Toward an Educational Politics of Aesthetic Disruption and Decentering

• In Event: Pleasure Is Political: Implications of Embodied Making and Teaching for Arts-Based Research

Abstract

Between 2015 – 2016, I returned to the four schools that I attended as a K-12 student—three of them in Boston, Massachusetts, and one in Tel Aviv, Israel-- to explore pedagogies of poetic inquiry. The processes of returning to these autobiographical sites of schooling involved a range of disruptions and personal decenterings that I could not foresee prior to those encounters: the “data” (photographs, sound recordings, “field notes” taken at each school) became disrupted as I manipulated those materials into abstracted forms and ghostly residues; images, objects, and sounds that don’t “belong” to each site in any logical sense found their way into my study; and my actions as a researcher disrupted conventional research protocols as I worked the nonhuman materialities of the sites (desks, windows, walls, flags) in ways that disrupted each site’s common sense—prompting unexpected perceptions of schooling by foregrounding the “thing power” (Bennett, 2010) of school objects and the sociocultural assemblages to which they belong. I did this as a way to speak aesthetically/politically (Ranciere, 2004; 2010), or insensibly, to broader sociocultural issues and absences particular to schooling in the United States and Israel. Moreover, my relationship to each “autobiographical” site was unfamiliar, and I noticed the study prompting a decentering of self rather than a personal expression or representation of experiences.

Turning now to the work of the artist Francis Alys, I look at the educational workings of disruption and decentering from a different angle. I focus on three of Alys’ performances: 1. dragging an ice cube until it melts down the streets of Mexico City 2. gathering a group of people to move a mountain a few inches in Peru, and 3. cutting a painting in half with a saw. I consider how each of these actions disrupts conventional notions of use and practicality in educational practices and the ways in which they decenter the artist; they are not about the personal voice or style of the artist but offer instead simple gestures that shift our perceptions of what a body can do (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I theorize these disruptive (and impractical) actions as aesthetics/political acts that expose a glaring scarcity in educational practices: a scarcity of disruption and decentering, actions that I argue are a form of social practice, re-imagining, and collective good. Extending from the works of Alys, I return to my own data generated from processes of “returns” to sites of schooling to explore possibilities for arts-based methodologies and teaching practices to become aesthetic/political sites of disruption and decentering.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ranciere, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

Ranciere, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. London & New York: Continuum.

Author

• Maya R. Pindyck, Teachers College, Columbia University