In the Event That Art and Teaching Encounter

• In Event: Deleuze, Guattari, and Art Education

Abstract

Summary
And again I walked into the classroom with syllabus in hand, daily lessons planned, course readings listed, assessment measures outlined, standards justified, academic calendar scheduled, and within days, in other words, a very short span of time, all that I had organized was asunder, rendered obsolete, my structure no longer held, it was out of my control from the twenty students enrolled, from the tangle of personal memories and cultural histories that they brought into the classroom, their particularities of family, neighborhood, community, schools, and other cultural institutions in which they grew up, the experiences they learned to embody, so as they responded to the assigned readings from the perspectives of their lives, all things on the syllabus disarticulated, a breakdown occurred that paradoxically transformed their disparate relations in the class into a dynamic, live assemblage that resisted academic closure, its disjunctive, contiguous ensemble, and engaging discourse in perpetual modulation enabling a breakthrough of seeing and thinking differently, and I was once again reminded of what I seem to easily forget every semester that any well-planned, well-intended, well-measured curricula and pedagogical strategies merely serve as launching sites from which to learn from my students, in teaching me what to learn, how to learn, and how to assess the crisis of knowledge that emerges between and among us, the critical interlude between what I painstakingly plan every semester and the manifold experiences and knowledge that they bring with them into the classroom, a cultural muddle and messiness from which teaching is immanent as art….
It is during such lived, self-differing moments in the classroom and the studio when an aesthetic politics emerges through the exploratory, experimental, and improvisational processes of teaching and art making that the normative aesthetics of academic, institutional, and corporate politics are challenged. In other words, what emerges experientially from the event that is teaching and the event that is art enables a differential seeing and thinking that constitutes a politics of becoming-other as compared with the overt representational politics of schooling. The aesthetic politics that emerge from crisis moments in the classroom and the studio have yet another dimension insofar as they suggest the becoming-other of the event as the aesthetic pedagogy of teaching and art, as becoming-pedagogical, the making of sense through semblance that constitutes learning as an imperceptible, immanent event.
For this panel, I explore the performative correspondences between the complex, disparate, and disjunctive encounters, alliances, and movements that characterize the making of art and the making of teaching that, according to philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, are constituted by a plane of consistency, Body without Organs (BwO), rhizomatic assemblage, disjunctive synthesis, and a multiplicity. My objective in doing so is to conceptualize the creative research and practice, the incipient event of art and of teaching as an interconnected politics of imperceptibility that is constituted through exploration, experimentation, and improvisation, and from which manifold possibilities for new knowledge emerges through immanence.

Author

• Charles Garoian, The Pennsylvania State University