New Materialist Pedagogy: Art and the Power of Things

• In Event: Doing New Materialism: Art Education and Object Vibrancy

Abstract

Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter (2010) has two overlapping aims. Frist, she has a philosophical project: to problematize a major bias in Western philosophical thinking that separates active and passive, vibrancy and inertness. As counter intuitive as it may seem, Bennett proposes that brute matter exerts its own power that exists below the human world. This philosophical project is linked directly to an overarching political hypothesis. Bennett argues that one of the causes of the destruction of the natural world and the impending ecological disaster is precisely the Western belief that matter is inactive, a mere resource for human consumption.

In addition to these overt goals, Bennett is also interested in the pedagogy of things—how things “teach” us new ways of perceiving the environment beyond our intentional purposes. Things have the possibility to interrupt anthropocentric (human-centered) educational aims, opening up a space wherein the mere thingliness of the thing can appear as a wondrous presence in its own right. The goal here is not to reduce things to resources that can be studied in order to improve human worlds. Rather it is to let their vibrant power shine. In this sense, things need to be seen as having pedagogical power of their own, as non-human teachers that do work on our perceptual common sense orientations and bodily comportments.

But there is a pedagogical problem here which Bennett does not adequately address: if human perception is embedded in the human world of meaning, equipment, and focal practices, then what kind of educational experiences help to counter-act this deeply ingrained anthropocentric stance? If things can teach, then what are the conditions that make us receptive to their lessons? In this presentation, I will tease out what an education in things might look like—and the unique role that art education can play in this process. What is at stake here is an education that does not merely hone perceptual intelligence for worldly success but rather an education that fundamentally disrupts the very structure of human-centered perception in order to reorient perception toward things as things.

In conclusion, I will suggest that art teachers can turn to object-oriented artists such as Robert Rauschenberg for educational inspiration in designing curricula that enliven the power of things. Through an analysis of his work, I will unpack several educational principles that help things shine as things: suspension of use, collage, and synaesthetic stimulation. A pedagogy of things is important for art educators at this moment because of current attempts to instrumentalize the arts under the banner of “creative economies.” When art education becomes nothing more than an adjunct to functionalist approaches to education, then wonderment at the very existence of things as things is replaced by mere curiosity concerning how we as human actors can better ourselves and fulfill our projects. As such, the goal of a pedagogy of things is a new political economy where there is no hierarchy between “active” humans and “passive” things.

Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author

• Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas