Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies Against the State

Art, Equality and Learning

Art, Equality and Learning Pedagogies Against the State Dennis Atkinson Goldsmiths University of London

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DEDICATION

For Ethel and Harold

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or else your hearts must bear the courage of the changing of the guards. Bob Dylan

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. ix Introduction............................................................................................................. xi 1. Pedagogies Against the State: Initial Thoughts about Learning ........................ 1 2. Theorising the Subject..................................................................................... 21 3. Subjectivities and School Art Education: Mourning and Openings ................ 49 4. Some Ethical and Pedagogical Issues: Forcing, Subjectivization and Desire........................................................................................................ 67 5. Tensions in Art in Education........................................................................... 75 6. Looking Awry at Assessment and the Abrogation of Becoming .................... 97 7. The Artist-teacher.......................................................................................... 115 8. Multiculturalism, Being-with and the Radicant............................................. 139 9. Ethics and Local Curations of Learning ........................................................ 151 10. Postscript ....................................................................................................... 169 References............................................................................................................ 175

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped and contributed to the production of this book in a variety of ways. Particular thanks must go however to Tony Brown, Paul Dash, Rosalyn George, Alex Moore, Michaela Ross and Ian Cole for reading and commenting upon various draft chapters. I want to thank a number of teachers and educators for their help and support; Henry Ward and his students at Welling School for contributions to Chapter 3; Annie Derbyshire, Tessa Hodson, Danny Murphy and Jude Thomas for their contributions to the chapter on the artist-teacher; Esther Sayers from Tate, John Johnston from Goldsmiths Department of Educational Studies and Sophie Leach from NSEAD. Thanks to all my colleagues and students at Goldsmiths for their lively debate and discussion of ideas and to Myrna Felix for administrative support. Thanks also to Yinka Shonibare MBE and the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, Ingrid Pollard, KOS and the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, Casagrande and the Juan Munoz Trust for allowing me to use reproductions of their work in the text. Earlier versions of Chapter 1 appeared in the International Journal of Art and Design Education, and Access: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural and Policy Studies. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. These chapters have been substantially reworked for this book. I am very grateful for the support, patience and encouragement of Michel Lokhorst at Sense Publications. And finally thanks, as always, to Karen...if not for you...

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INTRODUCTION

...an event, in affecting a world, always has a local rearrangement of the transcendental of this world as its effect. (Badiou 2009, p. 222) ...for me, the event is the immanent principle of exceptions to becoming, or (in other words) Truths. (Badiou 2009, p. 385, my bracket) Everyone has a capacity to think and to learn, to make and to act, to sense and to feel; these processes constitute something enduring about being and becoming. However, generally speaking, either consciously or unconsciously, we are encouraged or sometimes enforced to think, learn, act, feel and make in particular ways. We become subjected to particular ideologies and practices within which such processes are conceived, performed and regulated. But this is not a completely deterministic process, a closed circle; rather, it is always open to disruption so that possibilities for new modes of becoming come into appearance. This is the crux of Badiou’s notion of being and event which denotes an ongoing process of existence and change through which human subjects emerge. The notion of being and event signals a tensional dimension of becoming which is a fundamental theme of this book There are a number of tensions running through the book. These are: tensions between tradition and the new; tensions between art in education and contemporary art; tensions between ontologies of practice and epistemologies of assessment; tensions between the socio-cultural notion of difference and an egalitarian notion of the Same, tensions between an ethics of reality, of established values, principles and practices and an ethics of the real; tensions between the different ontological domains of the artist and the teacher which are brought together in the idea of the artist-teacher, tensions between knowledge and not-knowing, tensions between knowledge and truth. Though the book has a particular focus upon learning in art and education the discussion of pedagogies against the state, or pedagogies of the event, has a much wider application to other (perhaps all) fields of learning and its initiation. Most chapters of the book deal with each of these tensional relations in turn but not in the sense of attempting to resolve them; their resolution is always incomplete, but rather in the sense of an imperative to decide what kind of future we want for pedagogical spaces of teaching and learning. The imperative outlined below is not for consensus, which in Ranciere’s use of the term would, ‘reduce politics to the police’, (Ranciere 2004, p. 83), but for a space of politics and dissensus in educational sites, where issues of equality confront established policing frameworks, a space of agonistic encounter in which a struggle for truth in Badiou’s sense of this term is engaged in the pursuit of learning. Within a space of dissensus there is a potential for new subjectivations and new pathways for learning, for new distributions of practice, of speaking about and viewing learning. A space of dissensus includes an excess, an exception that holds such potential. It is not simply a space of opinion but a political process within which established frameworks and orders, for example, of representation, practice, values and thought are confronted with the overlooked, the marginalised and the not-known. The latter does not relate to particular individual interests, but xi

INTRODUCTION

to a subjectivation to a truth that brings to light new forms of existence and a subsequent reconfiguration of the social space from the status quo ante. The text draws upon key terms from particular philosophers that are then applied to pedagogical spaces in order to initiate a debate about teaching and learning. Though as I have already stated, the focal point is art education in a number of social locations, the intention is also to provide a discussion of pedagogical issues that are directly relevant to other educational sites and subject domains in which learning occurs. THE GAP AND MAGRITTE

The painting entitled, La lunette d’approche, by Magritte is a powerful image for the central themes in this book which are concerned with developing pedagogical strategies in which real learning is viewed as a process of renewal; a process through which learners leap beyond themselves into new accommodations of learning and what it might mean to learn. This involves a pedagogy against the state, a pedagogy that maintains a constant surveillance of the markers that define learning in order to pass beyond them into an expanded conception and affect of learning, which is then leapfrogged into further conceptual and affective states. It is the gap depicted in the painting by Magritte that signifies the potential for renewal. It is this gap that concerned Lacan in much of his work; the gap in the symbolic created by the eruption of the Real which leads to a renewal of the symbolic order, but which is never complete. In the painting we see the depiction of two open window frames through which we can see a blue, cloudy sky. Yet in between the frames where we would expect to see an uninterrupted view of the sky there is a black void. This visual rendering xii

INTRODUCTION

of the symbolic (view through the windows) punctured by the Real (black void) can be considered on several levels and used to think about the rupturing of representation by the Real. Of course in order to think about such ruptures we remain in the symbolic but we are also affected by the disturbance of the Real to our modes of representation. Thus we see in the Magritte the significance of the black void in relation to the view through the windows, which function as metaphors for the symbolic. When the symbolic is broken or interrupted the void emerges, the painting depicts the void but from within the symbolic itself. This uncanny image throws us back against the limits of representation, against the framing of our world by our knowledge frameworks and ways of understanding as well as pointing towards the absent-presence of points of impossibility which hold a potential for new worlds to emerge. These points of impossibility within social spaces may be evidenced by asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ immigrants who occupy gaps or voids in the social fabric. They are part of a social situation but given no recognition of existence as such except in terms of illegality or social pariahs. Such points also refer to radical breaks in knowledge formations as precipitated for example, by Hutton, Cantor, Schoenberg, Duchamp, Galileo and others. The purpose of this book is to consider local processes and curations of real learning as such points that lead to reconfigured states of learning.

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CHAPTER 1

PEDAGOGIES AGAINST THE STATE Initial Thoughts about Learning

INTRODUCTION

The idea of pedagogies against the state came to me through a mixture of experiences: thinking and reading, discussing and debating our current and recent situation in education and teacher education in England; whilst finding the philosophical writings of Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, Butler, Ranciere and others fruitful for trying to think again of pedagogies to initiate forms of teaching and learning that are required for our current and future social contexts. In the last two decades teaching practices, curriculum content and teacher education in England have been subject as never before to centralised state control and intensive systems of regulation. During this period our social contexts have changed dramatically; population movements, sophisticated forms of global communication, increasing numbers of sites of conflict and cultural retrenchments as well as the very recent global economic crisis are all factors contributing to such change. It could be argued that the changes we have witnessed in education, which has become increasingly subjected to the hegemony of audit cultures, are a reactive but failing response to issues precipitated by social change. The notion of pedagogies against the state encapsulates for me a way of thinking about pedagogy, teaching and learning that enables a more effective and responsive approach to local ontological states of learning (and teaching) as well as the wider socio-political states in which the former take place. Thus the term ‘state’ is deliberately ambivalent in order to address local states of practice and political/ideological states of regulation. Pedagogies against the state is a call for pedagogies that work against themselves, anti-pedagogies, in the sense that they cannot afford to become trapped within particular values and modes of practice, they cannot adopt totalitarian approaches to learning, in a world of increasing instability. TWO ANECDOTES

I want to begin with two short anecdotes. The first relates to an early, but seminal, teaching experience, which I wrote about in a previous book (Atkinson 2003), and that I believe had a latent but lasting influence. Nearly forty years ago in the early 1970s I started out on a teaching career in Batley, Yorkshire, a couple of miles from where I grew up. The school, Batley Boys High, sat on an escarpment overlooking the town and the heavy-woollen mills similar to the one in which my father worked. On one side of the school was a select Grammar School for girls and on the other 1

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side a very prestigious boys Grammar School. We were hemmed in by an academic elite! My school consisted of nearly 1800 boys about 400 of whom were boys of varying ages newly arrived from India and Pakistan. The school employed a streaming system but these immigrant boys were placed together in what were termed ‘X’ classes at the ‘end’ of each year group up to the fourth year. This was because they spoke little English, although this skill developed as they grew and became more familiar with a second language. It was reasoned that they would learn more quickly if they were taught for most lessons by Guajarati or Urdu speaking teachers. However, for more practical lessons such as woodwork, metalwork, Physical Education and Art these classes were taught by the respective subject teachers. And so as an art teacher I was expected to teach art to these boys even though I did not speak or understand Guajarati or Urdu and they had very little English. All my training and education in art was grounded in Western traditions and so, rather naively, but having little other security on which to proceed, I got them involved in observational drawing. They also made block prints and lino prints as well as ceramic pieces, for example, but it was the drawings they made of plants and a variety of objects that completely baffled me in terms of how to respond. These drawings were so different from western drawing practices in which I had been educated and so different from those made by other students, to whom I felt I could respond, that I seemed to have no secure ground on which to proceed. Their sense of proportion and composition did not conform, for example, to western projection or representational systems. They were highly decorative and rhythmical. I think that I failed to respond adequately to these drawings and to boys who made them. Because of barriers relating to language and other cultural practices, it was a case of trying to muddle through. In those days very few of these boys were even considered for the General Certificate of Education (16+) Examination. Their work was viewed with interest but not awarded serious attention within the institutional framework of formal examinations. In terms of identity, these students’ identities as learners appeared to be produced within two kinds of discourse; one in which their difference as students of art practice was acknowledged through a curious pedagogic voyeurism, and another in which their ability as art practitioners was unacknowledged and often marginalised. I was party to these discourses. Although at that time, as a newly qualified teacher, my thoughts on pedagogy were inchoate, my experiences with these Asian boys remain unforgettable and in a latent sense taught me something about the need to be able to respond effectively to the different ways in which people learn (see also Ann Taber 1978, 1981). My second anecdote moves forward ten years to when I met Bill Brookes at the University of Southampton. Bill took me through my Masters and Doctoral studies over the next eight years. He was a remarkable and insightful teacher, a founder member and leading figure in the Association of Mathematics Teachers in the UK and well known in the world of mathematics education. Bill always argued that experience is something everyone has and everyone has the capacity for reflecting on his or her experience….and this can be developed by attending to lived experience and through the discipline of a critical awareness of the limitations and possibilities of natural language. I remember him saying: “Mistakes demonstrate a form of 2

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thinking different from that which would have produced the right answer, and so mistakes can give rise to getting something else right.” This focussed on the requirement not to view and conceive action in relation to problems and solutions only through a particular, established lens which leads to a specific outcome, but to try to appreciate a variety of ways of interpreting and responding. I thought of this when teaching still-life drawing and responding to some students whose drawings did not fit my expectations with the comment, “Have you looked at this object carefully?” My comment seemed to assume a particular drawing form to which the student’s drawing did not correspond…and I wondered further how such comments unknowingly structured my understanding of students’ learning. Was I excluding other (equally) legitimate forms of expression? In relation to this issue my friend Alex Moore drew my attention to a passage written by John Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct (2001: 223, 227). Ends arise as a function within action. They are not, as current theories too often imply, things lying outside activity at which the latter is directed. They are not ends or termini of action at all. They are terminals of deliberation, and so turning points in activity. […] Even the most important among all the consequences of an act is not necessarily its aim. The key point to emphasise here is the immanence of learning, that it is a process which should remain open to possibilities and potentials that arise within the action and practice of learning and not be tied to specified aims except, of course, becoming a more effective learner. This book is concerned with issues of learner identities and practices that are implied in these two short anecdotes and with the plays and distributions of making, speaking, listening and viewing that form them. In this chapter I present a philosophical sketch, based largely upon the writing of Alain Badiou, in which real learning is viewed as a movement into new ontological possibilities. A more detailed presentation and discussion of Badiou’s writings and their relevance for pedagogy and learning will follow in Chapter Two. The idea of pedagogies against the state functions on a series of inter-related levels in that the term ‘state’ embraces local ontological states of learning, traditions of teaching and curriculum policy as well as wider political contexts within which educational practices are situated. A key concern of the chapter is that by viewing learning as an ontological shift opening up new possibilities for learners, an ethical imperative for pedagogy has to deal with expanding our grasp of what learning is. In very general terms we might argue that in the writings of Foucault (1977), Althusser (1984), Bourdieu (1990) and others we see the emergence, positioning and regulation of the subject according to the signifier; that is to say, according to established forms of signification and social practice. Here the subject is almost predetermined by the power of discourse and social practices in that they mark out a place for the subject. Butler (1997: 1–2) illustrates how the performance of normalising power processes, manifested in discourse and practice, become internalised to form a kind of psychic super-ego that precipitates a desire for subjection. From such theorisations of the subject we can say then that the production of the subject relies upon processes of representation or recognition. 3

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Under the influence of the writings of Foucault (1977, 1980) some of my earlier writing (Atkinson, 1995, 2002) explored the linguistic practices which are used by teachers and other educators and how these forms of language impact upon the identities of learners and teachers. The discourse of assessment practices became central to this work, discourses which are used by teachers and others to assess a learner’s ‘ability’. I was interested in how teaching and learning are actually constituted and performed as practices within the parameters of specific assessment discourses. This work was centrally concerned therefore with the idea of subjectivity, with how teachers and learners are formed as pedagogised subjects within educational practices and discourses. Here the subject is viewed not as someone who inherently possesses or lacks ability (teacher or learner), any more than he or she inherently possesses other identities relating, for example, to race, class or gender, but whose ability is conferred through established and accepted practices and values or socio-cultural norms. In this work I was hinting at the production of pedagogised relations within the normalising discourses of educational assessment practices and how subjects of learner and teacher are produced through the parameters of the discourse. Such norms decide almost in advance which kind of subject is valued; to quote a phrase from Judith Butler (2005), “they create the viability of the subject, its ontological and epistemological parameters.” It is in those disturbances of practice, when we are confronted with the unexpected, when we encounter something which diverges from normalising structures (such as a ‘strange’ drawing or other activity set by a teacher) that we may be precipitated into questioning how the learner as a subject emerges (and how a teacher emerges). Through such pedagogical encounters we can learn the value of difference in that such encounters allow us to expand our understanding of practice and learning by witnessing how people act and conceive in different and legitimate ways that often do not subscribe to normalising frameworks. If we impose the power of the norm when it appears no longer relevant to our changing social and cultural contexts and lived realities; when we fail to mourn outmoded or redundant practices and values (Atkinson 2006); then we effect a kind of violence upon difference. We might get a glimpse of this by looking at the imposition in schools of a National Curriculum and its inspection regime which, I believe was underpinned by an outmoded conception of teaching, learning and assessment. This model relied upon mechanistic and transmission approaches to teaching and learning that could not respond to rapidly changing socio-cultural realities. It was in effect a reactionary device trying to cope with a rapidly changing world. A new curriculum is now being introduced (since September 2008) which aims to give teachers more flexibility to determine the content and structure of the curriculum for which they are responsible. A similar normalising process has affected the process of teacher education which is structured according to a series of government ‘standards’ that prescribe the skills and knowledge required to become a good teacher. Foucault’s later work moved from exploring the subject as an effect of discourse towards seeing the formation of the subject in relation to norms and it is in and through such relations that the self as a human process comes to be viewed as an act of poiesis, a creative and aesthetic process which incorporates a process of critique. 4

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This critical position in relation to normalising frameworks provides a basis upon which we might begin to question the parameters of teaching and learning in which pedagogised subjects are produced. Such critical practice introduces a question of ethics in that the critique of normalising frameworks is, by implication, a critique of self; the self is organised/recognised and constituted within such frameworks. This critique, I would argue, is precipitated through disturbances in practice, and I think it is towards such disturbances that Judith Butler (2005) alludes when she comments: With the help of Foucault’s self-criticism, it may be possible to show that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, [those sites] where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed, where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgement: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (pp. 21–22, my bracket.) In pedagogic relations it is not uncommon to have experiences in which what happens cannot be understood within established frameworks when we assume ground to be “common” that is in fact not secure. Extending Foucault’s writing to this kind of situation where teachers begin to question how they respond to learners when the latter do not conform to established frameworks of understanding, suggests that teachers are in a sense putting themselves at risk, becoming unrecognised within the normalising frameworks that govern their practice. Is the teacher in such a situation risking his or her identity and professional standing by contravening the norms that govern ‘the scene of recognition’ anticipated by other professionals (inspectors etc) who want or need to feel reassured? Is the teacher in such situations indirectly asking the question who he or she is? Consequently what kind of forms of address should a teacher as a reflective practitioner find appropriate in relation to such ‘insecure’ or ‘uncertain’ pedagogical relations? In such relations it does not seem appropriate to take a reflective or reflexive stance toward the self in terms of a current or future ontology but rather to ask the question: ‘Who are you?’ Bearing in mind the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of answering this question, it posits the notion that there is a subject in the pedagogic relation that the teacher probably does not or cannot fully comprehend. Here the relation to the other disrupts the self. If in a pedagogical relation the learner is fantasised through the norm, the Other of the norm, then the learner becomes a surrogate identity (he or she produces what the teacher expects). If the pedagogical encounter begins from the question ‘Who are you?’ then a different relation seems to emerge through the question, ‘How does the other learn?’ ***

In this chapter I want to explore a different idea of the subject from the writing of Badiou (2002, 2005a, 2005b), a subject which emerges through an event and subsequent truth procedure. I then want to relate these ideas to learning and pedagogy. I will consider real learning arising through an event which involves a movement 5

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into a new or changed ontological state. Learning can thus be conceived as a problem of existence, an idea that resonates with Deleuze’s belief that the power of life is its “power to develop problems” (see Colebrook, 2002, p. 1). Pedagogy, in relation to such problems, can be conceived as pedagogy (or pedagogies) against the state as it attempts to embrace new ontological possibilities for the learner and teacher beyond established states of representation in order to expand our grasp of human learning, of what it is to learn, to produce new subjectivities and new learning communities. This suggests that immanent to pedagogy is a movement against itself. The ethical imperative for pedagogy is concerned with maximising the power of learning, it is not focussed on what we are and should be, that is to say on some transcendent position towards being, but upon the potentiality and ‘unknown’ of becoming. A brief, perhaps over-sentimental interpretation of a video of a child painting provides a context of practice for the ideas on learning that the paper develops. The notion of risk taking has often been put forward by art educators in order to promote creative and individual approaches to learning (see Swift and Steers, 1999). The idea of learners being encouraged to take risks in their specific learning context suggests a pedagogy that is not totally controlled by specified learning outcomes. It suggests a flexible teaching-learning space that attempts to accommodate unpredictable or unexpected directions in learning. Encouraging learners to take risks in their art practice, by implication, suggests that teachers themselves are also taking risks in that they have to be able to ‘let things happen’; they have to be able to facilitate these learning pathways without a clear sense of outcome. But how can we understand the idea of risk taking? Is it possible to provide a theoretical basis upon which to enhance our understanding of this concept that takes us beyond the prosaic idea of ‘taking a chance’ and thereby provide pedagogy with a more substantial theoretical underpinning of this concept? Some years ago I had a conversation with a leading gallery educator who expressed his extreme frustration whenever he heard the term ‘risk taking’ being used as a central aim of learning in school art education. For him this term had become no more than a romantic cliché. Here I go some way towards theorising the idea of risk taking through the notions of the ‘event’ and ‘truth procedure’. These are taken from the philosophical writings of Alain Badiou and they provide a way of thinking about risk taking that explores the dynamics of this process which can be applied fruitfully to practices of teaching and learning. EARLY ENCOUNTERS: A VIDEO OF A CHILD PAINTING

I deploy the following story as an indicative cameo for thinking about learning, pedagogy and practice with which the rest of the book is concerned. The story begins from a panoptic place, a place of surveillance in which all appears to be revealed before the viewer. It is a place at once visual and at the same time visualised according to a panoply of ways of seeing and, therefore, without question, a plethora of ways of meaning. It might be comprehended as a space of power where flows of power are complex and almost always invisible. It is certainly a place of inter-relation; inter-relations between a little boy and two adults but also 6

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inter-relations between actions, as well as strategies and tactics that structure and lead action towards its distant horizon. It is a space of multiplicities, invisible inter-relations, not seen, but which are powerfully present between thinking, desiring, intuiting, hypothesising, responding and testing; a rich amalgam of physical, affective, psychic and social processes informing the pathways of becoming. His story begins in the ground of practice where there is no separation between acting, thinking, reflecting, desiring or feeling. These categories do not exist in his space of practising; their function is to provide the security and even the subjectivity of the viewer’s gaze. He asks for red, then blue and then pink. Paint pots are handed to him one by one as he uses a brush to inscribe the large roll of paper with a series of lines and marks. His gaze is fascinated by the outcome of his actions, the painted arcs, twisting and sinusoidal lines. Painted marks denote an absence of immediately prior actions as well as perhaps a bleeding into a virtual future, all accompanied by attendant psychic and visceral processes. These lines simultaneously constitute relics and futures; they are traces of a disappearing and of a prescient forthcoming. Such marks and lines may suggest a meaning to the boy but when others focus upon their presence and form to suggest meaning then crucial moments of being disappear whilst, simultaneously, an existence is inscribed. (This hints at a possible radical dilemma of assessment in art education where art practice is reduced to the predicative gaze of knowledge, of the signifying chain; it hints at the gap between a learner’s presentation and a teacher’s representation of the latter in an appropriate discourse. It also, more significantly, points to differences between the here and now ontologies of practice and the atemporal signifying chain of knowledge.) But there are also sounds, voices; other signifiers that accompany painted configurations, noises to indicate a hissing wind followed by a series of stabbing actions that leave their traces in splodges of green paint followed by a soft murmuring, “footprints”. Again the presence of the mark suggests a significant absence. In the next phase, (though there are no phases for the boy), curling and intersecting lines become entangled with spoken words, “a windmill” and the sounds of a howling purple storm. Repeated spitting sounds suggest an imagined ferocity emulated and adumbrated by an adult who supports the child’s visual and oral narrative, extending its possibilities: “Is it a storm? What’s happening, Luca?” But the narrative changes; the focus is transformed. Luca makes a slow and deliberate red line as he pushes the brush to his left along the paper. He imagines a train. He pushes the brush along the red line and pulls it back repeatedly and finally to a collision point accompanied by a crashing sound, “Dead end.” He changes colour and describes in line, movement and sound a blue train going forwards and backwards along the same route. He terminates the return trajectory with a thick squiggle and accompanying sound. Then, “Here comes another train.” This time it’s green and it also crashes after making its journey. These hermeneutic and semiotic flows proceed fluently and undisturbed; they suffer no interruption, only the gentle background of adult support, curiosity and affirmation. A period of deep concentration follows as Luca uses water to dilute the paint; he makes a zigzag line across the paper. He overlaps green with red and then makes a 7

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series of rotations leaving their corresponding loops in blue and red. Noticing paint on his finger tips he makes a finger-print, then another, and another. A transformation occurs; he paints his hand and fingers uttering the word “dinosaur”. He makes a handprint deliberately and carefully. A succession of hand-prints follow coupled with the obvious enjoyment of applying paint to his hand. Then he uses his hand as a template on the paper and traces around his fingers and palm with the brush; he removes his hand and fills in the outline. His body then becomes the painted surface; Luca paints his hand and carefully describes a red line on the front of his forearm from his wrist to his elbow, the point where his jumper sleeve has been folded. There is something archaic and primeval in this application of paint to the body surface. He tries to make a print of hand and arm. AN ETHICS OF PEDAGOGY

It is possible to offer a detailed analysis of Luca’s painting and construct a meaning of his practice. For instance, we might consider the representational and semiotic strategies employed by Luca that together constitute his painting practice and endow it with meaning. We can think of his painting as a temporal flow consisting of different narratives that include scenarios, plots and dénouements; and identify conceptualisations of movement, reversibility and termination. We can reflect upon the metaphoric and metonymic dimensions of his painting; and we might analyse the syntactical structure of the painted marks, their fusion with the voice. We could consider the dialogical relations, though minimal, between Luca and his caregivers and how Luca is able to extend his practice through such relations. We might pursue Luca’s control and orchestration of his practice as well as his direction and regulation of the adults supporting him, thus exploring the micro-politics of this space of practice. All these forms of enquiry and others can be undertaken legitimately in order to further an understanding of this child’s visual practice and its context of performance and production. Such enquiries further our understanding along established lines of thought and bodies of knowledge. That is to say, such enquiry presupposes or is predicated by established epistemological frameworks through which Luca’s painting practice can be understood. Such interpretations constitute a series of truth discourses in their search for meaning. To use a phrase from Ranciere, to which we will return, such enquiries are predicated upon particular distributions of the sensible, upon distributions of the visible and the speakable in which the child and his practices can be comprehended. In this and subsequent chapters I will be concerned with such distributions in a number of sites: art practice, learning, pedagogy, ethics and theory. My aim is to consider the ways in which practices, pedagogies and their attendant visibilities and discourses, configure and reconfigure their subjects and objects. A key aim, embedded in the title of this book, is to confront particular demarcations of ‘art’, ‘learner’, ‘teacher/facilitator’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘assessment’, ‘ethics’, ‘subject’, in order to inspect how meanings attached to these terms are distributed and thereby invoke specific forms of recognition and value. For example, traditional knowledge and skills in art educational sites (observational drawing, painting, biographies of artists,) and 8

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more contemporary art practices in such sites (participation, performance) produce what I have previously termed specific pedagogised identities. These emerge through the practices and discourses that educators initiate and with which learners engage. My point is to open up such demarcations and their respective forms of subjectivation in order to offer a way of thinking about pedagogy and learning which tries not to become trapped within accepted distributions (practices and discourses) in order to extend how we understand practice, pedagogy and learning. The ethics of pedagogy with which I am working does not abandon traditional practices and skills but seeks to make room for local truth procedures of learning (Badiou, 2002). This means that the pedagogic encounter must avoid over ‘prescription’ or ‘inscription’ vis a vis tradition and, to use an oxymoron, anticipate unpredictability in learning. Here I want to make a distinction between normative learning comprising much of the daily learning, teaching and assessment processes and real learning involving a leap into a new space, where the event of learning precipitates a new order of becoming that has the potential to invoke new states of existence (Dewey 2001). This applies to both children/students and teachers. It is crucial to understand that the event is not the learning but that which happens to precipitate learning. That which is precipitated can be conceived in terms of a truth procedure that remains faithful to the event of learning. There are two important dimensions to this ethics of pedagogy, the first concerns the child or student as learner and relates to real learning viewed as a problem of existence involving movement into a new ontological state, so that the pedagogic requirement is to support these local processes. The second concerns the teacher-aslearner more directly and involves those teaching-learning encounters through which previously unrecognised or uncounted elements, that is to say, forms of learning and practice children develop, become appreciated whilst at the same time this process of appreciation or recognition makes visible to the teacher/facilitator the limits or parameters of his or her previous pedagogic situation. This process of revelation thus produces a modified pedagogic space for the teacher in which an expanded understanding of learning evolves. Put another way these pedagogic events relate to the real of the pedagogic situation, those forms of learning behaviour that disturb the teacher’s pedagogic parameters, the symbolic framework that constructs learning, sufficiently so as to change them and make visible forms of learning and learners previously not recognised as such. Thus I am concerned more with opening up pedagogic spaces to the truth of learning encounters and events rather than analysing (normative) subjects of knowledge. I use the term ‘truth’ as it is found in the work of Alain Badiou in relation to a truth process that builds upon an event occurring in a particular situation (see Badiou, 2005b, pp. 43–51). This will be described in more detail in Chapter Two and discussed further in later chapters. I use the term ‘real’ from the Lacanian triad: imaginary, symbolic and Real. In Lacan the Real is that which lies beyond the symbolic, that is to say, beyond those forms of representation, such as language or image, through which we function and obtain meaning in our social networks and contexts. The Real hints at the gaps in the symbolic, it hints at those moments when our symbolic forms break down, when the symbolic order is punctured, when 9

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our practices of representation are severely disrupted by something that happens. If we apply the Lacanian notion of the Real to the term ‘real learning’ this relates to situations when assimilated symbolic or representational schemas, which allow learning to proceed, break down due to an encounter that punctures established learning processes and in time this encounter precipitates new forms of learning. The Real of learning cannot in itself be signified, and in that sense it is an impossible encounter, but it can lead to a reforming of the symbolic, it is the Real of the encounter that establishes the possibility for new ways of thinking and acting. We can see the truth of a learning encounter in Luca’s painting practice above, where, even at this micro level, as we observe the intensity and absorption of action, there is a clear insistence to follow the direction of the practice without any knowledge of outcomes but where outcomes leap into new forms of practice and enquiry. Here chance, perseverance and immanence are vital aspects of learning which lie in stark contrast to learning promoted by instrumentalist and transcendent pedagogies. BEING AND EVENT

But where does the truth of Luca’s painting lie? How might we consider the idea of truth beyond a hermeneutics of practice? In order to consider these questions, which appear to insist upon passing beyond the limits of language, an idea of truth in relation to human action is required in contrast to notions of disclosure or adequation. Here Badiou’s (2005a) book Being and Event develops the notion that the truth of being emerges from an evental situation through which a subject (as learner) emerges. For Badiou truth is linked to the eruption of an event and its generic consequences, it is nothing to do with knowledge or meaning. Truth is not what knowledge produces; on the contrary, “it is what exceeds, in a given situation, the knowledge that accounts for the situation” (Leclercle, 1999, p. 8). In other words truth is what cannot be conceived in a particular situation according to existing knowledge, “a truth is a puncturing of such knowledge” (ibid, p. 8). We can comprehend this idea of truth as lying beyond meaning or as a void in current meaning. Badiou (2001) writes: To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking [...] ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course – since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation – compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation (pp. 41–42). Whereas Badiou uses the notions of event and truth to describe major eruptions in the fields of politics, science, art and love, and without wishing to distort his philosophical endeavour, I think what he has to say has direct relevance and insight for local states of becoming, such as individual learning processes. In relation to education Badiou (2005c) remarks: Education (save its oppressive or perverted expressions) has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them (p. 9). For Badiou, “the ‘and’ of being and event names the space of the subject … the one who unfolds new structures of being and thus writes event into being.” (2005, 10

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p. xxxi) In other words, for Badiou a subject comes into being through the dynamics of an event and truth procedure that punctures and transforms knowledge. This book is concerned with how we might employ these ideas from Badiou to extend our understanding of local learning processes, what I refer to as local curations of learning. In relation to Luca, our young painter, how might we comprehend the truth of his painting practice? Well, perhaps we can regard the sequence of painting in which Luca engages as a series of unpredictable learning events, that is to say a series of actions each containing points or moments of fracture, revelation and potential that precipitate a movement into a new way of functioning such that, as a learner, Luca emerges through the truth of a perseverance with the new possibilities opened up to him by the chance contingencies of a series of painting events. Here Badiou’s idea of an ‘evental truth’ can be employed to consider learning as a process of disturbance and a movement into a new ontological state. We can see this happening as Luca discovers new ways of ‘painting’ (he uses brush on paper to make different marks, he prints with his fingers, he paints his body, and so on) and their corresponding potentialities for further action and thought. The consequences of the event of these moments of potentiality, for this learner, in the practice of painting reconfigure what it is to paint and define new ontological states of learning. The issue becomes more complex when we consider learning events or encounters from the learner’s ontological context and also from that of the teacher/facilitator. It is difficult to understand from an onlooker’s perspective how such an event happens for the learner and its level of significance for future learning. It is also difficult for the teacher or facilitator not to allow his or her knowledge-frame to structure this encounter and so interpret it from established forms of knowledge to form a closure of meaning. This sounds a little crazy, for how else are we to respond to and so understand a child’s learning encounter? Well, here again Badiou is interesting in terms of what he has to say about events and truth procedures. Badiou describes the “state of a situation” in terms of those practices, knowledge, values and so on that constitute a particular context in which action occurs. In some respects this is similar to Bourdieu’s sociological conceptions of field and habitus (Bourdieu 1977) and Ranciere’s idea of the distribution of the sensible (Ranciere 1999), which consists of those particular dispositions, forms of understanding, beliefs, values and ways of functioning within a particular social context. For Badiou an event is something that occurs in a situation but is not of the situation, that is to say it has little meaning within the current make-up of the situation. The disruption that Duchamp’s ready-mades effected in the Western art world can be viewed as an event in the sense in which Badiou uses this term. Duchamp’s intervention happened within a specific historical context but it could not be understood through the established values, practices and knowledge that constituted the art world of the time. This was because the intervention was so radical that it undermined how art objects, the artist, skill, technique and the spectator were understood. That is to say it shattered those discourses and practices through which art at that time was understood. Truth procedures leading from this event and remaining faithful to it have continued to question how we understand art objects and practices. We could say then that the Duchamp event is 11

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still happening today. It is through following a truth procedure leading from an event that, for Badiou, a subject comes into existence. In the field of science Galileo’s work in mathematics and physics can be viewed as an event whose consequences gradually transformed the field of science. In politics the French Revolution is mentioned frequently by Badiou as an event that reconfigured the field of politics. Although in speaking of Duchamp we are referring to a major disruption affecting a macro context I think it is profitable to apply the idea of a subject formed through the consequences of an event to processes of learning. For a child, or other learner, that which is presented through a learning encounter could, if seized, lead to new states of learning but, understandably, this seizing is often difficult without support or confidence. On the part of the teacher the learning encounter might consist of being confronted by a child’s work that he or she he finds inexplicable due to his or her framework of understanding (see Moore 1999, pp. 87–92 and 101–110). In such instances this might lead to a puncturing of established frameworks and a subsequent expanded understanding. However, more commonly, such encounters, where what the learner produces seems at odds with teacher expectations, frequently lead to the child’s practice being conceived as lacking or mysterious in relation to the teacher’s pedagogical framework. I recall this happening to me on numerous occasions when needing to respond to children’s drawings and other art work composed of forms radically outside of my expectations. The relations between expectation, appearance and meaning is expressed by Peirce (1958) in his well-known pragmaticist aphorism: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object (p. 124). It is the severe disruption of our understanding of objects as conceived through their practical effects that suggests something close to Badiou’s notion of event, which has no meaning when viewed through current conceptions that are radically insufficient. A second exemplar from previous writing (Atkinson 2002) can be used to illustrate these ideas on learning and truth. A few years ago I was interviewing a secondary school teacher in his art room when one of his examination students (16yrs) came in and asked to see him. This was at the time of the BSE crisis when thousands of cattle were being slaughtered around the country and their carcases burnt in huge fires. It was an event which triggered an intense political and ethical debate. The student was carrying a cage made from wooden rails. She said that she had not made the cage but wanted to use it for her examination piece which would be displayed the following week. She intended to suspend a frozen cow’s heart from the top. The bottom would be covered with straw and a map of England. Then she asked her teacher if this would be all right and if he thought she might pass the examination. The teacher and I just looked at each other. I am using this incident as a means of illustrating what I want to say about learning as an event. This concerns a relation between the real of practice and its inscription or perception by others (in this case a teacher) that precipitates ethical and pedagogical 12

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questions that open up possibilities for expanding our comprehension of what learning ‘is’ or can become. My direction then is to consider an ethics of pedagogy through which learners and their respective learning practices can emerge into existence. It is an ethics of the unknown of becoming rather than established forms of being. I am making a distinction therefore between an act of real learning involving a leap into a new ontological space, where the event of learning precipitates a new order of becoming, and normative learning as that which comprises much of the daily procedures of learning, teaching and assessment. In relation to the caged heart then how might we comprehend this incident in relation to the notions of event and truth? Well, I think it is possible to see an answer in the pedagogical relation where a local event precipitated a flow of energy. The student was clearly in a situation where she was attempting to break new ground but was uncertain of its validity. Her teacher had introduced her to the work of Damian Hirst and Mark Wallinger in an earlier project relating to the portrayal of animals in art practice including the work of George Stubbs. But the key was the introduction to contemporary practice and how this allowed her to think and work in a particular way coupled with the teacher’s encouragement, which projected her into a highly creative flow that enabled this student to pursue and persevere with the truth of her ideas and her commitment to them. There seems to be an important ethical dimension to this relational process whereby the learner and teacher together persevere with their local but unpredictable journeys of learning and emerge through a deep sense of commitment and resolve. I think these ideas on event and commitment can be usefully linked to another term used by Badiou, ‘that-which-is-not-yet’, from his little book, Ethics (2001), in order to develop these thoughts on pedagogy. THAT WHICH IS NOT YET

The concept of “that which is not yet” has relevance for interrogating as well as theorising pedagogical spaces on a variety of levels. This notion concerns a transition from being to becoming and also involves the problematics of existence and recognition, all of which are constant issues in many kinds of educational sites (schools, universites, colleges, galleries, museums, community sites) involving practices of teaching and learning as well as curriculum policies, course content and assessment practices. We can think of “that which is not yet” as referring to forms of being that have no existence, that is to say, to being that does not count or is not yet valued. This might refer to emerging states of becoming but also to those forms of being that are often present but absent, that is to say where they have no existence, no recognition in the sense that they lie outside of dominant modes of understanding and value, or again, quoting Ranciere (1999), outside the current distributions of the sensible and their police orders. Within teaching and learning contexts it is quite possible for there to be learners whose ontological status as learners is not recognised so their potential for becoming is constrained and therefore they have no (or marginal) existence within the pedagogical space. A glimpse of this situation can be perceived for instance when 13

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students produce work that is mysterious or incomprehensible from the perspective of the pedagogical framework as formed by the discourses and practices of the curriculum that inform the teacher’s practice. It can also be witnessed when learners from other cultures enter into a pedagogic context that fails to support their previous existence and achievements as learners (see Moore, 1999). Thus the idea of “that which is not yet” has at least two ethical implications for pedagogical sites: 1. It can be used to unpack the ontologies of learning. If we conceive of learning as a movement into a new ontological state, that is to say, where learning opens up new possibilities, new ways of seeing things, new ways of making sense of what is presented to us in our different modes of existence, then this movement involves, “that which is not yet”. Accepting such new states involves accepting new states of existence as learners. This idea would indicate a space of potential. 2. It can be deployed to consider the politics of existence in the pedagogic space particularly in relation to marginalised or obscure subjects. For instance, when a learner from outside of an indigenous culture enters its pedagogical institutions, though great effort is made to help, we often find a situation in which the institutional framework does not cater for the learner’s lifeworld, his or her cultural background or ways of understanding. In other words the learner’s existence is not recognised by the pedagogical context (and may never be) and so the learner occupies a position of “that which is not yet” within this specific context. Similarly within the dominant culture there are learners whose ways of understanding or strategies of learning are not recognised within the norms of pedagogic strategies employed by the teacher. For example, we know from the work of Bourdieu (1990), Bernstein (2000) and others, through the concepts of cultural capital and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) and the pedagogic device, recognition and realisation rules (Bernstein), that the curriculum content of the pedagogic space can be culturally biased so as to priviledge those learners who have access to valued forms of knowledge (cultural capital). Thus many or some of those learners who do not have access might be viewed as “that which is not yet” within the pedagogical context of state education and sadly remain in this ontological vacuum. Again, the being of the outsider, the absent present, can be applied to the field of sexuality where, for instance, gay, lesbian, bisexual or transsexual learners are not readily accommodated within the pedagogical framework. Such learners are therefore “that which is not yet”, they have limited existence within the pedagogical context (see Addison, 2007). This important notion has therefore, direct relevance for reflecting upon the position of learners, how they are situated and produced, that is to say, how their pedagogised idenitities are formed. The first implication recognises a space of pure potential, and whilst this potential is implied in the second it designates pedagogical spaces in which such potential has to overcome powerful prejudices in order to emerge. PEDAGOGIES AGAINST THE STATE

In order to embrace the idea of real learning as a movement into a new ontological state through following local truth procedures, and the ethical implications for the 14

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pedagogic space of “that which is not yet”, I want to argue that what is required for pedagogy are pedagogies against the state. This notion requires some elaboration. Essentially pedagogy against the state is a term which embraces both states of representation and encounters. States of representation affect our everyday lives as teachers or learners, because they refer to assimilated bodies of knowledge and practice. By implication therefore they refer to specific normalised subjectivities that are produced through these knowledges and practices, these states of representation. On the other hand an event of learning, a learning encounter or real learning, as described above, would involve a puncturing of these assimilations and their respective subjectivities and therefore demand a pedagogical practice commensurate to this ontological shift in learning. In other words if real learning is a problem of existence that involves a movement into a new ontological state, which includes the fracturing of established subjectivities, then pedagogy has to support this encounter with the real. Rather than being driven by assimilated objects or bodies of knowledge it has to try to accommodate learning encounters that precipitate new forms of learning. By implication pedagogy against the state suggests that pedagogy itself must pass beyond assimilated knowledge and practice in order to open up new pedagogies and new learning communities. It suggests an anti-pedagogy. In a sense representation controls thought and practice whereas events or encounters have the potential to open up new ways of conceiving and acting and in doing so lead to new, perhaps more emancipated subjectivities and learning communities. The notion of pedagogy against the state must also include the political state within which education functions and which largely determines educational policies and practices. In this context therefore pedagogy against the state advocates a spirit of critique towards the wider political context that regulates practices of teaching and learning in schools. In summary then pedagogies against the state have to contend with local ontological states, states of representational orders such as bodies of knowledge, and the political state in which government policies relating to education are formulated. This can be summarised as follows: 1. Pedagogies against the state relate to local ontological and epistemological states where real learning can be conceived as a movement against previous modes of understanding into new modes. They are pedagogies that attempt to accommodate the unpredictable, from being to becoming, a process that challenges the learner out of a complacency, a comfort zone. This is equally applicable to teachers or facilitators and their teaching or facilitating strategies. 2. State also relates to the context of state curriculum policy where it is all too easy to rely upon established traditions of teaching and learning, that is to say traditional epistemological frameworks that impose specific ontologies of learning which may be incommensurable with the social realities within which they function. This complacency often indicates a failure to mourn traditions that are obsolete but which are maintained by reactionary ideological and political forces (see Atkinson, 2006). It can also refer to underpinning pedagogical principles or theories of learning that are embedded within teaching practices, for instance, transmission-based pedagogies where teachers deliver knowledge and skills to 15

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their pupils. This process denotes active teachers and passive learners. Pedagogies against the state signal a resistance to such complacency and failure to mourn as well as to transmission models of pedagogy. (I shall discuss the notion of mourning in relation to pedagogical practices in Chapter Three). 3. We must also use the idea of pedagogies against the state on a more overtly political level by interrogating the relationship between pedagogy and liberal democratic policies. Here we are concerned with pedagogies as forms of resistance to liberal democratic economics as the driving raison d’etre for state education. Badiou’s idea of politics is helpful here. He does not use the term politics to refer to the manoeuvres of political parties but to a process of thought-action that strikes out from normative or dominant ideological forces in order to create new possibilities for existence. The ontological difference between “that which is” and “that which is not yet”, (from being to becoming) in learning is paralleled in the idea of pedagogies against the state which recognises the struggle of learning in local states of becoming as well as the political struggle for existence of learners who do not fit within dominant distributions and modes of learning, teaching and assessment as determined by institutional sites and their educational policies. CONCLUDING COMMENTS AND A THIRD ‘EVENT’

In conclusion the key point is to emphasise the philosophical position for a pedagogical approach that places emphasis upon the truth event of learning which, by implication, as already intimated above, calls for pedagogies against the state; against prior states of learning as a movement into a new ontological space emerges; against the power of normalising teaching, curriculum, assessment methodologies that obscure ‘other’ forms of learning and teaching. Such forms can also be understood in the Deleuzian sense of ‘minor’ in relation to ‘major’ (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, pp. 291–309). That is to say, where a minor language or art form is not in a relation of inferiority to a dominant or standard form but where the minor produces difference or a “minor treatment of the standard” so as to effect a deterritorialisation of the standard. Or, in other words where the minor is not of inferior quality but marginalised by the current hegemony. Reading dominant forms through minor positions can undermine normalising perceptions of learning and teaching and so effect new insights into these processes. Such readings can decentre dominant conceptions and reveal their dissimulated social power or, put another way, the ‘lie’ that sustains their hegemony. The idea of negotiated spaces is an important conception for the above remarks on learning. We negotiate existence every day and this largely conforms to established norms, customs, values and habits. In art practice we might view such negotiations relating to norms that govern traditional or common understandings of the artist, the art object, skill and technique. In some contemporary practices these traditional negotiations are frequently punctured so that, for example, artists and the public work together in quite different negotiated spaces that demand new ways of thinking about how we understand the artist, the art object, community and so on. These new 16

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kinds of negotiations open up new ontological states, new subjectivities and new communities, and they have relevance for pedagogy in educational sites, where we might rethink teacher/facilitator and learner identities, as well as ideas about knowledge and skill. In writing about learning and practice this book will also employ Ranciere’s terminology relating to distributions of the visible and the speakable in art and art educational sites. Whereas Badiou uses the notions of evental sites and truth to consider the emergence of the new, and Lacan the idea of the Real revealing gaps in the symbolic through which the new emerges, Ranciere considers the notions of politics, dissensus and the aesthetic which corrode the police orders and representational regimes respectively in order to reconfigure the distributions of the speakable and the visible. Thus a particular concern of the book is to look at how we can think about the emergence of new practices and subjectivities in the domain of art and art education as well as other educational sites, and it will employ some of the work of these thinkers and others, including Judith Butler, as investigative tools to structure and assist this concern. In the next chapter I provide a more detailed overview of the theoretical framework of the book. I explore the theoretical tools which form the background of my thoughts and which allow purchase upon issues of pedagogy, learning, equality and subjectivity. I conclude this opening chapter with a postscript describing a third ‘event,’ the Bombing of Poems, performed by the Casagrande art collective from Chile and led by Cristobal Bianchi, Julio Carrasco and Joaquin Prieto. Casagrande have devoted a number of years to developing a project of bombing cities with poems from a helicopter, cities that have experienced military bombings in the past, such as Santiago, Guernica, Dubrovnik and Warsaw. The actual performance consists of dropping over a hundred thousand bookmarks, containing poems, in the evening onto city squares where people are gathered. The poems are written by young poets from Chile and the host country and printed in the host language and Spanish. All this is done without any prior warning (except gaining permission from the respective authorities) and the performance is recorded by video cameras. This act of bombing and subsequent experiences for people who witness the event has many dimensions that can be explored in depth. The contrast between the initial military action and the rain of poems can be conceived as a re-signification of the act of bombing, a poetic or art event that produces a multiplicity of affects amongst those old enough to have experienced the military bombing of their cities as well as those younger members of the community. The relations between history and memory interrupted by this event are complex. The bombing of poems is in a sense an affirmation of survival but equally provides a form of detournement (a rerouting) for remembrance in our current world, linking with recent and current acts of violence and destruction, and the need for rethinking an ethics of community. The bombing event and its subsequent multiplicity of affects, is close to Althusser’s idea of aleatory materialism, his theory of the encounter (2006 in Bourriaud), where the central issue is to explore how such encounters are captured, congeal and endure in new forms of existence. 17

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Thus the ‘event’ of the bombing of poems is not the bombing itself but the multiplicity of unpredictable affects, or to employ a concept from Deleuze and Guattari (1988), the new lines of flight that are precipitated amongst members of each community and which have the potential from this experiential intensity for new possibilities for thought and action; for a becoming new.

Bombing of poems in Guernica.

Bombing of poems in Warsaw. 18

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How might we use this social event as a metaphor with which to think about local events of learning and their subsequent truth procedures within educational sites? What kind of interventions do facilitators or teachers need to initiate in order for real learning to proceed and what dispositions are required to formulate effective responses? Returning to Luca – the practice of this young artist encapsulates the explorations of this book. As we observe his actions and expressions we detect a mixture of experimenting, uncertainty, perseverance, curiosity and contingencies that constitute unpredictable lines of flight and their local organisation in the struggles and enjoyment of learning. What kinds of pedagogies are required to facilitate such learning? I can answer this question by taking a quotation from Alain Badiou (2005) and then supplementing the term pedagogy. Badiou is writing about philosophy and states: We do not fundamentally need a philosophy of the structure of things. We need a philosophy open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such a philosophy would then be a philosophy of the event (p. 41). I think that this statement can be translated and applied with force to pedagogical processes: We need pedagogies that are open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, pedagogies that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such pedagogies would then be pedagogies of the event, pedagogies against the state, within their respective functioning contexts.

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THEORISING THE SUBJECT

A CURIOUS CONTRADICTION

In our everyday conversations and relations with others we treat individuals and ourselves as stable entities. We relate to each other as though we are responding to a particular person with a specific identity, if we know them or even if we do not. We tend to assume a clear distinction between people and the world in which they live. Frequently we use language as though it was a transparent medium of communication in which we express clear meaning, epitomised by phrases such as, ‘do you see what I mean,’ or ‘I see what you mean.’ Frequently we regard vision as a ‘natural’ universal process in the sense that in our cultural settings we assume we see the world in a similar way. We suppose that knowledge is neutral and associated with ideas of human progress and development. However, just about all of these ‘everyday’ suppositions that facilitate social interaction have been the subject of detailed interrogation in the worlds of philosophy, sociology, art, science, anthropology, literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and other disciplines, concerned with trying to understand how the human subject is formed. Indeed the term ‘human subject’ is indicative of a shift from viewing people as free-thinking individuals functioning independently in society towards understanding them as subjects who are largely affected and regulated as subjects by their social contexts and conditions. This chapter will explore some theoretical literature on subjectivity and try to illustrate its relevance for pedagogical contexts; this will include issues of ontological change with respect to learning and practice. My intention is to discuss theory in such a way as to show its usefulness for generating fresh insights into learning and pedagogical practices. For example, how does the philosophical work of Badiou or Ranciere help to generate new ways of thinking about pedagogical relations and processes? BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SOME THEORIES OF THE SUBJECT

I begin with a brief and selective sketch of how the human subject has been conceived by some seminal thinkers in order to establish a backcloth for the focus of this chapter. Descartes’ well known aphorism, ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum) suggests a fusion or correspondence between thinking and being; it implies a rational, conscious subject, in control of his or her own thoughts through which the world is comprehended. This is the detached subject of natural science who is able to observe the world of phenomena from a transcendent position and attain understanding through the light of reason. Reason will equip an observer with the cognitive tools to discover the laws of nature. Vermeer illustrates the Cartesian subject beautifully. 21

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In the painting, The Geographer (1668–9), the subject peers over a map holding a pair of dividers, instruments with which to measure the world. The scene is brilliantly lit by light from an adjacent window, the light of reason. The subject is not measuring the ‘real world’ but through the devices of representation and logic he has the power to conceive the world and thereby order and control it (see Crary 1990, p. 45). Of course this idea of the conscious, rational subject has been challenged or modified on numerous occasions since Descartes and Hall (1997) draws our attention to key turning points emerging in the work of Marx, Freud and Saussure which in turn have been extensively elaborated over time. Marx situated the subject as a production of historical and social process. Thus whilst the Cartesian subject generally speaking is deemed transcendent and ahistorical, the Marxian subject is deeply embedded and determined by historical processes. Freud introduced the idea of the unconscious which established a domain of human being that is not accessible to conscious rational thought processes. In a sense this challenged the omnipotence of the rational cogito and introduced the idea that there are domains beyond consciousness that form an important aspect of being such as repression, anxiety and desire which have to be factored into the human condition. Saussure was concerned with language and semiotics and he argued that meaning is not formed as a result of a direct relation between a word and designated object but that this relation is arbitrary. He believed that meaning instead emerged from relations between linguistic signs. The implication here is that whereas for Descartes language is akin to a transparent medium in which meaning is formed, for Saussure meaning is a production of relations between signs, in other words there is no direct relation of correspondence between a sign and its object, consequently there is always a gap between the world and how we describe or theorise it. In other words there is no necessary relation between reality and its symbolisation. The epistemological breaks formulated by these three people have since been developed extensively and have led to the general notion of a subject largely determined by language and social processes; a notion that is challenged by Alain Badiou as we shall see shortly. In passing however, it is important that Descartes is not viewed entirely as a rational philosopher. Though he is regarded as the philosopher who proposed a separation between mind and body and emphasised that knowledge is developed through cognitive process, Rachel Jones (2009) makes the important point that Descartes placed considerable value upon that feeling of wonder we experience when we are confronted with something we find strange, when we encounter something that is inexplicable or surprising. Descartes writes in The Passions of the Soul: When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions (reference in Irigaray, 1993, p. 73) Jones develops the importance of wonder for Descartes as the passion accompanying the state of not-knowing and that for Descartes philosophy begins in wonder because 22

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this passionate state is what precipitates a search for understanding. Equally I want to argue that this passionate state of wonder is fundamental for real learning and that it should be at the heart of any pedagogical relation. Zizek (1999) also draws attention to the subject of radical doubt that Descartes discusses which emerges through the loss of its ground in being (see McGowan 2010 p. 23). I will return to this aspect of Descartes’ thought and the ethical importance of wonder in the final chapter. It could be argued that the work of Freud, Marx and Saussure ultimately presupposed a hermeneutics of truth whose source lies in either the unconscious, historical process or language structure. Freud enabled his patients through language to locate their difficulties in previous experiences that were buried in the unconscious, Marx located the subject as a product of history and social processes, Saussure located meaning as a product of linguistic codes and structures. In the second half of the twentieth century post-structural theory rejected such truth discourses in preference for a polyvalence of meaning and a rejection of ideas of origin or presence. This led to a critique of established certainties and ‘grand narratives’ such as the ‘human subject’, ‘history’ and ‘truth’. The investigation of language and meaning intensified. (Of course in rejecting the idea of truth discourses post-structuralism in fact established its own truth.) FOUCAULT

Foucault describes the growth of institutional discourses and practices in asylums, prisons and schools, within which individuals are positioned and regulated as ‘subjects’, according to each institution’s regime of truth and power-knowledge relations. In this scenario subjects are constituted as such through specific practices and discourses, such as those proliferating within educational institutions, which produce learners and teachers as specific pedagogised subjects. We can witness this process of subjection for example in the deployment of assessment discourses. Such discourses construct teachers, learners and objects or products of learning within specific discursive and practice parameters that define ability and performance. We might say that within such parameters learners appear as such according to varying degrees of intensity or ability. To give a brief example which I have discussed elsewhere (Atkinson, 2002) and use often in my seminars: a group of teachers are asked to consider two drawings of the same chair and, although they admit they know nothing of the students who produced them or the context of production they feel they can say which is the more effective drawing. They all identify the same drawing as the most effective and proceed to use a series of terms to designate qualities in this drawing which make it so; ‘better use of line,’ ‘better perspective,’ ‘sits well on the paper,’ ‘moves you into the picture,’ ‘better balance,’ ‘better composition,’ and so on. Here a particular discourse of representation, rooted in a long historical tradition, is being used to elevate one drawing over another and by implication to suggest that the student who produced the better drawing is more able. In using this discourse these teachers are also confirming their identities as teachers, that is to say, they are constructing themselves as teachers through the discourse. It is possible to consider the ‘other’ drawing from different discourses as being an effective 23

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drawing but the hegemony of the particular representational discourse employed by these teachers prevents such consideration. We might say that within the chosen discourse employed by the teachers one drawing appears intensely (the better drawing) whilst the degree of appearance of the inferior drawing is less intense. Foucault’s later work saw discourse less in terms of power and subjection to institutional norms and more in terms of resistance, thereby providing opportunities for an aesthetic project of the self. There are implications of this later work for the construction of pedagogised subjects which dwells less on the production of surrogate identifications (more in line with subjection) and more on the development of learners and teachers as militant subjects. Foucault’s influence upon research into educational practices and discourses has been substantial over the last three decades producing a heavy industry of enquiry. Judith Butler (1997) aligns Foucault’s work on power and subjection with psychoanalytic theory. She describes how the psyche is formed through a dissimulation of social norms that are taken in and constitute the psyche. The subject is not viewed as a preconstituted being who absorbs social norms from outside but as someone who comes into existence through the performance of such norms. For Butler this performative function produces not only the subject but also the ‘trajectory of its desire (ibid, p. 2).’ She demonstrates how this process of becoming a subject involves a series of passionate attachments for a subjection to particular norms and values. We might view the teacher’s assessment discourse above as manifesting a passionate attachment to specific norms and values relating to visual representation and through such attachments they constitute their subjectivity and the trajectory of their desires in the discursive practice of assessment. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form that power takes. To find, however, that what “one” is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and regulates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are (Butler 1997 pp. 1–2). LACAN

The Freudian notion of the subject has been reworked extensively in the field of psychoanalysis in the work of Klein, Winnicot, Kristeva, Irigaray, Laplanche and others but perhaps the most significant reworking (which is not to deflect from the importance of others) is that developed by Jacques Lacan. For Lacan the constitution of the subject is not straight forward and involves a complex relation between lack, desire, drive and fantasy. In general terms for Lacan the subject-in-itself is a void in the sense that it lies beyond signification whilst in reality the subject is a subject 24

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of language (the symbolic) and fantasy. The triad of imaginary, symbolic and Real plays an important part in Lacan’s formulation of the process of subjectivity. In The Mirror Phase (1977), Lacan describes the very young child in a state of uncoordinated being. On perceiving his image in a mirror or the gaze of the mother, (the mirror is in fact a metaphor), he identifies with its unity. We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives the term: namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image (Lacan, 1977, p. 2) This process of identification, the assuming of an image (or representation), is simultaneously a process of alienation in that the child’s identity emerges from outside in the container of an image. Consequently this image can be viewed as a fantasy, an imaginary production through which the child secures identification. So the imaginary can be understood as the birth of fantasy. However, we might ask what facility allows the young child to take on identification; is there already a prior ‘agency’ or ‘consciousness’ that facilitates this transformation and if so why then does the child fall victim to the image if it already possesses some kind of discriminatory powers? Laplanche (in Butler 2005) appears to suggest that such identification arises through an overwhelming imposition of social positioning and relations which the child cannot ‘refuse’. As the child becomes more involved with and embedded in the wider social world, for which it is predestined, so the symbolic order (the Other in Lacanian terminology) exerts its influence in that the symbolic is the domain from where the subject is viewed and given existence through the defiles of the signifier (see Easthope 2002, p. 147). …a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier. The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as a subject (Lacan, 1979, p. 207). Zizek (1998, p. 74) provides an illustration of this point when referring to the medical chart that sits at the bottom of a hospital patient’s bed. The information on this chart does not represent the patient directly for other subjects, such as doctors and nurses but ‘primarily for other signifiers, for the symbolic network of medical knowledge,’ in which the information on the chart has to be inserted to obtain its meaning. A similar process occurs in relation to school reports where the comments do not represent the learner directly for teachers and parents but primarily for the symbolic network of disciplinary and pedagogic knowledge according to which the learner is positioned and appears as a pedagogised subject. We can also ascertain a glimpse of this process of signification within which the subject is made manifest in Lacan’s (1979) description of the gaze. I must to begin with insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the function found 25

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at the heart of the institution of the subject of the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form – I am photo-graphed (p. 106). Here the subject is pictured in the scopic field by the symbolic order of the gaze. That is to say the gaze for Lacan is similar to the symbolic. If we think of a perspectival image not only are we, as viewers, positioned before this image but we are also pictured by its gaze. That is to say we are constructed as particular kinds of viewing subjects by the perspectival gaze. We can transfer this idea to other kinds of visual spaces within which we are, in Lacan’s terminology, ‘photo-graphed.’ For example, take the sequencing of action and events in a film and how the way in which these are organised to effect a particular kind of viewing subject. A film depicting a fairly traditional linear temporal flow of events, such as Shawshank Redemption will produce a different viewing subject to a film in which the temporal flow is fragmented and where events are non-linear, such as Pulp Fiction. Similarly we can consider how teachers are constructed as viewing subjects when they respond to learners’ practices and try to determine how the pedagogic gaze is constructed. How does the pedagogic gaze anticipate particular pedagogised appearances of both teachers and learners? Different pedagogical gazes will in effect create different kinds of teachers and learners. For example, is the dominant pedagogic gaze informed by critical pedagogies, developmental psychology, cultural reproduction, social construction theory, socio-economic concerns; is it determined by adherence to particular attitudes or dispositions towards practice? Although for Lacan the imaginary consists of a process of identification as the subject assumes an image, whilst the symbolic constitutes the domain of meaning, in both orders there is still something missing, something lacking which the subject continues to desire. The emergence of lack and desire occurs in early childhood when the child is separated from the union with the mother and the breast; this precipitates a sense of lack and a subsequent desire for this lost object, a desire which after separation takes the form of a representation of the imagined object. But this representation (of the breast) is itself lacking, that is to say the representation is not the object of desire but the imagined object cause of desire which Lacan terms objet petit a. This imagined object cause of desire occurs throughout life and we can view it functioning within discourses of identity such as nationalist or racist discourses in which purely imagined identities become objects of desire, frustration, anger or hatred. Equally we can consider the imagined object and desire functioning within pedagogical contexts particularly in contexts of assessment where learner identifications are produced within particular value systems that celebrate particular skills and practices that, as we have seen from Butler above, constitute the assessment gaze and the trajectory of its desire. The imaginary and symbolic orders, are not all there is and it is through the gaps in our symbolic frames of reference that Lacan’s third order, the Real, persists. The interruption of the Real refers to moments when the symbolic is punctured, when it 26

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ceases to function due to some event or happening that does not fit our frameworks of understanding. Subsequently this disturbance can effect a change in our symbolic order. I have applied this idea of the Real to an analysis of student teachers’ experiences of learning to teach, where they frequently experience moments of anxiety and disruption when their frameworks of understanding and practice become inoperable in their teaching situations (see Brown, Atkinson and England, 2006, pp. 61–04). The important point here is that the Real concerns gaps in our symbolic orders, it does not relate to a plenitude of existence beyond the symbolic. In The Parallax View (2006 pp. 25–26, p. 390, note 21,) Zizek extends the Lacanian Real by describing what he terms the parallax Real which consists of the gap between two radically contrasting viewpoints on the ‘same thing.’ His reference point is Levi Strauss’s analysis of one of the Great Lakes tribes in which two subgroups, one superior to the other in the social structure of the tribe, produce radically different drawings of the ground plan of their village. Strauss’s explanation for this rests not upon cultural relativism whereby ‘the perception of social space depends on the observer’s group-belonging,’ but upon an irreconcilable social antagonism which cannot be addressed. Here the Real consists of the difference between these viewpoints. The drawings are different representations that mask the social antagonism which the groups could not come to terms with, an imbalance of relations. So we have the actual arrangement of the village and the two interpretations which are distorted due to social positioning. The Real is not the actual arrangement but the core of the social antagonism which distorts the groups’ interpretation of the actual arrangement. The Real is therefore a disavowed Thing which distorts these views of social reality, it is the very shift of perspective from one standpoint to another what we might term, after Zizek, the parallax gap. The Real then is something which appears to exist beyond different interpretations but which in fact is simply this difference. This precipitates the illusion of the Real. The gap is not between noumena and phenomena as found in Kant, but rather the gap between representations themselves. It is this gap which intimates the existence of something substantial but which in fact is purely virtual. This means that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself; it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from one to another. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns to its place” – as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverises the sameness into the multitude of appearances. In a first move, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move, this very hard core is purely virtual, actually non-existent, an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is” (ibid., p. 26). 27

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In the world of teacher education it is not uncommon for student teachers, who facilitate a learning situation and their tutors who observe the situation to hold quite different accounts of what happened. During the feedback period after the lesson often the student teacher has a different impression and view of events during the lesson to that of the tutor. On occasions these feedback sessions are quite contentious. Each individual notices different aspects of the ‘same’ lesson. This difference is not to be accounted for purely in terms of relativism but rather to a more fundamental ontological difference and its subsequent tensional points between each individual. The Real therefore refers to a ‘structural impossibility,’ it does not lack existence but it is impossible from within the framework of the symbolic order, a little akin to the amorphous blob in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which from the normal viewing position makes no sense, but when we regard the painting from the far right the blob emerges as a skull. McGowan (2010, p. 18) states that for Lacan every symbolic order, ‘structurally requires a point that exists within it and yet cannot be thought within the categories that the symbolic order itself lays down.’ This can be taken as a point of lack, the place of the Real, which I believe, as a point of ontological possibility but structural impossibility, provides a framework for pedagogical thinking and action. For example, in the world of children’s drawings it is frequently the case, as shown extensively by John Matthews (1999, 2003) and others that trying to understand how young children are using drawing or what a particular drawing means can be quite difficult and sometimes impossible from within our assimilated structures of interpretation and representation. Consequently such drawings can be easily dismissed as meaningless scribbles but from a different kind of structure and understanding of practice such drawings can begin to make sense and in doing so reveal the limitations of our original interpretational system. Here the Real attests to the puncture of symbolic frameworks of interpretation and, in pedagogical contexts, what has been excluded or obscured. However the crucial point is that in order for our symbolic frameworks to be disturbed so that a gap appears something has to happen. We do not simply transfer from one interpretational paradigm to another. It is crucial not to fall into the trap of seeing the Real as a kind of excess that exists beyond the symbolic. The Real is not the transcendent substantial reality which from outside disturbs the symbolic balance, but the immanent obstacle, stumbling block, of the symbolic order itself (Zizek 2008, p. 319). This idea of an immanent stumbling block reminds me of a teaching-learning episode many years ago when I worked with a group of early year secondary students doing mathematics. One girl (12 years) who had recently arrived in England from North Africa (I forget the actual country) struggled with a simple division task in which she had to divide 18 sheep into three equal groups. In helping her words seemed of little use although she understood English. I resorted to eighteen bits of paper to try to facilitate the task, but with no success. Struggling to make headway I held up three fingers and asked her, ‘How many lots of three do you see?’ She replied ‘Three’. Her response made no sense to me so I asked again and I received the same answer. Then I asked her to show me and to my amazement she counted the three segments 28

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of each finger! In trying to help this girl my symbolic framework was totally inept; in a sense it reached its Real. The Lacanian Real has been deeply influential upon Alain Badiou’s idea of the event and Slavoj Zizek’s idea of the act (2008, pp. 304–316). These concepts introduce a serious disturbance to theories of subjectivity that are grounded in the general notion of social construction. I will consider the work of Badiou in particular but also refer to Jacques Ranciere to illustrate their relevance to pedagogical practices. I begin with my reading of Badiou’s work on the subject, event and truth. BADIOU

Badiou’s philosophical world is energised by a deep meditation on change and the new and I believe it has profound implications for considering pedagogical practices, particularly if we regard learning as a future-oriented process. My aim is to present a discussion of some key concepts that constitute the core of Badiou’s work and to show how they are helpful for developing pedagogical thinking. A crucial notion to bear in mind can be found in the title of the book Being and Event (2005a) in which the translator Oliver Feltham makes the point in his preface (ibid, p. xxxi) that the task is to ‘think being and event, not the being of an event or the event of being.’ This points to a disturbance of being in the form of an event in the immanence of practice, it signals a fracturing of being through an event which I argue constitutes real learning. This signifier ‘and’ represents the place of the subject, a subject in the process of change. Feltham remarks that the subject is ‘the one who unfolds new structures of being and thus writes the event into being (ibid, xxxi). The task of this book is to take these ideas of change and the new and apply them to the worlds of teaching and learning, in other words to contextualise these abstract ideas in pedagogical practice. For Badiou the idea of multiplicity is primary it is what is before any kind of symbolisation and he terms this pre-symbolic multiplicity inconsistent multiplicity. Any attempt to provide an order upon such multiplicity is an operation which Badiou names ‘a count’ that produces a consistent multiplicity and all that can be presented as knowledge are the productions of such counts. To put this in more practical terms; what we refer to commonly as ‘the creative process’ is multiple and cannot be accessed in-itself but we try to comprehend this process through a series of discourses which, in Badiou’s terminology, consist of a series of ‘counts’ that is to say ways of ordering our thoughts about the creative process. A situation (or world) consists of a presented multiplicity; it is a multiple which is composed of an infinity of elements each one of which is itself a multiple (ibid, p. 25). It can be viewed as an open set, a set with an infinite number of elements. It consists of all there is in a particular situation such as a classroom, a riot, a work of art, a sports event, a school curriculum, a supermarket, and so on. Each situation has a structuring principle which determines what belongs and what does not, or what appears and what does not. A further illustration to clarify inconsistent from consistent multiplicity may help with reference to Rothenberg (2010, p. 32). Imagine you are standing on a vast rubbish tip where it is impossible to distinguish anything at 29

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all and this continues on and on in all directions, if you remove yourself then there is now no reference point or means of orientation, no up, down, backward or forward, no point from which to determine relations between things. This void resembles Badiou’s inconsistent or pure multiplicity. Once a point of orientation is added then structures, relations, positions, identities and differences can develop. This would be analogous to Badiou’s consistent multiplicity. We can think of this as the difference between pure being and existence which implies a being there in a particular world. The state of a situation is a term Badiou employs to refer to the structuring principle that determines a particular world. Badiou calls this the transcendental of a world in his most recent book, Logics of Worlds (2009). It is concerned with the way in which elements appear (or do not) and are organised or regulated in a situation. Thus it constitutes a controlling device which defines the contents of a world. For example, in educational practices the state of a situation or transcendental can be viewed as the overarching principles and strategies that organise learners, teachers, inspectors, the curriculum, assessment practices, examinations and so on. It is therefore concerned with how such parts and the space of Education are configured. There are always within a situation parts that are inexistent, that are present but not recognised. Thus the state (transcendental) is not concerned with elements or individuals as such but with parts or categories or groupings and it exerts a particular order to these groupings according to the dominant group or ideology. As Hallward (2003, p. 97), suggests, in order to derive a clear view of the ‘intrinsic’ presented elements or individuals in a situation, if this is indeed possible, then the place to begin is with the state’s classificatory or grouping procedures of representation. As well as referring to the classificatory use of the term state, ‘state’ also refers to the local ontological positions and relations of those present in a situation and this will include those recognised by established representational and regulatory processes as well as those who are not (indiscernible, excluded elements), or are in some way marginalised by such processes. It is these indiscernible elements, from the point of view of the structuring order (frameworks of knowledge and practice, regulatory devices) that constitute a potential for rupture and change. For example, in political contexts the indiscernible might refer to those excluded elements (asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants, travellers and homeless, those who have fallen from view or who are overlooked) who are present in a situation but are excluded or not recognised by the state of a situation. In a sense they constitute a void in the situation. I have already alluded in Chapter One to indiscernible or marginalised elements in educational contexts such as learners from other cultures whose ways of learning may not be recognised by dominant pedagogical orders (see also Moore 1999). An event for Badiou is something that happens in a situation but cannot be understood according to the current knowledge of a situation. Events tend to occur in places of indiscernibility; such places are in the situation but not counted as part of a situation. The event is a category of that-which-is-not-being-qua-being inasmuch as its structure forms a point of impossibility for the discourse of ontology (Feltham 2008, p. 101). 30

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An event is a site that has implications for the logics of appearance of its world (Ibid., p. 107). The event involves an encounter; something has to happen which fractures our current ontological state; this is close to Lacan’s encounter with the Real. The event disrupts our modes of representation. Badiou (2001) writes: To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking... the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course – since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation – compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation (p. 42). A truth procedure follows from the interruption of an event and is reliant on a subject who becomes a subject through maintaining a fidelity to the radical consequences of the event: ‘A truth bores a hole in knowledge’ (Badiou 2005a, p. 525). For Badiou truth always transcends or is in excess of knowledge which is reliant upon veracity. The idea of truth is related to the idea of being truthful to something and this truth process denotes a process of subjectivization which in other terms can be viewed as a ‘commitment to.’ According to Hallward (ibid, p. xxvi) ‘I am, because I am (or we are) struggling (for a new society, a new art, a new scientific order, etc.).’ This idea of an ontological struggle is central to Badiou’s idea of subject, which arises only in moments of such struggle where we can be carried beyond our normal range of responses. A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order. I have named this type of rupture which opens up truths ‘the event’ (Badiou 2005a, p. xii). The idea of the subject for Badiou involves a mysterious temporality within which the subject is in a situation but because it emerges through a truth procedure subsequent to an event, it is equally not part of a situation as structured by the state. This temporality, as mentioned earlier, is encapsulated in the idea of being and event. For Badiou then a subject is ‘a militant of truth,’ where the idea of militant is concerned with someone who opens up a new fields of enquiry (2005, p. xiii), it indicates a reconfiguring of local situations and life-worlds. It is important, I believe, to acknowledge that the relation of event and truth has to involve an engaged subject, someone who believes in and is therefore able to perceive the event and its subsequent truth in their local situation and which leads to a reconfiguration of this space. Thus the event-truth relation is immanent to the functioning space of an engaged subject. PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

In a short essay entitled Philosophy and its Desire (2005b, pp. 29–42) Badiou provides a brief overview of philosophical work during the 20th century, more expansive and complex accounts can be found in Being and Event (2005a) Logics of Worlds (2009) and The Century (2007). For Badiou, ‘philosophy is something like a logical 31

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revolt,’ whereby, ‘it pits thought against injustice’ (2005b p. 29). This notion of ‘logical revolt’ is homologous in many ways to Badiou’s idea of the subject, who emerges through the epiphany of an event-truth procedure, a form of revolt, into a transformed situation. He outlines three philosophical orientations that he believes have dominated 20th Century philosophy. The first is hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricouer) whose grounding concept is interpretation and is concerned with the search for how things (texts, actions, communications,) become meaningful within social contexts. The second is the analytic orientation whose origins lie in the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Carnap) and which is concerned with what can be determined as meaningful according to agreed rules and conventions and what therefore cannot. The third is the postmodern or post-structural orientation (Derrida, Lyotard) which aims to deconstruct what are often termed ‘grand narratives’; those major conceptions, such as history, the historical subject, progress, humanity, and truth which are now redundant in a world of difference and a plurality of languages, thought and cultures that are unable to be totalised. Badiou suggests that common to all three philosophical orientations are two major driving concerns. The first is that the classical idea of truth is now untenable. Hermeneutics replaces a search for truth with an inquiry into how things become meaningful. The analytic orientation considers the relation between utterances and legitimating rules, in Wittgenstein’s case, how specific language-games generate meaning through the use of language generated by particular forms of life. The poststructural orientation abandons the idea of universal truth for a polyvalence of meaning according to life-world contexts and the impossibility of achieving essentialist ideas of truth due to the endless play of signification which prevents any final resting place for truth. The second major concern, almost implicit in the first, is the belief that language is the fundamental process through which meaning is formed, regulated and determined. For Badiou the 20th century moved from a philosophy once concerned with truth in earlier periods to one which is concerned with language and meaning. These two concerns, truth and language, will precipitate serious reactions in Badiou’s philosophical work which I will discuss and, more specifically, they are taken to task in his distinction between truth and knowledge and in his theorisation of the subject. Badiou is seeking a reassessment of the idea of truth which he believes cannot be produced by a philosophy whose priority lies with a meditation on language and meaning. For him truth is a process of interruption, it is not associated with the idea of linguistic relativism, but with a singular-universal relation. It is also linked with a notion of the subject that maintains some sense of agency but not the sense assumed by the idea of an autonomous self-reflecting individual. Everyone knows that the singular is always, in the final analysis, the true centre of any decision which counts, and that all truth is first presented in the form of the absolutely singular – as can be seen in scientific invention, artistic creation, political innovation or the encounter that comprises love. In every place where, in some way a truth is pronounced on existence, it is founded on a singularity (2005b, p. 40). 32

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And further, already mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, in our precarious and crisis-ridden world, he argues that: We do not fundamentally need a philosophy of the structure of things. We need a philosophy open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such a philosophy would then be a philosophy of the event (ibid, p. 41). So he is arguing for a philosophical project based upon the unpredictability of an event combined with conceptual rigour and reason. Together a new theory of the subject is possible emerging from the contingency of the event that precipitates a subject of a truth procedure. Badiou cannot accept, for example, the general social constructivist argument that the subject is a production of social or historical processes because such a view excludes the idea that, ‘it must be possible to think, in a world, what does not appear within that world (2009, p. 122)’. Put another way, constructivist theories of the subject fail to take into account the event and truth. Badiou puts this in the form of what he terms the materialist dialectic: There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths (ibid, p. 4). He is fundamentally opposed to theories of the subject which rely entirely upon established bodies of knowledge and practice or categories of thought, established ideas concerning identity, established codes of moral conduct. In other words he is opposed to theories of the subject that rely upon the bounds of human knowledge. His opposition, generally speaking, stems from his idea that the subject is constituted both within a situation and its knowledge frameworks and practices but also beyond these frameworks in fidelity to a truth procedure following an event which has the potential to transform or reconfigure the existing frameworks of knowledge and practice. There is something about the subject which can be considered as that-whichis-not-yet (see Ethics, 2001) as though it occupies a strange temporality, suggested by the title of Being and Event. Equally in believing that truth exceeds knowledge Badiou opposes social constructivist theory that emphasises language over being or meaning over truth (see Coward and Ellis 1977). Truth, subject and event are all aspects of a single process: a truth comes into being through the subjects who proclaim it and, in doing so, constitute themselves as subjects in their fidelity to the event (Hallward 2003, p. xxvi) This is the crux of Badiou’s position vis a vis his rejection of the constructivist position of language as the fundamental ground of the subject as declared, for example, by the notion of the discursive subject. In such theory the subject is always already subjected to an existing structure, or count, or a version of resistance to it and this fails to account for the possibility of events and truths, as formulated by Badiou, and thus for a notion of the subject as an exception, as ‘a local configuration of a generic procedure through which a truth is sustained (2005a, p. 429).’ The turn to ontology provides philosophy with an opportunity for a more creative exploration of being and those processes that effect the emergence of the new 33

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which in turn transform ontological (and epistemological) coordinates. In order to do this Badiou suggests that there are four domains of knowledge and practice each possessing their distinctive forms of enquiry and upon which philosophy depends, as its conditions, for reflecting upon how conceptual, ethical and practical change happens. These domains or conditions of knowledge are: politics, art, science and love. His philosophical project is therefore to consider how the radically new emerges in relation to each domain. In passing, Easthope’s (2002, p. 150) point that Derrida’s (often viewed as a poststructural philosopher) opposition to the notion of subjects with predicates does have some correspondence with Badiou’s notion of subject even if not being fully commensurate. Here the argument is that if we presuppose a particular idea of the subject then we are assuming a particular epistemology and ontology which, by implication, establishes a fixed idea of the subject. This suggests that, ‘you have closed off the horizon of what it might mean to be human (ibid., p. 150).’ Applied to pedagogical contexts we might raise similar issues, for example, what might it mean to be a teacher or learner, to teach or to learn? What predicates of teachers and learners are presupposed by particular pedagogies? The idea of excess is important, that which is present but not yet available or apparent but which, nevertheless, functions as an attractor to pass into a new space which is beyond the limits of current knowledge. We will see how this point is homologous to Badious’s idea of the relation between being and event and in pedagogical terms the idea of real learning where a learner passes beyond his or her current limits of practice and comprehension into a new ontological framework for learning. The idea of excess is homologous to Badiou’s theory of the subject whereby the subject is conceived as existing within a particular situation but also in excess of the situation as it becomes constituted through a truth procedure which is indiscernible according to the existing knowledge of a situation. CHANGE AND SOCIAL ORDERS

Badiou is concerned with issues of belonging and inclusion implicit to which is the notion of excess and these ideas can be applied to social contexts. Thus for example (Norris 2009, p. 7) we can consider the relational position of excluded or marginalised groups (asylum seekers, travellers, migrants,) to the existing state or institutional frameworks of liberal democracies which broadcast their belief in equality, inclusion, social justice, human rights. The gap or deficit between the liberal democratic manifesto and marginalised or excluded groups forms the potential for a politics of radical democracy to emerge because, in a manner of speaking, it is within this gap that those on the margins may be able to challenge the existing social order. Put in another way it is at such points that the excess to the prevailing order might challenge the latter and this could then lead to a transformation of the social order itself. Within liberal democratic educational contexts and their agendas concerning ‘every child matters,’ or ‘no child left behind’ we might ask, are all learners really included and supported in such agendas or are there still some who are left on the margins? Badiou terms such points the evental site in that this is the location where events occur quite unpredictably and whose consequences could radically transform the 34

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pre-existing social ontology. In a political context, when Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to vacate her seat for a white passenger, she precipitated the Montgomery Bus Boycott and fuelled public resistance as part of the Civil Rights Movement against racial segregation. Though she was not the first to take such action, in her particular case her action sparked public resistance that led to social change through the Civil Rights movement, whose truth is still in process. Badiou’s terms of inconsistent multiplicity and consistent multiplicity are relevant here (2005a p. 25). As described earlier, inconsistent multiplicity refers to being, meaning simply all that there is, all that exists, without imposing any kind of order. Consistent multiplicity arises when inconsistent multiplicity is given some form of order, or in Badiou’s terminology, a count-for-one. Thus ontological orders are consistent multiplicities in that they establish particular frameworks for existence, they allow particular ‘beings’ to appear and establish degrees of appearance, but the important point is that even within such frameworks there is always an excess of inconsistent multiplicity, in other words an excess of that which lies beyond, which is not recognised or fails to appear as existing within particular ontological frameworks. These points of excess, or void points, can be viewed as potential evental sites where events precipitate local truth procedures. Thus truth is that which exceeds the knowledge of a given situation. A classroom, a sports audience, a shopping centre, and so on, can be viewed as a consistent multiplicity. They become such through the structuring devices (practices, discourses, rituals) that constitute each site and facilitate particular kinds of appearing from intense appearing to non-appearance. Here I am thinking of the kinds of discourses and practices that are employed within pedagogical sites: classrooms, art galleries, museums, art schools, universities, through which both teachers/ facilitators and learners are recognised and in which they appear, in various degrees, or become visible as facilitators or learners. If we consider the event of Duchamp (which is not the individual but the singularity of the practice and its subsequent consequences), we might say that what happened was part of a historical situation in the world of art practice but it was not at the time recognised as belonging to the situation. Thus the Duchamp event seems to occur in a void space, a space of excess within a situation. And the consequences of the Duchamp event, its truth procedure faithful to the event, followed under the name and various developments of conceptual art. My intention in this book is to apply these ideas from Badiou to pedagogical contexts and to try to consider events of learning which, within the localised situations of learners, arise but then leap beyond into a new ontological state of learning. I have already provided some examples of this leap in the preceding chapter. THE OBSTACLE OF AUDIT

One major obstacle to trying to think in this way about pedagogical processes is the devastating effect of management, audit and inspection discourses and practices which can only function and make sense within established bodies of knowledge and practices. This point is echoed by many educators; for example, in a recent 35

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interview Jon Thompson speaking about the reasons why teaching in art schools in the UK has changed dramatically for the worse states: I’d have to say that it is the mechanisms of academic surveillance and control that have completely destroyed what was best in it. There is no trust any more between the different levels. They call it quality control, but really it’s a form of policing (Interview with Jon Thompson, in Reardon 2009 p. 342). He insists that the really beneficial experience between the artist and the art student in art schools is severely curtailed nowadays due to the exponential increase in bureaucracy and the documentation required for surveillance bodies. The pernicious problem with audit and control is that it tends to predicate what practice is or should be and that is corrosive because it perpetuates a kind of consensus, whereas art practice, if it means anything, is much more concerned with dissensus, with negation and renewal. The suffocating effect of audit highlighted by Thompson is no stranger to the context of school art education and other subject disciplines. How then can we configure the relation between being and event? How is it possible for events, in Badiou’s terms, to occur without acknowledging some prior established ontological ground from which they emerge? How is it possible to think pedagogically about how thought can surpass and then redefine its ontological parameters? Is it possible to develop pedagogies around such ideas: pedagogies against the state or pedagogies of the event? Again Thompson in the same interview provides a very brief hint: Art is about chance-taking; about holding certainty at bay long enough to discover something. You have to feel that you are risking something when you start a work. It may be a miniscule risk, but still a risk. You’re trying to do something that you haven’t quite managed to do before, or you haven’t tried before… an idea, a move that you don’t know is viable. The only way that you can ever know whether it is a sound move is by carrying it through to completion (ibid., p. 349). This quote from Thompson takes us back to the student with the caged heart in the preceding chapter and her desire to persevere with her idea without knowing if it was viable. His comment also resonates with the painting practice of Luca as he experiments and ‘plays’ with the medium of paint as well as using paint for a variety of narrative and expressive functions. In both practices there is an element of risk and experimentation, a state of not-knowing coupled with a perseverance to act. In many ways I suspect that Thompson, without wishing to misrepresent him, in aligning art as chance-taking and risk resonates with Badiou’s ideas on truth. SUBJECTIVIZATION AND LEARNING

For Badiou subjectivization emerges from the consequences of an event, which is not part of a situation nor its epistemic framework, but it is also connected to the situation as it were before the event and its subsequent truth process. Thus subjectivization involves both the temporality of a present situation as well as the 36

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temporality of the future, that-which-is-not-yet (for that which will always have been). This is a bit tricky, but important. Badiou refers to Lacan’s writing on the subject in terms of a future anterior (see Hallward, note 57, p. 375). What is realised in my history is not the definite past of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming (Lacan 1977, p. 86). This describes the process of subjectivization neither in terms of past events since they do not exist nor in terms of a distillation of past events in the present, but as an endless open process in which the subject interprets his or her past through the future of becoming, which in turn retrospectively changes the past. This is a bit like a learner in a real learning process persevering with a line of enquiry without knowing where it is going but which when undertaken eventually changes the horizon of the learner and her situation as well as the view of the past situation of the learner. It is the event of learning and a subsequent perseverance with its line of enquiry, its line of flight, which constitutes the subject in the future anterior. To repeat, the subject is neither a production of the past, nor, a distillation of the past in the present but a retrospective view of the past from the future of becoming. We might see the intervention of real learning as bringing into light the limitations of current ‘ways of thinking’ (epistemological frameworks) and, through a process of testing out, experimenting, risking, keeping faith with an unclear pathway, gradually transforming the learner’s horizon. The subject is thus a combination of persistence and chance that leads to testing new encounters and insights. For example, drawing may become a new process for a learner as a consequence of an event in a drawing process that transforms the learner’s comprehension and practice. This would involve a process of testing and experimenting as a consequence of a disturbance through which new possibilities for drawing emerge over a period of time. The disturbance or event, out of the blue, might occur, for example, when the learner is confronted with a ‘problem of representation’ which her current skills, ways of conceiving, cannot resolve and this disturbance results in a determined perseverance to find a resolution, which in turn projects the learner-as-subject and the situation of drawing into a transformed ontological state. A LOCAL EVENT OF LEARNING

Although Badiou refers to radical events that have major impact upon their domains (Schoenberg, Cantor, Galileo) I believe his work has relevance for more localised or shall we say less prominent spaces (but not for the learner) of learning where an event is an event of real learning through which a subject-as-learner emerges and is transformed, even though for others beyond this local space this particular local event is not an event and would not be considered as an event by Badiou. Thus Real learning is akin to a wager combined with a rigorous and determined perseverance even though outcomes are uncertain. Badiou’s notion of subject seems to indicate a difference between what we might term ordinary individuals and subjects, which is 37

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a distinction between existence, defined by a counted presence in a situation, and inexistence which is that strange temporality consequent to an event-truth process through which a subject (real learner) emerges. Perhaps a brief account of what I mean by a local event, truth and subjectivization in a classroom situation would help here. Some years ago I was observing a student teacher introduce a lesson on portraits to a class of 14 year old students. I was positioned away from and behind the student so as not to be too conspicuous. He had prepared a range of visual aids from different historical periods. During his introduction he became very uncertain and seemed to ‘lose the plot’, he was noticeably disturbed, and I thought he might not be able to proceed. However his students continued to listen politely and made no attempt to take advantage. He managed to retrieve his composure to continue and the students began their paintings. Immediately after his introduction to the lesson he approached me and apologised for his introduction but I couldn’t fathom what had occurred. What happened for this student teacher was a real disturbance which, in retrospect, had a significant effect upon his future teaching. To be brief, although he had made great efforts to plan his lesson by providing good visual aids, when he was in the process of introducing these to his class he realised that all his images were portraits of white ‘western’ people whilst half of his class consisted of black pupils from the UK and other parts of the world. For this student teacher this disturbing event had a dramatic effect upon his future teaching. It could be argued of course that he should have made provision for the cultural or racial mix of his class when preparing his lesson; this class was not new to him. But the crucial point is that, for this teacher in this particular context, this unanticipated event and its consequences, which were grasped by the student teacher, triggered an intervention to which he remained faithful and so changed his approach to future teaching. In Badiou’s terminology he followed a truth procedure becoming a subject that led to a new ontological state of practice. It is this activity of grasping the unpredictable event and following its consequences through a series of inquiries, questions and decisions that brings about a new situation. Of course it is often the case that such interventions and subsequent enquiries fail. But for this student in his momentary state of uncertainty, this temporary ontological vacuum, the event laid bare the existing parameters of his teaching, as though he could see the limitations of his teaching and then take action to create a more effective practice. This purely contingent event precipitated radical effects upon the teacher; the event opened a gap in his pedagogical situation which forced him to reconfigure his future teaching. In this teaching situation the event revealed the inexistent (the black pupils) who were absent (unintentionally) within the ideological parameters of ‘teaching portraits,’ as the student prepared his lesson; in these particular epistemological parameters black people did not exist. On one level the student’s practice saw these pupils but on another it did not recognise them. There was no intention to exclude these learners when planning his lesson but within his symbolic framing of ‘portraits’ they were excluded. We might argue that the direct universal consequence of this pedagogic event for this student-teacher was that learners are neither black nor white. 38

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Here, in this brief classroom incident, we might see the distinction between the ‘state of a situation’ for the student teacher, his established knowledge frameworks and procedures which form a consistent multiplicity, and the ‘being of a situation’ which contains elements, inexistents, that are not part of these frameworks and which therefore form an excess that has the potential to constitute an evental site. The interesting point about this incident and for teaching and learning generally is the difference in the ontologies of action, before, during and after the event; before in the existing situation, during the disruptive force of the event and after in the truth procedure leading to a new situation and a new subject. The teacher’s framing of being in a classroom that creates or imposes a consistent multiplicity of existence brought about by structuring devices such as pedagogy, curriculum frameworks, assessment and examination discourses and so on, is punctured by the inconsistent multiplicity or excess that lies beyond such framing and leads to a new distribution of existence. I think it is useful therefore, with the risk of perversion, to take Badiou’s idea of a truth event and apply it to less exceptional (but not for those involved) happenings in the context of teaching and learning. If real learning can be viewed as a problem of existence then these ideas of truth, event and subjectivation seem insightful for thinking about the relation between law and desire in learning processes. How is it possible to adopt a pedagogy of the event in order to encourage and support a subject of truth in learning? A pedagogy of the event is concerned with moving beyond the law (state) of a situation, precipitated by a desire for new states of existence; a desire of learning is a desire for new states of existence. TRUTH, SUBTRACTIVE ONTOLOGY AND EXCESSIVE SUBJECT

A truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, general revolt, a surprising new invention) and develops a fidelity to the novelty thus experimented. A truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual according to his pure humanity (which I call generic humanity). To become a subject (and not remain a simple human animal) is to participate in the coming into being of a universal novelty. That requires effort, endurance, sometimes self-denial. (Badiou 2002) Badiou’s ideas of event and truth can be viewed in relation to a subtractive ontology and an excessive subject. His concern with such spaces of ‘immanent exception’ (Hallward 2003, p. 162) is with the way in which they precipitate change. The term subtractive ontology designates that which is present in a situation but is not counted, the excluded element or indiscernible which is there but not recognised. Badiou’s approach to philosophy centres on this element which has the potential to disrupt or negate the existing ontological and epistemological structures and reconfigure them. The term subtraction is commensurate with negation and so Badiou’s philosophical enterprise is concerned with the negation of existing ontological orders through that which is not counted in a situation but which has the potential to disrupt the existing 39

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count, forms of recognition or parameters of appearance. If we return to the drawings of a chair discussed earlier, the drawing that was completely ignored by the pedagogical discourse could be said not to exist within such discourse, or to have a minimal level of appearance. In order for this drawing to gain more recognition and value then the logic of appearance governing the discourse would have to be transformed which in a sense would mean a transformation in how drawing as a practice is understood. The notion of excessive subject springs out of a subtractive ontology in that the subject, in Badiou’s theory, is more than that already established within existing social frameworks, more than what appears in such frameworks. In a local context, such as the one described above concerning the painting lesson, we can interpret the disruption to the student teacher’s situation as an event that led to a truth process in which the student saw the limitations of his practice and was able to move into a new subject position in excess of his previous ontological state. For Badiou, ‘truths have no substantial existence (2009, p. 5),’ but they do have finite subject points. So Badiou works with an idea of truth relating to the notion of excess. Badiou’s book, Logics of Worlds is based upon the key premise already mentioned: ‘There are bodies and there are languages except that there are truths,’ and it is in the key term ‘except’ that the excess of truth from existing knowledge is signified. APPEARANCE AND TRANSCENDENTAL

In Logics of Worlds Badiou provides a detailed and complex discussion of the notion of appearing. The idea of appearance is governed by a transcendental which establishes a logic of recognition of objects in a world and, by implication, what cannot be recognised or has minimal recognition. For Badiou appearance is a category of existence. It is crucial to remember that existence is not as such a category of being, but a category of appearing; a being only exists according to its being-there. And this existence is that of a degree of existence, situated between inexistence and absolute existence. Existence is both a logical and intensive concept (ibid., p. 269). A transcendental represents a framing device according to which a world is organised and which allows certain things to appear in degrees of appearance. So, for example, we might consider assessment criteria, which will be discussed in Chapter Six, as constituting the transcendental of the world of assessment practice so that work that is being assessed is attributed certain degrees of appearance. In other words the parameters of assessment allow certain objects and subjects to appear whilst others may register only very weakly within these parameters. Equally we might consider a world of practice such as art, science or mathematics within which certain forms of behaviour or procedure establish the parameters of each world. For example, the world of art practice, according to Wright (2008) consists of three major assumptions, the artist, the object and the spectator. In mathematics the world of Euclidean geometry allows certain procedures and objects to appear according to specific logics. 40

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To summarise then, for Badiou a truth is concerned with something that happens, it is rooted in practice. The terms subject and truth are indicative of the same process, they are inter-changeable with each other: Every truth pushes the subject into the realm of the untried, and for that reason, “tries” (is the trial) of the subject. Or again: every subject “believes something without knowing why (Hallward 2003, p. xxv).” Truth for Badiou is infinite, it is enduring and cannot be totalised but it can be manifested through local instances in which people emerge as subjects (subject points). Truth surpasses knowledge; it is a local process in a situation which establishes its own conditions of verification as it proceeds. Truth produces its own integrity. Hallward (ibid, p. 154) makes the point that although we make the truth it is, ‘precisely as something that exceeds our knowing.’ A truth procedure, as we have already stated, emerges from an indiscernible element in a situation, something happens and simultaneously reveals the limits of the existing situation as well as a hint of the inconsistency on which the situation exists. My account of the student teacher taking a lesson on portrait painting was given to demonstrate these points. TRUTH AND PEDAGOGY

If we subscribe to Badiou’s idea on truth then the truth of pedagogy cannot be situated entirely within pedagogical discourses that advocate social and cultural reproduction, the idea that learners need to be inducted into valued and established forms of knowledge and practice before they ‘can think for themselves.’ Nor can it be situated entirely within a critical paradigm that provides learners with critical facilities to interrogate their social, cultural and political worlds (hooks (1994), Giroux & McLaren (1989), Friere (1972), Apple (1990)). In art educational sites the development of visual cultures has developed this critical perspective (see Duncum (2006), Freedman (2003)). Each of these two approaches to pedagogy would not fit with Badiou’s idea of truth because they are already situated within existing knowledge frameworks; reproductive and critical. Another approach, which has some correspondence with Badiou’s writing on truth, relates to the pursuit of the truth of learning by which learners take on board and ‘personalise’ or ‘subjectivise’ the content of learning in novel ways through exploration and an immanent critical practice. This may lead to new subjects (in contrast to surrogate subjects), new ontological orientations to learning and the fracturing of traditional values and skills. Here the truth of learning is not attained through existing forms of knowledge or practice (reproductive or critical) but through a fracturing of these and the forming or reconfiguring of knowledge and practice in local contexts. If we remain ensconced within a reproductive regime then we may fail to support and facilitate alternative learning practices that remain obscure from the perspective of this regime. In this approach to pedagogy a new ‘count for one’ has the potential to emerge for a learner within his/her world in a newly extended situation where ‘old’ or previous objects of learning are transformed retrospectively and involve a new function in 41

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the newly perceived and conceived situation. Similarly, for the teacher, previous pedagogical objects, ‘learner,’ ‘ability,’ ‘assessment,’ can be transformed in a new functioning context where they are perceived and conceived differently and have a new function because pedagogy itself is transformed. RANCIERE, PEDAGOGY AND EQUALITY

In the final section of this chapter I turn to the work of Jacques Ranciere that is concerned with pedagogy and the idea of equality; this work has important implications for conceiving pedagogic subjects and programmes. There are some similarities between Ranciere’s work on politics and Badiou’s notions of truth and subjectivization, particularly in relation to the ideas of the excluded element, the indiscernible within a situation or what Ranciere terms ‘that part of no part’. For Badiou these elements form the place of the evental site whilst for Ranciere (1999) they constitute a place of politics as he understands this term, they locate a wrong which has the potential for dissensus and political action. Before I discuss Ranciere’s writing on pedagogy and equality I will give a brief outline of key concepts that run throughout his work. His general emancipatory project is concerned with disrupting the distribution of the sensible within social sites whereby particular groups or individuals are marginalised, have suffered a wrong or have no place from which to speak. They are held in their place by the ‘police’ order of the distribution of the sensible. Ranciere (2004) uses the term distribution of the sensible to refer to a ‘system of divisions and boundaries that define among other things what is visible and audible in a particular aesthetico-political regime (ibid, p. 1)’. A distribution of the sensible is concerned with the organisation and legitimating of ways of doing, saying and seeing in particular social contexts. With this notion he is seeking to explore the ways in which social communities are formatted; how this formatting regulates and defines social spaces and positions; who is able to participate within this particular formatting and who is not; what parts individuals play according to the format of particular communities. The term formatting, although not used by Ranciere, indicates that the distribution of the sensible possesses an aesthetic dimension. He argues that there is an aesthetics at the core of politics (ibid, p. 13) and he is employing this term to suggest a particular circumscription of space and time of the visible and the invisible that determines the place and issues of politics as a form of experience (ibid, p. 13). Thus for Ranciere the distribution of the sensible concerns the particular formatting of the visible and the discursive spaces in a community and who has a legitimate position prescribed and inscribed by such formatting. This enquiry is close to the work of Foucault and his concepts of regulation, surveillance, normalisation and power. The police order consists of a specific organisation of the distribution of the sensible, which establishes social groupings, positions and functions; immanent to this distribution is an aesthetic division between that which is recognised and that which is not in the forms of the visible, discursive, affective, and so on. The police order thus determines which bodies and groupings are visible or invisible, it establishes a coefficient of visibility. 42

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The police is, essentially, the law, which, generally implicit, defines a party’s share or lack of it. But to define this, one must first define the configuration of the perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed. The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another is noise (Ranciere 1999, p. 29). Ranciere uses the term ‘politics’ not to refer to more conventional understandings of the manoeuvrings of political parties; the continuous bickering and posturing between government and opposition. For Ranciere politics refers to a challenge, driven by an issue of equality, and levelled against the established police orders of identification and classification, it is a process of emancipation, a process of subjectivization (according to a particular cause or identity) in which subjects confront the police order. Politics happens through specific actions, under the banner of equality, which attempt to reconfigure the distribution of the sensible (see Ranciere, 2004, p. 90) but political subjects are always on the margins of a distribution. This is because once a specific distribution of the sensible is established it invokes a policing of its order and so any challenge to this order in the form of the political will exist in the margins. Politics is therefore driven by a state of dissensus in contrast to the consensus of the police order. As a practice politics is relational and interventionary. Politics in its strict sense never presupposes a reified subject (learner/teacher) or predefined group of individuals such as the proletariat, the poor, or minorities. On the contrary, the only possible subject of politics is the people or the demos, i.e. the supplementary part of every account of the population. Those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal (2004 p. 3, my bracket). For Ranciere the term ‘democracy’ precisely defines these intermittent and random acts of subjectivization to a specific cause through which a challenge to the police order brings about a reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible. In some ways this seems close to Badiou’s notion of a truth procedure leading from an event which changes the organisation of a world or situation. In his pedagogical work, particularly in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), the notion of equality forms a pivotal premise for pedagogical action. In this book Ranciere presents a disruption of traditional didactic relations between teacher and learner or between learners themselves that assumes an inequality of intelligence. He describes how Joseph Jacotot, a nineteenth century teacher developed a method of teaching that did not depend upon explication but upon heuristic principles and the axiom of equality of intelligence. He had experienced what might be termed progressive approaches to pedagogy whilst teaching in universities in France but when exiled after the restoration of the monarchy in the 1820s he took a teaching 43

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post at the University of Leuven. His experience in this post could be described as a personal epiphany. He had no Flemish and his students spoke very little French. He gave them a bilingual edition of Fenelon’s Telemaque and asked an interpreter to inform the students to read the book, referring constantly to the translation and reviewing what they had learned, and then to write an essay in French on what they thought of the book. He was astounded at the level of student’s work and the subsequent realisation that although he had done no teaching because he did not speak his students’ language nevertheless they had learned to read and write French. Hence the ignorant schoolmaster had somehow been able to facilitate students’ learning. Ranciere does not view the relation of education to emancipation as one in which the latter is achieved through the acquisition of knowledge, a position which implicitly assumes inequality, where inequality is reduced as people become critically aware of the ways in which social realities are structured. (Indeed he is highly critical of social theorists who take on the mantle of ‘educating the lower classes’). Rather, he begins from an assumption of equality, an equality of intelligence, and then to try to verify it, a verification which he finds to be manifested in the Flemish students’ ability to learn French where he found that there was no link between teaching and the possession of knowledge. Here, as Pelletier (2009) argues the traditional notion of inequality upon which educational systems and pedagogical relations are established in order to remedy should not be grounded in the transfer of knowledge: but by establishing a relationship of equality between master and students, between the one who demands that intelligence manifest itself and the other who develops his or her own intellect (ibid, p. 142–3). Ranciere highlights a difficult issue regarding the function of the teacher if students, as Jacotot shows, are able to learn without having to rely upon the teacher’s explication of knowledge. Does our traditional understanding of the pedagogic relation perpetuate inequality? Does it maintain that epistemological distance between teacher and learner assumed in the idea if inequality? …the pedagogic myth…divides the world into two. More specifically, it divides intelligence into two. It says there is an inferior intelligence and a superior intelligence (Ranciere 1987, p. 16, quoted in Pelletier p. 143). The student thus tends to rely upon explication and this for Jacotot and for Ranciere creates the ‘stultifying effect’ of pedagogy (Pelletier 2009, p. 17). In contrast to this supposition of inequality in the pedagogical relation Jacotot (Ranciere) believes that we should begin from an equality of intelligence and then consider strategies for action and support in relation to this assumption. But this should not be seen as advocating a particular pedagogical method, rather as an approach to learning and teaching in which ontologies of learning (teaching) are materialised and legitimised and where a redistribution of knowledge, knowledge practices and discourses facilitates a more equal pedagogical enterprise in the sense that Pelletier (ibid., p. 148) terms, ‘performative subjectification.’ This refers to Ranciere’s notion of politics as a disruption of the existing police order of education and pedagogy, whereby those learning practices which are not recognised, not represented, ‘come into light’, are ‘performed’ 44

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and thereby legitimated and in doing so reconfigure the distributions of knowledge practices, pedagogised subjects, assessment practices and so on. In other words this is an issue of trying to detect how equality is denied by current structures and how, in contrast, inequality is legitimised. Thus we need to consider carefully how pedagogised subjects are formatted according to existing categories in which learners (teachers), for example, are construed as able, weak or underachieving; how hierarchies of knowledge locate and position learners; that notions such as ‘inclusion’ (every child matters) are interrogated in relation to their ‘inclusive parameters’ and thus consequently what such parameters exclude due to their existing formatting of subjectivities and knowledge. It is hard to concede that current educational institutions such as schools and universities (as well as other educational sites) presuppose and perpetuate inequality in their pedagogical methods whilst simultaneously arguing passionately for equality (every child matters, no child left behind). These concerns reflect the positing and positioning of presence: who is visible, who is able to speak, who is valued, and, in contrast, who is not, within contexts of educational policy, learning and teaching. Thus the notion of ‘performative subjectification’ indicates the coming to light of a particular individual or group according to a previously invisible or marginalised subjectivity, the performance of which then transforms the distribution of the sensible of a specific (pedagogical) community to embrace a more egalitarian (but never complete) distribution. Ranciere advocates the axiom of the equality of intelligence so that consequently everyone has the potential or equal capacity to perform a redistribution of the sensible in his or her worlds. Alternative distributions of the sensible are always possible. Barbour (2010) discusses the similarities and differences between Badiou and Ranciere in their respective approaches to equality and politics and makes the intriguing suggestion that Badiou’s description of political action, which is close to Ranciere, could be legitimately applied to pedagogical programmes: Organised in anticipation of surprises, diagonal to representations, experimenting with lacunae, accounting for infinite singularities, politics (pedagogy) is an active thought that is both subtle and dogged (Badiou 2005d, p. 77, my bracket). As Barbour argues, a similar approach to pedagogic action could generate the possibility for real learning, the pursuit of truths through disruptions, uncertainties and evental redistributions of learning. If we take on board these ideas from Ranciere concerning the distribution of the sensible, police order and politics we can apply them productively to the world of education, teaching and learning. We can use these concepts as tools to interrogate the discursive formatting of teaching and learning and how this makes us construe these practices in specific ways, how this formatting makes visible such practices and how it ‘polices’ them. The idea of equality brings into play that which does not fit such formatting, that which according to the system has little meaning but which, through political action, or in Pelletier’s terms, ‘performative subjectification’, achieves recognition within a reconfigured formatting. If we follow Ranciere and view pedagogy, (in its widest sense as a productive social practice), through his conceptual analyses of the social, then we must accept the incompleteness of teaching 45

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and learning and, by implication, their constant renewal or reconfiguration. In practical terms we have to accept that we do not know what teaching and learning are and that the multiplicity of these social practices are always more than we ever comprehend. SUMMARY

Foucault’s work on subjection and power provides an incisive implement to expose social hegemonies, regulation and subjection in educational practices. His conceptions of surveillance or panoptic devices, normalisation and power-knowledge are useful tools to interrogate how pedagogised subjects are produced and controlled within educational policies, curriculum discourses and assessment practices. Butler demonstrates how these hegemonies and norms become internalised through persistent performance which in turn precipitates passionate attachments whose affect produces not only the subject but the trajectory of its desire. The subject is viewed as a fusion of social, psychic and affective forces but emphasis is placed upon the social distribution, integration and regulation of norms. Lacan and Zizek both view the subject as a void, a point of lack which generates processes of desire and fantasy that structure the social reality and so create a framework through which we experience social reality as meaningful. So here the subject becomes a subject through plays of signification that produce ideological framings which appear ‘natural’ but which never actually complete the subject. For Lacan the subject is always lacking and constantly seeks the lost object, the object cause of desire. Putting this into a pedagogical contexts, the hole in being, theorised by Lacan, emerges when the symbolic framing fails to provide a stable or convincing picture of reality, as may be the case, for example, when our understanding of learning and practice is disrupted, when it fails to explain or comprehend a learner’s practice. Here the Real of the pedagogical relation interrupts the imaginary-symbolic framing of this relation and may lead to a more refined reframing or, alternatively, it may revert to a reactionary or perverse pedagogical position. Badiou views the subject more in terms of excess, as a consequence of an event and perseverance with a truth process. This is not based on a fundamental lack inherent to the subject but a void in relation to knowledge, which has deep implications for teaching and learning in the sense of producing surrogate or militant learners and teachers. So for Badiou the subject emerges from a hole in knowledge, the state of a situation, which brings about a changed ontological status whereas for Lacan the subject is produced through an ontological lack, a hole in being. For Badiou the subject does not exist until after the event (which lies outside of established knowledge and representation), it is simultaneous in Badiou with the forcing or the fidelity to the truth of the event. Badiou’s event leads to questions of existence, that is to say who is included within signifiers such as ‘citizen’, ‘learner’, teacher’, and thus who may be excluded or ‘in-existent’. This can be applied creatively to pedagogical contexts to consider their transcendental structures and how these exert particular forms and degrees of appearance of pedagogised subjects and practices. Lacan’s triad when applied to 46

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social contexts of learning and teaching, can help us to see the effect of the Real of the signifier and its non-substantial ideological basis as constituting the frame through which we experience the world as consistent and meaningful (Zizek 1989 p. 123). Ranciere’s conceptions of the distribution of the sensible, police, dissensus and equality equally provide us with theoretical tools for exploring the organisational frameworks and practices of educational sites and how these might be disrupted so as to develop more emancipatory paradigms of learning. However the notion of emancipation employed by Ranciere is not concerned with someone acting to emancipate another person, which presupposes an inequality in the pedagogical relation, but rather in terms of learning as self-emancipation by paying attention to what and how one learns. Ranciere is not proposing a particular pedagogical method, indeed his writings on education are opposed to such an idea, he is instead giving priority to supporting local processes of learning through which learners appear and are recognised as learners. *****

In the remaining chapters of this book I will endeavour to apply these theoretical discussions on subjectivation, truth and equality to a series of issues in educational contexts that are concerned with practice, assessment, identity, culture and ethics. Though these issues are often unpacked and explored in the context of art in education I believe that they are relevant to wider fields of teaching and learning within all educational sites.

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SUBJECTIVITIES AND SCHOOL ART EDUCATION Mourning and Openings

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the findings of a recent research project that surveyed the content of the art curriculum in a selection of English secondary schools. The research by Downing and Watson (2004) found that a particular construction of pedagogised subjects and objects rooted in ideas of technical ability and skill, underpinned by a transmission model of teaching and learning, formed the dominant approach to art education in the secondary schools they researched. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and social theory, reasons for passionate attachments to such curriculum identities are proposed, when in the wider world of art practice such identities were abandoned long ago. Working with the notion of the subordination of teaching to learning and the difficulties of initiating curriculum practices within increasingly complex social contexts, the chapter argues for learning through art to be viewed as a productive practice of meaning-making within the life-worlds of students. The term, encounters of learning is employed to sketch a pedagogical quest in which an ethics of learning remains faithful to the truth of the learning event for the student. Downing and Watson’s research was followed in 2009 by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) report, Drawing Together: Art, Craft and Design in Schools 2005–08, which took a wider perspective to include primary and secondary schools in England as well as art galleries. It found that the state of art education in schools is generally positive in that half the schools visited (90 primary, 90 secondary) used art, craft and design effectively, but the quality of provision varied widely (2009, p. 4). INTRODUCTION

A radical transformation occurs in the classroom when one knows how to subordinate teaching to learning (Caleb Cattegno 1971). Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems for understanding and utilising the resources of the natural world and for governing society and creating imaginary worlds are very complex (Margaret Mead 1972). The conjunction of these two quotes identifies a necessary tension which I will approach in due course. Some leading writers and critics in the field of school art education in England argue that practice in this field has reached the point where the subject is in danger 49

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of becoming an anachronism, (Steers 2003, Hughes 1998). Though there are some schools in which innovative and exciting work is being achieved they appear to be part of a small minority. Addison (2005) and Addison and Burgess (2003) claim that the school art curriculum has evolved an insular approach to art practice and understanding art practice. A recent research report written by Downing and Watson (2004), School Art: What’s in it? Exploring visual art in the secondary school, sponsored by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in association with the Arts Council of England and Tate produced a report that confirms the critical evaluations of aforementioned and other writers (Swift and Steers 1999, Atkinson 1999). This research investigated the contents and practices of eighteen secondary schools and though not claiming to be representative, its findings are said to be indicative and illustrative (2004, p. viii). Eight schools involved contemporary art practices in their art curriculum whilst the other ten followed a more traditional art curriculum. The major findings are that the predominant art practices in all schools surveyed are drawing and painting. The major references for art practice are taken from early twentieth century European art with limited references to art before the 19th century and early 21st century. Few women artists’ work is referenced. The central pedagogic function relates to the acquisition and development of technical skills such as drawing from observation. The making of art or involvement in art practice in order to explore meaning is a minor pursuit, though there was more evidence of this in the schools using contemporary art. Within their limited survey Downing and Watson (ibid, pp. 28–9) provide clear evidence that through the early years of secondary schooling art education is mainly concerned with developing skills and techniques in preparation for later examination stages when pupils move towards more exploratory and independent learning. However throughout the secondary period as a whole far more emphasis is placed upon developing specific techniques, handling the formal elements of space, line tone, colour, texture and developing observational drawing than on developing research skills and learning how to express meaning. Hence the emphasis is placed upon the craft skills of art rather than on critical and expressive skills. In my own professional discussions with art teachers and prospective art teachers over many years a similar scenario emerges. Many teachers say that it is vital that their pupils are given the opportunity to acquire a variety of skills in order to be able to express themselves. In essence this perfectly understandable rationale is based on a belief that learners should be introduced to the repository of skills and knowledge that constitute the discipline of art and design thus enabling them to develop personal responses to inquiry through art media. Frequently the emphasis on developing skills and techniques is justified by the claim that such development equips the learner with the necessary tools for self-expression, viewed by many as a key aim for art education. The concept of self-expression is often employed in association with the terms, uniqueness, originality and authenticity and is indicative of what might be termed a modernist discourse of art practice and understanding. The crucial point here is that the discourse of self-expression allied to discourses of technical skill and their associated practices of representation constitute the discursive framing of art practice, art object and artist in much school art education. In other words such 50

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discourses and practices form the epistemological parameters through which school art education is conceived. In the wider world of art practice and social theory the notion of self expression qua uniqueness, originality and authenticity was relinquished long ago. The idea of a self signifying an accessible original entity or presence has been replaced by understanding the self as a socio-psychic and affective performance that occurs within specific discourses, practices and their immanent power relations. The notion of performance is important here in that it sidelines the idea of the self solely as a production of the social and incorporates possibilities of new or transgressive social positions. This suggests a more complex and fluid understanding of ‘self ’. Consequently the notions artist, object and spectator have similarly shifted from an essentialist understanding of these terms to one in which they are also viewed as social, psychic, affective and discursive productions and performances. Throughout the last century the art object, the authenticity or originality of the artist and the position of the spectator were radically disrupted. The notions of skill and technique have been severely destabilised because of the wide diversity of forms of practice in which artists engage and the materials they use. A great deal of contemporary art work is concerned with confronting, exposing or exploring social and cultural issues, relations or identities, that is to say it is centrally concerned with investigating meaning, or developing a critique of meaning, through a wide range of practices and this includes, by implication, what the word ‘art’ signifies. So, if we accept the findings of School Art: What’s in it, why is school art education situated mainly in modernist and essentialist conceptions of practice, object and artist? Though it would be unreasonable to expect school art education to be at the forefront of artistic practice why is it that such a large conceptual and practical gap seems to separate much school art from contemporary art? Indeed, the Ofsted report, Art, Craft and Design in Schools 2005–08 (2009), confirms that learners who are encouraged to engage with contemporary art practices are producing more creative work and innovative approaches to learning. This is also borne out by a research project, Learning, Teaching and Communicating Through Contemporary Art (2008 Adams et al) conducted with colleagues at Goldsmiths University of London in collaboration with Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool and local primary and secondary teachers. I will come back to this research. Why in general then has there been a failure to mourn particular art practices and their related understandings of art object and artist in school art education? This is not to argue that we should abandon traditional practices but to try to understand their genealogies and respective ontological conditions with a view to incorporating, modifying and transforming such practices so that they become more compatible with current ontological contexts. For example, observational drawing in its more traditional manifestation in schools presupposes a particular idea of representation, object and artist. It evolved within a particular historical and training context, producing a specific disciplined subject, a particular kind of knowledge and object as well as presupposing a particular relation to the world. How relevant is this kind of knowledge and subjectivity in our contemporary context? Furthermore, how can the practice of drawing be employed so that it is more relevant to learning in our current 51

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contexts. How might we conceive the purposes of drawing and learning through drawing today? What could the signifier ‘drawing’ mean today? Allied to these questions are ones concerned with theories and practices of learning and teaching. If Downing and Watson’s findings are representative of the art curriculum in a sizeable proportion of secondary schools then the emphasis on craft art skills presupposes a particular theory of learning, teaching and assessment that I would argue is largely rooted in the 19th century. This would assume a view of knowledge, learners and teachers based largely on notions of transcendence and authority. Particular bodies of knowledge are clearly defined, organised and deemed valuable whilst learners are ‘presumed’ in the sense that this knowledge is what they need to acquire. In this paradigm therefore learners, teachers and assessment are constructed and regulated according to an acquisitive view of knowledge in which the learner assumes a universal subjectivity. What I mean by this is that learners are expected to acquire particular skills and knowledge that are deemed to be of general value, they have little choice in the matter. Terms such as ‘differentiated learning’ appeal to differences in learning but do not alter the knowledge and skills to be learned. There is a basic assumption here that we know the learner in advance and what kind of knowledge and skills s/he requires and how this acquisition of knowledge and skills should be assessed. In contrast to this we can conceive a radically different scenario of learning where outcomes are not so predictable or clearly defined and which are grounded in processes of experimentation combined with rigorous analysis and reflection. MOURNING THE PAST

If we accept that the self is largely a production of social practices and the effects of power then we can consider the psyche as a space in which such practices and effects are lodged and thus play a significant part in the formation and policing of subjectivity. Hence we might ask how the psyche has been produced and policed in practices and discourses of art education in schools (and other educational sites) and if this psychic construction of identity in art education is compatible with broader social contexts of visual practice. Downing and Watson (2004) show that many art teachers in the schools surveyed identify art education and by implication themselves as art educators and their pupils as learners according to specific discourses and practices. In other words such discourses and practice constitute frameworks of recognition and identification. For these teachers these discourses and practices form what Butler (1997) calls ‘passionate attachments’ through which identification is desired, achieved and stabilised. In what Zizek (1989, p. 102) refers to as a transferential illusion, art education for these teachers is a particular understanding of drawing and painting and those other aspects of their practice with which they identify. To understand art education within such specific discourses, practices and desires establishes a critical and reflexive discursive framework through which art practice and art object are interpreted; through this framework practice and object are understood, reviewed and regulated. In psychoanalytic terms this framework constitutes the relations between ego and super-ego through which understanding is achieved and regulated. In these halcyon 52

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days of audit cultures their super-egoic effect upon the construction of teaching and learning should not be under-estimated. In general terms then, Downing and Watson’s research indicates that secondary school art education is understood predominantly as the acquisition and development of technical skills relating to specific practices, mainly painting and drawing. Learning and teaching are conceived according to a transmission model whereby knowledge and skills are transferred from teacher to pupil. Knowledge and skills are organised, delivered and regulated in particular formats by the teacher. Pupils are assessed in order to gauge their levels of understanding and skill. This model is what Cattegno (1971, p. ii) many years ago referred to as the subordination of learning to teaching. The model is not restricted to school education but dominates, for example, the field of teacher education in England, now named teacher-training, where student teachers are ‘trained how to teach’ according to a series of professional standards for the award of qualified teacher status. They are provided with firm guidance in how to plan and initiate lessons, how to assess pupils’ work, how to evaluate their lessons and so on. In many ways learning to teach can be viewed therefore as a production of surrogate identities. Equally, though more flexible approaches are now in place, the numeracy and literacy hours in primary education invoked a subordination of learning to teaching. In this teaching and learning initiative children were required to be passive learners whilst the teacher introduced and directed the session. Though changes have been introduced teachers have become embedded within a modus operandi of careful structured planning which has encouraged a rather mechanical and formulaic approach to teaching and learning. The effect of such models of teaching upon teachers and the fact that they are subject to constant inspection and surveillance has been to reduce the desire to explore other, perhaps more creative approaches to teaching. Teachers and teacher educators in England have therefore been colonised by particular methodologies of practice and assessment expounded by government institutions such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Teacher Development Agency and then monitored by Ofsted. Learning and teaching in art and design education is constituted in many schools therefore largely through a transmission of specific knowledge and skills, which provide a stable and secure curriculum and reinforce a subordination of learning to teaching. Thus a reflexive ego, that is to say the capacity for critical reflection, is framed within a skills-based discourse. A similar notion of transmission also underpins the notion of self-expression, which is viewed as a key justification for art education in association with notions of authenticity, originality, uniqueness. This discourse is centred upon the figure of an autonomous self, able to express (transmit) an inner identity, an inner self of feeling/emotion/idea through the art medium to be encoded in the art work. Similarly the process of interpreting the work of other artists is a matter of getting in touch with or revealing the meaning of the work deposited there by the artist. Though terms such as self-expression, authenticity, originality and so on are frequently used by teachers in discussing the purpose of art education they tended to disappear during the formative years of the National Curriculum for Art followed by its successors but they are beginning to resurface in the new curriculum and in the current focus upon creativity and learning. 53

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It has to be recognised that although the research by Downey and Watson indicates a predominance of a skills-based approach to art and design education there have always been teachers who have been able to rise above such horizons to instigate wider, more visionary and critically aware pedagogies. One way of thinking about these passionate attachments to a transmission model of teaching and learning, a skills-based art curriculum and the elusive aura of selfexpression is to consider them in relation to the Freudian concepts of mourning and melancholia. The psychic process identified with the difficulty of relinquishing the past, a failure to mourn lost objects or ideals and therefore to preserve them as ‘passionate attachments’ is called melancholia by Freud (1917). In a clinical context melancholia is associated with acute depression and retreat into an inner world but Butler (1997) adapts Freud’s work to show how this psychic process is important to the forming of a reflexive conscience (a super-ego function) in which the power of social norms is dissimulated within the psyche. For Butler melancholia, Describes a process by which an originally external object is lost, or an ideal is lost, and the refusal to break the attachment to such an object or ideal leads to the withdrawal of the object into the ego, the replacement of the object by the ego, and the setting up of an inner world in which a critical agency is split off from the ego and proceeds to take the ego as its object (1997, p. 179). Butler reworks the idea of psyche, moving away from seeing it as a nebulous inner process towards one that is formed by the performance and internalising of the power of social norms. In effect the psyche is formed through the dissimulation of the power of social norms, which appear ‘natural’. Thus the psychically embedded power of past ideals, objects and practices constitutes a melancholic effect that makes them difficult to mourn successfully, where mourning relates to the successful letting go of the object. We are used to the notion of power being exerted from external sources whereby relations of ‘dominant and dominated’ ensue. However Butler describes the paradoxical operation of power, following Foucault (1980), in which power forms the subject as well as ‘the trajectory of its desire.’ Here power is not something that we might simply impose or oppose but it is something that defines our very existence and which, therefore, we hold at the centre of our being. Power is productive and forms the core of our being. As subjects we are only able to understand our existence through the parameters of those discourses, practices, ideals etc., to which we are subjected and which we desire, thereby achieving subjectivity. Though the notion of the melancholic subject does not take account of the notion of resistance, it is not too difficult to appreciate how the power of traditions and ideals of art practice, whose initial purpose and function have disappeared, constitute ‘objects’ that provide stability and security to the school art curriculum. Such traditions establish a form of reflexive conscience rooted within particular methodologies, ideals and ethics of practice that define its boundaries. They constitute the parameters through which practice is understood. It is as though passionate attachments to particular practices produce policing mechanisms according to which practice is conceived and regulated. Consequently we can conceive the notions of the autonomous, self-expressive individual, originality, authenticity and uniqueness, so central to the pedagogy of many school art educators, as identifications that cannot be 54

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mourned successfully and which still constitute a powerful pedagogic ideal at the heart of the school art curriculum. Indeed this ideal is itself grounded on an assumption of the subject as an autonomous, self-reflexive individual; the Cartesian subject based on a split between mind and body or cognition and sensation, which is difficult to mourn. The difficulty therefore in trying to avoid the stasis of such power, seems to be one of loosening the hegemony of such identifications whilst simultaneously confronting future possibilities for practice that avoid the sentimentality and security of past traditions. After all it is nearly a century ago that Duchamp introduced the ‘ready made’ object into the gallery and so challenged head on notions of authenticity, self-expression, the artist, the art work, skill, originality and uniqueness. It could thus be argued that in relation to school art education there is a tendency, in many schools though by no means all, to promote dubiously out of date curriculum models that are held in place to some extent by the power of caricatures of past practices. Yet this line of thinking is not entirely, if at all, convincing. Why do many art teachers understand art education mainly in terms of traditional skills and techniques when they are fully aware that these have been transcended by artists and art practices in the wider world? Why do they subscribe to such transmission models of teaching and learning? Reasons for this do not lie exclusively with teachers, and we should not fall into such an essentialist or accusatory trap! We need to bear in mind a whole series of socio-political relations: teachers, as subjects, are subjected to social, political and historical processes that inform their practice and largely constitute who they are. Curriculum authorities policed by political discourses subscribing to particular canonical values, regulated and enforced by inspection regimes, professional training in art in different historical periods, examination systems grounded in conservative models of practice, professional development courses, and so on, all constitute the background to teaching, informing and structuring its practice. A further speculation which cannot be simply dismissed could be that many teachers believe that before their learners can move into more abstract or conceptual practice they require a fundamental grounding in traditional techniques and knowledge of practice. But this seemingly contradictory position of subscribing to a curriculum that has been transcended by the world of art practice, may not be simply a question of knowledge or objects of knowledge, rather, it may be a question of belief and an illusion structuring knowledge or reality. Zizek (1989) refers to this point in his discussion of Manoni’s, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand meme’ (I know very well…but all the same): What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as though they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy (pp. 32–33). 55

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Is the belief in traditional skills that constitute the reality of art teaching for many teachers based upon an illusion, a fantasy, which structures their relationship to the reality of teaching? “I am fully aware of the developments in the art world but still I think that traditional skills and knowledge are important to teach.” (I know very well, but still…). Though they know contemporary art practices have moved beyond traditional skills their pedagogic actions remain rooted in a tradition that structures their world. Thus such actions are embedded in ideological fantasy. This is not a fantasy which hides a prior reality but one which structures reality itself. Whilst teachers know very well of the existence and forms of contemporary art their pedagogic actions seem to deny this. Such ideological fantasies manifested in action are not internal predispositions but rest within a particular symbolic order of representation and its attendant semiotic and technical systems. I will return to this issue in Chapter 6 when I consider assessment. …belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality (Zizek 1989, p. 36). Here the teacher is ‘captured’ by a particular symbolic order or representation and technique that structures the reality of teaching and learning. She is, according to Pascal (1966, p. 274 quoted in Zizek 1989 p. 36) as much ‘automaton as mind.’ These points are of course applicable to everyone in that our particular beliefs and understanding of the social realities within which we function are grounded in ideological fantasy and the only way to escape the grip of such fantasy is to be able to confront the real of our desire. This means that it would not be sufficient to see beyond the grip of traditional skills and view them for what they are, as it were, simply a particular form of representational practices that are invested with value. We need to reveal how the ideology of such practices is ‘invested with our unconscious desire (ibid, p. 48).’ That is to say we need to expose the embedded nature of an investment in a specific pedagogical practice, to reveal its contingency as opposed to a truth, and this is, of course, quite difficult in that such exposure could lead to instability and uncertainty. The position we have reached therefore is one where the pedagogic stability required for practices of teaching and learning is partly dependent upon a series of passionate attachments to specific forms of practice coupled with government policies that promote and regulate transmission models of teaching and learning. If we are eager to promote pedagogies in school art education with more emphasis upon an exploration of meaning rather than the transmission and acquisition of specific skills and knowledge then where might we look for inspiration? The work of many contemporary artists, for example, is concerned with challenging and resisting the very traditions and the notions of subjectivity that are implicit to the art curriculum surveyed by Downing and Watson. It could be argued that these artists are more concerned with disrupting the very idea of tradition. For many teachers therefore it is not so easy to conceive pedagogic rationales for practice and assessment when engaging with contemporary art. Nor is resistance or challenge to existing pedagogical models easy within current curriculum, examination and inspection frameworks. Some of these tensions and issues will be revisited in Chapter 7 which is devoted to the notion of the artist-teacher. 56

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APPROACHING THE FUTURE

In the last chapter of the book, The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben provides a description of two images, one by Paul Klee (discussed by Benjamin) and the other by Albrecht Durer. Klee’s image, Angelus Novus, depicts ‘the angel of history,’ a winged figure that is propelled into the future backwards by the wind of progress. A pile of debris, the agglomeration of history, forms at his feet. Durer’s image, Melancholia, depicts a winged figure in deep contemplation surrounded by tools and utensils of life. Both images involve a sense of alienation. As the events of the past become indecipherable to the angel of history so the tools of daily life have become redundant to the melancholy angel but they have become charged with an elusive property, what we might call ‘culture’. Agamben is concerned with the transmissibility and the intransmissibility of tradition. In what he calls traditional systems there is no distinction between the act of transmission and what is transmitted, that is to say, processes of living and tradition are inseparable. Such systems lose their vital force when the act of transmission and what is transmitted are separated. This is a characteristic of what he calls nontraditional societies and constitutes the accumulation of culture. But this does not entail that the past is lost or devalued, rather that only then is the past able to be revealed but in an alienated form. Only then do we have history as we know it. What is lost is transmissibility. Thus the past collects behind us and we lose the once stable basis of developing principles for action that are able to accommodate present and future circumstances. In periods of transmissibility, when social and environmental change is slow, moving towards the future was not deeply problematic. Losing transmissibility, for example, when the rate of social change increases, means a loss or blurring of reference points and increased instability, so that we become positioned between the indecipherability of the past and a future that is difficult to predict. Many art practices in schools pay homage to particular practices and visual forms whose embedding social context is now ‘unknowable,’ covered over by the patina of history. The findings of the research by Downing and Watson (2004) suggest that such practices are likely to be redundant for a curriculum commensurate with ongoing social and cultural changes. In the context of school art education any rationale for current and future practice has to take into account how practice, teaching and learning are conceived. Such issues cannot be divorced from the patina of tradition nor from current and emerging social worlds in which teachers and learners live. There are difficulties therefore in that any attempt to embrace new discourses and practices is likely to create uncertainty and anxiety. For example, attempting to incorporate contemporary art practices into the school art curriculum could bring radical implications for assessment. Pedagogical strategies rooted in traditional modes are likely to be inappropriate in sustained periods of intransmissibility. THE SUBORDINATION OF TEACHING TO LEARNING

