensory-motor
linkages that “eventually deteriorate to the level of clichés” (179). The movement-image also inheres
conceptualization of cinema as a “narrative code structured like a language” (Rajchman, 2000, 123).
As Rajchman argues, the organization of cinema as narrative marks the triumphant formation of the
movement-image. It is in paradigmatic contrast to this image of thought that Deleuze (1989) mobilizes
the time-image as a technology for thinking unfettered from the submission of time to movement.
Freed from the habitual sensory-motor linkages of the movement-image, cinema becomes a tool for
experimenting with both somatic and social organizations. As Rajchman writes, “the break with […]
narrative is […] to be understood in terms of the emergence of a new kind of cinematic “image””
(123). Alliez (2006) argues that this circuit-breaking force requires an artistic intervention oriented to
invention rather than representation.
11
Implicated here are those forms narratological forms of arts-based-research that function to structure
art like a language.
12
Sharing only a spurious affinity to Merleau-Ponty’s spiritualization of the flesh, Bacon’s paintings
sense the violence of becoming-meat.
13
Admittedly, the RAF emerges as an unusual example given its tendencies toward violence and its
tipping into moments of fascism. This said, O’Sullivan advances a poignant case for the consideration
of the RAF in terms of its affirmation of minoritarian aesthetics, implicit futurism, and its becoming-
political through the emergence of collective-subjectivities.
14
The term “abstract” is used in order to highlight the depersonalized characterization of the guerilla in
RAF communiqué. In terms of the Red Army Faction, urban guerillas were literally everywhere, and
hence, impossible to contain via the policing of specific bodies.
15
This is to say that the RAF did not recycle the image of a people from some prior revolution,
mythopoeitic imaginary, or nostalgic age of freedom. Rather, the political force of the RAF might be
more profoundly located in its predisposition toward a future people not yet attributed an image.
16
While a/r/tography has developed its own particular conceptualization of collective-enunciation, this
conceptualization continually takes as its basic unit of organization the “members” and “personal
engagements” that comprise it (see Irwin, 2008). In this way, the so-call rhizomatic relations capable
of being forged in a/r/tography begin with the personal understandings and interpretation of the a/r/t/
ographer herself. This conceptualization appears fundamentally antagonistic to the form of collective-
production articulated by Deleuze|Guattari (1987), for whom the individual is already an abstraction
cut from a virtual multiplicity. It is hence instructive that the RAF does not begin with individuals and
their personal interpretive positionalities, but become sensitive to the excess of social flows in manner
that seeks enunciation in alternative forms of performativity. As the collective enunciations of the
RAF demonstrate, the intent was not to focus on the interpretations of individuals and subsequently
bring these interpretations into correspondence, but rather, to stay with the flows of the political milieu
through which new forms of subjectivity might be composed.
17
This is not simply a banal or novel creative formation. As Holland (2004) argues apropos Attali,
music produces the non-musical division of the social milieu. For example, the orchestral score
territorializes spatial relations (polis) through the striating, hierarchical, and delimiting powers of
the State. In classical orchestration for example, a spacio-political hierarchy is established between
the composer and orchestra. Attali’s argument that the organization of music impacts the image of
the socius hence gains creative momentum via Messiaen, whose becoming-birdsong posits a people
whose aesthetic sense is capable of sensing hitherto imperceptible alien semiotics.
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ARTS-BASED RESEARCH OTHERWISE
Arts Research as a Machinic Diagram
Perhaps the best way to disturb Eisner’s particular clarion call for humanistic
arts-based research is to raise the very idea of an idealized ‘icon’ that is implicit
throughout Eisner’s position, and secondly raise the difficult question of judgment
that undergirds his connoisseurship model. Both of these queries will draw on the
posthuman philosophical positions as developed by Lacan, Deleuze|Guattari, and
more recently by theorists such as Katherine Hayles, Mark Hansen and Bernard
Stiegler that undergird the “proposal” part of our book for ‘a people yet to come.’ It
offers somewhat of a preview as to where our particular investment lies.
It is perhaps somewhat alien for art education research to begin to reorientate
itself from its historical reliance on subject centered agency, which continues its
legacy of representational thinking, to the possibility of recognizing the singularity
of an artistic assemblage as it becomes incorporated within a particular research
paradigm to be conceptualized as a machinic diagram, an in(design)1 that is capable
of structuring new aesthetic percepts for humans through neuro-modification of
perceptual capacity—a modification that starts at the level of the senses (aisthesis).2
Such modification occurs through specific technologies of engagement, which we
discuss and worry throughout our study. If art and science are now blurring, as
we have maintained earlier, it seems art educators should begin to grasp how the
processes of art as various forms of poeitic techne modify who we ‘subjectively’
can become given that we are an ‘incomplete’ species, especially in the changed
landscape of contemporary screen imaging technologies.
The machinic within the human—as the nonhuman—can be most easily and
convincingly demonstrated via the alphabetization of speech as a code. Jacques
Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have decentered what agency means for
humans, ushering in the posthuman subject where consciousness is far from the
seat of agency. We are left to speculate as to why we act the way we do as free will
and rational mind become shaken as the founding tenets of modernist Enlightened
thought. Lacan’s persistent claim that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’
draws on automata theory (Lui, 2010). Symbolic manipulation has inherent in
its structural relationships, functions like those used to program a simple Turing
machine, which is the foundational design for computerized calculation. A Turing
machine is an abstract machine composed of three interrelated components—a
‘head’ that reads and writes binary symbols forwards and backwards on a tape; a
specified input as the ‘rules’ for producing an output; and lastly, the tape itself which
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is infinitely long making it function theoretically perpetual. In Seminar XI, The Four
Fundamentals of Psycho-analysis (1978), Lacan refers to such automata analogously
to the operations of the unconscious. The machinic operation of the unconscious is
a ‘missed’ encounter with the Real, meaning that such an automaton works on its
own accord but ‘fails’ when it comes to a disruption via trauma or shock. Only
then does it undergo a fundamental change. This unconscious has an agency of its
own as when psychotics hear a ‘voice’ inside their heads telling them what to do, a
disembodied voice that no longer belongs to them, as there is a disconnect between
conscious and unconscious neuronal connections.
Lacan’s machinic notion of the unconscious was radicalized by Deleuze|Guattari
and then further radicalized by Guattari.3 When Anti-Oedipus was first published
in 1972, Lacan was not upset by its thesis. As a matter of fact he told Maria
Macciocchi, one of his confidants as reported by Elizabeth Roudinesco (1990, 348),
that he thought Deleuze|Guattari had stolen this idea from his seminars. However,
the full implications of the difference between Lacan and Deleuze| Guattari never
emerged until the publication of A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, the very year when
Lacan disbanded his ‘school’ due mostly to illness. He was to pass away a year latter.
Deleuze| Guattari extend Lacan’s initial insight by elaborating an alternative theory
of “desiring machines.” Nature becomes a vast machinic process where flows of
energy are endlessly produced, inscribed, and consumed, cut into, siphoned off and
then connected to yet other flows. The ‘human’ is once again leveled. A machinic
assemblage is the working together of heterogeneous flows of parts and processes.
Rather than seeing this as an organic process, one where unity and harmony is
forwarded, they propose a different sense of ‘consistency,’ what they call a ‘plane
of immanence’ that is consistent in the way unstructured parts come together and
coalesce in a multiplicity. Such a collectivity of forces working together (what they
refer to as a ‘pack’) does have a non-hierarchical structure, without seemingly a
central command or control; it appears acephallic. How then does such a ‘system’
change, for this has major implications for an arts-based ‘research.’ If arts-based
research is conceptualized as various forms of assemblage, the question becomes
how does human subjectivity—as subjectivation change? What are the implications
for species being as the individual subject becomes relocated into these assemblages?
Important for our reconceptulization of arts-based research as a machinic process
is Deleuze|Guattari’s notion of the machinic phylum. Such a phylum cuts across
the oppositions between the human and nonhuman, of history and nature. We use
the term self-refleXivity to indicate this change of an ‘thought without image’ to
distinguish it from self-reflection and self-reflexivity that dominates our field of art
education.
The machinic phylum engages with the posthuman by conceiving of ‘life’ as
a combination, conjunction, or interface between the inorganic and nonorganic,
moving us in the direction where human agency is not thought of representationally,
as in capitalist forms of the liberal subject, nor does it ‘disappear’ as in the dynamic
systems theory that characterizes Manuel DeLanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent
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Machines (1991), which appropriates Deleuze| Guattari as well. Also worrisome is

the sophisticated dynamic systems theory developed by Niklas Luhmann’s (2000)
Art as a Social System where “the function of art can be traced to problems of
meaningful communication” (139). For Luhmann the basis of society are not social
subjects but the matter of the recursive network of communications between social
subjects. Only communication can communicate, enabling communicative acts to
develop an autonomous logic within a network. Since we are unable to ‘peer’ into
another psyche (inner life or imagination), and we ourselves are never certain of our
own psyche, communication is always a failure or disruption of meaning. Yet, for
Luhmann, the materiality of the work of art disappears in communication.
From Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) perspective, art requires a social network of
believers to sustain the field of art and confer its magic. This network or habitus
ensures its fetishistic value and elevates the creative power of the artist. It is a
self-referential, self-constituting and self-reproducing game of struggle and power
constituting a field that is maintained by this primordial belief Bourdieu calls ‘illusio.’
Illusio is that ‘magical’ enchanted relation to a game that is the result or product of the
ontological complicity between the mental structures [schemes of habitus] and the
objective structures of a social space [or social field]. In other words, the relationship
between one’s own representation of the self to the given perceived social structure,
the complicity between mental structures and the objective structures of social space.
It seems this is just a step to Rancière’s (2010) ‘distribution of the sensorium’ since
this network of gaming competition constitutes an unequal distribution of cultural,
symbolic and economic capital. Bourdieu’s illusio certainly recognizes fantasy,
animism and desire. Yet, Bourdieu does not go far enough. There is a danger that
his ‘science of artworks’ has a tendency to stratify the dominant art forms along
class lines. His concepts of “cultural capital “ and “symbolic capital” have been
neatly dispatched and appropriated by the neoliberalist agenda for their own ends
as positive notions of differentiation within the advertising industry. There seems
to be no strategy for change suggested, aside from analysis. Arts-based research
based on Bourdieu’s sociology seems to repeat the Frankfurt critique, but misses
out on a radical avant-garde that offer ways to trouble the illusio. Bourdieu presents
the challenge for art research to take place ‘outside’ the established habitus. But if
there is no transcendental ‘outside’ the task for a radical political strategy has to be
rethought. One turn has been to theorize radical democracy on agonistic ‘adversarial’
grounds that can harness the passions as a social model of ‘agonistic pluralism,’ as a
clash of illusio if one still thinks in Bourdieu’s terms. Chantal Mouffe (2007) argues
that the role of artistic activism (and by extension art education research) can abet
such a radical democracy. Conflating art and politics, Mouffe maintains that “there
is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art […].
The real issue concerns the possible forms of critical art, the different ways in which
artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony” (2007). The
dominant hegemony for Deleuze|Guattari is the ‘control society’ where movements
and space are already choreographed in specific ways to meet capitalist ends. To
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break this hegemony, arts-based research that maintains a representation critical

orientation is not able to shake the commodity object. Jan Verwoert (2007) maintains
that the potential of appropriation as a research strategy “in relation to a reality
constituted by a [global] multiplicity of spatialized temporalities” could be a force
“to cut a slice out of the substance of this [capitalist] commodity culture to expose
the structures that shape it in all their layers […]. [T]he appropriated object [must] be
able to reveal in and through itself the riddled historical relations and dynamics that
today determine what things mean.” Verwoert cautions that such an act of research
appropriation should not be “on structural topography of social space [because then]
there is little room for ambiguity concerning issues of property.” If the position of
the object appropriation is fixed in time, then “the trajectory of its displacement
[drawn] in a coordinate system with multiple temporal axes, the complications
of property become confused.” Such an orientation is one of ‘becoming.’ “The
ownership of something that inhabits different times, that travels through time and
repeats itself in unpredictable intervals” can’t be pinned down as a ‘dead object.’ It
lives. “Things that live throughout time cannot, in any unambiguous sense, pass into
anyone’s possession.” The call is for invocation for something that lives through
time to achieve a radical transformation of the experience of the historical situation.
A rather perhaps unusual example is Richard Kelly’s film Southland Tales, which
presents the ‘future is now’ form of science fiction realism where a different timeline
is presented after 9-11. The Republicans have majority rule, and the world is totally
mediated by the screen image. A nuclear attack in Texas has Kelly projecting an
apocalyptic end of the world, which does Alice in Wonderland one better. We would
take Kelly’s writing and directing of such a screenplay a form of arts-based research
where it’s a-grammatical non-narrative style becomes a crucial formula of resistance
projected from the surveillance society that already exists.
Even Bruno Latour’s celebrated and much discussed ANT theory that science
education has embraced needs to be questioned as to its appropriateness in relation
to arts-based research. In a very witty conversation between an ANT and a SPIDER,
Tim Ingold (2008) initiates just such a critique, comparing the difference between
Latour’s relational network theory and his own re-evaluation of the assemblage
that is distinctly Deleuze| Guattarian in its direction. Skilled Practice Involves
Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness (SPIDER) is an example of “meshwork”
as opposed to “network” (Ingold, 2006, 80–82). Ingold takes into account the flows
of materiality and the coupling of body and movement absent in Latour.
While human agency is decentered in all of the above cases, and the interrelatedness
of various network of circuits are given their complexity, however, the question of
desire in DeLanda, Luhmann, Bourdieu and Latour seems to be missing, or not
given enough priority as it is in Deleuze| Guattari. For a new image of thought for
Arts-based ‘Research’, what captures desire and then sets it circulating is crucial
when discussing the place of human agency within the larger set of distributed
relations that define an assemblage. We are tempted to say that, with Lacan the objet
a, as the ‘cause’ of desire, is that element in the assemblage that forms or binds the
114
singularities of that very assemblage. Singularity, to recall is another term for an

attractor. It is that element that stands out and binds. Further, given the disputes that
surround the virtual|actual (pre-individual|individual as a process of individuation),
it may well be that this element establishes the intensity that overcomes any notions
of dualism. Quite to the contrary, Deleuze|Guattrari do not offer a binary structure
of virtual|actual as is often been claimed by their distractors such as Badiou and
Hallaward, rather the virtual is already the result of a more primary process of
ontogenesis (see Hughes, 2011).
For our purposes we call on Deleuze| Guattari’s notion of the assemblage (their term
is agencement) rather than complexity theory or chaos theory per se4 that, from our
position, remains focused on the stratification of a system, that is its lines of stability,
consistency and repeatability, rather than how desire can dissipate them, which are a
matter of flows of desire. Assemblage can be most easily grasped as an arrangement
or setup, but Deleuze|Guattari attempt to describe it in processes terms, complicates
its make-up by what they term a ‘double articulation’: the way an assemblage is
selected or sorted and consolidated or coded through the processes of stratification
and destratification, coding and decoding that take place simultaneously. This
produces a duality of substance and form, substance being the territory as the first
articulation that emerges from the array of “unstable particle-flows, molecular units
or metastable quasi-molecular units” (TP, 40-41). This territory has a “statistical
order of connections and successions,” which it forms. A second articulation codifies
these, establishing stable molar structures (stratification). The territory (as substance)
is then “actualized” (coded), producing “phenomena of centering, unification,
totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization” (41). A junction of these
two subassemblages thus constitutes an assemblage: a specific regime of signs and
gestures (enunciation), and a machinic assemblage of interacting bodies. Deleuze|
Guattari identify three stratifications, which are doubly articulated but differentially
so. With the first, geological or physico-chemical stratum, it is enough to identify
this double articulation to be between the ‘molecular’ (uncoded) and the ‘molar’
coded.
With the next stratum—organic stratification—content and expression become
distinguishable, meaning that a specific code can detach itself (‘decode’ itself as a
‘line of flight’) from its associated territory enabling it to take on another form of
expression. To describe these latter stratifications, Deleuze| Guattari draw on the
semiotic theory of Hjelmslev (his glossematics) to move away from the Sausserian
differentiation of sign as a signifer/signified, which is caught up in meaning alone and
misses out on the physical effects of the signifier. Hjelmslev’s theory yields a form of
content and a form of expression, as well as a substance of content and a substance of
expression, thereby yielding a tetravalent account. Applied to organic assemblages,
Deleuze|Gauttari equate the first articulation with content and the second with
expression. Expression becomes particularly important when theorizing an arts-
based research since it is independent from content, a rather significant claim since
form and content have been the mainstay of arts research. Further, expression should
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be understood as being both symptomatic and productive. It provides what could be

grasped as a structure of feeling as ‘blocs of affect’ (after Deleuze|Guattari). We use
the terms Xpression as a grapheme of differentiation to identify the condensation
and transduction of its form.
The third stratification—the anthropomorphic stratum, introduces language and
human activity. Content and expression once again undergo a new distribution.
Roughly, content becomes linked with ‘hand-tool’ couplet, while expression with
the face-language couplet (see TP, 60-61). The hand is extended in tools as ‘formed
matter,’ which can in turn serve as tools, while speech becomes the new form of
expression.
De-anthropomorphizing arts-based research offers new challenges. Nancy (2000)
has argued with great conviction that the notion of Being (singular) can never be
tenable. “[I]t is necessary to refigure fundamental ontology […] with a thorough
resolve that starts from the plural singular of origins, from being-with” (26). “Being
singular plural” as he phrases it, affirms that “being-with” thinks of existence as
relation with an “other.” If we accept Nancy’s claim, then subject|object gap vanishes,
better thought of as a membrane (a remembering of exchange) than anything else.
This also applies to the term ‘culture.’ Culture only emerges when a differentiation
with another culture is encountered, establishing modernity’s preoccupation with the
self-other couplet and all the questions of equality, justice and ethics that this brings.
Differences, in this case, are hierarchically, bifurcationally, and functionally codified
and established in what is a dynamic system of constant flux. Systems undergo a
structural coupling, according to Luhmann; hence art as a specific social system to
modernity is coupled to the economic sphere (see also Sevänen, 2001).
Luhmann (2000) offers a variation of constructivism wherein the artwork’s
imaginary “offers a position from which something else can be determined as reality
[…]. Without such marking of difference the world would simply be the way it is.
Only when a reality ‘out there’ is distinguished from fictional reality can one observe
one side from the perspective of the other” (142). Art provides a ‘double reality’
from which reality can be observed. Luhmann comes close to Deleuze’s notion of the
“powers of the false” as developed from Nietzsche (which we address in section V).
For Luhmann, the very fictionality of art enables it to act as a critical practice
to explore questions of suffering, oppression, disharmony. This separation of art
from the ‘real,’ as part of the modernist project, is given special consideration in
Luhmann’s system that undergoes entropy (decay) and is countered by negentropy
(increased complexity of organization). This is not unlike Deleuze|Guattari’s
territorialization and deterritorialization where a dynamic ‘line of flight’ that detaches
itself from a territory means that somewhere in the assemblage something else is
being captured, recoded and stratified. Deterritorialization (entropy) is therefore
relative. As a contingent process, it becomes perhaps impossible to identify when
deterritorialization becomes absolute, causing the entire assemblage to transmute
or dissolve. Luhmann treats the advent of the autonomy of the art system in
modernity as arising from such a dynamic; namely that a social system is formed
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(produced) along with its territory (environment) simultaneously as a boundary

emerges. Autonomy and heteronomy are mutually dependent, which is precisely the
same formulation Rancière (2006) develops regarding aesthetic regimes. There is
then an internal dynamic in each system as to what potential line it might take for
change. In The Shape of Time, George Kubler (1962) argues that there are multiple
simultaneous historical trajectories of artistic and cultural development, each with
their own intensity and speed. Luhmann (2000) also conceives of the system of art
as constituting a multiplicity of operations through time. All of these are recursive
responses to prior operations; they act like cybernetic feedback loops. Hence the
virtual potential lies at the heart of the system. “For bold strokes of innovation or
revolutionary research to have some chance of even being conceived, it is necessary
for them to exist in potential state at the heart of the system of already realized
possibilities (sic)” (added emphasis, 235). The art system as it currently stands
places the creation of art no longer front and center. Dealers, publishers, galleries
and the curator as being involved in formulating a type of ‘art’ production under the
umbrella of a specific theme—for example Nicolas Bourriaud or Rirkrit Tirvanija—
accelerate the speed and turnover of production for instant satisfaction, especially in
major metropolitan centers.
While these remarks appear ‘obvious,’ these relational aspects of arts-based
research are often underplayed because of the legacy of the artistic as hero and self-
generator. And the question emerges whether only relations need to be taken into
account to grasp how certain affordances are forwarded? As Keith Ansell-Pearson
(1999) puts it, in the light of developments in philosophy and science, behavior
can no longer be “localized in individuals.” It must be treated “epigenetically as
a function of complex material systems” capable of cutting across “individuals
(assemblages) and which transverse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries
(rhizomes)” (171). Katherine Hayles (1999) in the conclusion of her ground-
breaking book, How We Became Posthuman, maintains that the human is no longer
“the source from which emanates the mystery necessary to dominate and control
the environment. Rather, the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject
correlates with […] the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which ‘thinking’
is done by both human and nonhuman actors” (290).
Diagrams of Affective Sensation:

The Time-Machine of Skin in Contemporary Art
A number of attempts to mobilize Deleuze|Guattari as ‘research methodology’

for education have been initiated under the label of qualitative research. The
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2010) offers a wide array
at such attempts. Scattered through the literature are also reflective pieces on what
such a ‘methodology’ in action research might mean from a Deleuzian orientation
(Drummond and Themessi-Huber, 2007; Biddle, 2010; Henderson, 2010). In this
section we approach ‘research’ quite differently by dwelling on three fairly well
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known artists who have each made a dramatic contribution concerning the sensate
body itself as machinic. They offer a radical departure as forms of arts-based
research. Deleuze|Guattari, as is well known, call on Spinoza to develop “what a
body can do,” making it constitutive and reconfigured as a sum of its capacities.
This phrase should not be naively understood as to how a body functions, its organic
or physiological concerns. Rather, it is through affects that the term ‘body without
organs’ (BwO) must be understood (see Buchanan, 1997; Bignall, 2007). It is the
‘beyond’ of the body’s physical limits that are desired, which BwO addresses, a
shift from etiology to ethology. The latter is a concern with the body’s affects and
relations rather than the former terms of causation of diseases. BwO as desire itself
is machinic5 and intransitive. It must be hooked up to the actual body via desiring-
machines to initiate the process of becoming-other. This abstract BwO therefore
exists alongside a concrete body, which then actualizes it.6 The virtual BwO is an
undifferentiated material mass of elements, what Deleuze|Guttari also call a ‘plane
of immanence’ that has yet to be organized. It is therefore abstract and chaotic,
unformed bundle of forces.
Affects, as we have explored in earlier chapters, refer to the capacity of the
body to form specific relations. These are differentially, virtually and potentially
distributed so that these part-objects can then be actualized. The key concept here is
that such ‘relations are external to their terms,’ as developed by Hume and embraced
by Deleuze, which simply means that there is no transcendent nature, no ‘I’ that is
before experience. Experience is something to be created. It does not ‘belong’ to an
internal ‘I.’ The moments of experience have to be externally related to each other
to create a sensation: a cold wind, and a snow ‘white out,’ and a shivering body, and
… all bind together as a blizzard, a multiplicity of part-objects come together as an
assemblage. The externality of the social world always-already attests to our habits
and desires when it comes to these ‘binding forces.’ Relations are impersonal effects;
they are not subjective. The relations between (or external to) things is Deleuze’s
way of philosophizing the line, not the point. Relations are lines between terms or
things that exist independently of the points, things or terms they happen to connect.
Such lines are forces and follow the logic of the conjunction—and. A line or relation
is the ‘and,’ which has its own existence. It does not originate between points, things
or terms, but is itself ‘becoming.’
In TP, Plateau VI, Deleuze|Guattari offer a ‘methodology’ or procedure of
experimentation as to how the BwO can be created and recreated along side a
body that is already stratified, caught as it where by the milieu it finds itself in. A
stratum is defined by its content and expression: the way the parts are composed
into a composition and their expression in relation to each other. A stratum is
therefore an organized body. Subjectivity emerges here as a residual effect, as an
assemblage that is both a noun and a verb, a double movement, which the original
French meaning, agencement carries; i.e., assembling and the resulting structure
or assemblage. Later Deleuze uses the idea of the fold (pli) to convey this same
concept of the inside|outside folding in on one another, much like desire and drive in
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Lacan who uses the torus figure rather than a fold to illustrate the same indistinction.
Assemblages belong to the level of virtuality, produced within a stratum, carving out
a territory or smooth space by extracting pieces from various strata that contexualize
a milieu. Deleuze|Guattari also call this a “diagram.”7 It is the experimentation
with the diagram (or assemblage) and with the BwO (as desire that is the force
of associations that combines the elements to produce an assemblage) that enable
forms of deterritorialization of the strata to take place. The diagram is also a double
movement: it maps the strata as well as images a flux.
Deleuze|Guattari distinguish different types of bodies in terms of their particularity
of content and expression. “For each body, there is a need to identify its composition
and style, to define its internal powers and desires in terms of their active or
reactive effects, and for each body the aim is to actively select its composition,
with respect to creating the kind of emergence that responds to collectively agreed
ideal” (Bignall 2007, 218). We have used the term self-refleXivity for this process.
Arts-based research is such a process, a deterritorializing or destratification and
reterritorialization of the interplay between BwO and Body, the ‘body’ understood
not in humanist terms but in terms of a complex assemblage of elements that are
organized into an enduring pattern of relationships. A body is not a ‘discrete entity,’
but any stable form of organization or being. When it comes to the destratifications
of the sapien body the mediation with the milieu needs to be carefully considered
through what has been termed technogenesis by Bernard Stiegler (1998a). This
is certainly one aspect that has been underplayed in the secondary sources of
Deleuze|Guattari studies, which is why the work of Gilbert Simondon becomes
increasingly important to supplant ontology with ontogenesis. Deleuze’s cinema
books clearly articulate how the cinematic apparatus as machinic ‘posthuman’
vision exposes a potential of life that goes beyond phenomenologically centered
human vision, while the video philosophical explorations of Maurizio Lazzarato
(2007) are equally impressive. The question of what the emerging bodily sensorium
that is shaping bodily experiences in this digital age is only beginning to open up.
The phenomenological ‘haptocentricsm’ (Derrida, 2005) of the hand and finger that
supports haptic realism is now challenged by the more narcissistic feedback of digital
finger interface designs (Elo, 2012), while the various strategies of interactive art
8
—or diagrams as we are using the term—are raising new questions concerning the
‘intrinsic body,’ which is what this chapter confronts regarding arts-based research.
We hope to introduce something new to this question by focusing on the
importance of skin in relation to incarnation—flesh.9 Skin is a topological figure
in the form of a membrane. Previously, we briefly brought up the question of the
‘powers of the false,’ to be revisited soon enough, which forces us to think differently
about the real/unreal and true/false opposition. With the transcendental gone, the
question of incarnation becomes to fore as we fall ‘back,’ like Icarus towards the
earth and into flesh, so to speak to confront ‘belief in the world.’ “Descent implies
a movement in time and flesh, a destination. Between the two, skin filters the fall
into sensation. Skin is the liminal membrane that articulates the dimension of time
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in the concept of incarnation […]. Skin is not simply a receptacle but an elastic
organ progressing through time” (Zdebik, 2012, 178-179.) Skin’s significance, when
theorizing contemporary art, is explored on three intra-related levels through three
contemporary performance artists—two of which are very well-known within global
artistic circles for their extremism—Stelarc and Orlan, while the third, Wafaa Bilal
is equally important when demonstrating, in this case, the limits placed on the body
through symbolic signifiers. Bilal’s performance that we discuss has found a way to
trouble identity politics that continue to beset poststructuralist theory. He offers what
Deleuze called an counter-actualization.
Each artist explores a ‘skin-level, ‘ addressing a ‘body’ that corresponds to Jacques
Lacan’s well-known psychic registers: Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. Although this
is a Deleuze|Guattarian inspired section, it is also very much an experimental one
where an attempt is made to generate a productive assemblage between what many take
to be two disparate paradigms of thought.10 The result may indeed prove monstrous,
and perhaps untenable? Hardline Deleuzians dismiss Lacan for his overemphasis on
the signifier, desire as lack, the mirror stage and so on. We draw on the ‘late’ Lacan’s
development of the sinthome (Seminar XXIII) and the importance of technology as
a supplement (in the Derridean sense) as developed through the writings of Bernard
Stiegler and Mark Hansen’s theoretical explorations11 of digitalization within the
‘new media.’ So this is an attempt to re(form) the Lacanian registers within ‘control
societies’ as governed by the new machinic assemblage of the synopticon; that is a
scopic assemblage where the few are watched (celebrities and the like) and we watch
each other within what are increasingly becoming interactive environments. We do
this by emphasizing the neglected virtual dimension along with the importance of
non-human machinic vision and time for each register.12
All three performative artists have been chosen for exploring the limits of the
body in the way they address designer capitalism; they do so with the skin being the
‘default envelope of intensity.’ Their performances are both traumatic and dramatic
and offer a resistance, in a political sense, in the promise of “creating a people” that
do not yet exist in Deleuze’s sense13; these are not utopian promises but “fabulations,”
offering a potential to transform the future. Each, however, offers a rather different
“fabulation,” derived from what defines their sinthome.14 All three introduce new
dramatic affection-images15 and engage in institutional displacements—Stelarc
the authority of science over artificial intelligence and biological discourse; Orlan
the authority of the operating theatre and the cosmetic industry, and later issues
of identity with the bioart of her Harlequin’s Coat performance, and Wafaa Bilal,
interrogating the ‘state of exemption’ as developed by Giorgio Agamben.16 They are
all politically engaged in very different ways: Sterlac raises the problematic over
technology and bioart; Orlan’s surgical performances address feminine jouissance
and has potentially queer political leanings, while Wafaa Bilal addresses the state of
global terror, violence and the desensitization of video games.
Succinctly put, we maintain that Stelarc’s performances engage with the virtual
Real—the BwO as in(formed) by the skin-ego.17 This is an exploration of the
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sensate-affective-inner body, what takes place under the skin through the prosthetic
supplements of machinic vision and time that he invents. This is an instrumental
operation. Orlan’s surgical performances virtualize the body-ego, literally at the
level of the skin. The ideal-ego is made to move through a series of variations and
serializations—to potential exhaustion.18 The virtual Imaginary troubles the image-
screen as developed by Jacques Lacan19 in Seminar XI by way of the synoptic
technology of machinic vision and time that Orlan harnesses and then deconstructs
as her performances are broadcast around the world. The same applies to Wafaa
Bilal’s performance, Domestic Tension, in his harnessing synoptic machinic vision
to explore the gaze—so as to gaze back, so to speak. He engages with the symbolic
identity that has been signified on his body during this historical and contemporary
moment. This is his stratification in Deleuze|Guattarian terms. He is ‘stripped’
bare—psychically so to speak, as he engages with a global interactive audience
in a love/hate relationship. Wafaa Bilal is working beyond the skin, harnessing the
‘forces’ of hatred, racism and ethnicity. Most importantly, it is the trauma of his
memories that are at issue here, hence the Bergsonian memory recall is very much at
play.20 The claim is made that the virtual Symbolic is actualized through the durée of
his performance (31 chronological days). The gaze is ‘materialized’ through video
mediated images. His work explores the trauma of war and the loss of family while
living in Iraq. This we take as an exemplary form of counter-actualization where
“[t]he eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the
flesh” (LS, 161).
The notion of ‘time-machine’ in the title of this particular section refers to the
recognition that in contemporary art (‘new media’), where artists and audience
interface and interact with digitalized technologies, there is a confrontation between
incompatible embodiments of vision and time, between humans and digitalized
technologies. The ‘intensive’ time and vision of machine processing is ‘beyond’
human lived experience raising the specter of the inhuman. This has profound
consequences in the way the skin|body|machine assemblage should be theorized
given that the entire neurological ‘revolution’ around affect is raised around this very
interaction. The provocative writings of Mark B.N. Hansen21 concerning the ‘new
media’ present a compelling, if not an open and shut case, that digitalization opens
up affective neurological embodiment that enables the body to experience itself
‘more than itself’ (to echo Lacan)—the entire body ‘synesthetically’ experiences
information. The epiphylogenesis of these digitalized technics, according to Bernard
Stiegler, presents new challenges to memory via recording devices. The Bergson-
Deleuzian take on memory, virtuality, the time-image (as purely a mental space),
and the “brain-image” couplet, argues Hansen throughout his texts, which have
marked the high point of previous media theorizing, fall short if the inhuman is
not attended to as well. The ‘new (digitalized) media’ are in need of re-theorization
along affective neurological lines given that these machinic assemblages have an
interactive dimension to them that extends the sensorimotor dimension of the body
as affect.22
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This is a premise that we have accepted throughout this section when discussing
the three artists. Such a position means drawing a line away from phenomenologically
and hermeneutically inspired directions toward contemporary art where tactility,
touching and haptic perception are claimed by many23 to be an advance over visual
essentialism. Theorizing haptic space as affective touch has the advantage of not
establishing an opposition between ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’—auditory sense can be
tactile as well. The danger, however, is a fall to haptocentricity, as Jacques Derrida24
has argued, a belief that touch is the primary sense, a privileging of the hand as in
Merleau-Ponty’s maxim of auto-affection of touching and being touched, without the
recognition of the role of techno-prosthetics that has shaped our species. Here again
Stiegler’s account of epiphylogenesis remains crucial, while Simondon’s emphasis
on ontogenesis is equally crucial for a machinc grasp of arts-based ‘research.’
Diagrams/Diagrammatics
A word needs to be said about diagrams.25 We have chosen the term ‘diagram’
as initially and famously developed by Deleuze|Guattari to capture how each
performance in itself is “an abstract machine,” a word that they interchange for
‘diagram.’26 The diagram for Deleuze|Guattari (but especially for Guattari27),
designates a ‘mixed sign’ by which he means diagrams are neither representational
nor non-representational, but fall somewhere in between so that they escape a
signifying semiotic system of categorization. The diagram intervenes, one might
say, in an already given form in order to suggest the “emergence of another world.”28
Guattari ‘twists’ or ‘skews’ Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the icon (a sign of
similitude), upon which the diagram is based, so as to deterritorialize it. It now
becomes an a-signifier in the sense that the diagram might be thought as a working
out circuit that assembles the human and the ‘machine’ with particular political and
ethical consequences. As an abstract machine, the diagram “does not function to
represent even something real, but rather constructed a real that is yet to come, a
new type of reality.”29 The diagram is, therefore, association with a “people yet to
come.” It is ‘utopian’ without being transcendental. So, the search is to bring forth
a new sensibility, an attempt to use forces that work on the nervous system to create
a stuttering in the established (iconic) forms so that they can begin to expressively
decompose (deterritorialize), thereby introducing a ‘heteronomy’ into the medium
through a logic that remains at the level of the virtual, a potentiality that may be
actualized in a ‘world’ to come. Affective diagrams are, hence, unprecedented new
beginnings, which we believe all three artists have initiated.
The significance of ‘abstraction’ in the diagram points to the invisible (molecular)
dimension of chaos, prefiguration, the informe or formless materialism (as George
Bataille would have it), catastrophe, and the serialization of actualizations based
on the manipulation of such a productive encounter with ‘chance.’ All artists work
with chance and contingency in this sense. The ‘machinic,’ on the other hand, opens
up desire within an assemblage functioning immanently and pragmatically in a
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viral way—the contagion of affect which strikes the holding together of belief as a
habituation of mind/body. The performances discussed are ‘contagious’ in just this
way. For the diagram to remain operative it must ‘unnerve,’ and by doing so, the
‘machinic’ function disrupts our common sense of chronological representative time.
The habitual mode of being is disrupted releasing forces within the body, mediated
by the skin, as they make contact with forces that exist outside the body as well. As
is so often repeated by Deleuze|Guattarian theorists, in this conceptualization of art,
it is no longer what the art ‘says,’ it is also not the phenomenology of intention or
the hermeneutics of meaning, but what the art actually ‘does’ by way of its affective
production. Rather than intention, it is better to think in-tension when it comes to
the interactivity with contemporary new media art. The measure is by intensity and
this intensity always requires an ethico-political assessment. The skin, therefore,
becomes an important surface for this rupturing and stammering of human habit of
thought and acting.
There is also a larger sense of what the diagram is, and that is how it creates a
new type of reality, truly an entirely new line of flight that breaks with historical
precedents that are caught symbolically. Deleuze draws on Alois Riegl’s concept of
the “will to art” (Kunstwollen) to get at this ontological potential of the diagram,30
making it fractal than historical. In this sense each performative artist discussed
has his or her diagram that holds the potential for a particular line of flight that
deterritorializes representation and the ‘human’ as we know it. While Orlan and
Stelarc have received wide attention because of their extreme positions and their
long-standing involvement in the global art community, it is their technological
integration, namely their use of digitalization and the new media that interests us as
well. Waffa Bilal is, perhaps less well known, but equally important for our thesis in
the way he mobilizes new media (Internet’s chat room, a computer hooked paintball
gun, video diaries on YouTube), memory and the gallery space, what we are referring
to as the nowhere “space of exemption” as discussed widely after Agamben’s initial
development of this concept, so as to stammer identity politics. The diagram, we
believe can be linked to Lacan’s development of the sinthome.
Sinthome
There is a need, before actually engaging in these three artists, to say something about
Lacan’s sinthome since those Deleuzians who dismiss Lacan as an impingement
on their territory generally ignore this development. The sinthome31 is a major
turning point coming late in his career (1975), along with his greater emphasis on
the Real as the satisfaction of the body of drives (Triebe) rather than desire as lack.
Jacques-Alain Miller32 can remarkably say, “the fantasy becomes the drive” (original
emphasis). The sinthome is a partner-symptom, a life partner or supplement that
allows us to live. The need to single out the importance of the sinthome is based
on the conviction that a society of control, marked by designer capitalism and
regulated by a synoptic assemblage, has severely shaken the cohesiveness of the
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three registers; they are becoming unraveled and decoupled, which was why Lacan
took on himself the task of grappling with James Joyce as an artist whose ‘body’
of work prevented him from becoming unraveled, falling into a sate of despair.
The extensive writings by Slavoj Žižek33 convince us of this general claim. The
symbolic as the big Other has moved into its post-oedipal variations—while there
is no doubt the capitalist crisis is undergoing a reterritorialization, as is the family,
the general state is a global crisis of leadership, a global war on terrorism, the failing
profits of the market as capitalist ‘recovery’ seems slow and sluggish and global
warming; and while heteronormativity, androcentrism, patriarchy, racism continue
to persist, documents such as “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” move
the ‘civilizing processes,’ to use Norbert Elias34 here, ‘forward,’ however ill-defined
the litany of overdetermined signifiers—freedom, liberty, social justice, security and
so on—may be. Sadly, human rights violations are often used as an excuse to invade
countries in the name of ‘protecting’ citizens.
The same applies to the Imaginary psychic register. Certainly, identity politics
continues to be hotly contested territory amongst academic circles. Poststructuralism,
unfortunately often reduced to a neo-Foucauldian constructivism in North American
circles, has held the center of the field in cultural studies, but that is now waning.
And lastly, the register of the Real is undergoing a demystification process despite
the protests of orthodox Lacanians as the multiplicity of the immanent plane of the
virtual comes more into the theoretical debates. The ‘body of the drives,’ where the
question of affect emerges,35 (more below) has been given a neurological accounting
in Wilma Bucci’s36 coupling of psychoanalysis with cognitive science and Daniel
Stern’s37 coupling of psychoanalysis with development psychology through his
explication of ‘Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized” (RIGs)
as the basic affective building blocks of ‘core ‘ identity. Guattari took Stern’s views
to heart. Coupled to this is the renewed grasp of Bergson-Deleuze influence on
rethinking unconscious memory in ‘trauma’ studies, as well as disability studies in
terms of ‘what a body can do,’ and now there is a re-reading of Freud in developing a
non-psychological unconscious.38 We have the beginnings of a paradigm shift—the
so-called ‘affective turn’ in many fields.
The sinthome succinctly stated is what precisely gives a subject its consistency;
that is, it supports the subject in relation to the three registers. Dare we say this
is the singularity of an attractor? Even more precisely, the sinthome refers to the
subject’s singularity, and in this sense it addresses ‘pure’ difference. This is not
unlike the Deleuzian development of ‘pure’ difference; the sinthome is not related
to the sameness/difference of representation, but to one of a kind. Jouissance (as
jouis-sens) that binds with it can also be read as intensity of affect in the way it
points to ‘emotional’ life. If such jouis-sens is strictly applied to lalangue, which is
to say, the ‘poetry’ of language (its tones, rhythms breaks and so on), then there are
affinities with Deleuze|Guttari’s a-signifying dimension, although (granted) limited.
Often jouissance is translated as painful pleasure, but more accurately it is what
‘tickles’ the subject.39 Of course, one can be tickled ‘to death.’ But it is a sensation
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that gives life. Through his analysis of James Joyce’s autobiography, Lacan makes
the claim that his literature, the way he played with language and epiphany, came to
stand for the organizing principle of his jouissance, an ‘artifice’ that reconstituted
his Imaginary so as to work through his relationship to his body and his father who
had abandoned him.40 Lacan was to eventually drop the Name-of-the-Father as the
transcendental signifier and maintain that virtually ‘anything’ could be substituted
in its place.
There is a difference between creative ‘art’ produced as a symptom and a ‘body’
of art that Lacan names a sinthome. Art produced in the former case makes ‘sense’ in
the Symbolic. Such creativity is shaped through a signifying process that is culturally
accepted, where the usual forms of ‘communication’ apply. Such artwork can be
‘deciphered’ and has no potential to transform the Symbolic which it is part of. An
artwork as a symptom—participating as metaphor—is a displacement of whatever
is already a compensation for a lack. It comes from the unconscious and aims at an
unconscious (let us say, in this case it is structured as a language) at what is already
there, but concealed or hidden, repressed or lacking. Typically then, as symptom,
such art can be named in the therapeutic situation releasing a subjective burden or
perhaps a social impediment. Art as therapy, in the usual sense applies here. The
work of art as sinthome, on the other hand, breaks with the signification—with the
Symbolic. There is no fundamental (castrating) lack, at the heart of the subject, no
void or ‘hole’ to be filled by desire. The sinthome enables jouissance (affection)
to take shape in this hole, which is why it is possible to name it a virtual Real. A
‘sinthomatic’ work of art is ‘driven’ (forced) by a potentiality to be actualized. It
holds an ‘enigma’ of what is yet to come, and what is not yet there. It is not within
the unconscious. In Deleuzian terms, it has been ‘problematized’ as the unthought.
The sinthome ex-ists outside the subject yet immanently defines him or her or group,
nation and so on. It is that which ‘drives’ the subject ‘to become.’ Lacan finally
meets Deleuze|Guattari at the molecular level to some extent. The unconscious is
now a factory and such ‘sinthomatic’ art is schizophrenic—crazy—for it resists the
Symbolic.
All art as sinthome is an indirect recognition that the phallic structure is failing,
thereby generating, what Lacan called jouis-sense, which is ‘beyond’ the law. In
this sense such art is ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’ since it appears nonsensical, beyond meaning,
for meaning can only take place within the confines of the symbolic. This jouis-
sense is not the artist’s experience but attributed to the transitive working through
of the performative work of art itself; that is to say, a-signifying instances begin to
‘make sense,’ a becoming sense that is not possible to signify. This then is creativity
‘proper’, not innovation. As such, the sinthome participates in an ambivalence
between the Real and the Imaginary to shore up the ‘failure’ of the Symbolic so
that the subject can continue ‘to become’ its own ‘cause,’ which is the equivalent
to what Lacan called ‘subjective destitution’; the artist is no longer ‘hysterical,’
trying to ‘answer’ just what is it that the Other wants of him or her, the realm of
desire.
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So, this is not narcissism, but a going ‘beyond the Law’ for sinthome participates
in the ambivalence between the Real (skin-ego) and Imaginary (body-ego). This shift
is to ‘productive desire’—to the drives in Lacanian terms. Such a de-hystericized
subject is ‘free,’ but at the same instance subject to a ‘death drive,’ continually at
risk, since there is less symbolic support, but more urgently, an artist is subject to
the body of the drives, as the non-subjectivized acephalic ‘force,’ which demands’
intense satisfaction. It is what is ‘in the subject more than itself,’ an ‘alien’ apersonal
‘other thought’ that cannot be subjectivated—a spiritual automaton. Lacan banks
that this drive can be sublimated through art or religion. Throughout Slavoj Žižek’s
writings, this becomes the figure of the living-dead zombie (updated latter to the
Terminator) who never stops its forward pursuit—the demand of the drive (Trieb). In
Deleuzian41 terms, this is the “mummy figure” of “free indirect discourse,” seemingly
disconnected from any particular speaker point of view, which then becomes “free
indirect vision” or machinic vision of cinema acting on the nervous system that
awakens the “spiritual automaton” (the mummy) in us through vibrations and
affects, rather than representations. In either case, below we argue that this “spiritual
automaton” that “produces a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the
cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly” is none other than the body
of affect (jouissance), which has become exposed through technological means. The
image world is the brain world of the spiritual automaton: “The brain as the screen,”
as Deleuze summarizes it, can no longer be sustained in digitalized technologies
as the body of the drives becomes ‘exposed’ through these very technologies. The
body’s energies are harnessed and codified and decodified as a subject-in-affect,42
thus made perceptible especially through the performances of Stelarc, to generate
new posthuman potentialities.
The subject of the signifier is supplanted by the subject of jouissance in the late
Lacan (see Fink, 1996) bringing him in dialogue with Deleuze|Guattari.43 The subject
becomes its own ‘cause’ by being faithful to his or her sinthome summarized by
Žižek’s44 pithy remark “enjoy your symptom!” By ‘identifying’ with their ex-istent
sinthome, the artists discussed are productively driven each generating a singular
affective diagram; this is ‘necessarily’ political in the sense that the Symbolic is
resisted and transgressed, and as such their ethico-political stance can be debated in
the way their sinthome addresses the unthought.45
Inter-mission
I: The Affective Turn, or Getting under the Skin-Nerves
The skin is faster than the word (Massumi, 2002, 25).

The “affective turn” has been announced,46 but what exactly is it? Basically, it is
an exploration of an ‘implicit’ body. It is worth the risk to claim that affect can be
at times synonymous with jouissance, libidinal energy and zoë (as opposed to bios
which is already under the level of the signifier) depending on the discourse one
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finds oneself in. Brian Massumi47 presents perhaps the best account throughout his
Parables of the Virtual, which has become a ground-breaking book for this question.
It is the very autonomy of affect, as the title of the seminal chapter48 explores, which
is at issue; the significance of the approximately 0.3 seconds of temporality that
neuroscience informs us the body takes to process the sensory information it has
received through the skin’s surface. The shock is that the body ‘knows’ before
there is an active response. The brain and the skin resonate with one another at an
unconscious level, which is not under our control. The will, and consciousness in this
scenario are after the fact events, subtractive functions that reduce the potentially
overwhelming complexity of sensory stimulation. The emergence of mind as
conscious reflection acting on what the body has already ‘infolded’ follows. This
realm opens the Deleuzian door for Massumi to refer to it as a virtual unconscious
domain of stored potentiality, haunted as it were, by the Bergsonian development of
memory, which is also without ‘location’ but impacts precisely within this virtual
interval as well. It is a paradoxical realm where opposites co-exist (as a disjunctive
synthesis), can coalesce and hence connect. Such a description addresses Deleuze’s
explorations of the ‘logic of sense’ that are consistent with Freud’s own claims that
the unconscious knows no negation, and that the primary (instinctual) processes
have a temporality of their own.49
Massumi’s ‘definition’ is that affect is an incipient force of intensity; drawing
on complexity theory, affect in this discourse becomes the point when a structure
dissipates, transforms after one potential is actualized or expressed from a multiplicity
of potentialities. In Lacanian terms, we can call this an exchange of the three psychic
orders coming together in particular complex forms of organization. Why not?
Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s50 influential theory of (collective) individuation,
Massumi articulates affect as essentially the intertwining of “implicit” and “explicit”
forms—this follows the Deleuzian virtual|actual intra-relation or David Bohm’s51
“implicate” and “explicate” orders. The potentiality of the implicit body (virtually
infolded interactions that are in-tension) is then actualized (unfolded) as expression.
We can only grasp affect in its actualization—its virtual potential is obviously
unconscious to us. Hence, such an expression marks the functional limitation of its
potential. Affect is autonomous to the extent it participates in the virtual and to the
degree that it escapes confinement, necessary for any organism to ‘live.’ Troubling,
is when complexity theory becomes its own form of instrumentalism, swallowing
up homo sapiens as simply the most complex organisms within an assemblage—this
leads to the difficult road of bio-ethics.52
It is possible now to switch gears and ground what is difficult theory as offered
by Simondon and Massumi, amongst others, concerning affect to eventually position
Stelarc’s singular diagram in relation to his own sinthome—as to what ‘drives’
his unthought. One way to do this is to identify the ‘missing virtual temporality’
(0.3 sec) with the present ‘now’ that belongs to an implicit body—the body schema,
which is different but integrated with the more common body image.53 While often
confused with the body image, the former belongs to the non-representational
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implicit body, while the latter is the explicit body at the level of representation.
Both, obviously are complexly inter and intra-related. Placed in Lacanian terms, we
are simply referring to the Real and the Imaginary respectively. The body schema
involves system of motor capacities, abilities and habits that enable movement
and the maintenance of posture. All these are non-conscious processes affected by
memory. The body schema is not a perception, a belief, or an attitude, but a system
of motor and postural functions that operate below the level of self-referentiality, as
preconscious, subpersonal processes carried out tacitly as keyed to the environment.
It is machinic in its functionality.
This body scheme—the phenomenal body54 that is aligned with proprioception—
when grasped as being in(formed) by the skin-ego, as worked out by Didier Andieu
and Esther Bick,55 opens up more interesting speculation. Freud’s56 well-known
assertion—“The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface
entity, but itself the projection of a surface,”—can be interpreted along two lines:
as surface and as projection—non-representationally and representationally offering
interesting meditations on topological figures. To read Andieu’s skin-ego as surface,
non-representationally, is to recognize an emerging psyche of the implicit body—the
body of the affective drives—that are forming an emerging sense of a core self.57
The body-ego is a latter development, coming with the spectacularization of the ‘I’,
the sense of the “self versus the Other,” as Stern58 puts it, an ‘alienating moment’ in
the infant’s development that is overcome as it moves towards a social ‘I’ with the
acquisition of language—the self with the Other. As such there is an interval, frission,
or écart, between the skin-ego and body-ego, between the dermis and the epidermis,
between the passage from a less fragmenting to a more unified body image. Skin-ego
(implicit body) and the body-ego (explicit body) are therefore non-identical. A gap
separates them, which may well be identified as ‘alienation.’59 This explanation is not
far of from the Deleuze|Guattarian account of ontogenesis where from the plane of
immanence, the originary chaos, emerges the virtuality of the plane of consistency
from which actualization can take place. We have here a three-stage process.
While all three psychic registers are now in place: Real (skin-ego), [or virtual
Real], Imaginary (body-ego) and Symbolic (Super-ego), the point to be made here
is that Lacan’s ‘body in pieces’ is misplaced, or arrives too late on the scene. An
affective-sensate core self emerges before the famous mirror stage, which already
begins to ‘gather up’ and organize the ‘pieces’ through the skin. There are immanent
ontogenetic forces of nonorganic life (not pertaining to the organs as a formed entity),
a form of spirituality (vital effects) at ‘play’ at this level. Deleuze|Guattari’s BwO
is the dis-organized body—the ground zero of chaos, difference, duration as living
matter with its genetic ‘programs’ in play. The BwO (body in pieces) is continually
being reconstructed by the ‘miracle’ of forces we have no knowledge about. The
interval between BwO and the core self will always remain indeterminate. It would
be like asking when does the fetus become ‘human.’ The disorganization of the BwO
is the Real psychic order —it is the “limit of the lived body,”60 it can’t be reached
nor attained.
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Both Adieu and Bick maintain that the primordial skin touching skin (namely
the baby with nipple in its mouth and being held during the processes of feeding)
introjects a (non-representational) sensible being. In the primal mode of passivity
the infant experiences skin from the ‘inside’—as a space within itself, and from the
‘outside’ by introjecting the skin as its boundary. The skin-ego (what Stern would
call a core self and Deleuze|Guattari the virtual) leans on biological functions. The
‘sensate body’ of the core ego forms as it begins to grasp parts of the body-surface
through the skin as it is slowly built up—non-representationally since there is no
stable referent.61 This process of development undergoes repeated disintegration
and transformation as RIG modalities are formulated and memories are encoded
throughout the body proper. If the phenomenal body is the body of affect, it is also
the body of distributed libidinal sexuality, and it is also the BwO as an egg-formation
as Deleuze|Guattari62 put it, “where organs are distinguished solely by gradients,
migrations, zones of proximity.” In this sense Anzieu and Bick’s skin-ego should be
grasped as the originary (non-representation) container (the ‘outside’ of Deleuze’s
egg), acting as an envelope for the formation of vitality affects and as a protective
shield against over stimulation. It fulfills a function of maintaining the (core)
psyche—an emerging subjective ‘me’ which will eventually differentiate itself from
its environment to some degree depending on the milieu it finds itself in.63
It is this affective-schematic-phenomenal-autonomic body, the core self that is
the site of the affective turn; for this body enveloped by the skin ego has its own
non-representation imaging potentials that become coded and decoded through
digitalized technologies. As such, it lends itself to technological exteriorization
because of this potential, what Stiegler64 calls the “epiphylogenic” evolution of the
human which starts as far back with the eolithic tools used by the Australopithecines,
the prosthetics of technics. Art is one such techne. With this background we can
now turn to Stelarc, a performative artist who explores the implicit body by coding,
encoding and decoding it.
Stelarc: Flesh Games in the Virtual Real
Our actions and ideas are essentially determined by our physiology.

(Stelarc65 1998, 117)
Hopefully, we are now in a position to say something about Stelarc and then end
this section of how a great deal of contemporary art (new media) interacts with
such affective embodiment—Stelarc being the extreme case. It could be said, in
a skewed sort of way, to grasp Stelarc as a diagrammatic figure is to envision him
as a three-dimensional figure painted by Francis Bacon, who is equally convulsed
and tortured by inner forces, only here those forces have been harnessed through
the prosthetics of technology within a synoptic assemblage. Stelarc’s diagram
opens up the implicit body, to the ‘ecstasies of chaos’ – the forces that deform
it, producing disjunctions and breaks in the normal functioning of his organs.
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The psyche of the skin-ego undergoes exteriorization. ‘It’ comes out of its protective
inner envelope, so to speak. Merleau-Ponty’s66 “flesh” is made “flesh” through his
machinic projections. No wonder life ‘without a head’—the zombie or mummy—
fascinates him. To paraphrase Stelarc,67 “a corpse can now be indefinitely preserved,
while a comatose body can be put on life support system. Further, a body can be
cryogenetically preserved waiting re-animation. It is possible to engineer new kinds
of chimeric architecture in vitro and grow tissues and insert stem cell in vivo.” For
Stelarc the cadaver, the comatose body and the chimeric body are the new tropes for
his performances where biotechnology and nanotechnology come together. This is
his current bio-art work, which we briefly discuss below.68
In many respects Stelarc’s interest in the plastinated body and the role of technology
as a body prosthesis comes dangerously close to becoming the poster boy for designer
capitalism, the apotheosis of technological instrumentalism. Massumi69 identifies
an “operative reason” working throughout his oeuvre. “Stelarc applies instrumental
reason—careful, calculated, medically-assisted procedure—to the body [face], taken
as an object, in order to extend intelligence into space, by means of suspension.”70
What saves Stelarc is the utter ‘uselessness’ of his prosthetic extensions and a
failure of instrumental reason as such. Their cyborgian extraterrestrial possibilities
seem remote, although the monstrosity of their possibility is not foreclosed. The
ambivalency of accusations of narcissism71 and phallic jouissance, we believe rest
on just this tragicomic failure of what are new and unprecedented creations. As such
the promise of inventing a “people to come” (in the Deleuzian72 sense of a “minor
practice”) encompasses all the cyborgian fantasies that are pelted at him by his
critics.
Stelarc has been performing since the mid-70s. The literature by him and about
him and his performances is overwhelming. We focus on a series of ‘phases’ of his
work to show an affective diagram that is shaped by a Real sinthome. By this we
mean, Stelarc’s performances are keyed to the body of the drives—the sensate body
of the mute skin-ego; there is no lack—only a drive for jouissance. As Massumi73
puts it, Stelarc’s work “is desire without an object … desire as process.” There seems
to be a complete exposure of the skin-ego, which undergoes various intensifications
through prostheticization in each phase—as such the charges by some critics of
primary narcissism appears to hold.74 It is appropriate to say virtual Real once more,
since it is the sensations of this body that are being ‘imaged’ through technological
means. The consistency of the bodily Imaginary is disrupted, more accurately—this
disruption is through a confrontation with the body schema. The Symbolic order, on
the other hand, is shown to be limited. The human body is “obsolete” he claims. “The
hollow body would be a better host for technological components.”75 In an artistic
statement from 1988 he writes: “What is important is the body as an object, not a
subject—not being a particular someone but rather becoming something else.”76
His name, ‘Stelarc,’ an obvious pseudonym, stands in and fills the Symbolic’s
lack through his prosthetically and biologically enhanced body. He has no need of
the Symbolic in this sense. In Lacanian terms, Stelarc presents phallic jouissance
130
where enjoyment is transgressively stolen from the Other—the Ideal ego that is
(in this case) taken to be deficient. Stelarc has no interest in the representational
body caught by gender, transsexuality, personality, the psyche, and any forms of
transcendentalism or metaphysics that shape other dimensions of contemporary art.
Nor are his prosthetics understood as forms of substitution—as replacement parts
or organs for an (already) organized body, rather prosthetics are extensions that tap
into the ‘pure potential’ (virtuality) of the body.77 This is what is sought. It is in the
exploration of the body in its 0.30 processing interval that intrigues him.78
Diagrammatic Phases
Brian Massumi, a fellow countryman of Stelarc’s, whose widely disseminated

commentary on him, “The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason,”79 we draw on to make
our case, calls his body medium the exploration of a “sensible concept.” Stelarc’s
attempt is to show how the implicit body thinks. The series of phases of Stelarc’s
work takes, forms a diagram that develops from his Skin Suspension series, (16
suspensions in all that take a full eleven years to ‘resolve’), through to a ‘prosthetic’
phase, which then moves into a ‘cyborg’ phase and lastly to bioart. The trajectory
moves rhizomatically and through an ‘involution,’ that is to say, there is a certain
exhaustion in the skin suspension problematic and a new phase emerges.
The first phase of the diagram consisted in his body (skin) suspensions. These
required no audience, nor did any sort of notices, manifestos or written explanations
accompany them: the imaginary (audience) and the usual social (signifiers) were
’suspended;’ they fell out of importance. Suspending the body with hooks through
the skin, in mid-air, was carefully and instrumentally thought out. By defying
gravity, the body was rendered ‘useless,’ non-functional. Suspension now takes on
another meaning, for the body becomes dysfunctional, unable to move and extend
itself. What is being suspended then is “embodied human possibility.”80 Such a
problematic—the object-body as a limit state in space—presents itself as a serial
unfolding, each performance leading into the next. Why these suspensions can be
considered to be in the virtual Real is because there is an impossible ‘stilling’ of the
body within a present moment of time (0.3 sec.) that is continuously being filled with
jouissance (pure sensation), pure potentiality, or multiplicity. There is no ‘future’ (no
action for this body), only a serialization of past (equally but singularly different)
body suspensions.81 Stelarc overlays or supplements the early inductive, more self-
contained, suspensions by having the sensate body begin to ‘express’ itself through
technology. The implicit body becomes a transducer, at first his body converting
the invisible gravity into the visible pattern as ripples and hills of his hook-stretched
skin, which subsequently called a “gravitational landscape.” The force of gravity on
his body eventually began to be transduced by the sounds of his inner body—the
rush of his blood and the beating of his heart. The body now also becomes “sonic
architecture” as sound filled the room where the suspension took pace. This ends the
first phase.82
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Phase two can be covered under the signifier: prosthesis. Massumi83 identifies
this phase as “the sensible concept as extension.” The prosthetic projects like Bug
Goggles, the Third Hand, Extended Arm, and Exoskeleton belong to it. The turn
to prosthetics here has nothing to do with the ‘natural’ body lacking, or the usual
understanding of replacing body parts and organs, but raising the question of evolution
itself. We have always been prosthetic creatures through the technologies of our own
invention: to the degree that the body itself is a prosthetic (composed of matter) and
open to a symbiotic relation to things, it becomes modifiable. This phase is extended
when the formerly passive audience begins to be let into his performances, a shift
to “the sensible concept as contagion.”84 Beginning with Fractal Flesh, Split Body:
Voltage-In/Voltage Out, Stelarc succeeds in the intense transfer of the body as a
‘sensible concept’ through contagion to his audience through an elaborate computer
relay system that controlled his left-side movements, while he remained in control of
his robotic right arm, staging an elaborate entwinement of human will and machinc
control.85 The body’s inner flows were audibly transducted as well. ‘Contagion’
suggests that his performance infected the audience, penetrated them at the neuronal
level. It didn’t necessarily matter under what signifier(s) any one body was identified
by: Black, White, Male, Female, Hetero, Queer and so on. These performances were
intense enough for penetration to have happened at the embodied sensual levels,
shocking them, as it were.
Stelarc emerges at the end of this second phase as a ‘split’ body (rather than
a Lacanian ‘split’ self). He now moved into an extended phase. Such projects as
PingBody, Parasite, and Movatar have network participation through a remote global
audience. They manipulate his ‘split body’ via the Internet bringing the audience
into a loop where they see visually the dance of his body to the data that is running
through it. The force of information in and on his body is, once again transduced,
expressed through visual feedback loops and sounds as it moves, caught between the
‘will’ of the audience and his own ‘will.’ Massumi refers to this phase as evolution.
This, of course, raises the specter of Stelarc’s sinthome, that which drives his artistic
process, which raises the unthought of his work. Paradoxically, Massumi86 theorizes
Stelarc’s technological ‘uselessness’ as performing the “conditions of evolution,” not
evolution itself. For Deleuze|Guattari, it is the intensity of involution, the creative
turbulence at the molecular level that produces the inexplicable gaps over limitless
time. Stelarc projects a “postevolutionary evolution of the human,”87 says Massumi,
meaning that Stelarc’s conditions of evolution are the potentialities that have yet to
be actualized in the next phase of our species—the posthuman.
The same might be set with the current phase of his work—Extra Ear: Ear
on Armproject (2006-2007), Walking Head Robot (2006), Blender (2005, with
Nina Sellars). We might extend Massumi and call it the “sensible concept of
postevolution”—now further explored as bioart, which was already nascent in
the previous phase, as is the case with each phase: the infolding and unfoldings
of the performances. “All of the phases and events are present, potentially and
differentially in each other.”88 The Extra Ear is no longer a receiving organ but
132
a transmitting organ; like Telepolis, the Ear will wirelessly transmit sounds to the
Internet becoming a remote listening device (a microphone will eventually be
implanted in the arm at the site of the Ear). The Partial Head (inspired from the
Prosthetic Head, 2003) is generated from the “image of the flattened digitalized
skin that had been made for the Prosthetic Head.”89 Stelarc face was scanned along
with a hominid skull. Stelarc’s human face becomes digitally transplanted over this
skull with thermal plastic, over which are seeded living cells, thereby a third face is
constructed. This Partial Head, which Stelarc names post-humanoid and pre-human
in form, was incubated in a life-support system but became contaminated within a
week and ended up being preserved in formaldehyde.90 I end here.
Stelarc’s performative output raises questions that surround bioethics through
the ‘postevolutionary’ question concerning the ‘death’ of his Third Face. It once
more raises the impossible question of just where life begins and ends, and who is
responsible if the ‘human’ is swallowed up entirely in a machinic assemblage of
biocyberneticism.91 Tapping into the implicit body—the body ‘under the skin’—via
technology has become a line of flight in contemporary art where the gallery visitor
interacts with the computerized environments that are engineered to be explored.
The most interesting artists obviously explore the implicit body in unique ways.92
But few, if any, raise the bar of ethico-political problematic of AI., technology, and
bioart as does Stelarc.
Inter-mission II: Body-Ego
Brain and skin form a resonating vessel.

(Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 29)
Stelarc’s movement toward bioart, especially his Partial Head project is a good
segue into Orlan. Like Stelarc her performance career is equally long, equally
controversial and equally dramatic and traumatic—crazy. She is best known for her
surgical performances. However, an intermission of sorts is required before engaging
fully with Orlan. To keep with our explorative thesis, Orlan works on the border
between the skin-ego and body-ego; she works the gap between them, foregrounding
the Imaginary psychic register. This requires some explanation since we depart from
the usual understanding of this development in the psychoanalytic literature.
The shift to the body-ego of representation is famously developed by Lacan’ s
mirror stage,93 but there is a concern here raised by the moment of ‘alienation,’ what
Daniel Stern, mentioned earlier, called Self versus Other. This moment of alienation
Lacan persists as being paranoid whereas the phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty94
interpreted the moment of alienation in the mirror as being much less dramatic,
explaining that the spectacular image of the self brings about a more complex self-
relation. Indeed, it is here that emphatic sympathy95 becomes possible through such
identity-at-a-distance, a being-with the Other that begins to emerge. We might here
speculate that the vital animism of object oriented ontology (OOO), referred to in
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chapter 1, has some play, since is at this moment that the world for the child is
‘becoming’ alive with the world. Some have referred to this as the archetype of a
‘magical child’ where vacuum cleaners are alive and so on. The doubling of the
self in the mirror does not lose sight of the implicit (interoceptive) body. There
has to be a spatial extension of the body’s primarily tactility, entering into a space
of intercorporeality with others.96 Whereas the earlier Lacan made much of the
méconnaissance of the mirror stage, things began to change in Seminar XI and even
more so in his late period of the sinthome.
In Seminar XI,97 the mirror stage, a simple representational assemblage, is replaced
by an image-screen, in that rare occasion where Lacan deconstructs the spatiality
of the Imaginary look with that of the contingent Real gaze. These diagrams have
had wide discussion and continue to have broad implications. Kaja Silverman,98
who is certainly one of the foremost inventive and unorthodox Lacanians, a free
thinker who has the uncanny ability to open up Lacan in ways not thought possible,
in her The Threshold of the Invisible World, was quite aware of tension between
the implicit and explicit bodies. In the early chapters she discusses the work of
Viennese neurologist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder and French psychoanalyst
Henri Wallon; both psychoanalysts explored the “sensational” or “proprioceptive”
ego in the mid 1930s. Identifying the alienating moment of transition into the
specular self, Silverman writes, “Wallon’s account of the mirror stage indicates
that the proprioceptive ego is always initially disjunctive with the visual image,
and that a unified bodily ego comes into existence only as the result of a laborious
stitching together of disparate parts.”99 Further, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The visual
makes possible a kind of schism between the immediate me and the me that can be
seen in the mirror.”100 The ‘me’ is therefore a product of the imaginary interval that
exists between the skin-ego and the body-ego, or what is the same equivalence,
between the implicit and explicit bodies. Silverman101 continues to develop what she
calls “the self-same body.” Why does a stubborn and persistent ‘me,’ a somewhat
‘coherent’ ego seem to persist over the duration of chronicle time? This self-
sameness persists to the degree that the sensate body (skin-ego) remains aligned with
the imaginary ego (body-ego) that is itself conditioned by the larger symbolic visual
regime. There is a confirmation of the ‘me’ (the ego-ideal in Lacanian terms) at the
level of the sensate body. Alienation (in the extreme—paranoia) is kept at bay to
the extent the gap between being-for-others and being-for-oneself is smoothed over
or collapsed. The in-tensions of all three psychic layers are in play, continuously
in the interval of becoming. On Deleuzian terms, it requires an event for the
fracture of the self to result and the unthought to emerge. The Outside opens up, so
to speak.
The disjunction between implicit and explicit bodies is therefore an ‘originary’
schism, gap or interval at the heart of being, a split between the touch and vision.
This, puts a different ‘spin’ on the meaning or interpretation of the Lacanian ‘split’
subject ($), for it is precisely in this interval that ‘identity’ is contested through
familiarity and estrangement that has occupied the academic world. The ‘transitivity’
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of identity as the exchanges between being-for-others (an outside-in view) and a

projection (inside-out view) towards the Other in relation to how the corporeal ego is
maintained, sets up the difficulties of identity politics that surround race, sex, gender
and so on since this way of theorizing rests on the difference/same distinction that
grounds representation.
This originary disjunctive relation between the visual imago and the sensational
body becomes more evident when the mirror is substituted for the screen. It is well
known that Lacan had the camera in mind when developing his look/gaze distinction102
and Silverman103 makes the most of the screen becoming shaped by the apparatus
of the camera. Put another way, the screen is a visual regime (as theorized by the
many writings of Jacques Rancière104), that exceeds any one individual, a differential
array of specularized, socially accepted images available for identification as the
ephemeral gaze is socially and culturally ‘materialized.’ This visual regime is media
managed. However, the camera as a machinic assemblage is no longer entirely
adequate to grasp the images that are being offered for identification. Lacan was
thinking about the radio and the camera for the voice and the gaze as objet a. When
it came to television, he was already somewhat ‘too late’ to begin to re-theorize his
earlier work. The digitalization of the image and the synoptic assemblage changes
things considerably as has been argued. The screen as a ‘visual regime’ managed by
designer capitalism through synoptic assemblages asserts a force on the sensate body
to conform. Individuals cannot simply choose how they are “seen.” Especially crucial
here is the computer video imaging that projects idealized faces and bodies. When it
comes to cosmetic surgeries the images that are projected are hyper-idealized, how
one will look with computer-generated alterations.105 Once again, here we have an
array of possibilities (and not potentialities) to choose from, an instrumentalization
and colonization of the Imaginary, which does indeed augment and extend the shape
of body and face, so much so that in some postfeminist circles this is perceived to be
sources of empowerment and choice.106 Orlan on the other hand, as it will be shown,
is interested in the potentialities of surgery. “I show surgical gestures that have never
been executed, plastic results that have never been envisioned.”107 Hers is a creative
invention.
There can be a collective struggle to change the existing visual regime. Or, at
the individual level, an attempt may be made at a masquerade (as a number of
feminists beginning with Joan Riviere108 have tried), to ‘pass,’ or to go ‘undercover’
and substitute another image for the one through which they are conventionally
framed by, or to enact a performative citationality (as in influential writings of Judith
Butler109) so as to begin to deform and skew the existing hegemony of managing
differences. This last option unfortunately has not proven to be a strong one. As
Claudia Benthien110 reminds readers in her book Skin, “The body is not only a
cultural sign but also an entity with sensation and perception. We must therefore
preserve a tension between cultural construction and prelinguistic aisthesis (sense
perception) to avoid reducing the skin from the outset to a projection surface and the
bearer of signs.”
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CHAPTER IV
Orlan: Skin Games of the Virtual Imaginary
You’ve got to make yourself a skin out of art.

(Orlan, in O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 146)
Hopefully, we are now in a position to say something of Orlan in relation to what

has been developed above. Orlan offers perhaps the most radical intervention into
the visual regime of the screen by bringing her audience to a threshold of the Real
and the Imaginary psychic registers. Her work is about feminine jouissance,111
that ‘other’ jouissance beyond the phallus that is denied women in patriarchal
orders. Her performative surgical operations penetrate directly into the embodied
skin-ego, making it lose its protective envelope, exposing the nerves to the point
that some audience members faint, or nearly faint, others close their eyes, but the
carnivalesque staging of the operating theatre (surgeons wearing colorful robes,
Orlan conscious, reading text, outrageously dressed, holding a pitchfork in one
operation, an advertisement banner was hung in another, and so on) is meant to keep
the audience looking. The use of cybernetic and biomedical technologies, video
recordings, and satellite relays that take place during her Carn(iv)al Art procedures
convert her organic flesh into transmittable digital representations. She even uses
e-mails to help create numerical images. These videotaped surgical performances
are simultaneously sent out as video streaming through the Internet and are received
in galleries simultaneous around the globe. Her carnal body not only becomes
digitalized but also mapped and cut by the surgeon’s scalpel along the lines of her
own choosing. While it is Orlan who performs it would be impossible without the
assemblage she is embedded in.
“This is my body … this is my software,” she says,112 which can take on
a multiple of meaning. The perceiving of video time—the time of slow motion,
freeze-framing, and repetition simply, does not hold here. The real-time immediacy
of video however is in full force. Whereas Deleuze identified the time-image113 as
making a fundamental break with the sensorimotor logic of the movement-image,
here we have video footage whose intensity overwhelms the viewer’s sensorimotor
embodiment. The surgical performances presented and documented in real time,
‘force’ the audience to dwell on the interval opened up by the ‘informe’ of her
body, yet somewhat barely contained by the Imaginary screen of the video and her
theatrics. It is especially the extreme close-ups of her face being ‘lifted’ in several
of her surgical performances, exposing the viscera beneath that creates an entirely
new affection image, an image that cannot just be contained by thought or the brain
as (again) Deleuze maintained.114 Her identity ‘disappears,’ performing just the
opposite of what a close-up is supposed to do —reveal the ‘truth’ of identity.115 If
the gaze is male or medical, it fails miserably here. Few can enjoy this spectacle as
a voyeur. The viewer-participants embodied physiological response time is arrested
within that very interval, making the lifted face tortuous to look at as affect builds
up and often leads to fainting.116 Orlan, the artist, being made numb by an anesthetic
136
injection—the skin’s feeling sensors have been effectively shut down—is now able
to ‘deliver’ the full force of her performance. The unbearable images are transferred
directly over to the viewer-participant via the video screen as the full force of affect
hits, numbing the viewer to the potential point of unconsciousness, as if being hit by
a ‘ray-affect’ gun.
Flayed, and yet animate, Orlan, lying on the operating table in the theatre of her
own creation is not the living dead—the zombie or mummy. Quite the opposite,
she is paradoxically death living—a resistant anti-specimen exposing its ‘innards.’
Although her bloodied subcutaneous layers beneath the skin, signifying the organic
and the immanence of death, are on display, she remains quite conscious throughout
the operation, giving direction, reciting text from a Lacanian psychoanalyst,
responding to the audience and so on. She exposes the one image that has been
taboo, repressed throughout the history of western art—the body of the flayed
woman. Claudia Benthien’s explorations on the history of skin make this taboo very
explicit.117 Such an abject image immediately collapses any masculine fantasies of
desire at the level of the Imaginary. As Benthien further shows, the historical shift
over the past two centuries, the model of the skin as a garment (subject is the skin)
was eventually replaced by skin as a house (the Enlightenment view). Orlan makes
explicit that her skin is a ‘garment,’ and thus she (intentionally) reaches back to the
Medieval Age (the world of Rabelais as explored by Bakhtin118) to position her body
within the Judeo-Christian tradition that she continually transgresses. Her personas
of Black and White Virgin in performances prior to these surgical operations point
to the witch and seductress—women denied their jouissance within the Judeo-
Christian tradition. “The laugh of Medusa,” Hélène Cixous119 widely discussed essay
applies to Orlan’s seemingly sadistic humor in the way she treats her audience.120 It
is no surprise that she became Saint Orlan in 1971, given the close ties between
religious ecstasy and eroticism, as well as horror and violence.121 It was in the early
‘70s that Luce Irigaray and Lacan had a falling out over sexual difference, Lacan’s
interpretation of Saint Teresa in S XX, Encore being one point of contention. Orlan
was drawn at that time to feminine écriture.
Orlan places herself in the very unknowable interval that forms the question
of identity, between touch and vision, between core self and what will become
the social self that she continually tries to escape from being ‘named.’ It is a
form of self-alienation,122 through the frame that forms the screen of her surgical
performative operations, if it can be put that way. Her “transsexual from woman to
woman” is the making of a different bWo123 that does not yet exist—that promises
of “a people yet to come;” where the jouissance of monsters and mutants as queer
folk124 constitute an impossible ‘continuum’ of n-sexes—“becoming-woman” in
Deleuze|Guattari’s125 terms—who are now allowed their desire. Or, to put it another
way: queer becomes the vanishing point of complete desexualization—the zero
ground of sexualization—the becoming of imperceptibility.126 As a schizoid, Orlan’s
sinthome, to push potentialities here, is therefore a queer one.127 By this we mean her
‘sinthomatic ex-istence’ is located in the virtual Imaginary, in the multiplicities of
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virtual identities that co-exist in a continuum of intensities rather than differentiated

within a same/difference binary, some of these potential identities she has actualized
into monstrous proportions to disturb the visual regime. By keeping the interval open
between the implicit and explicit body through the surgical procedures, Orlan is in
a state of perpetual ‘becoming’ someone else in appearance. In this sense, the skin-
garment can also be seen as a changeable costume.128 Her core ego remains quite ‘in-
tact’ as she believes she has a ‘soul.’ Like Stelarc, Orlan is not a family name. Both
deliberately create proper names that break with Oedipalization. She named herself
Orlan at the age of 15, referring to the synthetic fiber Orlon.129 This already suggests
an early transgressive stance toward Symbolic authority, which is more obvious
directed to Judeo-Christian and patriarchal structures in her performances.130
Like Stelarc, whose body is ‘split’ through technology, electrodes wired into his
proprioceptive body, Orlan is ‘split’ as well—on sex/gendered lines. Her skin-ego,
after all is that of a female. She talks about not having any control over this ‘body’:
the breasts and pubic hair developing in puberty and her experience of motherhood
itself.131 This ‘split’ body was performed as The White Madonna, with her one bare
breast exposed from her surrounding garment, ready to feed the infant Jesus. The
body-ego, on the other hand, the visual Imaginary she can control is that of the
Black Virgin—the whore, explored in an early promiscuous performances like The
Kiss of the Artist,132 in 1976 that led to her being suspended from her teaching post.
Eventually, this whore, as the performing figure is surgically transformed into a
“saint:” The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. Ironically, the saint, as the late Lacan
argued in Television, has no use for the Symbolic Order.133 The symbolic is unable to
‘use’ him or her economically. The saint becomes the ‘subject of the unconscious,’ as
the cause of the subject’s own desire. The “Reincarnation” series clearly shows the
importance of temporality in her work, the recall of art history where she draws from
idealized female portraiture to construct her face, and the serialization that works
on ‘exhausting’ the problem by generating her bodily jouissance. In many respects
Orlan has not followed the advice of Deleuze|Guattari to make a BwO. “You don’t
do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file” they say (TP, 160). The file has
certainly been the scalpel but she has used a sledgehammer as well when necessary
to gain attention.
It seems to us Orlan performs her body utilizing the synoptic assemblage to
avoid representational capture by the powerful Judeo-Christian and patriarchal
symbolic discourses by taking charge of her own body, but never entirely escaping
them. Early in her career, she became infamous for her promiscuity as an artist, and
then eventually glamorous in her monstrosity. Orlan’s diagram can be identified
in two phases as we see it, based on this rather harsh claim.134 She moves from a
hysteric (first phase) to a ‘saint’ (second phase) to a ‘schizze’ (third phase). The
earliest phase (1967-1977) begins through a self-baptism in 1971 when she becomes
Saint Orlan.135 She moves through a series of body performances that play with the
Madonna figure (Occasional Strip-Tease (1974-76), artist as prostitute performance
(Kisses of the Artist, 1971, see footnote 120), Art and Prostitution Exhibition (1977),
138
Naked/with-out Hair (1978), MesuRAGEs (1972-83), The Draping, The Baroque

(1979 -1980), and her White/Back Virgin Series (1983). This period may well better
be served by the psychic formation of the hysteric since she is really not her ‘own
cause,’ but remains more in the position of a tease who rejects the symbolic Judeo-
Christian-patriarchal order and ironically plays with it.
The transition into the next phase takes place in 1983 when the Lacanian
psychoanalyst, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni published Le Robe (a metaphor for skin)
and Orlan appeared within the pages of its text. It became a defining text during
her operations. She then went to India and studied the cult of Kali, returning to
exploit the use of her name through bogus film posters and billboards. In 1990, she
began her well-known surgical performances, haunted (perhaps) by the memory and
documentation she did of a prior surgical experience in 1978 when she was operated
on for extrauterine pregnancy. This began a new phase under the knife where she
now becomes her own ‘cause,’ identifying fully with her sinthome. The affective
diagram changes—it moves up in intensity. This now becomes carnal art as opposed
to body art,136 a distinction she makes in her manifesto. Baptized earlier as a Saint
she now begins her series of performances as, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan
(1990 onwards – 9 surgical performances), interrupted by Omnipresence: the second
mouth (1993) and a series of digital self-portraits referred to as Refiguration/Self-
Hybridation (1998-1999) that will be discussed below.
Orlan’s last phase has moved into biotechnologies, an extension of the Self-
hybridization series. Here the influence of Deleuze is felt. She has become a
schizzie. Like Stelarc, she too sees the body as being ‘obsolete’ and genetically
malleable. As she explains the future of this work “involves deliberate détournement
(misappropriation or subversion).”137 She intends to take cells from her “skin and
dermis and hybridize them with skin and dermis cells from black people.”138 The
project called Lieu unique (Unique Site) is only hypothetical since growing such
skin is difficult to do. However a lab is available for her by an Australian artist cell
known as SymbioticA. The trajectory is to grasp difference very much in keeping
with a Deleuzian thought. Lastly, there is also her exploration of what might be
referred as the ‘traces’ of a work of art. Here she develops ‘fake’ posters for a film
she has never made nor acted in (although David Cronenberg once promised her a
leading role that never materialized, as yet), as well as faking a television broadcast
by structuring people and events to claim that it had indeed taken place. These are,
again, ironic forays against designer capitalism.
Orlan as Probe Head
Faciality, as argued by Deleuze|Guattari139 is the site of capitalism, historically

established through such famous ‘faces’ as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Facial
forms in designer capitalism have obviously taken on a hyper-idealized look through
digitalization, but even more so through plastic surgical upgrading— a ubiquitous
practice in the star and celebrity business. The play between veil and mask,140 the
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former a metaphor for the skin, which then hides and reveals identity as played out
in heteronormative relationships. The later can also be a ‘type’ of veil in the sense it
conceals another identity beneath it, but hides it more completely than a veil, making
identity more impenetrable (masks that range from being just around the eyes to
the burka, for example). Both present different transgressive strategies (as does the
masquerade, which may have applied to Orlan’s earlier phase than her latter one).
The veil however remains trapped within the (patriarchal) law more so than the
mask. It is trapped by desire.141 Yet, Orlan’s Sain suaire number 9 (Holy Shroud No.
9), a photographic transfer of Orlan’s face onto a blood soaked gauze (a derivative
of a shroud of Turin), while disturbing the Judeo-Christian tradition, also raises the
question: “Can the veil be deconstructed and simply become a facial surface?” Such
a veil also offers no desire hiding beneath it. However, it is Orlan’s face as mask that
disturbs the Law much more effectively. Dawning any mask, already suggests evil,
being up to no good by hiding from the Law. Surgically implanting protrusions on
each side of the forehead certainly begins her transformation toward monstrosity, but
such monstrosity ends up meeting those whose beauty operations or enhancements
have gone terribly wrong; who themselves like Donatella Versace, must live with
the body’s own rejection of implants and improper healing of the skin. And, here
lies the rub. Like Donatella Versace, Orlan’s mask of monstrosity can be glamorized
and expected within a culture that also celebrates Michael Jackson’s monstrous face.
This all raises the question when the disturbance no longer disturbs. When has this
‘form’ exhausted itself? Perhaps, this is why Orlan has now moved into another
phase?
The movement that escapes faciality, the territorialization of the face, Deleuze|
Guattari call a probe head.142 Orlan’s 1993 portrait Bride of Frankenstein perhaps
had the potential to become a probe-head, to trouble the visual regime. But oddly,
in Paris people call her Cruella, after the Parisian actress who has the same hairstyle
(white on one side, black on the other).143 Orlan’s close-up lifts of her face during
an operation are certainly probe-heads as they disrupt faciality. But maybe more
so is the work in the early stages of her third phase of her affective diagram that is
charged with ‘difference’ that is in keeping with Deleuze|Guattari’s articulation of
difference. Self-hybridizations precolombienne and Self-hybridations africaine, is a
series of computer manipulated self-portraits wherein Orlan inscribes herself into
signifiers of beauty that originate outside of Western culture (scarring, manipulating
the cranium by flattening it or enlarging it, lengthening the neck through rings and
so on). This series begins to appropriate physiognomic features from other cultures
into new assemblages. They are virtualizations, formed by historical memories
that come together as impossible hybridic cultures, creative in the highest sense
of heteronymous desiring machines coming together. These may or may not be
actualized through surgical means. It is once more a promise “of a people yet to
come,” as a continuity of mutants so that the mutant can no longer exist as a signifier
since what is ‘normal’ has been eliminated, or in the Deleuzian sense—difference
as such, which leads to imperceptibility. Of course, these Self-hybridizations are
140
subject to the difficult question of appropriation. Western art and artists have always
appropriated the Other. Anthropology as a science ‘invented’ the Other. But such
questions take us to what it is precisely that Orlan wants her affective diagram to do,
to be a “catalyst for debate”144—namely, dialogue on the unthought.
Our sexual body is initially a Harlequin’s cloak.
(Deleuze LS, 197)
Orlan and Stelarc present two artistic approaches where the artist’s body is the
material used to reconstitute the BwO in a dramatic way. Deleuze|Guattari identify
three strata for doing so: the organization of the organism, signification as the
stratum of the unconscious and subjectification. Orlan’s plunge into biotechnology
through her Harlequin’s Coat Project, one of her most recent projects, is not as
invasive as her previous bodily performances, but it does ‘perform’ on another
register. It becomes a question whether Deleuze’s epitaph “what a body can do,”
which Olan herself quotes (2008, 89) when discussing this work, can be extended to
the cellular level. Harlequin’s Coat, which extends her project of self-hybridization
mentioned above, does begin to go past the explicit body of representation and
reaches non-representational status by way of the material of her own cell, which
in this project is seeded with a 12 week-old female foetus of African origin and
the fibroblast muscle cells from a marsupial (a fat-tailed dunnart) with the help of
SymbioticA’s laboratory. The cell being a molecular machine. The project is meant
to further problematize multiculturalism in the way hybridity has become more
cleverly categorized. Finally, it should not be forgotten that Orlan also called her
Harlequin’s Coat—“a modified Readymade” (author’s emphasis), which she says is
an “unsaleable and almost unshowable” work (87, emphasis added). Perhaps Orlan
is a Dada-sein as we joked in the introduction: a new term for schizzies like her.
Waffa Bilal
Videogaming beyond the Skin, or Staring Back at the Gaze
This isn’t a time for art,” he said. “This is a time of war”

I said: “It is never a time for war, but it is always a time for art”
(Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi, 94)
Waffa Bilal used to teach at the Chicago School of the Art Institute, or did so at
the time of the performance, which began in mid-May 2007. He is now assistant
professor at the Tisch School of Arts in New York. While identity is not an issue
for Stelarc’s “flesh” performances and something to be deconstructed by Orlan’s
skin as a garment or costume, it is of utmost concern for Wafaa Bilal. Born in Iraq,
it is precisely his symbolic identity in a time of terrorism that is at issue, an identity
that presses on him within a country, the U.S., that he has a love/hate relationship
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toward. His brother, Haji had been killed by explosives dropped from an American
helicopter that flew in after an unmanned U.S. drone had scoped out the area. We
will not develop the entire oeuvre of Bilal’s projects (among which is yet another
controversial work, his Virtual Jihad video game), as we did for the previous two
artists; rather we are concentrating on just one performance that ran for 31 days,
beginning on May 15, 2007 and ending on June 16, 2007. Performed in FlatFile
Gallery in Chicago, it was euphemistically called Domestic Tension. For Wafaa Bilal,
the project had another name: Shoot an Arab, which was felt to be too controversial
to stand as a title. We draw all my material from a book dictated by Bilal and written
by a reporter, Kari Lydersen about the project, which bears the original name that
Bilal wanted to use: Shoot an Iraqi is subtitled, Art, Life and Resistance Under the
Gun.145
Bilal’s performance is very much situated in his own trauma, the deaths of his
brother and father in his hometown of Kufa (near the holy city of Najaf) in 2004.
It was his way to bridge the gap between his own comfortable life in the U.S. and
the pain and suffering of his family and friends in his homeland—out of guilt and
out of his own trauma. What concerned Bilal was the disconnect U.S. citizens had
concerning the Iraq war and the nature of modern warfare where the same disconnect
repeats itself when innocent civilians (like his brother) are bombed and killed by
missiles launched by remote control by soldiers sitting at consol desks. His project
is based on the model of a videogame. Only now ‘screen (virtual) reality’ becomes
actualized with Wafaa Bilal becoming a ‘live target,’ shot at by gamers (his interactive
audience) with a paintball gun that has been hooked up to the Internet. Hence the
videogame, which is the apotheosis of designer capitalism in terms of the complex
possibilities it holds out for gamers, is deconstructed as a machinic assemblage of
potentiality. Neither Bilal nor the Internet gamer-audience could remotely predict
the results. Rather the game unfolded through the durée of time, ending only by
an arbitrarily chosen pre-specified time limit—30 days. What the performance did,
and what Bilal desired was to raise ethical and political questions concerning video
violence, the terror of war, the choice to shoot or not to shoot, the loss of family, and
so on—questions that remain unavailable and ‘outside’ a videogame world.
Bilal’s performance piece used the same technology “that enables someone
sitting in front of a computer to drop a bomb from thousands of miles away.”146
His interactive art project eventually became a cybercultural event. Wafaa was
interviewed by a number of major networks: NPR, BBC, CNN, MSNBC and the
History Channel, helping to disseminate the event to a global audience. Wafaa
set up a space in the FlatFile gallery (a room 32 X 15 feet), which housed a bed,
his computer, a lamp, a coffee table and an exercise bike (that he never used). A
number of Plexiglas screens mounted on racks, as well as a mock doorframe were
the partitioning divide between his space and the rest of the gallery. A paintball gun
attached to a custom-designed robotic mechanism was positioned two-thirds of the
way between the back wall of his room and the doorway into the gallery. Its shooting
range was about 20 feet. The gun fired yellow paintballs in response to commands
142
of online viewers. Gallery visitors could fire as well from a small area that was
not in the line of fire. The gun could be fired at shoulder level; it could rotate 180
degrees left to right. Gallery exhibits ran on as planned—as did weddings (which has
become fashionable thing to do).
Waffa Bilal was to spend a month being shot at—as a moving avatar who
controlled his own movements. Publicity for the event was word-of-mouth and
viral. The entire month was streamed live on the Internet via a webcam mounted
on the gun that beamed the gaze of his audience. A website chat room was set-up
behind a Plexiglas shield. He could tell from where the shots were being fired from
by the shooters’ IP addresses. The website interface had been intentionally set up
grainy and without sound to heighten the sense of loneliness and isolation. Each
day Bilal would record the events with his own video camera and post some edited
footage, usually about ten minutes worth, as a diary video on YouTube. Visitors who
came into the gallery interviewed him, Bilal recorded their thoughts as well as his
own through reflective monologues and video posts. He wore a paintball vest and
goggles along with his trademark keffiyah. At the end, more that 65,000 shots had
been fired at him from people in 136 countries, many of them spending hours in the
website’s chat room. As Waffa notes, being hit by a paintball at close range was often
a debilitating experience.
What is especially significant about the book is that it intertwines two
autobiographical stories as two inter- and intra-connected remembrances: his life in
Iraq before he came to the U.S. and a daily reflection on each day that ran the length of
the project .147 They form the warp and weft of the book. Bilal’s recollected memories
of living in Iraq covers time spent under Saddam Hussein and his journey out from
Iraq to a Saudi refugee camp, and then a miraculous opportunity to immigrate to the
U.S. It is made clear that Bilal came from a family under intense trauma and duress
from Hussein’s dictatorship, the Iran-Iraqi war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and then
the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces. His father was abusive toward him, and while
his mother receives less attention, she comes across as a devote Muslin believing in
its mysticism and instilling in Waffa that he was special child, a transferential desire
which stayed with him.148 Brothers and uncles are introduced in the book, and it is
clear that Bilal found solace in his art to keep him ‘sane’ within such difficult living
conditions. One learns from these reflective memories that Bilal is a survivor, but
most of all that he was always a risk taker who resisted the Sunni dictatorship of
Saddam Hussein, whereas the village where he lived was mostly Shia. The Ba’ath
Party in his village was influential, but Bilal also rejected its politics. On the whole
he had no use for Islam as a religion, but of course he loved his country and its
traditions—the two are impossible to separate—exposing the complexity of identity.
The other autobiography is a daily reflection on the 30+1 days that the project ran
that appears interwoven within the above narrative. Bilal’s representational identity
is tested through the synoptic assemblage of his own making that surrounds the
game-like performance, and opens up the symbolic register on a global level: the
project’s website with almost no text; the chat room, which was to generate dialogue
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about the Iraq war, violence and his own traumatic loss of family; the YouTube video
diaries, which kept viewers posted as to the events and his own state of mind; the
media network that furthered the dissemination of the project and the never sleeping
machinic eye situated on top of the paintball gun which enabled his participatory
audience to survey the room and shoot at him. “I feel its [gun’s] eyes boring into
me —the camera on top, the sinister gun barrel … click, click, click … .149 The gun,
as a surveillance device, illustrates quite well how its desire and his were intimately,
symbiotically interwoven, to a point where he ‘missed’ its noise, and then began to
‘overlook’ it, increasing the danger of being ‘shot.’
Bilal’s performance is very much in keeping with artists engaged with traumatic
memory. Jane Bennett’s150 fine Deleuzian inspired book, Emphatic Vision: Affect,
Trauma, and Contemporary Art explores the various attempts by artist not to be seen
as victims, yet convey indirectly their loss and traumatic experience, and to rethink
trauma along the lines of sense memory that directly addresses the affective body,
the ‘semiotic body” in Kristeva’s151 terms or “deep memory” as Auschwitz survivor
Charlotte Delbo152 puts it. Sense memory registers the physical imprint of the event,
it is always ‘present,’ although not continuously felt. It is like another ‘self’ “but
wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present
‘me’ … everything that happened to this other ‘self,’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t
touch me now … so distinct are deep memory [mémoire profonde] and common
memory [mémoire ordinaire].”153 “When you have such traumatic memories,” Bilal
writes, “your past and present realities bleed into each other, until sometimes you
can’t differentiate were one ends and the other begins.”154 Bilal was quite aware
that identity happens at the affective level through embodied movement. “Whenever
we see a moving image we unconsciously associate it with our own body—we
are affected on a deeper level than the intellectual, conceptual or emotional; the
moving body speaks to the viewer in a corporeal language on purely physical level of
unconscious identification and interactivity.”155 This was to be a ‘neuronal’ project,
to get to the nerves of the shooter-viewers in terms of their concerns about the war
and violence, but it ‘got’ to Bilal as well.
Throughout his YouTube posts, Bilal tries hard not to show he is a victim. “I want
to document my state of mind, but I can’t allow the web viewers to see me at this
level of vulnerability, I’m too fragile.”156 It may be well that the yellow paint was
chosen on symbolic grounds as: “I’m not yellow,” meaning, “I don’t piss my pants
under fire.” It is the simultaneous absence and surfeit of affect that characterizes
traumatic experience—the emotional “rollercoaster” as Bilal puts it.157 It is an
oscillation between feeling and nonfeeling, psychic shock and numbness, pure affect
and no affect. Bilal is sometimes in control, the next moment he is tearing up and
crying. Bilal writes, “I hate being a victim. … I decide to take things in my own
hands, to fool them. I disconnect the compressed-air canister that powers the gun.
The paintballs stop coming out, but I can hear the trigger constantly firing, and the
gun swishing as it moves back and forth.”158 He knows precisely how to avoided
being targeted. Against the gaze of his shooters, he begins to mimic—playing with
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the gaze, camouflaging himself by being mottled against the backdrop, setting up
8.5 X 11 images of himself to be shot at. Unlike the masquerade women can play
with the symbolic order (like early Orlan)—a woman wearing a hat can be part
of a masquerade or a fashion statement, should the wind blow it off exposing her
charade, she can still continue the game. That’s not the case with the male who wears
a wig to hide his baldness.159 Once the wig is disturbed, his ‘phallic’ weakness is
exposed as well. This seems to be the case with Wafaa as well.
The first 9 days weren’t a ‘problem;’ the only ‘problems’ that kept emerging
throughout were technical ones: the amount of traffic that the servers could handle,
which required constant updating and eventually a ‘dedicated’ server was installed
to handle the traffic when Digg160 became involved (MIT hackers turned the gun
into a machine gun). The gun kept breaking down and needed to be reassembled and
cleaned, or the project was running out of yellow paintballs, the damage to the walls
had to be shored up. All of the physical maintenance (cleanup) was part and parcel of
the project. It was Wafaa’s struggle with his post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD);
this turns out to be the Real of the project. Bilal’s concern was to start dialogue
through his performance, but it reached a point about mid-way (Day 15) where his
sensate body haunted by memories takes over, and he goes into “survival mode.”161
Bilal had no ‘family,’ but he had his art. It was always the way he sublimated
his anxieties and resisted the symbolic order. His Iraqi experience taught him just
that. PTSD survivors have a tendency to relive rather than recall their story. And,
this is precisely what Bilal does—it was both an ‘acting out’ and simultaneously
an ‘acting through.’162 The space he sets up in the gallery might be identified (after
Giorgio Agamben) as a “state of exemption” where the Law has been suspended. It
is a “war zone” as Bilal says, as well as a “cell” and a “prison” of his own making,
as he puts its. Within it, Bilal experiences “becoming-animal” as Deleuze|Guattari163
would say, where his instinctive body ‘takes over.’ “I realize that I look like a caged
animal, cornered and aware he’s being watched.”164 It is reminiscent of Josef Beuys’
experiment with a coyote in a cage; he called them ‘social sculptures’. He wears
a mask—the protective goggles to prevent being hit in the eyes, just like Beuys
covered himself with felt blanket and had a stick so that he would not be bitten.
Perhaps 95% of his YouTube recording are made with this mask on, presenting an
affective-image made famous by the Blair Witch Project, the anxious, fear-ridden
close-up student speaking directly into the video camera as a testament to the terror
and anxiety she finds herself in. “Hey everybody” is heard with every new videocast.
One can feel his claustrophobia and desperation at times in his voice and in the
close-up of his face. With the mask/goggles on he looks like a mutant. Like a caged
animal, he gains 20 pounds as the confinement begins to drain his energy. He lets his
hair and beard grow. His movement falls more and more into a stasis, and his body
demands food. The goggle-mask further obscures his identity, making him angry
when someone in the chat room claims he is faking the whole thing. The question of
‘authenticity’ is very much at play, since it is the pain, the constant sound of the gun
clicking—a phallic object he freely admits— is the cause of his anxiety. Bilal begins
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to breath heavily. It is the objet a in the room, that part of the assemblage that stands
out the most. An instrument that can certainly maim him, kill him if he is hit in the
temple, he becomes ‘educated’ by it. He learns how to dance with it. As an anxious
object he must continually be aware of it. Sleep deprived, he has to physically tie
his body down so that he doesn’t suddenly get up in the middle of the night and
be hit by a ball in the temple. The gun has to be ‘fed’ paintball bullets, it has to be
maintained, and its presence is always felt by the noise of shots being fired, which
rarely stop.
Bilal’s performance is very much of an “encounter” as he himself puts it, which is
in keeping with Jane Bennett’s own claim165 that such traumatic (memory) art is an
“encountered sign,” following Deleuze’s166 own engagement with Proust, where such
a sign is felt, and not simply recognized or perceived through cognition. The claim
is that such artistic encounters can generate thought and a form of emphatic vision.
Bilal’s encounter was spectacular, necessarily so to capture attention in a synoptic
media environment where there is competition for attention. “Extra violence, extra
novelty, extra shock value “—is required, he writes.167 “Desperate times require
desperate means,” he says.
There is a “people to come” with Wafaa Bilal’s work. He says so in the end of
the performance: “to silence all the guns in the future.” It is ultimately a hope to
overcome difference and to live with difference. ‘Hope’ is a word he uses often in
his posting, a word that “came up about 300 times in the chat log—an average of
10 times a day.”168 For Bilal, hope is symbolized by the lamp that Matt, the Marine
had given him out of the ‘blue’ to replace his shot-up one. Hope is given its full
array of meanings in the chat room that ranged from desiring that Bilal be dead to
sympathy with his condition. Bilal’s ‘hope’ (a word he also used often in his video
postings) was that the performance would initiate dialogue through the chat room
conversations with him and between people; that it would stay as an open narrative,
each participant-shooter facing his or her own choice in the way to participate in the
project. What became significant was the way that the performance took a ‘life’ of its
own, and how Bilal’s body memory ‘took’ over as it were. A community of support
emerged around Bilal. The local restaurants ‘fed’ him; unknown visitors would come
into the gallery bringing him lunches and dinners. He would take the time to talk and
eat with them. Newspaper reports and media network reports came to interview him.
The gallery owner Susan Aurinko, put up with the constant noise of the gun firing
24/7. She lived upstairs! His students came for a critique of their work early in the
project. Matt brought him a new lamp when the original one was destroyed. On two
occasions he received plants as gifts: a tree in the middle of the performance and
then a lily-plant towards the end. Bilal had telephone contact, a strong technical crew
with unexpected technical help showing up. Above all, perhaps, was the Internet
action taken by a number of friends and extended friends who set up a “Virtual
Human Shield” in the last remaining days of the project (Day 27), which prevented
the paintball gun from rotating to the right. It was a jamming devise that helped stop
him from being a target; he interpreted this as a cyber political resistance.
146
Without such a flowering of love, as Julia Kristeva169 tells us regarding

traumatized patients, Bilal would never have made it through those 31 days. These
are his witnesses that enabled him to reconnect with the ‘living.’ His narrative was
‘heard’ by them. This is what enables him to come back into the symbolic, knowing
that there is hate ‘out there.’ The ‘walking corpse’ as zombie or mummy is given
a connective life. Often he would repeat how he wanted to see the visitors again
and again when the performance was over. This outpouring of concern and love
gave him the support and the ‘missing’ love that was no longer available to him.
Many survivors fail to feel a full measure of love and affection because life is no
recompense for the losses that had been experienced. Bilal, as witness, feels like
many survivors. If he had died in Iraq, in one sense it would have been the most
complete death. It’s as if he did not deserve the ‘good life’ that he found in the U.S..
Perhaps most interestingly, Wafaa identifies with a woman in Florida, the only
chat room participant he gave his direct phone number. “I don’t know much about
her, but I feel a strong connection and sense of comfort from having someone in
the chat room almost all the time who isn’t hunting me but rather watching over
me.”170 Wafaa’s referral to this “one” (as a Master-Signifier) is a way to ‘plug’ up
the w(hole) in the symbolic authority—namely, despite the hate and threats of death
that he constantly receives via the chat room, and the reminder that constant firing
of the gun is indicative of the choice that is being made to shoot or not to shoot
an Iraqi. There is the “one” who retrains the generosity of humanity, that keeps
hope alive, who prevents humanity from following into complete barbarism. Wafaa
can maintain his hope and dignity despite the horrible circumstances through this
“one“ Other. This structure Lacan named, Y’a de l’Un—there is the One.171 It repeats
the experience of concentration camp survivors, who looked toward this mythical
One as the minimum amount of support so that the solidarity of keeping the social
link together could be maintained, preventing a fall into a ‘dog-eat-dog’ situation.
This individual was always perceived as one (never a multiple) who retained his/
her dignity. Bilal transferred this dignity of the Symbolic to this unknown woman.
It prevented the symbolic from collapsing completely on him from falling into
complete psychic despair.
There is no way that this friends could ever feel what Wafaa felt as survivor, nor
suffer what he suffered. By re-living the terror, as it were, through the performance
to reawaken the terror that had happened to him, brought about by sleep deprivation
that affected his nervous system, haunted by the ghosts of his dead family, Wafaa is
‘reincarnated’ by re-facing the ‘body’ that contains the memories of terror. Unlike
Orlan, who attempts to become ‘imperceptible’ in the Symbolic, but fails to do so
through her very notoriety—Wafaa Bilal is also addressing the Symbolic Superego,
but to find a way to stabilize himself within it, to address the signifiers of hate (and
sexual abuse172) that is part of the global gaze. His sinthome lies there. His belief in
the Symbolic is restored not necessarily by the participating audience in the ‘game;’
at least not entirely, for he soon recognizes the myriad of affects this performance
is having, ranging from being interpreted as an anti-war protest, a lightening rod
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for racism and hatred, a diversity from boredom, a way Bilal becomes company for
the lonely (some flirted with him, some confessed to him) and, like this essay, he is
made a subject of intellectual discussion—part of a thought experiment.
What grounds Wafaa’s life is the community that began to gather around him,
that restored love and meaning for him. The shift to ‘survival mode’ (Day 15) came
when the material conditions of his cell began to deteriorate (he no longer had the
energy to clean up, the smell of the fish oil from the paint was getting to him, and the
place was becoming a ‘real dump.’) All of this marks the shift in the affective body
‘coming out’ as it were. For his body (unlike Orlan’s operations that are said to be
poetic) is the battleground. The conditions of the re-fabricated war becomes Real:
horror sets in. The ‘hole’ in the Symbolic is materialized, so to speak, in one instance
and then plugged up in the next through the wide shifts in emotion. Although this
w(hole) in the Symbolic is not ‘visible,’ it defies representation, Bilal recognizes
that it can be faced without swallowing him up into perhaps a psychotic state. While
there is hate in the world, there is also love and support. In the end, he is his art. He
is his Imaginary performative self, acting out his own identity as his ‘cause,’ who
comes out traversing his trauma by accepting his sinthome. He will always be an
Iraqi, that is his garment, which cannot be shed, and that’s what drives him. The 31st
day, the extra day he stays “in jail” is to reassure himself (as well as others) that his
own self-tortured therapy is over, and now he can go ‘outside’ (into the Symbolic),
which is how the last video diary ends.
Bilal’s performance is very much in keeping with what Deleuze referred to as a
counter-actualization (LS 160). For Bilal, performance offers a counter-actualization
to the painful actualizations of the Event as it has been inscribed in his flesh—
and here I mean skin that mediates the implicit and explicit body recorded as the
haunting memories of his past. The counter-actualization is the realeasing of a
potentiality that brings with it a repetition with a difference. So while Bilal’s Event
is brought about by the empirical conditions of his existence, the resut of his actions
and his passions, the eternal authenticity of this Event is irreducuble to these said
conditions.
The counter-actualization of his performance opens up an ethico-political
stance that affirms the irreducibility to such origins. It points to the transcendental
quasi cause of the wound, of time as Aion, of virual multiplicities, rather than to
any empirical cause. This performance as a counter-actualization limits, moves,
transfigures and mimes the affect of the Event. It is self-refleXion and Xpression
at its best, the enactment of a delicate operation since the counter-actualization of
the Event that embraces the wound as a virtual effect cannot fall into the role of
a victim or patient, that is the risk taken. It could have ended badily in psychic
breakdown. It is rather a draining of the self to face the wound. Wafaa Bilal
manages to come out the other end—re-born as it were. He is no longer the same
and neither is the audience who had participated as interactive witnesses and
interactors, those who had encountered the transference of Bilal’s Event within
themselves.
148
A Concluding Note
The three artists are extreme practitioners of performance art that offer an encounter
with an audience who is placed in an interactive mode that demand a response to
the unthought that they raise. All three have developed affective diagrams that are
driven by their own singular sinthomes, and all three have their versions of a “people
to come.” The technological engagement with the synoptic assemblage of the media,
in all three cases, is transgressive of the symbolic order: Stelarc explores the “flesh”
of the Real, Orlan the skin of the Imaginary and Bilal the signifier of identification
in the Symbolic. All three ruin representation: Stelarc by dangerously coming close
to an instrumentalism, Orlan by troubling the Imaginary body-ego and Wafaa by
defying any easy categorization of what it means to be ”Iraqi.” Contemporary art is
a neuronal art that harnesses affect to present affective diagrams where the implicit,
explicit and social bodies are complexly inter and intra-related to present a fractal
ontology that requires psychoanalysis (as begun by the late Lacan) to come to terms
with the Deleueze|Guattarian machinic developments, which in turn must be undated
to the processes of digitalization that lead to posthuman potentialities.
NOTES
1
See jagodzinski (2010a, 183–198).
2
See Jagna Brudzinska (2010) on the philosophical history of this word.
3
A succinct (and difficult) statement of Guattari’s rethinking of the sign wherein he modifies the
semiological categories of Louis Hjelmslev can be found in Guattari’s essay “The Place of the
Signifier in the Institution”, as translated by Gary Genosko (1996).
4
Chaos theory is much too broad a term in many ways since its interpretation varies. One tract has
stemmed from Illya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers exploration of dissipative structures while
James Gleick popularized yet another version. Complexity theory is equally too broad a term in its
application (see Nigel Thrift’s ”The Place of Complexity,” 1999).
5
“[T]he BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires” (TP, 165).
6
The BwO is also death as pure intense stasis as when there is no mediation between it and the concrete
body. In the Lacanian context this happens when the drives ‘involute,’ so to speak, and cannibalize the
body via anorexia, drug-use, and alcoholism. This is to say, the drives (Triebe) turn in on themselves
and the body itself becomes the object of the drive.
7
There is no straightforward or easy understanding of what precisely is a diagram throughout
Deleuze|Guttari’s oeuvre. Jakub Zdebik (2012) attempts to provide a comprehensive overview and
tracing its many instances throughout their texts. Then there is John Mullarkey’s (2006) call on the
diagram, which once more spins it as a path between representation and abstraction in so-called post-
continental philosophy. Manuel De Landa (2000) provides yet another view via topological thought.
For our purposes when it comes to art, the notion of diagram as developed by Deleuze’s study on
Bacon serves us best. Here, in a nutshell, the path it holds for us is like a preparatory sketch, perhaps
the ontological notion of a drawing where the wandering line and resultant shapes form the germ of
organization within chaos—perhaps poor simulacra of the Ideas shaping the virtual mind. Every artist
has particular diagrams she or he employs that are ‘sketches’ for Ideas. They are virtual musings in
this sense. Diagrams are starting points that overcome the clichés that are already in place so that the
new may be created. We attempt to provide a fuller account of the diagram latter in this section.
8
The research of Ryszard Kluszczynski (2010) is noteworthy here. He outlines eight strategies: strategy
of instrument, game, archives, labyrinth, rhizome, system, network and spectacle. The elements at
play within these strategies are organized differently and include the interface, interactions, data
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CHAPTER IV
(database), data organization (hypertext, cybertext), software/hardware systems, participant relations

and the performance/spectacle itself.
9
A start in this direction see “Skin, Aesthetics, Incarnation: Deleuze’s Diagram of Francis Bacon—An
Epilogue” (Zdebik 2012, 178-192).
10
An attempt has been made to bring Lacan, Žižek and Deleuze into a productive encounter within
cinematic studies. See jagodzinski (2012b).
11
Bernard Stiegler importance is his ability to show how memory has been technologically transformed
and industrialized shaping the representational symbolic order. See Stiegler (1998b). Mark B.N.
Hansen (2006a,b) has developed a series of books arguing for the embodiment of digitalized
technologies, especially as applied to ‘new media.’
12
The topology of Lacan’s Borromean knot is best done away with given its strong representational
emphasis and rethought along the lines of the complexity of layers and phases. I believe this is more
suitable when discussing the singularity of the sinthome that defines each artist. The symptomology of
designer capitalism itself is caught by categorizations and representation. Lacan’s ‘knot’ theory states
that when one string is cut, all others are cut loose as well. Like the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle,
as diagrams they are still caught by Euclidean typology. Complexity theory has multiple levels that
have different logics and temporal organizations but, nevertheless, are locked in resonance with each
other—ideally a fractal ontology of Lacan’s registers is needed. Steven M. Rosen (2006) has made a
start in this direction.
13
Giles Deleuze (1990a). Negotiations, 174.
14
We develop more as to what sinthome refers to below. This concept replaces the notion of a
“fundamental fantasy” with the late Lacan. Whereas fantasy was considered a barrier against the Real,
containing the effects of the Real (as does language), the change marks a shift to a new relationship
where jouissance becomes enjoined with the Other now becoming a kernel of enjoyed meaning,
understood as a way of enjoying with and through signifiers. Fantasy structures are no longer caught
by the Symbolic Order. This was Lacan’s ‘answer’ to Deleuze|Guattari’s schizonalysis.
15
As developed by Deleuze in his cinema books, where it fills the interval between perception-image
and action-image. The affection-image refers to the close-up, especially of the face. See Gilles
Deleuze. C1, 89.
16
Agamben’s State of exemption has received wide attention as becoming a common strategy of nation
states are using during times of crisis—war and most recently financial capital crisis—to suspend the
normative working of the Law and then do as they please. See Giorgio Agamben, 2005.
17
BwO is the body without organs as famously developed by Deleuze|Guattari in TP; in(forme) refers
to George Bataille’s development of the informe (formelessness) and skin–ego is Didier Anzieu well-
known psychoanalytic conceptualization. See George Bataille (1985) and Anzieu (1989).
18
Once in private conversation with Orlan in 1998, she told me she only had so many operation “in
her”; exhaustion has two meanings here—exhaustion in terms of allowing an artistic problematic (as
a process) to run its undetermined rhizomatic course, and physical exhaustion—the body would be
unable to respond, that is, to heal any longer after surgery.
19
Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamentals (1978).
20
The reference is to Deleuze’s (1988) Bergsonism. Deleuze incorporates Bergson’s notion of
unconscious memory as well as a refinement of the concept of difference between kind and degree,
which he latter abandons for intensity to describe elements that are felt, beyond perception.
21
See also his Bodies in Code (2006b).
22
Bergson characterized the external world as a universal flux of images with the body itself being an
image among other images, a special kind of image he called a “center of indetermination.” The body
becomes the source of action on the world of images as it ‘subtracts’ from this universal flux of images
that are relevant to its own interests. Bergson’s bodily aesthetic is linked to affect through perception
and that is what is at stake in Hansen’s reformulation of Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergsonian thought
to cinema, complicated now by machinic assemblages where the human “center of indetermination”
no longer holds but interacts with its inhuman counterpart. See also Pisters (2012) for the development
of a neurological image or neuro-image in contemporary cinema. Pisters locates the neuro-image in
the third synthesis of time, that of the future as Deleuze develops it in DR. Our view is that these three
150
performance artists develop a third synthesis of time as well but here their delirium to create the new
is played out as an incarnation of the flesh through the skin as a surface of experimentation that can
counteractualize the stratified molar body|mind.
23
Here, we have in mind the Maurice Merleau-Ponty inspired texts by Vivian Sobchack that have led
to a renewed haptic understanding of cinema as developed by Jennifer M. Barker. Laura U. Marks
theory of cinema is more Deleuzian than phenomenological in its theoretical force, which has the
advantage of recognizing the time-images that open up the unthought. It should be clarified, however
that Deleuze inspired film criticism, while recognizing the machinic aspect of the cinema, is of a
different order than interactive new media. See Vivian Sobchack’s (1992), The Address of the Eye
and her Carnal Thoughts (2004). Both books forcefully argue against more recent Lacanian cinematic
developments like Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek. See Jennifer M. Barker’s The Tactile Eye
(2009); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film (2000) and Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch (2007),
which are important here as well.
24
Jacques Derrida (2005).
25
See the Jakub Zdebik’s (2012) Deleuze and the Diagram for a full account.
26
TP, 141–148.
27
A brilliant clarification of the diagram can be found in Gary Genosko’s (1998), Guattari’s Schizoanalytic
Semiotics: Mixing Hjelmslev and Pierce. A full account of Guattari’s use of the diagram is found in
Janell Watson’s (2009) Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought. See also John Mullarkey’s (2006) Thinking
in Diagrams in his Post-Continental Philosophy.
28
Gilles Deleuze’s (2002) Francis Bacon, 100.
29
TP, 141.
30
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 122.
31
An unpublished English translation of Seminar XXIII (Sinthome) is available, However, Roberto
Harari’s (2002) How James Joyce Made His Name is more helpful to make sense of this difficult
concept.
32
Jacques Alain Miller’s The Sinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy, 71.
33
Beginning with his The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).
34
Norbert Elias (1994).
35
We find the argument of affect ‘preceding’ the drives or instincts difficult to sustain, nor have we come
across such a position as yet.
36
Wilma Bucci (1997).
37
Daniel Stern (1985).
38
I have in mind the writings of Jan Campbell who has re-read Freud through Henri Bergson to present a
non-psychological unconscious. See her Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life (2006) and her “Rhythms
of the Suggestive Unconscious” (2009).
39
I have in mind Slavoj Žižek’s (1999) superb, The Ticklish Subject.
40
Memory, as culled from Joyce’s literary writings of the body by Lacan, has some analogies to the
autobiographical memory in the literature of John Updike by Jay Prosser as he explores the literature
of artists whose stigmatization of the skin presents forms of repression, hidden in the family crypt as
theorized by the well-known psychoanalytic team of Marian Torok and Nicholas Abraham. See Jay
Prosser’s (2001) “Skin Memories.”
41
This leap is made by drawing on Cinema 1989, 2, 161–167.
42
An important exploratory essay in this regard is Patricia Ticineto Clough’s (2008b), “(De)Coding the
Subject-in-Affect.”Also, Hansen’s (2006b), Bodies in Code.
43
Bruce Fink’s (1996) The Lacanian Subject shows how the two subject positions appear throughout
Lacan’s writings.
44
See (1992) Enjoy Your Symptom.
45
The more difficult question, which we are unable to answer, is whether there is a sex/gendering that
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger introduces through her concept of a ‘matrixial sinthome,’ a difficult
concept and equally a difficult writing style. One way of answering this is to suggest that all such
sinthomatic art participates ‘beyond the law,’ and hence laced with feminine jouissance. But that
doesn’t escape the question of difference that someone like Luce Irigaray insists upon. See her
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CHAPTER IV
“Weaving a Trans-subjective Tress or the Matrixial sinthome” (2002). For Deleuze|Guattari such a
question is irrelevant in that ‘becoming woman’ is a move away from genders and genres to queer
positions that are post-human modes of life. This queering is not a counter-normative measure but
an ‘eternal return’ of strains and quantities that keep the species open. For this difficult question see
Colebrook’s ‘Just Say No to Becoming a Woman (Deleuze Conference, New Orleans, 2012) and
Berressem (2006).
46
For example, Patricia Clough seems to have established herself in this area. See her (2008a). “The
Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies,” and Patricia Ticineto Clough edited book
(2007), The Affective Turn. However, earlier in 2001 Anu Koivunen, published, Preface: The affective
turn?
47
Brian Massumi (2002), Parables of the Virtual.
48
Published earlier as Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect (1996).
49
This also opens the door to Jan Campbell’s re-reading of Freud in maintaining, mentioned earlier,
that he too has a notion of the non-psychological unconscious similar to what is being presented by
Deleuze, and Jean François Lyotard as well who developed his own Freudian variant —the affect
phase unconscious. See Jean François Lyotard’s (1991) “Beyond Representation.”
50
Gilbert Simondon’s (1992), “On the Genesis of the Individual.”
51
David Bohm (1980).
52
Here we would flag two important articles: W.J.T Mitchell’s (2003), “The Work of Art in an Age of
Biocybernetic Reproduction,” and Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerreo’s (2009), “The Biopolitical
Imagination of Species Being.” Both articles raise the ethical questions that surround genetic
experimentation in art and in the larger molecular and digital revolution of life.
53
The distinction between body schema (non-representational) and body image (representational) is
articulated in Shaun Gallager and Jonathan Cole’s (1995 and 1998), “Body Image and Body Schema
in a Deafferented Subject.”
54
Hansen claims that Merleau-Ponty’s schema corporel (phenomenal body) has been wrongly translated
as body image. See Bodies in Code, 38.
55
Esther Bick’s research on the importance of skin in infant-mother relations was an independent
development from Anzieu who built on her work, modifying and changing some of her premises.
For a review of her work see Roger Wiloughby’s (2001). “The Petrified Self: Esther Bick and her
Membership Paper.”
56
Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1923), 26.
57
The notion of “sense of” is crucial here since this is not a conceptual or cognitive notion of self, but an
experiential sense of events. The organized sense of a core self includes: self-agency, self-coherence,
self-affectivity, and self-history (memory). See Stern, Interpersonal World, 71.
58
Ibid., 69, emphasis added.
59
Where a major disagreement exists between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty is the question surrounding the
moment of alienation experienced by the infant around 2-3 months. For Lacan this becomes a paranoid
moment that ends up as a lack that becomes a perpetual struggle for recognition in the symbolic
order, whereas for Merleau-Ponty, this alienation is not paranoiac but productive. It is an ongoing
dimension of the implicit (introceptive) body. We can say it is the moi formed through in-tensions
of skin-ego and body-ego. So while the earlier Lacan forwarded the alienating aspect of the mirror
stage, the ‘later’ Lacan would be more sympathetic to the phenomenological position of alienation
as the interval where Real and the Imaginary are continually in play regarding the Symbolic—the
sinthomatic position.
60
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 44.
61
This is where the metaphysical aspects of genetics enter since there is no representational ‘blue print,’
if I can put it this way. The body ‘knows’ how to form itself.
62
Deleuze and Guattari, TP, 182.
63
This is extrapolated from Claudia Benthien’s very interesting book on the history of skin where she
calls on Anzieu’s work throughout. See Claudia Benthien’s (2002), Skin, esp. footnote 4, 243–245.
64
Bernard Stiegler (1998a). Stiegler explores the history of technics as epiphylogenesis. This marks
a break with genetic evolution, which has no way of preserving the ‘lessons’ of experience which
152
technics offers. This is crucial for the ‘new media’ of contemporary art where technics is part of the
interactive process.
65
Stelarc (1998) from “Psycho-body to Cyber-systems: Images as Post-human Entities.”
66
As developed posthumously by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1968), The Visible and Invisible.
67
Paraphrased from a YouTube performance.
68
An artist like Damien Hirst figures promptly here, with his ‘glass box’ art with pickled and preserved
biological specimens: from the pickled shark to bisected cows and embryos. As does Antony
Gromley’s Sovereign State —a concrete sculpture of the artist’s body lying in the fetal position with
rubber hoses attached into and out of his orifices as a self-sustained comatose human body, a neo-
mort, speaks directly to the dystopia of ‘biocybernetic art.’ (See Mitchell, 496). Also, Justine Cooper’s
1998 installation piece, RAPT I and RAPT II that uses 76 ‘slices’ or “MRI scans mounted individually
onto Perplex and hung so as to produce an entire image sculpture of Cooper’s databody.” See Anna
Munster’s (2006), Materializing New Media, 143–144.
69
Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 109–112.
70
Ibid., 99.
71
Benthien reads Stelarc’s skin performances as “continually giving birth to himself.” Skin, 233.
72
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986), Kafka.
73
Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 113.
74
Benthien ends her book, Skin (234) by addressing Stelarc as a paradoxical figure where his use of
technology at first “shatters the body,” [skin suspensions] but then returns to “reintegrate its fragments”
[cyborg phase].
75
As posted on his website (www.stelarc.va.com.au/). But this claim is already found in his early
performances.
76
Quoted in Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 99, emphasis added.
77
Charles Gaorian has explored the notion art as prosthetics in this sense (see The Prosthetic Pedagogy
of Art, 2013).
78
Massumi develops prosthetics as substitution vs. extension in Parables of the Virtual, 126–127. When
discussing Stelarc’s prosthetics, Joanna Zylinska sees the potential of a prosthetic ethics that goes
beyond self-possession and autonomy pointing to “relationships with alterity and exteriority.” See
Joanna Zylinska’s (2002),” ‘The Future … Is Monstrous’: Prosthetics as Ethics,” 216.
79
This essay appears as chapter 4 in his Parables of the Virtual, but it goes back to 1995. Versions of it
can be found in many sites online. On the use of the “sensible concept” (original emphasis), 90.
80
Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 101–102.
81
There was only one suspension where Stelarc hoisted himself up using his (third extended) arm
on a pulley; this counter-gravitational performance displaced movement from his legs to his arms,
confirming the divergent split between matter of sensation and ‘organic’ perception-action.
82
The most extreme suspension, a suspension that under any other name would be considered a form
of postmodern torture, was where all his bodily expression was radically closed down—being
voluntarily buried alive might get at the magnitude of this performance—comparable to David
Blaine or Criss Angel who bill themselves as magicians and endurance artists. Stelarc’s body was put
between two planks, eyes and mouth sewn shut, suspended from a pole and in the evening taken down
and laid on rocks for seventy-five hours. Sensation would implode his body to a point which would
become unbearable, the danger we would suspect that the skin-ego could no longer contain the bodily
resonances and vibrations. Stelarc would ‘crack.’ This is as close as one might get to the BwO at its
zero level—even the living dead as mummy or zombie is unbearably stilled.
83
84
Ibid., 116.
85
Stelarc’s comment on this performance when his body was split between voltage-in and voltage-out
can now be grasped. “That performance surprised me. I was watching my limbs moving in space.
I’ve neither willed that action nor am I contracting my muscles to perform that action. That action
is occurring beside, before, it predates myself as a free agent. In other words, half of my body has
nothing to do with my free agency … I was looking in sort of wonderment.” Quoted in Meredith Jones
and Zoë Sofia’s (2002), Stelarc and Orlan in the Middle Ages, 60.
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86
87
Ibid., 125.
88
Ibid.
89
The paraphrased description comes from his website on the Partial Head (www.stelarc.va.com.au/
partialhead/index.html).
90
Referred to as tansgenetic art by some (Eduardo Kac’s Genesis 1999 seems to be the ground work
here).
91
See Joanna Zylinska (2009). Such artist cells as Critical Art Ensemble (www.critical-art.net/) have
staged biotech critical performances, as have Rtmark (www.rtmark.com/).
92
Two outstanding articles in this regard do a wonderful review of what is possible here. See Nicole
Ridgway and Nathaniel Stern’s (2009), “The Implicit Body,” and Bernadette Wegenstein’s (2004),
“If You Don’t SHOOT Me, at Least DELETE Me! Performance Art from 1960s Wounds to 1990s
Extensions.” See also Ann Munster’s (2006) Materializing New Media. In chapter five Munster does
a nice review of contemporary interactive art, discussing such well-known works as Huge Harry.
Also Mark Hansen’s discussion of Myron Krueger interactive work is crucial for making a distinction
between those artist who have not fallen into the techniciy of VR and CAVE environments, and new
media artists such as Krueger who find ways to creatively interact with the implicit body. (See, Bodies
in Code, 25–38.)
93
Although we do not develop this in this section, the art of the Japanese artist Tomoko Sawada is
interesting in this case. She plays directly with the imaginary-screen as a mirror through the machinic
assemblage of her and a Polaroid camera (now a defunct technology). Her work might be deemed
(eye) representational. Shy, reserved and anxious, she overcame these ‘psychological’ handicaps
by photographing herself in a different costume and makeup 400 + 1 times (the +1 means that her
‘becoming’ could have continued) in the privacy of a passport photo-booth. The link been 400+
potentialities that could be actualized, obviously was able to affect positively her inner core self. See
Tomoko Sawada’s, ID 400 (2004).
94
As masterfully developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962).
95
On traumatic art of sympathetic empathy, see Jane Bennett’s, Emphatic Vision (2005).
96
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1964), The Child’s Relations with Others, esp. 129.
97
Jacques Lacan (1978).
98
Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (1996).
99
Ibid., 17. emphasis added.
100
Merleau-Ponty, The Child’s Relation with Others, 38, original emphasis.
101
Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 22–27.
102
This is developed by Ruth E. Iskin’s (1997), “In the Light of Images and the Shadow of Technology.”
103
Her discussion of “what is a camera” is developed in chapter four, The Threshold of the Invisible
World, 125–161.
104
Jacques Rancière’s (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics.
105
See Virginia L. Blum’s (2005), Flesh Wounds, 180–187.
106
So claim Ruth Holiday and Sanchez Taylor (2006) in “Aesthetic Surgery as False Beauty.”
107
Orlan as quoted in Jill O’Bryan’s (2005), Carnal Art, 144.
108
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1929). Excerpts can be found online.
109
Beginning with Gender Trouble (1990).
110
Skin, 12.
111
Jacques Lacan, Encore, Seminar XX (1998).
112
This is also the title of a book on Orlan by Parveen Adams, Michael Onfray, Vicki Berger, Orlan: This
is My Body, This is my Software.
113
Deleuze, Cinema 2.
114
Unfortunately, this affection–image is already exploited by the Hollywood Saw horror film series. The
irony of the title should be apparent.
115
To recall or discussion on the affect image in chapter 1 by Simone Brott (2011) where she too argues
that a new affection image is possible when a part-object of architecture overwhelms the subject
through touch and vision.
154
116
This was my own (jan) experience when watching one of Orlan’s operating videos. I tried to stay with
it as long as possible, but a ‘funny’ feeling kept build up inside me to the point that I knew that if I kept
on watching, I would faint.
117
“The female skin is understood as a concealing veil. Undressing a woman of her skin would
fundamentally destroy the myth of her being other. … [Exposing her insides] would pose a fundamental
threat to the existing order of desire. Woman would remain the wounded sex: the skin remains a fetish
and a veil, which of necessity conceals what she may not reveal” (Benthien, 86).
118
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), Rabelais and his World.
119
Hélène Cixous’ (1976). “The Laugh of the Medusa.”
120
Also Jill O’Bryan’s (1999) quite brilliant essay, “Penetrating layer of flesh: Carving in/out bodies
of Orlan and Medusa, Artaud and Marsyas.” O’Bryan refers to Marsyas, a mythological Phrygian
demigod who witnessed his own flaying. This figure is central to Claudia Benthien’s chapter four on
flaying in Skin.
121
As is well-known, these interrelations are best explored through the many writing of George Bataille.
122
“To show that our body is completely alienated by religion, work, sports, and even by our sexuality,
which is formatted according to set models” (Orlan in O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 144, added emphasis).
123
O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 97–100. O’Bryan spells the body without organs in this fashion.
124
O’Bryan, when discussing Orlan’s bWo says, “Orlan asserts the image of an alterable identity, which
is outside of the bounds of the historical male/female binary” (Benthien, 86). I think this applies
quite well to her queering identity as the “people to come.” Also, as Orlan says in an interview,
despite the ‘bumps’ in her head, she is not “an unfuckable monster” (142), and “one of my preferred
sayings is to ‘remember the future’” (ibid.). Orlan is interested in the figures of the freak, the mestizo
hermaphrodite and difference in-and-of itself, although I have not come across any mention of a
Deleuzian influence in the English literature. However, she does mention how “and” is an organizing
principle in her work —“past and present,” “public and private,” that which is considered beautiful
and that which is considered ugly,” “the natural and the artificial,” “satellite transmissions and the
drawing” (Orlan in O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 146). Further, “the consequences of my ‘and’ I will say that
the virtual and the real elements, when they are used at the same time, become new ways of obliquely
questioning art itself and the world around us” (148). I would be more than surprised if Orlan has not
read Deleuze|Guattari given that there are many French Google sites where the connection is made.
125
As explored by the widely disseminated essay by Elizabeth Grosz (1993), “A Thousand Tiny Sexes.
“Becoming-woman means going beyond identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeing up lines
of flight, ‘liberating’ a thousand tiny sexes that identity subsumes under the One” (178). Also Hanjo
Berressem (2006).
126
We are, perhaps, pushing this claim too far, but Claire Colebrook seems to be heading in this
direction as well in her latest musing on ‘becoming woman.’ The Deleuze|Guattarian trajectory
of “imperceptibility” that is developed in Thousand Plateaus does not rest well in some circles of
thought. However, Rosi Braidotti has explored the ethics of this possibility quite extensively. See her,
The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible (2006) and Transpositions (2006).
127
Jay Prosser (1998) in his Second Skins considers Orlan “an insane personification of the
poststructuralist insistence on the absolute constructedness of the body” (62). He was dissatisfied
when she told him she felt like a “un transsexuelle femme-à-femme” (ibid.) Prosser maintains that
she never addressed the question of embodied “flesh.” Part of the misunderstanding is that Orlan has
little to say about the core self (skin-ego). This is not her concern. Within the context of the thesis
offered here, the “transsexed” (63) (rather than transsexuals) who seek sex reassignment surgeries
are closing the gap between their implicit and explicit bodies. Which is why the mirror, as Prosser
shows in chapter three, plays such a significant role in their autobiographies; there is an acceptance
of the established symbolic differentiation of sexes. Transgendered people who Prosser addresses in
his fifth chapter (namely Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues) complicate the matter: desire is not
satisfied by a transition into another sex. The transgendered in this regard are closer to Orlan as a
“transsexuelle”—the ‘queer’ potentiality of the virtual Imaginary.
128
Orlan says this in an interview in 2000, “For my part, I would truly wish the body to be a costume—
something that is not definitive. In O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 141, added emphasis.
155
CHAPTER IV
129
O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 9.
130
“I intend to invert the Christian principle of the world made flesh to the flesh made word. It is necessary
to change the flesh into language by performing transgressive acts against the four governing police
forces (religion, psychoanalysis, money, and art history.” In O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 142, original
emphasis.
131
In an interview with Peggy Zeglin. See Jones and Sofia, The Cyborg Experiments, 60.
132
A photo-sculpture of Orlan’s body acts as her double. She stands behind it. A sign says to insert 5
francs into a slot that is situated on the photo-sculpture’s jugular. The participant can see the coin fall
through the body, down a transparent column and land in the sculpture’s crotch. When this happens
Orlan bends over and kiss the participant—man or woman. The performance concerns the explicit
gendered body, critiques patriarchy and the economic exchange of art for cash.
133
See Jacques Lacan (1987), Television. “A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he
acts as trash [déchet]; his business being trashitas [il decharite]. So as to embody what the structure
entails, namely allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the
subject’s own desire” (19).
134
O’Bryan’s Carnal Art remains the most comprehensive and by far the best study of Orlan’s entire
career. I have drawn from it to make this assessment.
135
The Lacan – Luce Irigaray dispute concerning the ‘ecstasy’ of St. Teresa as developed in S XX,
Encore forms the backdrop of this baptism. See Luce Irigaray’s (1985) essay, Cosi Fan Tutti.
136
“Carnal Art is not interested in the plastic-surgery result, but in the process of surgery, the spectacle
and discourse of the modified body which has become the place of a public debate” (Orlan in O’Bryan,
Carnal Art, 144).
137
Orlan, in O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 143.
138
Ibid.
139
Thousand Plateaus, Yero Zero: Faciality, 167–191.
140
Discussed by O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 102–104.
141
This points to Lacan’s famous story (in Sem. XI, Four Fundamentals) surrounding the contest
between Zeuxis and Parrhasius regarding representation. The victory went to Parrhasius who pained
a veil on the wall. Zeuxis, caught by desire, tried to see what was under it. See also the very difficult
essay on the veil problematzed by Ragland (2008) from a Lacanian perspective.
142
“Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity; no longer that of a primitive head,
but of ‘probe-heads’; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of
deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities.
Become clandestine [imperceptible], make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman
life yet to be created. Face, my love, you have finally become a probe-head” (Thousand Plateaus,
190–191, original emphasis).
143
Orlan in O’Bryan, Canal Art, 146.
144
Orlan, in O’Bryan, Carnal Art, 145.
145
Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen (2008), Shoot an Iraqi.
146
Ibid., 20.
147
These reflections are not in sync entirely with the You Tube postings. Day 26 is also missing in the
book.
148
Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 13.
149
Ibid., 83.
150
Jane Bennett (2005), Emphatic Vision.
151
Julia Kristeva (1996), 21.
152
Charlotte Delbo (1990), Days and Memory.
153
Delbo quoted in Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 25.
154
155
Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 21, emphasis added.
156
Day 15, YouTube posting.
157
158
Ibid., 81.
156
159
This example can be found in Jennifer Friedlander (2003), “How Should a Woman Look?
160
Digg.com is a website that ranks new stories in terms of interest. Bilal’s project became popular
and hence more and more ‘shooters’ began to be involved. (See Bilal and Lyderson, Shoot an Iraqi,
77–86).
161
Day 15 seems to be the turning point. There are two diary entries for that day. See Bilal and Lyderson,
Shoot an Iraqi, 73–84.
162
A distinction is made between the two by Freud, the former is seen as uncritically reenacted (raw
response) while the latter is an action is more self-reflective and conscious. Dominick LaCapra argues
that such a distinction is unwise to be maintained. Both are performatively necessary to “engage
social political problems and provide a measure of responsible control in action” (quoted in Bennett,
Emphatic Vision, 57–58.).
163
Thousand Plateaus, 156.
164
165
Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 8.
166
Gilles Deleuze (1964), Proust and Signs, 161–163.
167
168
Day 24, Bilal and Lydersen, To Shoot an Iraqi, 128.
169
Julia Kristeva (1987), Tales of Love, 277.
170
171
See Slavoj Žižek (1999), “The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion: Inside the Matrix.”
172
As he tells it, with every female who visited him, he received sexual jokes, innuendoes and outright
sexual slurs in the chat room.
157
CHAPTER V
DISTRIBUTING THE SENSIBLE
From its outset, the task of this book has been oriented to the critical relaunch of art
education or more accurately, a remapping of art education adequate to the dizzying
perplexity of the contemporary moment. Such remapping is not simply a metaphor, but
rather, a pragmatic encounter with a particular image of art education composed from
the complex mixing of political, social, aesthetic, economic, and geophilosophical
formations. By unleashing such images from overdetermined arrangement and
habitual circuits of desire, we aim to become more than provocative. The diagram
that will be composed in the course of this final chapter will attempt to palpate ‘a
way through’ the impasses of dominant thought and desiring-production operative
in contemporary art education (Buchanan and Lambert, 2005). Put differently, in
this final chapter, we will prepare a new plane upon which art education might be
most productively disidentified, operationalizing a style of thinking that begins to
contend with what has hitherto been unthought in the field. Briefly put, this section
will begin to diagram a counter-image that begins to take seriously the import of
the inhuman for art education. Prior to explicating such an inhuman approach to
arts education however, it is necessary to survey the emerging distribution of sense
along which art education might be contemporarily thought. It is by composing
this diagram that we will subsequently operationalize an alternative-machinery for
thinking beyond the gravitational pull of established thought.
In Anti-Oedipus (1983), Deleuze|Guattari write that modern society is caught
between two poles of desiring-production, one paranoiac and the other schizophrenic.
“Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine,
[modern societies are] caught between the Urstaat that they would like to
resuscitate…and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold”
(309). Herein, Deleuze|Guattari diagram the transversal exchange between the
codified rules of State society and the decoding of the socius under capitalism.
While State formations aspire to control via regulatory codes and systems of social
organization, capitalism functions to decode the social sphere in order to parasite
upon its unleashed creative impulses. Today, it might be conjectured that art and its
education remain inseparable from this transversal oscillation between practices of
semiotic decoding and the concomitant instantiation of reflexive certainty. This is
not to say that art reflects the milieu from which it emerges, but rather, that art and its
education are already imbricated within the circuits of the socio-political machine.
Beneath the avant-garde experiments of many contemporary artist-researchers
for example, the certainty of a human subject is fully preserved, often assuming
privileged status within practices of artistic auto-ethnography and visual narrative.
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Inhering the rhetoric of complexity and uncertainty, forces of chaos are continually
reterritorialized upon the promise of a creative human manifestor1. Beneath the
disruption of sign and signifier, the ‘I’ persists as a locus of manifestation. Under
the ostensibly radical boarder-crossings being enacted throughout the field of
art-education, a priori categories of identity are continually palpated into being,
multiplying the definitions of subjectivity without commencing a mutant semiotics
capable of misidentifying orthodox processes of subjectification (Colebrook,
2009). This is to say that amidst the avant-garde decodings rife in the field of art
education persists a paranoiac limit point that reterritorializes upon a desire for
representation. Behind the metamodelization of the Deleuze|Guattarian rhizome,
the lionization of hybridity, and the schizo-transgression of semiotic orthodoxy
remains a stealth fidelity to an internal block. In different words, while arts-based
research has fully operationalized various modes of schizo-production, a reactive
desire for representation remains. In relationship to what might be dubbed the
origins of sense, such a desire is hardly shocking. As Deleuze (1990b) articulates,
the phenomenological origins of sense presuppose such noemic attribution. That
is, in phenomenological thought, sense is always already the sense of some thing
that persists over time. The phenomenological act of perception (noeisis) occurs
concomitantly with the noema (the a priori), hence presupposing an automatic
circuit that might be dubbed ‘sense and representation’ (Deleuze, 1990b). While
practices of decoding may produce ‘semiotic flows’, hence dehabituating sense
from codified patterns of distribution, a reactive tendency to constrain such
flows to particular prior attributes persists. Primary amongst these is the impulse
to tether art to the actus purus of the human agent as its germinal point of origin
(Agamben, 1999a).
As O’Sullivan (2006) articulates, we have only begun to think beyond the
human, or rather, beyond the habit of perpetuating a representational being beneath
difference. This is again to acquiesce to a phenomenological approach wherein the
consciousness of the human agent is constitutive of its world. Behind it all, an agential
intentionality persists. Following this phenomenological tract, perception becomes
directed to what it is not, or rather, transposed upon a transcendent, noemic image.
In art education, this tethering of sense and representation has functionally reiterated
a transcendent image of thought born from the Western philosophical tradition.
Following this legacy, what is implied in the fettering of sense and representation
is a transcendent world beyond material percepts and affects (Colebrook, 2006).
It is here that the question “what is art?”, the attribution of artistic sensations to
human emotion, and the contextualization of art as a reflection of a priori conditions
remains loyal to transcendent enunciative possibilities established in advance. This
is already to commence the question of art as an aspiration to meaning. In this circuit,
art is brought into conformity with what already is. Further, the phenomenological
process of linking perception to the perception of a transcendent ‘x’ draws art into
correspondence with the drive to make phenomena communicate. This particular
conceptualization already frames art as the handmaiden of representation.
160
As even the most cursory survey of arts-based research reveals, modes of

interpretive analysis and historical criticism have functionally cathected art to
such specific machines of explication as classical psychoanalysis, critical identity
studies, hermeneutic inquiry, and the genealogical sediments of art history. While
such approaches to arts-based-research remain relevant, they have yet to promulgate
a necessarily challenge to the implicit link between sense and representation.
Perhaps this future challenge has yet to be palpated due to very conditions under
which sense is constituted. In particular, what has come to constitute the notion of
common sense (cogatatio natura) has functionally constrained what it is possible
to think. As Lambert (2002) writes, common sense functions as a corollary to a
philosophical ‘image of thought’ by which everyone already knows what to think.
More specifically, what is common to sense is its transformation into a function
“of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the
Same” (Deleuze, 1990b, 78). Putting the “squeeze on… the singular”, common
sense reduces diversity to particular forms or individualized images of the world
(Massumi, 2002, 21). It is in this way that common sense becomes a corollary to
representation insofar as it functions to identify and recognize the familiar within the
singular. In other words, common sense works to collapse the uncertainty of inter-
state formations into recognizable states of being.
Situated in time and not yet of it, the often untimely force of art becomes
submitted to the chronological-time of art history. We might think similarly about
the anomalous works of such clumsily labeled outsider artists as Daniel Johnston
and Wesley Willis, whose art has retroactively been understood as the symptom of
psychological disorder rather than singular styles of schizoid, anti-autobiographical
becoming. Likewise, it is against such anomalous works as Kac’s Natural History of
the Enigma or the unnatural transgenic filiations of Odani’s Rompers that common
sense functions as a mechanism whereby diversity is distributed via the all-too-
human matrices of moral, eschatological, and ontological orthodoxy. This is to say
that the shock to thought palpated by the singular is always at risk of becoming
overdetermined by common sense. In this manipulative ethos, difference is reduced
to the play of degrees from pre-established norms. As Daignault (1995) argues,
common sense constitutes one of the most significant problems for education
today, ‘killing’ the anomalous sense-event by tethering it to that which everyone
already knows. The stakes are no less for arts-based research wherein the implicit
appeal to common sense, or rather, a common matrix for the distribution of
sense has yet to be fully surveyed. This pertains not only to the question of how
autobiographical arts-research reflects the singularity of art in the habitual image of
the “I”, but further, in terms of how the various interpretation machines employed
by arts-based researchers already presume the ways in which the anomalous might
be territorialized or captured in meaning. In Deleuzian terms, common sense has
yet to force us to think insofar as it provides the a priori conditions for thinking
itself. Caught in the habits of representational thought, we have not yet begun
to think.
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CHAPTER V
Admittedly, this image of arts-based research diagrams the most paranoiac

tendency to tether difference to an object, interpretive vehicle, or individual
perspective that insists as a limit point for inquiry. As in its clinical application, this
paranoiac limit point palpates a transcendent image that preserves the conditions of
meaning itself. Beyond this world, the paranoiac insists on a world of higher and
more profound meaning. It is in this vein that paranoia functions as a territory of anti-
chaos insofar as it preserves the stability of a master signifier upon which experience
is continually reterritorialized. In contemporary arts-based research, this block of
anti-chaos has begun to assume increasingly habitual iterations under the banners of
autobiography, identity politics, and foremost, in the conceptualization of art as the
practice of meaning making. As Deleuze|Guattari (1983) develop, paranoiac desire
attempts to create a coded-block or Urstaat (dogma) amidst capitalist practices of
social decoding. Put differently, paranoiac desiring-production produces consistency
amidst the schizophrenic impulses of decontexualization and circulation particular
to the social function of capitalism. Beyond the capitalist impetus to release social
codes into flight, paranoiac-desire posits a transcendent shelter from chaos. Amidst
it all I am there! Identity persists! Art resembles the world from which it emerges!
However, the paranoiac impulse must be attached to a caveat. As Deleuze|Guattari
contend, desiring-production might very well aspire to the creation of its own
fascism. In other words, it is easier to acquiesce to a dogmatic image of life than
to fabulate a style of living radically different from that given representationally.
The stakes for arts-based research are immense, for if arts-researchers continually
reterritorialize their practices upon the paranoiac limit point of representational
thought, the power of art to commence new times and less oppressive styles of living
become radically delimited. The overcoming of paranoiac-production is a condition
of thinking the new.
As it might otherwise be dubbed structuralism, arts-based research might be
defined by the myriad approaches it has mobilized against the paranoiac-desires of
Western culture. This orientation cannot be understated insofar as it begins to plot
a new trajectory for the field in general. Yet, before we begin to engage with what
might be dubbed the schizo-production of contemporary arts-based research, it is
crucial that we engage more fully with the general problematic of common sense
and further, the marriage of sense and representation that continues to operate as
a stealth fidelity in even the most experimental arts-based practices. In brief, the
following section will commence an counter-diagram to the image of arts-based
research caught within the representational habits of paranoiac-production.
A New Idiot
People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything
speaks to them of themselves.
–Guy Debord (2003)
162
Universals do not explain anything but must first be explained (Deleuze, 1990b).
Exceeding what might otherwise be taken as a blithe reproach against universalism,
Deleuze means to commence the more demanding philosophical activity of asking
how the universal is composed in the first place. Advancing a philosophical
style cultivated in the work of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, Deleuze would
promulgate a general refutation of common sense as sufficient ground upon which
thought might naturally proceed. However, this rejection of common sense poses a
particular problematic. Specifically, without the notion of common sense to ground
thought, with what are we left? As Lambert (2002) speculates, “[w]ould a philosophy
that rejects a certain notion of common sense not risk becoming solipsistic [or] at
least a little schizophrenic…?” (4). For arts-based research, the stakes might be
posed similarly. Subtracting sense from representation, or otherwise, delinking the
distribution of sense from recognizable patterns of enunciation, does arts-research
not fall into impracticality, relativism, or the purposeful obfuscation and cynical
pratfalls of postmodernity? While the connection between sense and representation
has hardly evaded these potential stakes, an anxiety over the meaning of arts-based
research nerveless remains.
“Flailing in confusion, [can we] still claim to be seeking the truth?” (Deleuze and
Parnet, 1987, 148). Such an approach is not, as some arts-researchers have insisted,
recourse to laud uncertainty as a new epistemology of unlearning. Rather, what
Deleuze advances is the inadequacy of common sense to fabulate new problems for
thinking difference. Under the common distribution of sense, problems are always
already tied to a matrix of possible solutions. Such a scenario is hence sorrowfully
inadequate for thinking the radically alien sensations produced during Matisse’s
Fauvist years, the proximal zone produced between man and animal in Bacon’s
Triptych, or the becoming-music of Klee’s Bad Orchestra. More adequately perhaps,
the very becoming of sensation necessitates its subtraction from representation,
or rather, an image of the world given in advance. As the original styles forged
by Matisse, Bacon, and Klee demonstrate, the creative impetus is requisite upon
this very subtraction, or rather, the release (n-1) of sense from the conformity of
resemblance. Insofar as the formulation (n-1) suggests stealing away and letting
flee orthodox elements of signification, it becomes a condition for thinking the new.
This said, arts-based research is left with the problem of how meaning might be
produced once it has dispensed with a particular form of common sense intimate to
its hermeneutic and phenomenological fidelities. One answer to this problematic lies
in rethinking the very image of the arts-based researcher. In a manner characteristic
of the traditional philosopher, the arts-researcher is hardly the dupe of common
sense. Rather, arts-based research extracts itself from the “idiot’s point of view” in
the creation of an image of thought born of exposing, disrupting, and overturning the
hegemony of common sense (Lambert, 2002, 5). Admittedly, it would be erroneous
to suggest that arts-based researchers take as gospel that which everyone already
knows since the instantiation of arts-research is at least minimally oriented to the
exploration of sense divorced from conventional modes of academic enunciation.
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CHAPTER V
Yet, amidst this remapping of sense within the increasingly orthodox field of
academic research, we have yet to question what it is that constitutes the common,
or rather, the idiot’s point of view?
While the very mention of idiocy will no doubt arouse suspicion, the term should
not be taken pejoratively. That is, the conflation of idiocy to common sense is not
a synonym of stupidity. Rather, as it functioned in traditional philosophical inquiry,
idiocy might be more accurately connected to the idea of ‘natural consciousness’ or
rather, “the child of ‘natural man’” (Lambert, 2006, 5). However, as the opening of
this chapter asserts, if common sense is no longer adequate to the task of philosophical
inquiry, this also suggests that the image of thought by which philosophy
differentiates itself from idiocy (falseness and error) is concomitantly unsuitable.
As Deleuze develops, the very idea of the idiot undergoes a radical transformation
after the failure of representational thought to account for the brutality of the Second
World War. No longer a ground upon which inquiry can ‘naturally’ rely, the image of
idiocy characterized by the ignorant child is supplanted by an image of the idiot as
both deceiver as well as deceived. This new portrait of idiocy no longer reflects the
uneducated subject nor ‘natural man’ divested of critical powers. Rather, the portrait
of idiocy sketched by Deleuze is linked to a radical ‘will to falseness’. That is, the
modern idiot is one who ‘wills of the unthinkable’ into existence, refusing the edicts
of orthodox thought (Lambert, 2002). It is this radical idiocy that is exemplified in
such Situationist experiments as psychogeography, in which untimely virtual images
of urban space-time are fulminated against the orthodox movements demanded by
urban design and modern architecture.
Mobilizing an image out-of-step with the world as it is, the Situationist
International set about to compose a different kind of brain for thinking urban space.
Further, it is through the practice of dérive, or “drift”, that the Situationists advocate
for a break in the habit of sense and representation, bending the geometrical
organization of both space and time through the instantiation of a smooth or
molecular approach to urban movement that has constituted a philosophical plane
for such unorthodox social experiments as parkour, counter-surveillance, and the
remapping of urban space by such artists as Julie Mehretu and filmmaker Jim
Jarmusch. Such a ‘will to the unthinkable’ is, of course, incommensurate with a
conventional notion of stupidity except for the fact that the modern idiot refuses
common sense as a ground for creative inquiry. Perhaps more importantly however,
the idiot promulgates a recalcitrant attitude toward the common distribution of sense
insofar as this distribution has become overcoded by the ideas men of contemporary
marketing and the educational bureaucrat who knows in advance how sense will be
aligned to educational experience (Lambert, 2002). In this manner, we can begin to
understand the new idiot as more than simply ignorant. Against the sense producers
of contemporary marketing and education, the idiot fulminates a ‘will to the false’
that breaks the circuit of sense and representation by forging an image of life out-of-
step with what is. “The old idiot wanted indubitable truths at which he could arrive
at himself” Deleuze|Guattari write, whereas the “[t]he new idiot…wants to turn the
164
absurd into the highest power of thought – in other words, to create” (1994, 62).
Where is meaning to be made once common sense is no longer adequate for creative
action? The modern idiot responds with an entreaty to the powers of the false!
But what is meant by the powers of false? For Deleuze|Guattari (1994), the idiot is
contrasted against the public professor who unquestioningly adapts to the desiring-
machines of the State and hence, ceases to think. The idiot cares for neither the truths
of History or the indubitably of sense and representation. “The new idiot wants the
lost, the incomprehensible, and the absurd to be restored to him” (Deleuze|Guattari,
1994, 63). This is a cursory approach to what it might mean to rethink arts-based
research as the task of palpating the false, or rather, of composing an image of
thought that does not aspire to either correspondence or representation, but rather, the
extension of what might be thought. Contemporarily, it is in the work of such artists
as Matthew Barney that we might begin survey the potential of the false for thinking
the futurity of ontology. Productively failing to fall back into correspondence with
any prior mytheme, Barney’s mythopoetic compositions short circuit the hermeneutic
interpretive machine. More importantly however, Barney’s mythopoetic Cremaster
Cycle begins to diagram a style of life that is distinctly nonbiological (O’Sullivan,
2006). Rather, Barney’s Cremaster Cycle emphasizes the act of fabulation, or rather,
the force of compositional falsification. As O’Sullivan comments, the Cremaster
Cycle is less a reflection of the world as it is than a becoming of the world. Put
differently, via the powers of the false, the Cremaster Cycle creates a world – one
populated by mutant semiotics and alien sensations impossibly ascribable to some
all-too-human experience or representational referent. Barney composes a myth that
does not reflect a given people but rather, prepares space for a people yet to come.
“The only true political image must be the unnatural one” (Kelley cited in
O’Sullivan, 152). Kelley’s gambit does not simply entail accepting the post-
structural condition that all images are mediated. Nor does it entail adopting
a strategy of deconstruction by which the mediated character of the image is
autopsied and reconfigured. Rather, the radical import of Kelley’s affirmation
extends from its challenge to arts-research. That is, as arts-researchers, it may
no longer be adequate to simply critique the image. Rather, for arts-research to
become a political force, it must begin to focus on the fabulation and deployment of
untimely images capable of opening new spaces and times of living. Such untimely
or falsified images become political at the very point that they become capable
of short-circuiting the orthodox categories of the polis in a manner capable of
thinking a people at the periphery of the city (nomos) (Deleuze|Guattari, 1987).
To put this differently, the unnatural image called for by Kelley becomes truly
political insofar as it is capable of misidentifying from common sense the singular
or inimitable case. Such a productive disidentification might be detected in the
work of Canadian artist K. C. Adams, whose futural portraits productively delink
“Euro-Aboriginals” from an image of the “Indian” overdetermined by cliché
and romantic idealism. Beyond fabulating the hitherto unthought term “Euro-
Aboriginal” to signify the emergence of a mutant, neo-aboriginal subjectivity,
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Adams mobilizes an image of an aboriginality-to-come. Populated by post-gender

and post-racial techno-hybrids, Adam’s world reterritorializes the subject within a
high-tech milieu capable of rendering a shifting spectrum of skin tones from the
“white” of her Scottish heritage to the “brown” of her Blackfoot lineage. Inhering
the potential to become actualized along a diversity of skin tones, Adam’s Euro-
Aboriginal is distinctly post-racial, queering the representational power of presence
by which the subject is organized within the social order. Avoiding a sedimented
historical narrative by which her techno-hybrids might be known, Adams fabulates
an untimely future- anterior through the production of such untimely artifacts as
LED chokers and flip-flops. As a-people-yet-to-come, Adams’ Euro-Aboriginal
escapes the capture-apparatus of classical anthropology by thinking a wholly
unnatural image no longer anticipated by powers of biopolitical or colonial control.
That is, while Adams’ neo-aboriginals are signified by such labels as “Indian
Princess”, “Drunken Indian”, and “Mohawk Gas”, they are concomitantly out-
of-step with any representational signified, eclipsing anthropos through a process
of biotechnogenesis. Leaping from the clutches of common sense, the hybrid
Euro-Aboriginal opens a new space and time for a people no longer reflected in
a prior image or historical mytheme. It is in this way that Adam’s work becomes
political.
Palpating the powers of the false, the Euro-Aboriginal wrests the forces of
difference from an image of the “Indian” overdetermined by the media and the
historical forces of colonization. More adequately, Adam’s hybrid Euro-Aboriginals
are the unthought of a neo-colonial imaginary that continually wills an image of
the past into the present. Against this, the Euro-Aboriginal marks the fabulation of
a becoming that no longer resembles the past-present moment, but rather, marks a
“shred of futurity”, or rather, a potential future born from a crack in the present order
(Massumi, 1992, 105). The powers of the false are, in this way, always a thought
of the unthought. Following, it might be said that the false is in the world but not
of it. It is in this way that we might better understand the always-untimely force of
creation and concomitantly, the necessity that true creation escape the stultifying
prison of common sense. Today, there may be no task more serious than cultivating
a radical stupidity capable of recommencing thought in a manner unhinged from
common sense, or rather, that which everyone already knows. To become sorcerers,
not surgeons!
Art is Monumental
Rethinking the task of arts research as a will-to-falseness advocates a style of

