The Event of Research as Art Practice

• In Event: Pedagogy of the Bereft: Reevaluating Arts-Based Research and Learning in a Deprived Society

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper contests methodological prescriptions in research and praxis that impose unreal, moralizing expectations and limitations on real, lived experiences during the research process.

Perspective(s):
I often find myself working with graduate students who express an urgent need for methodologies to address the cultural phenomena that they are researching for their theses or dissertation projects. My response usually bewilders when I suggest rather than relying exclusively on orthodox methodologies that they pursue research as the event of ontological immanence conceptualized by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1990); an incipient, machinic process of becoming-research, becoming-methodology correspondent with arts practice that enables seeing and thinking in irreducible ways while resisting normalization and subsumption under existing research methods.

Modes of inquiry:
Explores a kind of methodology-in-the making that also constitutes a different kind of research ethics, an ethics that is called for when responding to unanticipated experiences that emerge during the exploratory, experimental, and improvisational practices of art and teaching; those indeterminate, imperceptible experiences that when they do emerge cast socially and historically constructed knowledge and methodologies into a state of crisis.

Data sources:
Defines and unpacks several abstract Deleuzoguattarian philosophical concepts in the context of reflecting upon mentoring conversations with novice researchers.

Conclusions:
Deleuze scholar Levi R. Bryant (2011) characterizes the event of ontological immanence as “ethical phenomenology.” He argues that traditional ethics in philosophy is wrong-headed insofar as “the ethicist begins with well-determined situations that have already occurred and then proceeds to search for a rule that would allow him or her to evaluate whether the action is right or wrong. In ethical philosophy and theorization everything seems to proceed as if the action were already accomplished and then the action gets evaluated.” As Bryant suggests, the insistence for predetermined methodological rules and procedures are wrong-headed given that they are based on previous assessment outcomes. Their reductive prescriptions occlude the particularities of complex and contradictory occurrences, the nuanced phenomena that emerge unexpectedly during research and practice in art and art education. In other words, the need for pre-existing methodological representations as modes of addressing crises of knowledge that emerge during art and teaching practice suggests a fear and loathing of the nascent and unforeseen, and a reactionary rush to judgment to ensure that the research process is successful, and its outcomes are well within the parameters of academic and institutional acceptability.

Scholarly significance:
Rather than reverting to past problems and solutions, I encourage students and novice researchers to address the event of an unanticipated experience as an emergent problem and to find “the solution that it merits, according to the conditions which determine it as a problem” (Deleuze, 1990). I encourage them to suspend and delay applying familiar and known solutions to the emergent problem, to linger on its eccentricities—exploring its differences and peculiarities until a multiplicity of unfamiliar and unknown solutions emerges. It is only then, after solutions have been discovered from the existential conditions of a problem that their correspondences with those in the past are theorized.

Author

• Charles Garoian, The Pennsylvania State University