thinking oriented less to the production of anomalies than to a kind of vigorous
experimentation through which new forms of inquiry and becoming might flow.
The will-to-falseness is hence not simply license to free play. Rather, the will-to-
falseness demonstrated in Barney and Adams become ways of actualizing specific
social, scientific, and artistic perplexions while remaining unequal to them.
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However, although Barney’s mythopoetic mutants and Adam’s cyborgian neo-

aboriginals dilate ontology in a manner that breaks the circuits of representation
while mobilizing unthought forms of subjective enunciation, we have yet to fully
encounter their most radical inhuman potential. That is, while the work of Barney,
Adams, Odani, Kac, Jeremijenko, Dion and others produce an encounter with the
inhuman life of viral strains, transspecies assemblages, and non-human modes of
communication, what continues to persist as an implicit ground in arts research is the
primacy of the artist ‘itself’. Flaying open the closed system view of humanism, the
aforementioned artists produce trajectories of animal and inhuman becoming at the
conceited heart of anthropocentrism. Yet, amidst this radical reconfiguration of the
human in an age of viral exchange, chemical contagion, and human-animal ethics,
much arts research remains wed to the presumption of a primary human actor. Briefly
put, arts research remains hinged to praxis, or rather, to the notion of a creative and
intentional consciousness operating ‘behind’ the object of its production. Herein,
the field continues to exert a paranoiac desire to ground artistic production in a
historically stable and commonly accepted point of reference. As Deleuze (Deleuze
and Parnet, 1987) writes, “[w]e are always pinned against the white wall of dominant
significations, we are always sunk in the hole of our subjectivity, the black hole of
our Ego which is more dear to us than anything” (45). For Deleuze|Guattari (1983),
‘the artist’ is an insufficient ground up which to reterritorialize artistic thought. The
artist, they write, is a “becomer” or elsewhere, a “shadow” of fabulation (171).
We are not in the world because we become with the world, as Van Gogh would
become-sunflower and Cézanne a pulsation of the micro-moment petrified in still
life. Beyond reterritorializing the force of art in the image of the artists’ capacity
for creative production, this lingering anthropocentric fidelity has occluded what is
most inhuman in art. That is, where art is reterritorialized upon the personal narrative
of the artist, the intentionality of a conscious creator, or the metaphysics of genius, it
fails to apprehend art’s monumental power.
This assertion begs the question as to what it means to call art monumental,
and further, how such a characterization might help arts-based researchers to
think the inhuman quality of art itself. In contrast to the phenomenological
assertion that art is located within lived experience or composed from personal
memory, Deleuze|Guattari (1994) assert that art stands on its own. “No art and no
sensation have ever been representational” (193). Delinking art from lived inquiry,
Deleuze|Guattari think art in a manner noncontinuous with either the experience
of the subject or the conscious creative activity of the artist. Turning from a
phenomenological legacy that would begin by taking art as a vehicle for
disclosing the world, Deleuze|Guattari argue that art is in no way is naturally
disposed to the reflection of what is. Rather, it is this very conceptualization of art
that has become tethered to the broad concept of human experience, thereby reifying
the legacy of anthropocentrism dispersed by art’s autonomous force. Eclipsing
the presumption of representation is hence crucial should art become capable of
moving out-of-step with either a perceiving subject or image of the world composed
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in advance. Yet, does art not already function in this way despite its familiar
reterritorialization upon the life of the artist or the artist’s lived inquiry?
To take seriously Deleuze|Guattari’s argument, we must jettison the all-too-
human image of artistic expression as the expression of the artist’s lived experience.
As Deleuze|Guattari write, if art reflects anything, it is the expressive potential of
matter itself. In other words, the work of art does not reflect experience but rather,
actualizes matter’s potential to differ in ways capable of escaping a human point of
view. Take for example a stroke of yellow upon a canvas. While one can point to
the presence of yellow in the world, its selection upon the canvas releases it from
any practical context. Yellow becomes autonomous. “The work of art is a being
of sensation and nothing else” Deleuze|Guattari (1994) write, “it exists in itself”
(164). Such autonomy is intimate to expressivist painting in which colors enter into
confused relations of sensation with other colors, lines, and rhythms. For example,
the confused zones of sensation composed by de Kooning stand alone. There is
no prior world or experience that is reflected in them. Rather, as they move out of
joint with what is, they begin to palpate the powers of difference itself. In part, this
is what it means for art to be monumental. It stands alone, beholden to neither the
artists’ lived experience or the grounded location from which the artist creates. “The
monument’s action is not memory but fabulation” (168). The expressive potential
of matter is hence not preorganized by the author’s contextual location, but more
radically, becomes an opening through which different experiences and sensations
might be composed. Art does not express the world as it is nor does it reflect the
artist’s intent to communicate or create meaning. Rather, art mobilizes affects or
potential encounters that are then forged into meaning (Colebrook, 2006). This
differentiation is crucial, for if the autonomous force of art is not yet meaningful
or representational, then it inheres the potential to palpate difference, or rather, to
create what is not yet given. It is in this way that the monumental force of art is
both inhuman and futural, presenting us not with meaning but more radically, the
potential for infinite variety (Colebrook, 2006).
If we take seriously the monumental force of art, the question of what art means
must necessarily be supplanted by the question of what it does and can do. Following
this provocation for arts-based researchers, let us commence the question of what
art can do. For Deleuze|Guattari (1994), “the aim of art is to wrest the percept from
perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from
affections as the transition from one state to another” (167). Herein, we already
begin to detect what art can do. That is, in Deleuze|Guattarian terms, art functions
to detach percepts from either the perception of some thing or the perspective of a
perceiver. In this vein, percepts “are no longer perceptions; they are independent of
a state of those who experience them” (164). Taking this conceptualization seriously
would entail art’s becoming incommensurate with meaning, metonymy, or even the
conceptual anti-artistic impulses of modernism.
Before the emergence of meaning and recognition commonly attributed
perception, art is sensed. Oil smiles, fired clay gestures, metal propels, Romanesque
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stones crouch while Gothic stone ascends (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994). Sensation is

exemplified by the haptic lines populating Pollock’s’ non-optical expressivist
paintings. Composed at the edge of chaos, Pollock’s Untitled #3 is not an object
of interpretation, but a bloc of sensations that overflow representation. In this
example, sensation becomes neither common sense or the sensation of some thing,
but rather, an encounter with the imperceptible or unre-cognizable detached from
those clichés that always-already threaten the canvas (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994).
Such imperceptibility (unrecognizability) is also confronted in the work of Francis
Bacon, who mobilizes percepts unhinged from conceptual form and strict artistic
taxonomies. For Deleuze (2003), the kinds of percepts mobilized by Bacon require
an entirely new way of thinking about art. Rather than a function of narrative
or object of perception, Bacon’s work might be thought as a complex diagram
composed of differential rhythms (constant variation in units of measurement),
chaos (that which is unequal to any unit of measure) and force (the question of how
to render the nonvisible and nonorganic visible). In these diagrams, Bacon’s use of
tonal regions over color value palpates a haptic sensation of color. Put differently,
where the use of color value aspires to represent the optics of light, Bacon’s
broken tones relate intensively to evoke the sensation of color as a nonsignifying
and nonrepresentational force. Further, it is via Bacon’s diagrammatic approach to
painting that the virtual (nonvisible) potential of bodies to vary, metamorphose, and
enter into relation with other species is palpated. Overrunning perception, the percepts
encountered in Bacon necessitate a new way of looking, reacting, and thinking. It
is in this vein that Bacon’s radical percepts might be linked to Deleuze|Guattari’s
advocacy that art should function to create a new nervous system for the subject.
Unfettering percept from perception, we might come to react and be affected
differently.
The conceptualization of percept in a manner differentiated from perception
is hence critical as the patterns of reaction in contemporary arts-based research
become increasingly territorialized around debates of interpretation, method, and
the dogmatic instrumentalization of sense in the image of what is most common
to thought. Put differently, the field at large has yet to take seriously the inhuman
quality of percept, thereby reterritorializing art upon those terms of re-cognition
already at our disposal. While such fidelity to representation is undoubtedly sufficient
for founding common sense, it is no longer adequate to a myriad of emerging art-
forms and practices that have begun to take seriously art’s potential to create new
subjective and social nervous systems capable of breaking from clichéd circuits
of reaction and meaning-making. As we have begun to detect, the works of Jim
Lambie, Eva Rothschild, and Hayley Tompkins mark a encounter with object-based
practices and the question of how art is composed in the first place (O’Sullivan,
2010). Put differently, today, there is an emerging body of art and arts practices
that no longer aspire to meaning-making in the sense of attempting to reflect the
world. As O’Sullivan writes in reference to this style of work, “[art] is more than an
object to be read” (190). Similarly, it might be said that the percepts mobilized by
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a number of contemporary artists overflows the desire to render artistic production

into an object of communication. Herein, art education becomes less an inquiry on
the epistemological or representational power of art than the fulmination of art’s
most ethico-political dimension: Not what art means but what it can do. Such a shift
is imperative should we desire to break the reactive fetters of paranoia to which the
field of art education remains beholden.
The conceptualization of percept that we are advocating herein is far from new.
Indeed, the reconfiguration of the subjective and social nervous system emerges
as early as Vertov’s experimental delinking of optics from the perspective of the
human organism. Deterritorializing the eye from the organism’s head, Vertov’s
camera would actualize a host of inhuman percepts unrecognizable according to
a human point of view. It is this “luring power of the screen” and the changes it
can introduce to the brain that has received renewed attention in contemporary art
(Pisters, 2010, 224). For example, it is through the gaseous percepts of Brakhage’s
The Dante Quartet (1987) or Mothlight (1963) that the camera-eye undergoes a
radically inhuman deterritorialization. Simply put, Brakhage’s camera no longer
aspires to reflect human perceptions. Rather, through the inhuman eye of such
films as Mothlight, the screen becomes unre-cognizable according to any orthodox
human optics or traditionally representational composition of human life. It is here,
in the haptic speed and varying pulsations of Brakhage’s film, that new circuits of
sensation and reaction are created. That is, if the screen does indeed coincide with
the brain (the brain is the screen), then Brakhage palpates a distinctly alien nervous
system within the spectator, hence overthrowing the conflation of sensation with the
humanistic character of perception promulgated in phenomenology.
Brakhage’s film summons what is most inhuman and unrecognizable in us.
In different words, Brakhage’s film evokes an eye detached from human optics,
a brain not yet oriented to re-cognition, and a nervous system pulsing with alien
temporalities. Minimally, Brakhage’s fabulation of ethereal percepts break from
the solidity of narrative cinema or rather, of narrative conventions in which man
is continually reflected. More radically however, the inhuman sensations palpated
by Brakhage fabulate a Cézannian world wherein “Man [is] absent but entirely
from the landscape” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994, 169). Revolting against what has
become human-all-too-human in art, Brakhage diagrams the expressive potential
of matter prior to its territorialization into form. It is in this way that Brakhage
cultivates a singularly neo-materialist approach to thinking art. That is, where art
and its education often begin with episteme and form, Brakhage points to how
art is composed in the first place. This experiment recommences artistic inquiry
upon the question of what art can do. Such an experiment can only proceed by
extracting and letting flee percepts not yet territorialized in the image of man. In
Brakhage, this task is commenced via the camera’s inhuman eye “unruled by man-
made laws of perspective…[and] unprejudiced by compositional logic” (Brakhage
and McPherson, 2001, 12). “Imagine” Brakhage (1978) challenges, “a world
before the ‘beginning was the word’” (120). It is this challenge that marks the
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neo-materialist impulse at work in Brakhage’s inhuman diagrammatics. That is,

films like Mothlight, Water for Maya, and Preludes are able to palpate a virtuality of
sensations prior to their actualization as a thing sensed. It is in this way that thinking
might be reoriented to the question of how sense might be organized differently. This
is not simply to advocate for the fabulation of novel sensations, but more radically,
to divest thinking from those habitual circuits of perceiving that have come to
constitute a latent anthropocentric bias in arts-based research.
If we take seriously the notion of percept as a liberatory force, art and its education
must necessarily become more than personal. That is, through the inhuman eye
of Brakhage’s film, art becomes distinctly pre-personal, or rather, a chaosmos of
sensations prior to their attribution to form or consciousness. This posed, it has
become increasingly difficult to think about art in terms of the prepersonal. As the
primacy of praxis in arts-based research insists, authorial consciousness and the will-
of-the-artist found artistic production. Further, even the most critical deconstructive
approaches to thinking art education often commence upon the contextual actualities
of the artist’s life. Either conceptualization has yet to think about art and its education
in terms of affects which “are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the
strength of those who undergo them” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994, 164). This returns us
to the question of what art can do insofar as affect points to the nonhuman becomings
of the human. In this conceptualization, affect becomes discontinuous with emotion
in that emotion already marks the attribution of form upon sensation. In distinction,
affect might be thought as the subject’s becoming into the compound of sensations
of which art is composed. For example, it is through his relationship with Moby
Dick that Ahab is able to create a particular perception of the sea. Put differently,
Ahab’s ability to apprehend the vast singularity of the ocean runs counterpart to his
becoming-whale (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994). We might think similarly about Robinson
Crusoe’s desert island survival. Crusoe does not survive by overcoming the myriad
geological sensations of the island, but through his becoming-island. In the course of
this becoming-island, Crusoe assumes different rhythms, temporalities, and spatial
orientations corollary to the sensations of the island. Briefly put, such difference
is no longer of a human quality. Rather, Crusoe’s transformation is composed of
inhuman sensations. To reiterate, we are not simply in the world, we become with
the world. As Spinoza averred, we do not yet know what a body can do. That is, we
do not yet know how a body might divide, deterritorialize, or connect with others to
assemble compounds of sensation (Deleuze, 1998).
While the prior examples bear only tangentially to visual art, they are exemplary
insofar as they point to the inhuman force of affect. That is, they diagram the
flow of affect that neither originates or culminates in image of the ‘I’. In visual
art, such flows of affect might be exemplified in the work of Van Gogh, who
does not simply paint Sunflowers (1888), but becomes-sunflower. Put differently,
sunflower-sensations affectively pass through Van Gogh, whose head becomes-
sunflower in the speculative self-portrait Sunflowers (1888) and who canvas
is hitherto populated by the complex rhythms and intensities of the fruit bearing
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sunflower. Van Gogh’s lines, marks, and colors undergo a becoming-sunflower

without falling into resemblance. This is, of course, the difference between Van
Gogh’s paintings and an artist who aspires to the representational capture a given
object on the canvas. More specifically, Van Gogh’s affective becoming-sunflower
is not tethered to the form of a sunflower, but to particular sensations which pass
into composition with the night sky, the wheatfield, or the artist’s head. This is
simply to say that an artist might pass into affects “that no longer owe anything
to those who experience or experienced them” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1994, 168). The
inhuman becoming suggested in this conceptualization of affect mobilizes two ‘key’
considerations for arts-based research. First, if the non-originary force of affect is
taken seriously, it suggests that identity is not primary, or rather, that sensations are
irreducible to their terms. As in Henry Miller’s challenge whether it is possible to
become intoxicated by imbibing pure water, we might similarly ask how one might
seize upon particular affects without retroactively identifying them as the affect
of some thing. To reiterate Deleuze|Guattari (1994), affect stands alone. To take
seriously the monumental force of affect, art education must remain vigilant against
the representational correlation of affect to some object of attribution. Instead, we
might begin to ask how it is that the artist might seize upon flows of affect in order to
form new relations delinked from the terms upon which they appear to be founded.
To follow Uexküll’s (2011) example, how might we come to see the portrait of a
fly in the web of the spider? Put differently, how might a head become-sunflower,
or rather, how might we connect the affects that pass through the sunflower upon
the head of the human? Of course, this method is intimate to the manner by which
Francis Bacon machines the violent affects of the slaughterhouse upon the head, or
elsewhere, the intensities of animality with the human body. It is at this juncture
that we encounter a second shift necessitated should we take seriously the inhuman
becomings promulgated by affect. That is, affect produces connections with what
we are not yet and is in this way become synonymous with the Deleuze|Guattarian
rhizome. Yet, the application of rhizomatics in arts-based theory has yet to fully
grapple with the monumental force of affect or the kinds of inhuman becomings it
operationalizes.
Provocation 1: Ask: What does my rhizome do?
Following Deleuze|Guattari’s caveat that one must enter into processes of

deterritorialization with caution, this next section attempts to proceed with
trepidation. In crass terms, the answer to the paranoiac impulse of representational
thought can no longer be adequately posed in terms of plurality, multiplication,
or the promulgation of subjective or historical perspective. As it was articulated
in the previous section, there is nothing to say that such formulations evade the
presumption of a prima cause upon which multiplication is founded. Put differently,
there is nothing to say that the ostensibly critical proliferation of meaning is able
to evade the conceptualization of difference by degree, which might otherwise be
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written (n*x), where n remains a transcendent point of reference fettering what

might be thought in terms of what already is.
It is against this paranoiac foil that art-based theorizing has begun to embrace a
new set of tools for thinking artistic production from under the Western philosophical
legacy of representation. Today, we have become keenly aware of a schizophrenic
impulse in arts-based theorizing aimed at disrupting the sedimented genealogies
of art history, the coded distribution of life into the forms of race, gender, class,
and the deterritorialization of disciplinary limits project upon art by the image of
professionalism in which many schools continue to be organized. In this ostensibly
liberatory project, the conceptual tools of rhizomatics, hybridity, metissage, and
nomadism have begun to assume special currency as devices for challenging the
paranoiac image of thinking that continues to fulminate against experimentation in
the arts. However, it is not enough to simply laud these tools as if their relatively
recent arrival into art education were sufficient to confirm their revolutionary
power. For while the emergence of new tools for overturning the reactivity of
representational thought become increasingly necessary, arts-based theorists must
concomitantly render such tools into political weapons capable of warding off
their readymade immersion into the equally schizophrenic logic of neo-liberal
capitalism. Differently put, the adoption of new tools for thought must be capable
of commencing a style of political thinking that productively fails to fall back
into prior images of thought while carefully negotiating neo-liberalism’s need for
newness, complexity, and contradiction. As Deleuze|Guattari (1983) comment on
the transformation of the socius from under the despotic (coded) sign regimes of pre-
industrialization: “[s]ocial machines feed off the contradictions they give rise to, on
the crisis they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations
they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself” (151).
The schizophrenic impulse to unfetter visual culture from coded regimes of
interpretation has long been anticipated by a culture of marketing that aims to
recode culture within a complex field of consumable lifestyles, or otherwise, to
instantiate ambient free market consumerism via the deterritorialization of coded
social territories (Baudrillard, 1993). Yet, such practices of deterritorialization are
not reducible to the logic of capitalism exclusively. State power has transversally
learned the power of rhizomatic composition, henceforth deflating the foil of the
State as a strictly arboreal (transcendent) formation. For example, in their attack on
the city of Nablus in 2002, Israeli Defense Forces operationalized what Brigadier-
General Aviv Kokhavi has described as an “inverse geometry” of “micro-tactical
action” (Weizman, 2010). Recoding the urban fabric through the creation of
counter-cartographies, Israeli Defense Forces approached the city as a flexible
medium by blasting horizontal holes through walls and vertical holes through
ceilings and floors. Cutting “overground tunnels” to mask their movements from
aerial detection, the IDF contravened the coded space of the city, bypassing streets,
doorways, stairwells, alleys, and windows (Weizman, 2010). “Walking through
walls”, the IDF functionally produced a rhizomatic or deterritorialized image of the
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city-in-flux, operationalizing the kinds of molecular tactics that have been lauded
by many arts-based researchers. The problematic that this military application of
nomadic counter-cartography raises for arts-based research is immense, since
the adoption of nomadism and rhizomatics into these respective fields has yet
to be seriously understood in terms of the Deleuze|Guattarian (1987) caveat:
“[n]ever believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (500). The creation of
rhizomatic, nomadic, or smooth assemblages cannot naively be lauded as liberatory.
As the IDF demonstrate, such concepts can always be mobilized in support of new
tyrannies. After Lao Tzu, there is a renewed art of war.
Provocation 2: Mutate
For as much as corporate and State powers have begun to mobilize rhizomatic thought
for political and economic gain, the field of arts-based theory has correspondently
assumed a depoliticized approach to such radical conceptual tools.2 Via Bourriaud,
Alliez (2010) conjectures that the depoliticization of schizo-desire in the field of
artistic thought is in part manifested via the discourse of relational aesthetics. More
specifically, it is through the insertion of relational aesthetics into artistic thought that
the differentiation of modern and contemporary art is commenced (Alliez, 2010).
Marking a temporal shift, relational aesthetics reenvisions art as the task of forging
heterodox fields of social interaction. Yet, beneath this ostensibly liberatory project,
Alliez detects a particular fidelity to the post-Fordian impulses of contemporary
capitalism. Specifically, where relational aesthetics aspires to the composition of
a commons, it enters into resonance with the “culture of interactivity” particular
to integrated world capitalism (90). No longer capitalism and schizophrenia in
the Deleuze|Guattarian sense, but what Alliez incisively terms “capitalism and
consensus” (85). It is in this vein that relational aesthetics becomes an alibi under
which one might recuperate meaning by rendering art into a new, more novel form
of social communication. This is not to say that a qualitative difference does not
insist within this new form of consensus. While it is not imposed transcendently, as
in the case of art history and its encyclopedic interpretation of artistic genealogy,
the consensus inhering relational aesthetics introduces a post-Fordian ideal into the
avant-garde image of contemporary artistic production. That is, relational aesthetics
functionally aligns with new forms of transaction in which the post-Fordian values
of flexibility and mobility play an incisive and lauded role (90). It is in this image of
relational aesthetics that new forms of artistic intersubjectivity have been promulgated
in arts-based research, functionally representing the complexity of forms machined
in the logic of post-Fordian desire. While such forms aspire to schizophrenia
by displacing coded social territories, they concomitantly induce a consensus
through such flexible transactional theories as that of the mutable artist-teacher-
researcher.
While the kind of highly-coded disciplinary society theorized by Foucault (1979)
constitutes a foil against which arts-based theorists have mobilized heterogeneic
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alternatives, the ‘societies of control’ that exert biopower over the contemporary
subject function as immanently as any flash-mob or graffiti throw-up. Today,
flash-mobbing is as suited to protest as it is to the guerilla marketing campaigns
of Microsoft, General Electric or University advertisers seeking to appeal to
emerging youth markets. The use-value of graffiti has been drawn into relation to
the marketing of public officials (Fairey’s work for Barack Obama as a penultimate
case) as much as it has become the staging point for the performative construction
of celebrity exemplified in the rise of graffiti-pop-artist Mr. Brainwash. The danger
herein is twofold. First, if the schizophrenic force of art is continually linked to
a will-to-communication, the potential to seize the interval between image and
action is already under threat. In this all-too-familiar scenario, art is always-already
on its way to language, interpretation, or meaning. It is in this vein that the ‘alien
encounter’ that Agamben (1999a) dubs artistic pro-duction (poeitic production
without the artist) becomes overcoded by a form of praxis that continually produces
art in the name of something or someone else. Countering this perpetual will-to-
meaning, Lyotard (1988) contends that artistic percepts might be encountered by
doing nothing, or rather, by actualizing a somnolent temporality radically out-of-
synch with the hyperactivity of perpetual semiosis. It is in such a mode of being that
the imperceptible might become visible, as it did in the course of Matisse’s Fauvist
experiments, wherein the imperceptible forces of tonal saturation and luminosity
are most potently actualized (Alliez & Bonne, 2007). Rather than thinking in terms
of ‘what happens’ or ‘the thing that happens’, Lyotard (1988) approaches art as an
event - ‘it happens’, he writes. We might once again think of Matisse in this regard
insofar as his canvases are actualizations of chaos, or rather, a chaosmos “neither
foreseen or preconceived” (Alliez, and Bonne, 2007, 211). It is through this Fauvist
chaosmos that color becomes fully visual, transformed into a force of intensive
quantity. As Alliez and Bonne write of Fauvism’s event-character: “the relation of
quantity between colored surfaces…constitute the quality of color” (208). The ‘it’
that is summoned via Fauvism’s experimental approach to color no longer falls back
upon the authorial primacy of the artist, a ‘representation’ of the artists emotion, or
the praxis of the painter exclusively. Rather, what might be detected via Fauvism’s
experimental approach is the emergence of art’s inhuman force. Before its reactive
connection to the will-of-the-artist, color is first a haecceity. Colour happens.
Provocation 3: Do Nothing
For Lyotard, the event-character of art requires an endurance for perceiving

“occurrences as ‘directly’ as possible without the mediation of a ‘pre-text’…
[t]hus to encounter the event is like bordering on nothingness (Lyotard, 1988,
18). Herein, Lyotard points to the schizophrenic fissure in representation palpated
by the artistic-event. In doing so however, Lyotard suggests a kind of encounter
that breaks from the habits of narratological or interpretive response familiar to
many arts-based theorists. This maneuver might be dubbed schizophrenia without
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consensus insofar as it mobilizes a schizo-percept that no longer flows from the

will-to-representation or the transposition of art upon some other representational
machine. This is, of course, to encounter the inhuman force of art in a manner that
not only “de-sacralizes…the function of the artist” but further, introduces a line of
flight for escaping the distribution of sense maintained in contemporary capitalism’s
manipulation of aesthetic taste (schizophrenia and consensus) (Lazzarato, 2010,
102). As Lazzarato details, such a line of escape is detectable in the readymade
insofar as Duchamp inverts the familiar image of the artist-as-selector. As Duchamp
avers, it is not the artist who chooses the readymade from a place of inner-willing or
personal significance, but rather, it is the readymade that ‘chooses’ the artist (103).
This is neither an appeal to panpsychism or the attribution of a human consciousness
to the object. Rather, the notion that the readymade chooses might be thought in
a manner intimate to the virtual potential of the object to form linkages, function
heterogeneically, or to produce sensations alien to the representational possibilities
ascribed to it. Put differently, the readymade pro-duces a world that is neither the
world of the artist or correspondent to functions attributed to it by common sense. In
this example, the dilation of thought and response to which art might aspire is less
requisite upon the artist than the pro-duction of those unthought forces of the virtual:
Not that which is, but that which is not yet. Not what a thing is, but what its potentials
for transformation might be. This inversion functionally transforms the image of
the artist-as-creator, and by extension, the privileged status of artistic praxis that
continues to inform orthodox understandings of creativity and play as a matter of
freedom born of subjective action. Henceforth, it is not that ‘you play’ but ‘it plays’.
Like the strange hybrid monstrosities that populated the Baroque Wunderkammer,
the ‘thing’ creates a world that does not aspire to represent anything, but more pro-
ductively, dilates the ontological field of potential becoming.
To reiterate Duchamp, it is in the interval between activity and passivity that
we might encounter the prospect of “doing nothing”. However, “doing nothing”
cannot be easily equated to either passivity or nihilism since for Duchamp, the
readymade functions to short-circuit the binary division between artistic activity and
the passivity of working as it might be associated with wage labour. Of course,
one might think here of Melville’s Bartleby, who short circuits the orthodoxies
of molar communication by “doing nothing” or rather, by palpating the interval
between activity and passivity via the joyously sanguine phrase “I would prefer
not to”. Contemporarily, it is the DJ who palpates the interval between activity and
passivity by accessing the virtual potentials of the turntable to function in difference
to the image of reproduction and passivity formally attributed to it. As MacKay
(1997) suggests, this machinic reconfiguration of the turntable reinserted the hand of
African American DJ pioneers upon the very reproductive machines that had begun
to replace human wage labour in the 1970s and 1980s. Herein, we begin to touch
upon the radical political potential of pro-duction (poeisis) insofar as ‘it’ summons
the imperceptible virtuality that runs counterpart to the actual. Further, it is via pro-
duction or rather, the inhuman force of art without an artist, that we might begin to
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detect art-forces inhering the contemporary socius. Put differently, where relational
aesthetics is defined by such in-situ practices as site-specific artwork and context
driven installation, what is required today are new tools for creating and mobilizing
art-forces pro-duced in socius (Alliez, 2010).
Provocation 4: Steal and Cheat
It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.
–Jean-Luc Godard
The interval via which Lyotard short-circuits the privileged status of artistic praxis
might alternatively be thought in terms of a particular kind of theft. Such theft is not
resonant with either a desire to accumulate or a version of parasitivism that feeds
from or recombines novel flows of cultural production. Herein, theft might bear only
tangential fidelity to the lauded practices of bricolage or the combinatorial spirit
of the digital meme. The kind of theft that we would like to mobilize in this final
chapter does not aspire to the kind of perpetual semiosis that might be connected
to the desiring-machines of neo-liberal market capitalism, nor is it reflected in the
designer rage for the production of new images exclusively. Rather, we would like
to momentarily focus on a form of theft that promulgates new ways of thinking
what already is. Herein, Kafka emerges as a thief par excellence, evading the trap
of criticism without creation that sometimes marks the work of critical arts-based
research.
The language that Kafka palpates in his writing does not aspire to subversion
or to the kinds of tactics that we might retroactively dub deconstructionist. More
adequately, it is in Kafka that we begin to detect a style of artmaking that performs
new ways of approaching materiality. Kafka’s art does not aspire to the expression of
meaning, the representation of being, or to the imitation of nature (Bensmaia, 1986).
More accurately, the style of art introduced through Kafka’s writing promulgates a
new method or way of thinking language itself. For Deleuze, Kafka’s tactic marks
a double stealing insofar as it steals from the actual while concomitantly ‘stealing
it away.’ We might put this differently by saying that while Kafka’s art is from this
world (using the materials of this world), it is not of it. While it draws upon actual
material, it does so in such a way as to render them unrecognizable. Yet, it is crucial
that Kafka’s style be approached in a manner irreducible to a matter of idiosyncrasy.
As Deleuze|Guattari (1986) rejoins in his conceptualization of minor literature,
individual concerns always find themselves linked to the political. That is, Kafka’s
Prague German functionally deterritorializes the orthodoxies of German expression
and expressibility in a manner that forges an enunciative space for the Jews of
Prague, who were hitherto caught between the “impossibility of writing in German,
[and] the impossibility of writing otherwise” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1986, 16). The force
of deterritorialization promulgated in Kafka “has its real justification at the highest
possible levels”, stealing away from the collective values and ‘official speech’ of the
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State a mutant semiotics for a people-in-becoming (16). Herein, Kafka’s art-force

emerges in socius, immanently connecting the individual to a futural politics that
does not presume its reflection in an a priori form of life.
In Deleuze’s (1989) second cinema book entitled The Time Image, he advances
a provocation intimate to the style of artistic pro-duction at work in Kafka. That is,
when Deleuze-Godard (1989) assert that the people are missing, they summon a
problematic intimate to Kafka’s literary style. In the course of defining the character
of the minor, Deleuze|Guattari (1986) ask: “[h]ow many people today live in a
language that is not their own…or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and
know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?” (19). While the
focus of the social justice agenda in arts-based research remains largely committed
to the formation of a democratic public and the location of one’s voice within the
commons, this does not yet redress the Deleuze-Godardian claim that the people are
missing. Put differently, it is not enough to simply implore expression, or to blithely
equate the possibility of expression to liberation. Where the marketers of neo-
liberalism are continuously imploring us to find our voice and express ourselves, we
must remain vigilant to the fact that we have not yet gone far enough. It is in this vein
that Deleuze-Godard affirm a style of art that does not aim to reflect or otherwise
attribute a voice to the people. Rather, they aim to pro-duce an experimental
plane for a-people-yet-to-come. It is in the work of Kafka that the highest power
of such an experimental art is demonstrated, for what is pro-duced through the
works of Kafka but a people unanticipated by the State? In a similar vein, where
corporatism’s lifestyle-branding depends on the investment of subjective desire, it
is in Kafka that a new style of living enters into filiation with the political. What
is necessitated in an age overdetermined by the statistical powers of the State and
the ubiquity of neoliberal life-styling is the creation of new artistic styles for the
mobilization of a life – that is to say, a singular life no longer of the people, but for a
people-to-come.
The D.I.Y anesthetic of late 1970s and early 1980s punk rock is exemplary in this
regard. More specifically, the anart (anarchic art) of punk might be thought as the
collective desiring-production of a people out-of-synch with the distribution of sense
proffered by mainstream powers of political and cultural production. Emerging as a
fragmentary series of nomadic packs, punk mobilized an underground war-machine
for combating the glitzy aesthetics of pop and disco, practicing a double-stealing by
machining the overproduced sounds of corporate taste-engineers to the raw affects
of collective youth desire. Following Attali’s (1985) assertion that such art-forms
as the classical orchestra3 organize social relations in inherently political ways,
late 1970s and early 1980s punk marks a collective desire to overturn the edicts
of cultural conservatism and the various forms of poverty it actualized within both
American and European working class society. Hence, if one could attribute a style
to punk, such an attribution must necessarily be linked to the emergence of new
practices for social revolt. Linked to the highest aspiration of overturning the socio-
political fascisms of early 1980s, punk emerges in socius as a direct and forceful
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response to the overdetermination of life in the image of conservative idealism and

market economics.
That punk has become increasingly domesticated by corporatism should not
dissuade us. Rather, neo-liberalism’s parasitical power to absorb and reterritorialize
difference upon the body of capital suggests that we have not yet gone far enough.
It is a provocation to think art as an experimental approach for creating a life
that evades the clutches of biopower and corporate manipulation that continually
function to seize it. In this manner, the force of art might be rethought in a manner
distinct from the familiar image of personal creativity and expression. As the work
of Kafka rejoins, desiring-production is always-already social. Yet, as it emerges in
the work of Kafka, such pro-duction is unequal to an image of the social composed
in advance. More radically, it palpates a coefficient of deterritorialization into the
social subsequent to which new territories and worlds might be forged.
Provocation 5: Become Inhuman
It is peculiar to think of art in terms of creating a world that might hence be populated
by an unanticipated people. Indeed, we must be pedagogically cautious and redress
a potential misapprehension that arises at this point. As Spinoza (1985) develops in
his masterwork on ethics, there is only one world. Following, we do not intend to
suggest that there is some transcendent reality that functions to guarantee meaning
or impart a teleological image of life toward which we should strive. Rather, in our
assertion that art creates a world, we aim to recommence the question of how a
world is composed in the first place. This is not an appeal to history, but rather, to
the immanent relationship between an organism and its milieu. It is at this juncture
that we might grasp something previously unthought in arts-research by moving out-
of-synch with the ontologically privileged position of the human. More specifically,
by becoming-animal, we might more adequately survey the question of how a world
is created, and further, how animal worlds might be thought as radically singular.
At this juncture, it is crucial that we address a concern: What does the animal
have to do with art and education? To begin, it is important to redress a particular
myth of biology. An animal does not simply inhabit a territory, but more accurately,
creates one. A wolf does not simply occupy a readymade space with the terrain, but
rather, produces one through such performative gestures as howling, scenting, and
entering into relation with the pack. Such performativity shares fidelity with the
work of art insofar as it functionally produces a territory from the full body of the
earth. We might put this differently by saying that the animal’s creation of a territory
slices a stable refrain from chaos. The composition of such a chaosmos (a refrain or
territory) is a function of Andrea Zittel’s island-works, which in turn serve as a plane
for experimenting with the affects of isolation and the singularity of territorialization.
For the purposes of our argument, this notion of territorialization is dually important.
First, it links the ‘fundamental’ task of art-making to the creation of a world. Second,
it undercuts the vogue assertion that art should exclusively function to deconstruct,
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disrupt, or complicate. Such strategies ignore the importance of composing a world

insofar as a line of escape always finds a vector of reterritorialization elsewhere. A
wolf-pack may deterritorialize by leaving their territory. Yet, as Deleuze|Guattari
(1994) assert, the act of leaving is continually oriented to reterritorialization. This
conceptualization is important insofar as it suggests that practices of territorialization
and deterritorialization are not antagonistic, but rather, constitute a process of
becoming. Insofar as animals might be thought to practice art in its purest state,
the becoming of a territory begins by accessing and pro-ducing a refrain that
boarders, and yet, wards against the absolute deterritorializing forces of chaos. From
the decoded body of the earth, a bird sings its song, flashes its colored chest, and
assumes postures through which a territory is negotiated and pro-duced. It is in such
ways that the animal composes earthworks of different scales and temporalities
(some territories are seasonal, others form a permanent “abstract geography”),
palpating a multiplicity of ways for thinking a world. As earthworks artist Robert
Smithson (1996) rejoins, “[i]f an artist could see through the eyes of a caterpillar
he might be able to make some fascinating art” (126). Here, Smithson is not simply
appealing to the novelty of expression, but rather, to the diverse alien potential of
territorialization itself. Hence, to think art as a matter of producing human territories
of meaning, emotion, and significance is but one way that a world can be pro-duced.
As May (2005) writes, “[t]here is no need to privilege the life of a human [life] over
other lives…the mistake all along was to believe there was only one, and that it was
a human one” (24). To become-animal hence necessitates a renewed relation to the
notion that art creates a world. Further, it suggests a practical approach to dislodging
the anthropocentric impulse that continues to inhere the meaning of artistic praxis
and creativity.
The animal creates a world by emitting and reacting to signs. For such animals
as the tick, a world of signs can be extremely limited. Hence, there is no necessary
correlation between the creation of a world and the presumed need for complexity.
Yet, even in the case of a radically singular world, what characterizes the animal
is a predisposition of being “on the lookout” (Deleuze|Parnet, 2008). This is, in
part, what it means for the artist to become-animal. The animal is not only sensitive
to particular signs but further, emits signs in the composition of a territory. Yet,
following this definition, is every artist not already an animal? Not necessarily, for
while the animal continually negotiates the creation of its singular territory, always
on the lookout for emerging signs, there persists the danger of falling into habits that
overdetermine the territory in such a way as to obfuscate necessary coefficients of
deterritorialization being promulgated within the milieu itself. Differently put, where
territories of thought or action become overly routinized or otherwise presumed to
be fundamental, they enter into the all-too-human image of the ‘bounded’ State.
Arguably, this malaise produces a kind of illness not unlike that evidenced in the
case of the cage-bound animal that compulsively traces a deep rut at the boundary
of its enclosure. Yet, equally as dangerous is an overdose of deterritorialization,
where the potential singularity of a world is annihilated through a desire for
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absolute openness. Even the nomad makes camp in the process of assuming
itinerant work.
The becoming-animal of the artist is linked to the creation of a unique syntax, or
rather, a style that thinks in place of the animal. Such becoming-animal might be
detected in the work of Sally Mann, who describes her approach to artmaking as a
thinking in place of the magpie. By entering into filiation with the impulsive and active
intensities of the animal, Mann overturns the notion of artistic intent (forethought)
or self-reflective drive particular to questions of meaning or autobiographical
significance. Oriented to her surroundings with the sensitivities of a magpie, Mann
collects objects that ‘stand out’ or otherwise, ‘catch her eye’. It is in this way that
Mann’s process becomes a matter of creating an original world or style of living
sensitive to the reception to signs (Deleuze|Guattari, 1987). Such sensitivity is, of
course, no longer distinctly human insofar as it enters into relation with the magpie’s
affinity for the unique encounter. It is in this way that we might understand the artist’s
becoming-animal in relation to a sensitivity for particular signs. That is, Mann is not
interested in all signs pro-duced within a territory. Rather, her becoming-magpie
marks an attunement for the unique and the singular. This does not mean that all
animal-becomings are necessarily attuned to the unique. For example, Brakhage’s
becoming-moth marks an attunement toward the transformation of light. Insofar
as becoming-animal suggests the creation of heterodox nuptials, such becomings
always occur in relation to the an-omalie (outside rules) and animal alliances. This is
not a frivolous thought experiment, but rather, as Mann’s artistic process suggests, a
practical approach to creation. Such an approach is assumed by Deleuze|Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus, where they create a writing-machine that enters into nuptials
with the wolf-pack or insect swarm. That is, where one might expect two distinct
authorial voices, A Thousand Plateaus pro-duces an imbricated mass of voices.
Crucially, becoming-animal has nothing to do with imitating or otherwise
attempting to represent an animal. Surely, the artist who barks like a dog has failed
to grasp the ways in which such practices fall back into a logic of representation.
Becoming-animal has nothing to do with pretending to be like an animal. Rather, as
Deleuze|Guattari (1987) articulate, becoming-animal marks the profoundly creative
movement of thinking in place of the animal by palpating a world, a practice or
a style of thought that no longer falls back upon an all-too-human image of the
family, the State, or the readymade ‘individual’ desires of the neoliberal market.
Following, there are animal-becomings that we must take caution to avoid. Primary
among such animal-becomings is that of the domesticated animal (the ‘pet’). For
Deleuze, the domestic animal is already too familiar insofar as it is drawn into a
familial or Oedipal image of the family through which its difference is nullified.
Deleuze points to this nullification in classical psychoanalysis, wherein animal
imagery and encounters are often redistributed upon the image of the family. Such
a scene of domestication is exemplified in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), where
Deleuze|Guattari recount Freud’s clinical interpretation that his patient’s dream of a
wolf pack represents the primordial father.
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Against the domesticating machines of classical psychoanalysis, Deleuze argues

that when a person enters into a relationship with an animal, this relationship can
no longer be thought in strictly human terms. The human-animal relationship has
nothing to do with imitating animals. Rather, it is a relationship composed by emitting
molecules that enter into composition with those of the animal (Deleuze|Guattari,
1987). When De Niro walks like a crab in Taxi Driver, he is not attempting to
imitate an actual crab, but rather, seeks to draw something particular to the crab
into composition with the image (Deleuze|Guattari, 274). This is to say that animal-
becomings do not take place at the molar level of representation or resemblance.
As with all becomings, becoming-animal is always molecular. More specifically,
becoming-animal is a question of how one might create a zone of intensity with
an animal, or rather, a body without organs that enters into composition with
animal intensities. For Deleuze (2002), such an experiment is exemplified in the
artwork of Francis Bacon, wherein the deformation of the human head composes
a zone of indiscernibility that palpates an inhuman experience in the body. For
Deleuze|Guattari (1987), becoming-animal is an assemblage unnatural nuptials that
mobilize difference in what might otherwise be a programmed or overdetermined
image of the body.
Provocation 6: Lose Face
In each of the betrayals that are surveyed in these closing provocations, we have
been experimenting with faciliality. In a literal sense, we have been composing what
might be dubbed the inhuman ‘face’ of art, or rather, those aspects of art that have
been obfuscated by the rise of narratology and the increasingly populist image of
the artist as the ‘creative priest’ of meaning. Further, we have resituated art upon an
exploration of forces and futural becomings that no longer reflect the human face of
the world. To do this did not require a mythical transgression or threshold encounter.
Art is already inhuman. Our desire in this approach is linked to the problem of
recognition that continues to dominate the field of arts-based research. It is this
problem of recognition that we might otherwise dub facility, since the face functions
as the primary mechanism of signification for registering the relationship of the
subject to its world (Deleuze|Guattari, 1987). As MacCormack (2004) contends,
faciality is a site that “informs on a subject” the surface signs of class, race, gender,
history and future (135). Put differently, the subject is not prior to its face. Rather, as
Samuel Baum’s television series Lie to Me demonstrates, it is the face that produces
the subject, or rather, the signifiable truth of subjectivity. It is in this manner that the
face is capable of overcoding the body as a screen of signification into which the
potential of bodily becoming disappears. We might think here of the popular fairy-
tale cliché in which the inhuman face of the animal is ‘positively’ transformed into
the image of prince charming, or otherwise, where the unformed head (in Pinocchio,
for example) is seen as a transitory phase on its way to becoming realized in an
orthodox image of childhood (Genosko, 2002). Herein, processes of facialization
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function to subjectivize singularities according to the use-value ascribed to life under

neo-liberalism. Put on the happy face of neo-liberalism as you master Facebook’s
algorithms of recognition! Today, such faciality drives a new economy of control,
where the selections made within the limit-face of the marketplace compose a
counter-algorithm which markets like products back upon the subject.
Insofar as it has become subjacent to contemporary capitalism, Guattari (cited
in Genosko, 2002) writes, the face functions to eliminate “all traces of subjective
singularization to the profit of functionally, informatively, and communicationally
rigorous transparency” (138). It is here that we begin to apprehend the function of
faciality as an abstract-machine for organizing the body by means of an expansionist,
imperialist and colonizing limit-face. This function of the face is detected by
Baudrillard (2002), who asserts that the ubiquitous capitalist provocation that ‘we find
ourselves’ is an alibi obfuscating the limitation of possibilities (limit-face) into which
a subject might become. Youth, Baudrillard writes, “will find it increasingly difficult
to detach themselves; to find, not their identity […] as they are constantly being
told that they must […] but their distance and strangeness” (103, emphasis added).
Put differently, the limit-face collapses into models of probability and statistical
frequency, limiting potentials for expression and the creation of hitherto unnamed
connections according to a priori regimes of signification. Here, the horrified and
repulsed media portrayal of Michael Jackson’s inhuman becoming is instructive.
The more unrecognizable Jackson’s face became, the more vigorous was the attempt
to recode it according to the limit-face of raciality, gender, and psychological
normalcy.
Approached in this manner, faciality becomes a political ‘problem’ intimate to
the field of arts-based research. For example, the function of recognition operative
within autobiography and social justice continues to circulate within the limit-face
of statistical (race, gender, and class) or molar categories of thought. Beyond this
particular representational drive however, the facialization of art might otherwise
be evidenced via the face of art history and the manner in which it ascribes a
limit-face or threshold for thinking art. It is in this vein that the face of art and
art-education has become an endeavor that remains human-all-too-human. While
toiling under the banner of difference and the ostensibly liberatory multiplication of
perspectives, much arts-research has remained thoroughly cathected to a single point
perspective, failing to take up the charge fulminated by Dutch painter Samuel von
Hoogstraten, whose pedagogy urged students to practice humility by painting the
diversity of the world (promulgating the mobile image), “where each face is created
differently” (Olkowski, 1999, 25). As Olkowski argues however, such diversity
becomes political only once it has become adequate to the ruin of representation, or
rather, to the extraction (n-1) of any notion of diversity as the diversification of some
‘thing’. Herein, the privileged power of recognition subjacent to faciality continues
to exert itself on artistic form as an impulse to tether art to meaning – a task that
is frequently accomplished by mapping art upon some consensual sign regime.
Such a conceptualization continues to orbit a desire for recognition insofar as it
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reactively presupposes that the creative phylum is coextensive to systems of semio-

significance. As one might detect in contemporary arts-research, there persists a
latent assumption that the work of art functions as a sign that implicitly relates to
other signs, hence composing a chain of signification that serves as a ground for the
reconceptualization of art as a program of limitless signification and resemblance.
Everywhere a face! The ‘problem’ here is clear enough: The limit-face overcodes the
very prospect of thinking art. More specifically, in relation to the power that semiotic
flow (as perpetual semiosis) and backward-looking (reflective) interpretive semio-
hermeneutics continue to exert in arts-based research, the question of what art can do
becomes reduced to the faciality of meaning, representation, and communication. Of
course, such faciality has yet to think of art as the very condition required for ruining
representation. As Deleuze|Guattari (1987) assert, the future of creative thought
relies on a particular dismantling of the face, and it is via art that such experimental
dismantling might be commenced.
To evade the anthropomorphization of the face necessitates that arts-based
research task itself with the creation and detection of new facial machines. The
stakes of such creation carry political import for ontology insofar as the creation
of new facial machines might more adequately fulminate into becomings “beyond
the human” (Genosko, 2002, 149). “If the face is politics,” Deleuze|Guattari (1987)
write, “dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire
becoming-clandestine” (188). So long as the organization of the face is distributed
along a horizon of significance anchored by molar processes of subjectification, the
emergence of a people not yet anticipated by political codes of capture and ordering
remains unthought. To become adequate to a people yet to come, faciality must be
freed from those registers of identification that seek to recode asignifying or otherwise
inhuman traits upon human-all-too-human forms of signification (Genosko, 2002).
Such processes of political capture are inherent to the Oscar award winning film
The King’s Speech (2010), wherein the rehabilitation of King George VI’s (Colin
Firth) counter-signifying muscular tics within a matrix of identitarian recognition
and signifying communication is conflated with the salvation of the national polis.
The King’s Speech celebrates an overcoming of the inhuman.
“If human beings have a destiny” Deleuze|Guattari (1987) write, “it is to escape
the face, to dismantle the face and facializations” (60). For arts-based researchers,
this provocation introduces a new problem. Specifically, if the ruin of faciality is
necessary for a people yet to come, what, if anything, emerges in its wake? One
approach to this question, Deleuze|Guattari demonstrate, might be detected in the art
of the Venetians, whose liberation of line and color freed “faciality in all directions,
using the face of Christ to produce every kind of facial unit and every degree of
deviance” (178). Breaking from the representational impetus of classical art, Venetian
flows of painting detach from the face of Christ as “the typical European” or rather,
as an abstract grid for registering “the average sensual man” (176). Put differently,
insofar as the Christ-face is spread across the body or drawn upon the landscape,
difference becomes reduced to degrees of deviancy from the White-Man’s-face.
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As Deleuze|Guattari aver, such facialization produces the conditions for racism

insofar as faciality functions to assimilate non-conformist traits by emitting “waves
of sameness” while concomitantly criminalizing the attempt to evade identification
(178). It is in this vein that the necessity of defacialization affirms a people yet
to come, since the potential of the future relies upon the deterritorialization of the
face as either representational matrix or reflective limit-point. To be done with the
face is hence to be done with a representational grid that informs upon the subject
a standard of normalcy. In this manner, Venetian paintings of Christ on the cross
(c. 1450) came to express deviances from European normalcy by exulting the
resources of the Christ-face in such divergent creations as “Christ-athlete at the
fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ Negro, or at least a Black Virgin at the edge
of the wall” (178). What do the Venetians of the Renaissance palpate in the wake
of facialization but the connection of the face with a different kind of artistic
machine?
The Venetian practice of defacialization mobilized by the liberation of line and
color connects with atheist forces of desiring-production to create Christ’s full body
without organs, or rather, an artistic machine capable of registering a multiplicity
of potential expressions from under the auratic icon of Jesus Christ Superstar. Put
differently, from under the faciality of White-Man, the Venetians detect a probe-
head that is not yet a face. On this point we must be careful, since multiplicity does
not simply refer to the multiplication of the face (n*x) or the recuperation of an
inhuman head yet to be overcoded by faciality. While they may be effects of the
dismantled face, defacialization is nether an impetus to create facial deviances or
recover a primitive sensual corporeality prior to facialization. This is to say that
the political force of defacialization must not fall back into either the novelty of
multiplication (n*x) or nostalgic regression for a primitive pre-face. Against such
forms of representation, the Venetian deterritorialization of the face affirms the
force of art as a “tool for blazing life lines…[sweeping art] toward the realms of
the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless” (187). This affirmation is born through
a particular betrayal of the classical line and its imposition of an ideal form upon
matter.
Utilizing the new medium of slow-drying and highly workable oil based paint,
the Venetians ruin the representation of organic life by accelerating it into pure light
(Deleuze, 2002). Married to practices of painting involving the mixing of confused
zones rather than the contoured distribution of space effected by an a priori sketch
upon the canvas, the formal contour-line and its essentialist image of human nature
are liberated in such a way as to think inhuman affects subjacent to the image of
organic life. That is, Venetian art forces the line to pass into the asubjective realm
of color that is not-yet-a-face, or rather, a recognizable form correspondent to some
prior thing such as an underlying drawing, predetermination of forms, or essential
image of organic life (Zepke, 2005). In this manner, the Venetians ruin a particular
form of classical representation while affirming those potentials for expression that
do not yet fall into signification. More vitally perhaps, the Renaissance Venetians
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compose a probe head for surveying new forms of expression no longer fettered to
particular habits of representation or the essentialist image of life they presuppose.
Under the presupposition of a signifying face, the productive betrayal of Venetian
art detects a probe head or “cutting edge of deterritorialization…forming strange
new becomings, new polyvocalities” (Deleuze|Guattari, 1987, 191). Herein, the
Venetians mobilize a way of thinking the face at the end of its serialization: the face
at year omega. Ultimately, the instantiation of practices capable of creating a year
omega are necessary to arts-based practices that aspire to counter the emergence of
fascist thinking while affirming a people not yet captured by preexistent matrices of
recognition.
Provocation 7: To Betray Well
If the conditions of friendship constitute a contemporary problematic for arts-

based research, it is precisely because the production of common sense intimate
to friendship poses a problem for how we might begin to think a future that does
not reiterate the past, or otherwise, commence a style of thinking capable of
breaking from established orders of recognition necessary for the founding of an
agreement between minds (Deleuze, 2000). As Deleuze writes apropos Proust, the
goodwill of friends, or rather, an agreement on the meaning of things as a condition
of communication, does not yet force us to think. That is, friendship is predicated
on what might be called the conditions of the possible, or rather, those prior terms
of reference according to which the real is continually made to resemble. In this
vein, the very prospect of the possible remains a problematic requiring a different
approach for the recommencement of thinking. In other words, arts-based research
must become adequate to thinking what commences a thought, or rather, what kind
of encounter becomes capable of demanding a thought no longer cathected to the
cliché of common sense. To take this task seriously entails that arts-based research
produce a line of flight capable of breaking from that which everyone already knows.
However, to create such a cutting edge of deterritorialization would not come without
great risk. As Deleuze (2004) humorously writes, “knocking down a wall is really
difficult, and if you do it in a way that is too brutal, you knock yourself out” (240).
If one accepts that the highest ethical act of arts-based research entails stealing
back the greatest degree of freedom from the straightjacket of representation or those
habits of thought that topple over into fascism, it follows that the field must prepare
a new artistic machine no longer committed to either the goodwill of common sense
or those conditions of representation necessary for agreement between minds. As we
have suggested throughout this book, an arts-based research oriented to the creation
of a singular life might more radically be predicated on what we have called an
ethics of betrayal. The stakes here are clear: art’s ethical commitment must become
adequate to the creation of new times and spaces for living and in this task, it must be
made to produce new truths unfettered from the a priori conditions of the possible.
“The truth is not revealed” Deleuze (2000) writes, “it is betrayed” (95). Betrayal
186
becomes a positive condition for the recommencement of thought no longer tied to

the backward identification of reflective practice or the function of some automatic
interpretive machine by which truth is revealed on our behalf. This posed, what we
have dubbed an ethics of betrayal shares no relation to puerile defiance or contrarian
hysterics. Indeed, the penultimate question for the composition of a new artistic
machine must ask how one might betray well.
To approach the question of how one might betray well necessitates thinking
about fidelity in a manner distinct from its contraction with common sense. Unless
it is to fall into reactivity, betrayal must become capable of breaking from the world
in an act of affirming the becoming of the world. What we have dubbed the ethics
of betrayal must, at its best, be enjoined to the release of difference halted under
representation. Put differently, while the act of betrayal mobilizes a particular kind of
violence, it is a violence aimed at affirming the unthought or otherwise, the creation
of new problems necessitating the liberation of thought from habit and cliché. In
this manner, betrayal might be routed from destruction and reconnected to an ethics
fundamentally opposed to death. “There is no art of death”, Deleuze and Parnet
(2008) write. In this vein, it might be ventured that the very function of art coincides
with an ethics opposed to death, for what is art if not the potential liberation of a
life – not the life of the artist or his object - but more radically, the impersonal life
of affects that “overflow and exceed the forces of the one they traverse” (Deleuze
and Parnet, 2008)?
At its best, art not only commences a practical experiment in the expressivity of
matter unfettered from prior form, but promulgates the practical question of how
matter might be released from those material repetitions that so often constitute the
illusion of universality, or rather, the illusion that concrete assemblages (what is)
constitute our only resources for thinking. On this point, art might be thought as a
practice of betrayal insofar as it is capable of palpating and releasing a chaosmos
of intensities and affects running subjacent to the sedimentations of material life.
This is to say that as much as art is a power of composition and territorialization,
it is concomitantly a power of productive betrayal through which the world might
become what it is not yet. This marks both the power of betrayal intimate to art as
well as the affirmation of life such betrayal is capable of producing. The necessity of
such betrayal has become imperative in an age in which life has become increasingly
overdetermined by the organization of new socio-political and personal fascisms.
This is, Guattari (2009) asserts, a primary problem for the liberation of thought - it
is easier to will one’s fascism than to risk a betrayal.
The quintessential case of Judas’ betrayal might concomitantly be thought
as an act of love. That is, Judas’ role in the fulfillment of the divine plan is one
of both supreme risk and ultimate sacrifice. This is to say that Judas’ betrayal
is not simply destructive, but an act of ultimate fidelity to Jesus’ will. To betray
and love with a kiss (Kaufman, 2009). This book was written in the spirit of such
ultimate fidelity – a fidelity not to any one person, but to the force of art as a mode
of liberating the inhuman. It is in fidelity to the question of what art can do that
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CHAPTER V
we have sought to rethink the very axis along which one might sense art. It is in
this spirit of releasing the unthought into the field of arts-based research that we
have practiced a particular form of fidelity aimed at countering the mineralization
of arts’ deterritorializing powers. What must be evaded today but the realization
that at the end of much satisfied conversation and comfortable pretension all lines
of flight have been blocked, “‘every shame in being human’ swallowed” (Villani,
2006, 246)? To betray well becomes a way of thinking at the end of representation –
when representation is no longer adequate to the task of inventing new potentials
and styles of living. This is the beginning of what it might mean to live life as a
work of art.
NOTES
1
While the correspondent function of denotation points to an objective world “out there”, manifestation
points “backward”, toward the origin of the proposition. As Deleuze (1990b) remarks, manifestation
marks “the relation of the proposition to the person who speaks and expresses himself” (13). In the
traditional image of communication, it is manifestation, or the proposition of a basic “manifestor” that
makes denotation possible. It is within this traditional model of communication that a conversation
composed in language becomes dependent upon both denotative recognizability, but more crucially,
the source of the utterance which makes conversation possible. Put differently, it is upon this basic
manifestor or the privileged indicator “I” that denotation is reflectively related. Indeed, manifestation
not only refers to the “I” that speaks, but further, functions as the condition for the very possibility of
denotation.
2
For as much as deterritorialization constitutes a weapon for revolutionary thought, it can be made
poorly. To create is to resist, Deleuze|Guattari (1987) aver, for creation runs along a different line than
that of representation. However, we must be cautious as to what resists in our creation. Perhaps what
is most dangerous today are the appeals to deterritorialization that function to reinsert old hegemonies
under the guise of difference, hence maintaining the investment of thought within preestablished
circuits of power. It is in such a vein that both curriculum theory and arts-based research might
mobilize a mode of schizoanalysis more adequate to registering the internal and external limits
ascribed to pedagogical thinking. Put differently, our task as researchers must begin to address what
creativity preserves and whether such conservation is sufficient for the production of a life not yet
anticipated by the desires of the current socio-political order.
3
Attali comments that the image of social relations advanced by the classical symphonic orchestra
parallels the bourgeois ideal of harmony linked to the death of life’s vital force. Indeed, the
harmonious image of the socio-political sphere heralded by classical orchestration is oriented to the
generation of a stable image of life amidst the virtual multiplicity of chaotic noise. Yet, such structural
organization of the social field does not terminate in the hierarchical subordination of the player
beneath the composer. As Canetti (1962) argues, the classical symphony introduces an additional
hierarchy between the composer and the audience, whose bodily obedience is demanded during the
performance. The audience “is under the compulsion to keep still” Canetti writes, “and as soon as [the
conductor] finishes, [the audience] must applaud” (395). The social organization of composer and
score above both orchestral player and audience is analogous to the hierarchical organization of many
contemporary classrooms.
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The Inequality of Equality Based Educational Research
Educational research, by and large, has aided and abetted inequality in the name
of equality in modernist democratic countries. Such an accusation seems difficult
to believe or to swallow. How can the call to social equality and the call to social
justice lead to inequality? This sounds counter-intuitive and patently false. However,
if social injustice is continually defined by identity politics and the redistribution
of knowledge (or of wealth for that matter) in the name of ‘progress,’ there will
always be a ‘failure’ for the poor and the ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ (to use pejorative terms)
will always lag behind. The redistribution of knowledge is a perpetual undertaking
which will never be achieved, and always subject to criticism as not being efficient
enough and so on. What is overlooked, of course, is that there is someone setting
the agenda as to what that ‘knowledge’ is and what it means to be wealthy, and
that such an ideal is reached by only a few who are presented as iconic exemplars
of the rich and the brilliantly gifted and talented. In such a democratic system
that operates on meritocracy there is only a two-fold political system: either one
supports a social democratic justice agenda where there is a continual attempt to
gain ‘equality’ amongst the sex/gender, races, classes and so on, or turn toward a
conservative position based on the capitalist neoliberalism where each is on his
own means; survival is based on claims of hard work, individual talent, striving to
overcome adversity and so on—the melodramatic media forms that work so well
in promoting hard and fast moral divisions between good and evil, self-help or
failure.
Educational research placed within the structures of post-industrial global
democracies is caught by either increasing the efficiency for the creation of
knowledge by improved technological methods to ensure cognitive labor to compete
on the global markets, or promoting a social justice agenda to close the impossible
gap between those who have and those who have not, already predetermined by what
is meant to ‘have.’ The paradox is that the democratic system generates inequality by
promoting equality on both sides of the political spectrum.
Education as defined by Enlightenment is pretty much dead, but does not
know it yet. Those involved in charter schools and ‘work’ in education outside
the public schools (private and elite schools) are well on their way to shaping a
‘creative’ education that will help their children compete in the global market
where ‘creativity’ and the imagination have become the key signifiers for
entrepreneurship (jagodzinski, 2013). Education is no longer a question of
reform (like the “No Child Left Behind” in Bush’s US) but one that has become
necessarily transformative. Replaced by President Obama initiative “Race to the
Top” (RTTT).1
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A classic example is presented by Sir Kenneth Robinson whose presentations are

witty, funny, entertaining, accessible and pretty much present the new educational
paradigm for the 21st century. He is billed as a ‘creativity expert,’ lured over from
England by the J. Paul Getty Center, which has already had its shot at attempting
to change the face of visual art education through Discipline-Based Art Education
with much opposition (jagodzinski, 1997). Robinson was knighted in 2003 for his
educational services, and has the ear of the EDGE foundation, TED, RSA (The
Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts), Manufactures & Commerce, and
Fortune 500 companies, the leading institutions of capitalist gain. He has been
heavily awarded with medals, honorary degrees and recognitions for his ‘vision.’ The
‘management’ model he suggests has many parallels with a great deal of arts-based
research where the individual’s ‘true talent’ (as he puts it) is allowed to blossom. It
effect, Robinson pretty much wants to solve the ‘global’ crisis of human resources
by importing what is going on in the entertainment and gaming fields already where
creativity is busting at the seams—through performative competition in the virtual
level of gaming and on a myriad of ‘reality’ television programs. It is there that
‘personhood’ is celebrated, and where ‘hard’ work and skill to achieve recognition
is alive and well as framed by a capitalist market. Think of the extraordinary effort
it takes to be trained into dancing and singing and performing by ‘stars,’ and the raw
talent that make the first cut.
Robinson’s Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (2001), The Element
(2009) and Unlocking Creativity (2010) is all about human talent and how one
goes about discovering, or rather, unlocking it. It’s an old claim: people do the
best when they discover what it is that they love within purposeful community
contexts. Riches (and profit) and happiness follow. The ‘element’ in Lacanian
sense is the objet a of desire. Desire is being harnessed here to synergize with
technology and the information age. Vocational education is slowly becoming
sexified as the new horizon of possibility. Vitality replaces utility; creativity
replaces linearity, diversity replaces conformity, and customization replaces
standardization. Creativity economy is the boom industry for the creativity industries,
which according to John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy: How People
make Money from Ideas (2002) are defined as, “the sum total of four sectors - the
copyright, the patent, trademark, and design industries – together constitute the
creative industries and the creative economy (xiii).” The line-up of guests for
TED conference are very much part of this global impetus, after-all the acronym
stands for Technology Entertainment and Design and its roots sprang from Silicon
Valley. The question is asked to what extent is arts-based research caught by this
paradigm?
A Most Radical Proposal: Ruining Representation
If the reader has not given up on the tenor of the betrayals, it is time for pay back
now that our own stance has been exposed. Let us begin with a rather startling
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claim—if arts-based education continues to focus on art as “knowledge,” as an

epistemology, and art as an object—as commodity—then art-ing, which can
contribute to becoming via its processes and reception, will be lost. This position is
separate from the one that would ask: if art is not defined as a form of “knowledge”
that will be sanctioned by the Academy and its corporate interests, and if it is
not an “object” that is supported by the market network of capitalist institutions
(museums, art galleries, auctions and so on), then it will surely die as a discipline
in its current form. Recall the scramble by artists during the Renaissance as the
literati brought back Greek humanism leaving many artists reduced to being
perceived as a craft or skill. Leone Battista Alberti, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leonardo
… all wrote treatises on the worth of their artistic skill to claim status equal to
that of the humanist literati. This is Graeme Sullivan’s (2005) great achievement
today: to raise the status of arts-based research updated along side of science
and social science without reverting to qualitative method but by focusing
on the specificity of artistic processes. So, the proposal that we offer perhaps
cannot exist within the Academy and the definition of art in a capitalist system.
Maybe?
Given the array of positions that the special issue of Studies in Art Education (as
developed in chapter 2) presented from our own position regarding Deleuze|Guattari,
we are least attracted to the conservative qualitative accounts of Elliot Eisner (and by
extension Tom Barone). The (post)structuralist complexity narratives (as presented
by Congdon et al., Irwin et al. and Sullivan) have a limiting view of the subject (but,
in Irwin’s case, a more refined one than in her earlier position). Jim Sanders, although
he offers us a genealogical salad of performance artists where the point of their
“research” is sometimes lost, and the critical constructivist performance stance of
Charles Garoian are the most attractive developments for us. However, we believe that
they are not radical enough. To be fair, Charles Garoian has long since moved from his
earlier ‘critical’ position towards a Deleuze|Guattari paradigm (see Garoian, 2013). In
short, we would want to build on their particular line of flight through a radicalization
of unconscious desire in both its positive (as Deleuze|Guattari productive desiring
machines) and at times in negative terms (as Lacanian manque). The two positions
indicate the tension of the age, which we identify as post-Oedipal where the former
society of the spectacle is being replaced by designer capitalism—the digitalized-
nano-bio information world. Hence the complaint and ‘need’ of technology by Sanders
and the image-text that pervades the art world and methodology of a/r/tography that
has been filtered through globalized designer capitalism.
In chapter 5 we suggested, or rather worked out a “beyond” of ABER, a “beyond”
of the spectacle that is based on the simulacrum—not Baudrillard’s but Deleuze’s
simulacrum on the grounds that the posthuman has to be recognized—as repetition
and as serial image, in its inhuman forms. But not in its (post)structuralist forms
where the Imaginary and the Symbolic are intertwined in constructivist thought,
no matter how radical it looks and sounds, like the performative queer theory of
Judith Butler, which is exemplary here.2 But engages the “beyond” of consciousness,
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relocating the subject from the ego to that place that “knows that it doesn’t know,”
where the Cogito is not cognition of the Imaginary level but becomes relocated
by Lacan/Deleuze/Guattari/Lyotard and others as the subject of the unconscious,
or put another way, as the ‘subject’ of the BwO when it comes to schizoanalysis
and language with psychoanalysis. Since transformation has been a concern for all
ABER writers, and used in a myriad of ways, it means that a collective phantom
haunts humanity today in the way our immanent species potential can become other
than it currently is. What is spirituality if it avoids the fall into passive contemplation
or strives to the heights of spectacular consumption?
To start is by dispelling that the realm of “the arts” provide us with “knowledge”
that is specific to the claims of epistemology. Arts educators have been trying to stuff
research into this box in every which way they can, but it keeps oozing out. Dancers,
in particular are asked to do this parlor trick by claiming “embodied knowledge”
that (somehow) is research into movement which then (somehow) transforms the
spectator/audience, or transforms those who are asked to participate in the research.
One might as well be taking a yoga class to improve flexibility. While no doubt
affective transference takes place, there is no doubt about that, perhaps the invention
of new movements of the body is a better indicator of ‘research,’ e.g., Parkour.
If this indeed happens we should call it for what it is … not research. Epistemology
seizes the arts when art becomes captured and confused as a cultural object. This was
certainly Lyotard’s position. Its place as object in the capitalist system of exchange
extends to the discourses of sociology, history, political economy and so on. Dance
as an object becomes studied, even represented through the notational system of
Rudolf Laban, for example. It can then be studied, the moves learnt and so on. But,
it has now become molar—a structure, stratified. However, dance as a discipline
confined to doctoral level research, explores that particular art as an object. You can’t
(as yet) get a PhD by simply being a practicing Sculptor or Painter or Dancer, no
matter how bright, talented and innovative you are, as ABER members might wish it,
because these are not forms of research, unless an Honorary Doctorate is conferred
for the long standing commitment. Art PhD’s require a theoretical component, an
elaborate artist’s statement if you will (Elkins, 2009). However, if enough of a
critical mass of ABER representatives are in-place in higher education positions, and
they network globally for example, then a political will emerges which can institute
and confer such a research degree on a regular basis. Work is already underway. It
will redefine the field of higher education as it is now organized. Not a bad thing,
but the “epistemology” (or signification, or articulation) would need redefinition.
Politically, then, there is a way to move the edifice by initiating a ‘minor’ politics
in Deleuze|Guattari terms, and this is part of the effort to help in that disruption.
Whether it is seen as a betrayal or yet another line of flight can be judged as to its
performative affect as a document.
The other side of art is its non-containment as an object that continually brings
up the product/process dialectic or territorialization/ deterritorialization. This forms
the contradictory and fundamental antagonism of art in capitalist (ex)changes within
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museums (collection, exhibition, conservational archive) galleries, or culture that

is marked as tribal “artifacts,” imperial “plunder,” national “treasure,” monarchical
“symbolism” and so on. ABER’s notion of research, when it avoids falling into
treating art as an epistemological object of cognition (virtually an impossible
position to maintain and still be part of the Academy), usually sides with artistic
processes as well with aspects of its non-containment—its aesthetic import which
has to be immediately qualified since aesthetics has dominated arts education,
it seems forever. One still hears Baumgarden’s name come up once in a while at
NAEA presentations in positive light. The never-ending parade of phenomenological
descriptions describing art as “an aesthetic experience” cannot be dismissed, but nor
will the equal counter-claim be dismissed that this is precisely the very instant that
a fantasy space is created engulfing the viewer in ideology. The paradox of this
situation must be unpacked.
The radical shift we propose is fundamentally Deleuze|Guattarian. Namely,
aesthetics is moved from the Imaginary perceptual level where it has been doing
the most damage, and into the unconscious virtual Real as aisthetics and re-signified
as affect. Affect refers to the figural as opposed to the figure in art, the moment
of intensity, as reactions on or in the body at the level of matter. Hence, affect is
immanent (not transcendent) to matter and to experience. Affects thus have nothing to
do with meaning and knowledge. They are extra-discursive and extra-textual which
means constructing an epistemology is a latter development. Affects are part of the
Freudian drives (Triebe). At this level they are at the body’s duration as “passages,
becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of power (puissance) that pass
from one state to another. [Deleuze] call them affects, strictly speaking, and no
longer affections [emotions]. They are signs of increase and decrease, signs that are
vectorial (of the joy-sadness type) and no longer scalar like the affections, sensations
or perceptions” (Deleuze 1998, 138). There is a distinction between sensation and
perception. Perception is already structural or interactive, whereas sensations remain
eventful or processual. They form a ‘fourth dimension.’ What arises are processes,
sensation, affect, movement, transition, rhythm, creativity, imagination, the virtual,
force, the lived as experience—not as phenomenology but as non-human materiality.
When the artwork becomes aestheticized, reduced to the human sensorium of the
“lived moment” (Erlebnis), it becomes inconsequential and dangerously isolated
from historical and political memory (Erfarhung). The counter-actualizations of
the sense-event that are potentially there become lost. Artwork’s perceived isolation
from everyday life sparks the transformation of art into a recuperative, totalizing
mode of experience (the redemptive immanence of a totalitarian myth).
Art, in this regard, is precisely antithetical to knowledge. If we want to call it
knowledge or research these terms will have to undergo radical resignification. In the
Deleuzian terms, signification is not a question of meaning (hermeneutic) but affect
of the sense-event placed in the time of Aion. His is not a poststructuralist reiteration
where becoming does not fall out, but becomes theorized and entangled in discourses,
situations, and treks, or lines between nodes, already signified. Becoming slips past
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when it claims to have been identified. Experience does not personally belong to the
subject, it ‘hovers in the mediating space between subject and object, it is a dimension
of affect that is the becoming of life at the molecular level. Undeniably, art is more
than a mere cultural object. It’s marked by excesses and rapture, but this need not
be theorized as some transcendent spiritualism as so much of ABER heads that way,
lost in ecological transcendentalism that characterizes certain special interest groups
where spiritual religiosity is not easily disengaged (jagodzinski, 2013b).
If we do away with art as an object, what are we left with: art as an event or
an encounter. This is the thesis we also take from Krzysztof Ziarek (2004),
whose The Force of Art, draws on the avant-garde to reconfigure experience as
an event as the “event-structure” of experience. This offers a challenge to 1) the
privatized, subjectivized, isolated experience of aestheticism ; 2) the metaphysical
understanding of experience in terms of presence; and 3) the ruthless, technological
determination and instrumentalization of experiences in “techno-scientific modes
of perception.”
Once “experience” of the self has been self-authorized at the Imaginary level
of the ego, questions as to its constructed nature (symbolic) have to be brought in;
the question is how, given that vision is structured through language and history
and techne. Further, no amount of theorizing will reveal the structures that stratify
the self. It simply is not possible. A gap exists between self and Other. Symbolic
discourse cannot be fully comprehended. The collapse of body/mind/feeling, where
the subject’s body and memory form the scene of the lived experience to produce
the narrative structure is suspect of being anything more than a fiction—nevertheless
an interesting one. Not only interesting, but one can say artistic, but let’s not call it
epistemology…research. The powers of the false should be retained. There’s nothing
‘wrong’ with fiction, but should be recognized as such, as fantasy that has other
“causes.” ABER is hegemonically held by many forms of autoethnographic research
of the poststructuralist kind where the body and its memories as the scene of the
lived experience are theorized. This achieves a self-reflexivity that is admirable for
capitalist forms of the self—the “possessed individual” as Arthur Kroker (1992)
once wrote. We do not see why charges of hyper-narcissim are not applicable in
these many instances?
What emerges are forms of self-therapy, through personal stories, often traumatic
or hurtful. The bigger picture shows “research” of personal experiences on drug
abuse, being sexually assaulted, child abuse and pedophilia, rape, incest, anorexia,
chronic disease, terminal disease and so on to the point of death experiences. Pat
Clough (2000) has it right as to why such “autoaffection” has emerged in an age of
teletechnology. There is a craving to be heard and seen, and such research with its
artistic and aesthetic and spiritual overlay has emerged to see to it that the “voice” is
heard. Feminine écriture, the writing on the body, has emerged into something quite
different now. Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Cixous are forwarded as autobiographical
exemplars of poststructuralism (Gannon, 2006). What are vast writings are mined for
their claims to forward Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self.’ Derrida’s continuous,
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skirmishes not to get caught definitively pronouncing the “I” in Circumfession,

Barthes on ‘Barthes,’ and Cixous ‘écriture feminine,’ have become interesting again.
This is where a new image of thought might emerge for they do not adhere to a logic
of representation, identity, or a return of the Same. And, so it goes on.
NOTES
1
As we write this, Austria’s educational report card by PISA shows that it is in 36th position out of 40
countries on the ‘literacy’ list. Kid’s can’t read.
2
Questioning Butler’s representational materialism from a Deleuezian perspective can be found in
Colebrook (2000) and Berressem (2006).
195
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INDEX
A autism, 42; Amanda Baggs, 44; Temple

ABER, 76–79, 84, 191, 192–194 Grandin, 44; 45; 50n25
abyss of representation, 62 autoethnography, 3
actus purus, 86–87, 92, 108 autopoesis, 72
Adams, K.C. (artist): Euro-Aboriginal, avant-garde, 3, 77, 113, 159, 160,
165–166 174, 194
Adorno, T.W., 9
affect, 38, 39, 41, 118, 120; turn, 126, B
129, 171, 172, 193 Bacon, F., (artist): 8, 14, 105, 110n12,
affection-images, 136, 150n15 169, 182
affective close-up (S. Brott), 39 Badiou, A., 16, 115
Agamben, G., 86–89, 98, 104, 120, 123 Baggs, A., (autism), 44
agency, 47, 50n31 balance, 101 (see holism)
agonistic pluralism, 113 Barney, Matthew (Cremaster), 7, 165
Aion (time), 41, 148 Bartleby (Melville), 176
aisthetics (aisthesis), 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, Barone, T., 53, 58, 59
46, 104–105, 111, 135 Baudrillard, J., 62–63
alethia, 35 becoming-animal, 145, 179–182
alien, 89 becoming-woman, 137, 155n125
alienation, 133, 134 Benthien, C., 135, 137
amor fati (Nietzsche), 106 belief in the world (Deleuze), 2, 9–10,
Andieu, D., 128, 129 37, 119
animism, 33, 39 Benetton, 27; advertisement, 28
Ansell-Pearson, K., 117 Bennett, J.,144
anthropocentrism, 89–90, 108, 167, 171 Bergson, H., 4, 33, 46, 65, 121, 124,
Aphorism, 4 127, 150n20, 150n22
appropriation; as research, 114 betrayal; ethics of- 1–17; 186–188
architecture; subjectivity of, 38–39; Bilal, W., 120, 141–148
-close up, 38 bioethics, 133
Artaud, A., 78 bio-power, 91
artist, 89 bios, 11
Art & Research, 60–61 Blick, E., 128, 129
A/r/t/ography, 71–76, 87–108 Boal, A., 26, 69, 78
art-ing, 76, 191 body, 77–79, 104–105, 118–121,
assemblages (agencement), 41, 47, 112, 123 127
115, 118–119; synoptic-, 143, 187 body-ego, 121, 128, 133, 134, 138
Attali, J., 188n3 body image, 127, 128, 152n53
attractor, 115 body schema, 127, 128, 130, 152n53
audience research, 69 body suspensions (Stelarc), 131
211
INDEX
Body-without-Organs (BwO), 23, 118, counter-actualization, 120, 121, 148

128; bWo, 137, 155n124; 149n5, counter-diagram, 162
149n6, 150n17, 192 counter image, 159
Bohm, D., 127 Crane, D., 68
Borges, Jorge Luis 1 creativity, 46, 85, 125, 190
both/and logic, 23 critical theory, 26–27
Bourdieu, P., 113 critique, 2
Bourriaud, N. (curator), 30–31, 49n9, Crusoe, R., 171
75, 117, 174 crystal, 36
brain, 42–43, 44, 105, 121, 126–127, cynicism, 14
133, 136, 164, 170
brain as screen, 126 D
Brakhage, S. (film maker), 170–171 dance, 77
Buber, M., 67 death of the subject, 47, 104
death drive, 126
C DeLanda, M., 112
Cage, J., 11 Deleuze, G., 2, 5, 6
camera, 170 Derrida, J. 122
Canadian West Coast, 100 Descartes, R., 25
capitalism, 19–20; machinic-, 40; and designer capitalism, 120, 130, 139, 141
art, 40 desire, 71, 50–51n31, 75, 75, 93, 97
chaosmos, 179, 187 desire-engineering, 11, 14
chiasm, 41 desiring machines, 112
Christ, 184–185 de-subjectivation, 22–25
Cézanne, P., 8, 167, 70 diagram, 119, 122–123; Stelarc’s-,129,
cinema, 9–10, 46 131–133; 149n7, 169
CGI, (computer generated imagery), 63 dialectics, 98–99
cliché, 106, 109, 165, 169, 182, digitalization, 61–66
186, 187 dispositif, 21
cognition, 44–45 DIY (Do It Yourself), 178
Congdon, K., 61–62 doing nothing, 176
control society, 113 double articulation, 115
common sense, 6–8, 161, 163, 164 drives (Triebe), 23
communication, 4, 8–10, 32, 91, 93, Duchamp, M., 12, 41; readymade, 176
96, 105, 113, 125, 174–176, Dufrenne, M., 46
186–188, 188n1 dynamic form, 33
contemporary art, 12
contemporaneity, 29–31 E
contagion, 132 Earth, 35, 37
control society, 113, 120 effects-image, 38
cosmetic surgery, 135 Eisenstein, S., 65
cosmic people, 35 Eisner, E., 53–58
costume, 27, 138, 141 Emergence Marketing, 73
212
INDEX
emotion, 38 gaze, 134, 145

emphatic vision, 146 genius loci, 38
empty signifier, 103–106 gift|counter-gift, 100
encounter, 35, 47, 146 glance aesthetic, 19
epiphylogenesis (B. Stiegler), 121, 129 globalization, 124
epoché, 37 Grandin, T., (autism), 44
eternal return (Nietzsche), 106–107,
108–109 H
ethics; of betrayal, 1–17, 186–187; Habermas, J., 68
Badiou and -,16; Lacanian, 70–71; Harlequin’s Coat (Orlan), 141
ethnography, 68 haecceity, 41, 45, 175
eudaimonia, 69 Hansen, B.N., 121
event, 3, 24, 32, 34, 35, 41, 56, haptocentrism, 114, 122, 150n23
105–106, 107, 108, 121, 144; Harman, G., 31, 32, 37, 40, 47, 49n20
Bilal’s-, 148, 175 Harris, P., 35–36, 38
event-character, 96, 108 Hayles, K., 54, 117
exhaustion, 150n18 Heidegger, M., 2, 3, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39,
experimentation, 33–42 46; 49n16, 49n17
Hermes, 29–30,
F Hjemlslev, L., 115
fabulation, 120 holism, 101
faciality, 182–185 Holmes, B., 30
Fauves, 175 hope, 146
faciality, 139, 140, 182–185 hybridity, 15, 140–141, 166
feminine jouissance, 136 hylomorphic, 22
fidelity, 187–188 hyperreal, 65
flash-mob, 175 hypertext, 64
fMRI images, 44
fold, 32, 118 I
force, 8; affect, percept, concept, 99 I (ego), 95–96
form, 22 identity, 27–28
fractal ontology, 150n12 ideology, 56–57, 66
Freire, P., 26, 78 idiot: modern, 162–166
Freud, S., 40; death drive, 40; fort/da, idiot savant, 43
45, 50n26; 127 illusio, (P. Bourdieu), 113
friendship, 4–5, 186–187 Inflexions (journal), 33, 48n5, 48n6
fundamental fantasy, 150n14 image: of thought (Deleuze), 4–6, 7,
future, 107, 110n15 19; in science, 20; 28; and
movement, 46; 50n28; -text,
G 94;falsified-, 165
Garoian, C., 78, 80–81, 191 immaterial labour, 26
Gadamer, H-G., 67 imperceptibility, 137, 140, 147, 169
garment, 137, 138, 141, 148 impersonal, 58, 116–119, 197
213
INDEX
implicit|explicit body, 127–128 M

inequality|equality, 189 machinic arts, 10–12
Ingold, T., 114 machinic collage, 23
inhuman, 22, 23, 28, 30, 46, 47, 70, 90, machinic diagram, 111–117
106, 121, 159, 167, 168; eye, 170; machinic phylum, 112
become-, 179–182, (see nonhuman) machinic vitalism, 31–33
intermediality, 22 Magnani, F., (savant), 43
interval, 41, 175, 177 Magritte, R., 28–29
individuation, 23–24 making|doing, 68
intra-reflection (Latour), 47 Mann, S. (artist), 181
Islam, 143–144 manifestation, 95–96
market research, 69
J mask, 140
Jansen, Theo (artist), 92 masquerade, 135, 140, 145
Jodi (art game), 13–14 Massumi, B., 34, 40–41, 127
Judas|Jesus 1, 187 mass customization, 19
master signifier, 147
K membrane, 116, 119
Kafka, F., 177–179 Merleau-Ponty, M., 46, 133, 13; dispute
Kandinsky, W., 32, 42 with Lacan, 152n59
Kant, I., 16, 29 Messiaen, O., (musician), 85, 105,
Kaprow, A. (Happenings). 11 108, 110n17
Klee, P., 8, 32 metaphor, 94–96
Kuhn, T., 67–68 metonymy, 94–95
Kunstwollen (will to art), 123 methodology, 25
Kwon, M., 73, 74–75 minoritarian, 103
mirror, 96–98
L mirror-stage, 133
labour, 40 molecularity, 101
Lacan, Jacques, 1, 23, 28, 64, 70, 71, monumental, 7, 166, 167, 168
112, 114, 119, 120, 121, 138 Mouffe, C., 113
lamella, 23 movement-image, 50n28, 94, 110n10
language, 95–96 multi-literacy, 22
Latour, B., 30, 47, 50n31, 54; ANT vs. multiplicities, 32
SPIDER, 114, Murray, J., 64
Lyotard, F., 175, 177, 192
Lazzarato, M, 119 N
Levinas, E., 16 Nadia, 42, 43, 44
life, 12, 22, 25, 33, 41 Nancy, J-L., 73, 116
line of flight, 32, 123 n-sexes, 137
Lissel, E. (artist), 15 neuroaesthetics, 44
love, 2, 145 neuropolitics, 42–45
Luhmann, N., 113, 116 neurotypical, 42, 46
214
INDEX
noble savage, 56 postevolution, 132–133

nonhuman, 23, 28, 30, 41, 47, 92, postfeminist, 135
111, 120 posthuman, 3
nonsense, 35 post-racism, 27
Norberg-Schulz, C. 38 powers of the false (Deleuze), 3, 63, 65,
119, 165–166
O praxis, 27
object-orientated ontology (OOO), praxis|poeisis, 85–87; 104–105
31–32, 33, 37, 40, 41, 47; 49n13, prepersonal, 171
133, 190 probe-head, 104, 106, 107; Orlan as-,
object a, 24, 37, 114, 135, 146 139–141; 156n142, 185–186
One, (Lacan), 147 prosthetic, 131; and Stelarc, 132–133
Olsson, L.M., 46 Proust, M., 4, 186
Open, 34 punk rock, 178
open|openness, 91–92
original|copy, 63, Q
Orlan, 120, 136–139; as probe head, qualitative|quantitative, 53–58,
139–141 quasi-cause, 74
outside thought, 5, 14, 15, 65 quasi-object, 30
overcode, 30
R
P Rancière, J., 113, 117
panpsychism, 175 readymade, 41
paradox, 103 realism, 44
paranoia, 159–160, 162, 170, 172–173 Red Army Faction (RAF), 107
parasitism, 14 refleXivity, 46–47
passive vitalism, 33, 39 relational aesthetics (N. Bourriaud),
people are missing (Deleuze), 105, 178 30–31, 49n9, 174, 177
people-to-come (Deleuze), 3, 7, 11, 35, relational potential , 33
105, 106; creating a-, 120; 122, 130, representation, 6–10, 25–29;
140, 146, 165–166, 178, 184 Darstellung|Vorstellung, 61–62;
Peirce, C.S., 37 63–66, 96–97, 160
percept, 169–170, 171 research (Academy), 76
perception, 45–48, 169 resistance, 99–100, 188n2
performance, 76–80 rhizome, 71, 72; in ABER, 90–91,
phenomenology, 10, 32, 34, 37, 38, 46, 94, 98, 102; rhizomania, 103;
66–71,160 172–174
poeisis| praxis, 85–87; 104–105, 176 Runeberg, Nils 1,
poeitic event, 106, 107, 108
poeitic techne, 111 S
Pollock, J. (artist), 169 Sacks, O., 42–43
post-alphabetization, 21, 48n4, saint, 138
post-emotionalism, 21 savants; artistic, 42–45
215
INDEX
Sawada, T. (artist), 154n93 Stenslie, Stahl (Cyber S&M Project),

schizo-identity (designer subjectivity), 92, 109n2
90–91 Stelarc, 120, 129–133
schizophrenia, 159,175–176 Stern, D.: RIG’s, 124
schizophrenic force, 175 stupidity, 166
schizophrenic impulse, 173 subjective destitution, 125
schizo-production, 162 Sullivan, G., practice-based research,
science, 19, 25 58–61
screen, 135 surgical performances, 136, 139
self-ethnography, 87 symbiosis, 15
self-reflexion, 47, 61, 106 symbiote, 14
self-refleXion, 36, 148, 112, 148 symbolic identity, 141
self-willing, 87, 92–93 synopticon, 21, 120
sensation, 8, 169, 170, 193 synoptic assemblage, 143
sense, 105–106, 161, 163 synoptic machinic vision, 121
sense memory, 144
sense-event, 161 T
sensible; distributing the-, techne, 15, 26, 32
159–188 theft, 177
Serres, M., 30 thinking-feeling (Massumi), 34
sign, 5, 6 third culture: in Brockmann, 19; in
Silverman, K., 134, 135 Weibel, 19–20
Simondon, G., 23–24, 50n29, 119 third space, 94, 101–102
simulacra, 3; in Baudrillard and thought (outside), 5
Deleuze, 62–63, 65 time, 94
singularity, 48, 105, 115, 124 time-image, 9–10, 38, 94, 105,
sinthome, 120, 123–126, 150n14 110n10, 136
Sir Kenneth Robinson, 190 time crystal, 36, 47
Situationist International, 164 time machine, 121
skin, 119–120, 123, 137 tragedy, 69
skin-ego, 12, 128, 130 traitor-prophet, 12–13; -objects, 13
smooth space, 102 transversal (transversality) (Guattari),
speculative realism, 39 41, 46, 108
Spinoza, B., 179 trauma, 148
spiritual automaton, 47, 126 triangulation, 69
spirituality, 36, 49n12 transference, 69
spiritual fever, 50n25 transformation, 192
split subject, 134 truth, 5–6; -event, 34
Southland Tales (film, d. R. Kelly), 114 Turning machine, 111
standing reserve (Bestand,
Heidegger), 21 U
state of exception (G. Agamben), 120 , unconscious, 69
145, 150n16 universalism, 163
216
INDEX
V W
vampire, 21 war-machine, 103
Van Gogh, V. (artist), 50n25, 167, Weibel, P., 20–21
171–172 what a body can do, 141
Venetians (faciality), 185–186 White-Man’s face, 185
Vertov, D. (film director), 170 will-to-art, 105
vibrant matter (Bennett), 39 Wiltshire, S., (savant), 43
vicarious causation (Harman), v37, 39 witness, 147
videogame, 141
veil, 139–140, 156n141 X
violence, 5, 187 Xpression, 116, 148
Virtual Human Shield (W. Bilal), 146
virtual/actual, 24, 38, 115, 127 Z
virtual Real, 24, 33, 47, 64, 74, 75, 96, Zhichao, Yang (artist), 92
120, 125, 128–131, 142, 193 Zittel, A. (artist), 179
visual regime, 135, 136 Zizek, S., 1, 126
vitalism, 39 zoë, 23, 41
voice, 78 zombie, 21
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Arts-Based Research

A Critique and a Proposal

jan jagodzinski | Jason Wallin

ISBN: 978-94-6209-183-2 (paperback)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

Introduction: The Ethics of Betrayal 1

Chapter I: The Contemporary Image of Thought 19

Chapter II: Contemporary Currents 53

Chapter III: Questioning the Radical Edge: ABER’s Mirror Games 85

Augaries of the Actus Purus 87

Chapter IV: Arts-based Research Otherwise 111

Chapter V: Distributing the Sensible 159

And So It Goes On 189

THE ETHICS OF BETRAYAL

“I write for a species that does not yet exist.”

The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to Logos

In Deleuzian terms, the image of thought refers to a particular territorialization that

The Sign Must be Set in Opposition to “Common Sense”

The image of thought in relation to which we have begun to situate an ethics of

that had come to dominate the phenomenology of film. Irreducible to communication,

Betrayal is an enemy to common sense - as what is most common marks a will

Rise of the Traitor Prophets

If art-based education were to risk betraying its fidelities to representation and

Betrayal inheres a machinic quality that exposes the non-essential organization

The Symbiotic Force of Betrayal

What we are calling an ethics of betrayal might be characterized as a corollary

this practical parasitism is operationalized by connecting the game’s algorithm with

remains crucial for arts-based researchers. Specifically, those features of arts-based

An ethics of betrayal is a corollary of symbiosis insofar as its action draws what

To reorientate arts-based research along posthuman lines as first charted by

THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGE OF THOUGHT

the euphemisms for bio-capitalism, biogenetic capitalism and eco-capitalism have

is becoming an eroded form of literacy. It is a fantasy that is no longer sustainable

Throughout this book we attempt to follow Deleuze|Guattari’s lead in identifying

The decentering of the artistic subject in art is uncomfortably presented in

One wonders whether art is ‘research,’ which is knowledge creation though an

orangutans, bonobo or pygmy chimp). Eight primate faces photographed by James

The above model of consumerism of a glance and logo aesthetic is paradigmatic

extended through digitalization, Hermes, as the hermeneutic messenger, is replaced

Deleuze|Guattari do not return us to animism, it is however a recognition of an

Deleuze|Guattari) call to “thinking-feeling” or their “techniques of relation” miss the

distinct from the object of expression. Cowardice is an entity, a ‘feeling-thing’

deterritorializes corporally the protagonist differently in each case. In the case of

what Christian Marazzi (2010) calls an “anthropogenetic model” of capitalism where

identify as the three synthesis of unconscious desire (connective, disjunctive and

a philosophical theory of representation than of a linguistically based semiology”

Autistic artistic savants present a hypertrophied account of mimesis. They seem

Much of the talk concerning perception remains caught by an anthropocentrism

in this regard, utilizing Deleuzian framework is Liselott Mariett Olsson (2009).

nothing to do with self-reflection proper as the idea of thinking and reflection as an

perception has nothing to do with representation. Perception is co-terminus with

encouraged to have a mixture of both so as to appease both sides of this bifurcated

of the network of arts-based researchers by not alienating those already in power

Folkvine.org is an ‘early’ example of arts-based research where art educators

that is being constructed as folkvine.org, is a virtual world that belongs neither to

Liora Bresler’s (2006) contribution to the journal, “Toward Connectedness:

wherein perception is theorized as a harmonious form—“good of the whole” (55),

supposition. Scientific breakthroughs come ex nihilo and cannot be explained. What

There is a belief by Bresler that audience participation, which intensifies the

keeping with Bresler’s own research as “re-seeing” as a transformative process of