I take my subheading here from Cattegno (1971) in order to consider implications for learning in art education in a world where the inherent certainty of transmissibility 57

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is now problematic and where the future is increasingly unpredictable. The speed up in the rate of social change brought on, for example, by technological developments, social conflicts and population movements amongst other things has profound implications for institutions such as schools and other educational sites if they are to be responsive to socio-psychic, affective and cultural domains in which students live. Difference is now a fundamental concept in educational policy and provision, acknowledging the importance of providing equitable teaching and learning programmes. But I wonder if it provides an adequate signifier for informing pedagogy in a world of increasing social transformation. There are two formulations of difference to distinguish here. Firstly the idea of degrees of difference within a common space of representation where differences are recognised, and secondly, difference which refers to that which lies beyond a common space or is inexistent within it and which therefore has no place of recognition. The problem I am trying to articulate concerns forms of existence or experience, and this includes ways of learning, which lie outside of the representational space, that space consisting of the accumulated apparatus of knowledge and understanding; the space defined by Badiou as a consistent multiplicity that constitutes a situation. Laclau (2005) introduces the concept of social heterogeneity which presupposes the absence of a common space of representation that is required for difference to be representable. We might consider a traditional curriculum as an homogenising process along with transmission pedagogies. We might even consider multicultural or inter-cultural pedagogies as essentially homogeneous in that cultural difference is played out within a common space of representation. Some would argue that not to acknowledge this point is a fundamental flaw in such ventures. However the heterogeneous does not refer to a pure outside but rather to the idea of an ‘absent presence’ in relation to the representational space itself. It refers to a struggle that does not emerge from within the norms of a dominant system but from a break which disrupts the logic of such norms so that a new problem becomes visible, a new visibility between the heterogeneous and the dominant system, which demands a reworking of the space of representation. For Badiou this place of struggle is the evental site. This is similar to the difference between the Lacanian notions of the symbolic and the Real, where the symbolic constitutes the space of representation and meaning whereas the Real indicates a resistance to or a puncturing of, the symbolic, and a point of breakdown of representation. Thus the parameters of the representational space, in this case pedagogy in art education, have to be considered as unstable and shifting to enable new pedagogical demands to be incorporated so that learners and learning are continually reformed and where existing practices and knowledge are reconfigured. The evidence of a failure of the general school curriculum in England to meet the impact of social change in recent years can be witnessed in the many initiatives developed over the last three decades to respond to socio-cultural issues as well as the increasing number of ‘reactive’ policy documents emerging from government that attempted to redirect earlier policies that are quickly found to be wanting. For example, the National Curriculum had three makeovers in the space of twelve years. 58

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The national numeracy and literacy hours, introduced in 1997, presupposed a teacherled model of pedagogy in which learners are viewed as passive receivers and acquirers of knowledge and skills; this was modified through the policy, Excellence and Enjoyment (2004), in which more emphasis was placed upon learning strategies. The new curriculum introduced in 2008 grounded in the principal of ‘every child matters’ introduced a more personalised approach to teaching, learning and assessment. In other words this increasing requirement to restructure policies and practices can be understood as an effect of the loss of transmissibility referred to earlier; the difficulty of developing educational policy within a more unstable world. Put in a different way such developments signal a failure to mourn relatively stable practices; they are an attempt to accommodate change and instability within the sentimentality of past traditions, organisations and ways of thinking. Schools, as we currently know or have known them might be considered as manifestations of this sentimentality. The new curriculum (2008) can be viewed as recognition of earlier shortcomings and an attempt to transform policy, teaching and learning so as to place much more emphasis upon the need for learners to be more involved in directing their learning, and for teachers to design their curriculum. In the light of such curriculum changes the term, ‘eternal vigilance’ comes to mind. I think it’s important that we should continually try to rethink or re-imagine, to debate school art (and other) practices in order to make them relevant to the psychic, affective and social life worlds of students but I also think that it is crucial to conceive practices of learning and teaching in relation to an idea for social commitment within an evolving socio-cultural complex. This challenge highlights the tension created by aligning the two quotations heading this chapter. A call for a subordination of teaching to learning whilst, simultaneously, recognising the urgent demand for teaching practices/curriculum systems/pedagogies to be compatible with developing forms of understanding, imagination and practice necessary to meet the challenge of new, complex and emerging social communities. The phrase, ‘to make art practices relevant to the life worlds of students,’ is too quick, in that it obscures the complexities and perhaps impossible difficulties of such a pedagogical project. It also assumes that teachers know what these are when often they, understandably, do not. A better and perhaps more productive way of seeing this is to think about how we might reconfigure and support visual practices emerging from different life worlds. CHANGING THE SUBJECT

We can gain some insight into this approach by first of all reflecting upon early learning practices. John Matthews’s (1999, 2003) exhaustive and innovative studies provide detailed observations and analyses of children’s drawing practices that reveal a constant semiotic endeavour. His work clearly demonstrates the power of visual practice for early learners to explore and produce meaning in visual form. The effect of Matthew’s work has been to reconfigure our ‘visibility’ of children’s drawing practices and the ways in which we speak about them. This point can also be witnessed in the painting process of Luca described earlier. Young children are not 59

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‘taught how to draw’ or ‘how to represent’ no more than they are taught how to sit up or crawl. Given the opportunity and encouragement they will make drawings spontaneously through which they explore and develop conceptual, social and technical meanings. For them drawing is often not a discrete practice but one that is inter-related with other forms of representation and expression such as language and action. Hence their identities as learners are formed through a variety of interrelated signifying practices. We can learn a great deal from Matthews’s research about the child as learner through visual practices; about the child as an active maker and performer of visual signs where practice occurs within a genealogy of performance that produces an ongoing process of signification and re-signification. A quite distinct change occurs for many children when they leave the nurture and support of early schooling and home practices and move into the more subjectbased curriculum of secondary education. Here the child becomes a ‘subject of knowledge’ and not a subject of truth in Badiou’s terminology. There is a general emphasis upon developing art skills and techniques such as drawing and painting as indicated by Downing and Watson (2004). Specific skills relating to line, tone, texture, colour and so on are ‘taught.’ The emphasis appears to be upon a conception of learners as passive receptors of canonical knowledge. How much importance or relevance should we place upon such knowledge and practices? In general terms the emphasis upon technical ability and skill that dominates the early secondary art curriculum has replaced the innovative learning practices of early childhood as well as earlier multimodal semiotic practices in which visual, linguistic and action modes combine to explore and produce meaning. Hence within the early years of secondary education the pedagogical drive is largely conceived as remedial, to provide learners with skills, and as a consequence much earlier innovative, proactive learning and meaningmaking practices wither because they do not receive sustenance. It seems to me then that in secondary and much primary education we need to ‘change the subject’, the subject as learner and teacher as well as the curriculum discipline. We need to rethink the purposes of visual practices in educational contexts such as schools and, consequently their function as learning practices. This might involve reworking the multimodality of learning so prevalent in earlier learning practices (and in contemporary art practices), which then become compartmentalised within our institutions of schooling. There are some secondary school art departments which are embracing the challenge set out here by reworking pedagogised subjectivities and shortly I will discuss the work of one art department very briefly. Beyond school art practices there are also modes of functioning through art in other social sites, such as galleries, museums and community settings, which provide approaches to learning that could be of great value for school contexts. Such work will also be discussed shortly where the key emphasis is upon learning through art in order to promote both individual and social awareness within and between communities. ENCOUNTERS OF LEARNING

The subordination of teaching to learning means precisely that learners are placed at the centre of their learning experiences. This means that, as educators we have to 60

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respect their ideas, desires and intentions and refrain from passing judgements about the legitimacy of their practice, otherwise we are likely to disenfranchise such work. This does not mean that the teacher becomes redundant but that effective teaching in a world of discontinuity and intransmissibility demands a very different approach to and understanding of teaching to earlier circular systems of transmission models. Here the emphasis is upon how to learn rather than upon what to learn, upon the value of commitment and not upon what one should be committed to. Traditional skills and knowledge do not have to be abandoned but rather reconfigured alongside current forms of practice precipitating new skills, forms of knowledge and ways of understanding. Although Downing and Watson found that the pedagogical emphasis in the schools they surveyed was placed upon developing skills and techniques there are secondary schools that take a different approach, where meaning-making through art practice is a central aim. At Welling school in south London the Deputy Head Teacher (Director of Art), Henry Ward (2005) advocates, ‘an art education that gives people faith in their own means of expression.’ He believes that what hinders matters is a narrow understanding of skill which produces a feeling of lack or incompetence. His approach to planning is often quite different from carefully plotted programmes of study. He does not see it necessarily as a separate practice prior to initiating studio work but as something that is intrinsic and ongoing with work as it evolves for each learner. Ward states: Lessons and schemes of work often change course as a result of the lines of enquiry taken by each student. They are viewed as artists, not immature facsimiles of existing practitioners but artists within their own right, just ones which happen to be teenagers. This enables a different and arguably more sophisticated understanding of the work being made. These young artists create work which relates to and speaks of the context in which they find themselves, work which is ‘about’ being the age they are (personal communication). He comments further about his approach to teaching: What fascinates me about this process is the speed with which the pupils begin to show the confidence to trust their own instincts and ideas. What I think this proves is that they have – that we all have – remarkable imaginations and ideas. By introducing students to contemporary practice, by talking to them about the ways in which present day artists make their artwork and by allowing them the freedom to try anything, we nurture that sense of enquiry and willingness to experiment (Ward 2005, p. 36). Ward recognises the extreme difficulties in organising this kind of teaching, the amount of time and energy required to facilitate such a learning context. However it does precipitate a more open, unpredictable and adventurous space for learning, where frequently the teacher is trying to catch up with his or her students once they are engaged (ibid, p. 37). Ward maintains that the creation of such a space, both literally and metaphorically, opens up the possibilities of the teacher becoming an active participant, a co-learner where teaching is subordinated to learning. He remarks 61

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that teaching colleagues in the faculty of visual arts at Welling are deeply interested in this phenomena and they engage in an increasing number of collaborative and participatory activities which begin to embrace a different view of artistic practice as a whole: the act of teaching becoming an artistic practice in its own right. The three images below are stills from three videos made by Laura a year 12 student who asked her grandmother to teach her how to crochet, She became interested in the acts of learning and teaching in themselves and how you pass skills on to someone else. She proceeded to teach her younger brother how to crochet. Finally she made three videos of each person performing crochet.

Laura Lloyd Video Piece: (Courtesy of the artist and Welling School Art Department)

Emerging from a rather different but in some ways similar pedagogy, John Johnston currently works with community groups in a number of countries using art practices to explore personal and social identities often in contexts of deep social conflict. Earlier as a secondary school art teacher Johnston promoted a form of art education sometimes referred to as ‘issues-based’ where students explore personal or social issues through art practice. A key emphasis is placed upon the notion of symbolism. It is a symbolic way of working, it isn’t based around drawing and observation. We often begin with words. It is about the invention of symbols and the reinterpretation of symbols. The backbone of skills come in here so that initial exploratory images are developed by working deeper into a painting and inventing or re-using symbols, we will talk about composition and layout for example and the skills will develop around the reason for making (Johnston, in Atkinson 2002, p. 154) In relation to skills viewed from a more traditional angle Johnston believes that the word ‘art’ often gets in the way in that it tends to be predicated upon a particular idea of what art is. Taking a critical view of a centralised art curriculum he argues: When we construct a curriculum we like to have answers, a packaged item so that [people] know what to look for. There seems to be a particular emphasis upon observation, of beginning art in this way. Why is this? I worked in an art department in one school where every scheme of work was planned in great detail according to what they felt the national curriculum was expecting…it’s as though we bring the curriculum already sorted out to the students…I’m not sure if this is right (Ibid, p. 155). It isn’t right, in my opinion, because such a tightly organised curriculum closes down the spaces of learning that teachers such as Ward, Johnston and others wish to advocate. It tends to restrict teaching, and consequently learning, to a pre-established 62

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route rather than viewing teaching (and learning) in a more open-ended or flexible mode where, after initial negotiations or preliminary explorations, the teacher has to respond effectively to the multiplicity of routes taken by students each possessing its own legitimacy and experiential grounding. Let’s hope that the new curriculum being developed in England allows such teaching and learning to emerge. In more recent years Johnston has worked with groups of people in Belfast, Lebanon and Rwanda employing art practices to help young people to interrogate, debate and understand issues relating to human conflict and social development. Much of the work begins with group discussion and then later an initial search for imagery and/or text begins, which participants believe to be appropriate and significant for their intentions. The kinds of learning encounters facilitated by Ward and Johnston in their different contexts involve the truths of two journeys, that of the teacher and that of the student, and both are imbued with learning in a radical sense, not repetition. It is easy for a teacher to interpret a student’s art practice through past traditions, what we might term a conservative hermeneutic (Atkinson 2002, pp. 32–41, Gallagher, 1992, pp. 213–220), and direct practice accordingly without taking the ‘situation’ of the student’s engagement with learning into account. To illustrate this point a brief and simplified reference to the philosophical writing of Alain Badiou (2001) is helpful. In his book, Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil, written for secondary school and university students, Badiou distinguishes between the realm of established knowledge, which could include curricula, assessment, practices, identities, categorisations, differences and so on, and what might be termed a realm of radical or exceptional innovation or truths that develop through rare individuals who persist in their fidelity to such truths, avoiding all forms of interference in their work. For Badiou established knowledge is essentially static, objective and is organised according to the interests of those in power; a similar standpoint to Althusser and Foucault. This realm constitutes what Badiou terms ‘the state of a situation’ (Badiou ibid., vii–ix). Access to a truth however involves being able to form an over-view of the state of a situation and move beyond it to exceed its dominance and strike out into new territory. Such a process cannot occur unless there is an encounter or what Badiou terms an ‘event’ through which the dominant order is fractured. Though Badiou cites exceptional individuals such as St Paul, Antigone or Geronimo as exemplars of ‘subjects of truth’, we might be able to relate these ideas of truth and event to individual learning contexts in order to consider a radicalised notion of an ethics of learning, one which is grounded within the learner’s existence and action that springs from it. Such a learning event does not rely upon a repetition of established knowledge but a challenge with the unknown, what Lacan refers to as the Real. It involves an absorption in following and exploring a personal response to an encounter on the part of the learner and for the teacher who facilitates the encounter, it demands a respect for the truth of this encounter for the learner. This does not mean that traditional practices are abandoned but reconfigured to support the learning quest in its fidelity of response to the learning event. The ethics of this learning event can be summarised therefore through the notion of ‘keep going’ (Badiou ibid, p. 47–52), follow the particularity of your response. 63

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It is through the courage and conviction of their local action that I believe teachers such as Henry Ward and John Johnston (there are others) will be able to create a new generic will that produces new possibilities for school art education. THE GALLERY AS A SITE FOR LEARNING

In the context of gallery education many initiatives emphasise learning and a critique of learning. Esther Sayers, who works at Tate as part of the team encouraging young people to organise workshops for their peers, provides some insights into how, within this particular context a redistribution and reconfiguration of learning is happening. This produces new speaking, viewing and making positions and relations apropos learning and pedagogical practices. Esther has been responsible for the scheme entitled Raw Canvas in which young people become group leaders and learn to organise workshop events in the gallery for their peers. The young people involved are not from schools, though some are attending school; the point of the workshops is to offer a distinctive alternative to learning than that provided traditionally by schools and their specific pedagogical agendas. The programme makes a deliberate attempt to involve young people who do not visit the gallery but, it is anticipated, would gain a number of skills from doing so. It is keen to explore the negotiations, configurations and reconfigurations of meaning and experience that young people, individually and in groups develop in the gallery context with the work on display and practices of curating. A key principle guiding Raw Canvas is that young people do have experiences and ways of knowing that they bring to the gallery, they are not seen as individuals in need of ‘education’ or social improvement. But in order to make the gallery a place young people choose or want to visit, it has to offer ways of working that relate directly to the lives of young people, so that they don’t view art from within prescribed paradigms of skill and practice, thus largely excluding themselves, but are able to view art in terms of their current interests and concerns: skateboarding, music, grafitti, the web, and so on. The exponential growth and use of the web to promote social networking sites has increased the potential for young people to get involved with visual and audio materials, so that in their domestic life-worlds engaging with and manipulating the visual is natural to them; they do not view themselves, as perhaps might be the case in school contexts, as ‘not very good at art’. The image reproduced below gives an illustration of one of the workshops from the Raw Canvas programme entitled Gifted by Nature in 2008. The group were working on a retrospective exhibition of the work of Juan Muñoz held at Tate Modern that year as a means of exploring animation and the use of video equipment (video is always a popular form of engaging young people). The exhibition was used as a stimulus to investigate animation and formed a basis for discussion about contemporary art. Participants considered the processes and techniques used by Muñoz and then began to work on their animations by using the themes from his work to inspire theirs. Esther comments: This project was not strictly peer-led but involved an artist-educator working with peer-leaders as advisers and assistants. Participants were all ‘looked-after’ 64

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people from Tower Hamlets, Southwark and Lambeth aged between 8 and 16. They produced animations in response to the work; many chose to work their own biography into their animations. The way that they were introduced to Muñoz work was through open ended questions to stimulate discussion, they were encouraged to form their own responses to the work and to interpret it within their own frames of reference, as a result the group had great ownership of the exhibition and this young man, Najib (pictured) gave the photographer an impromptu tour of the show with a coherent talk about the work. By exploring meaning participants feel ownership of the work, this is evident through the ease with which they talk to others about the work. Although interested in art Najib was not a gallery goer before this project, through the discussion sessions he gained enormous confidence in talking about the content of the work (personal communication).

Image printed with kind permission of Juan Munoz Trust

Many smaller galleries combine art practice and pedagogy exploring possibilities for practice and learning in which more traditional pedagogical objects: teacher, learner, knowledge and practice are dismantled and reconfigured. In such sites the relative positions of teacher and learner become much more integrated, unstable, unpredictable and not so clearly delineated. In these relationships knowledge and practice are oriented towards users and empowerment and are unhampered by 65

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institutional constraints such as audit, canons or hierarchies. Emily Pethick, Director of the Showroom Gallery in London, also indicates that a number of smaller contemporary art institutions place their emphasis upon conversations and exchange rather than on presentation She cites Sarai in New Delhi and 16 Beaver in New York and there are other institutions in the UK initiating similar initiatives of exploring spaces and relations of participation and collaboration.

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SOME ETHICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL ISSUES Forcing, Subjectivization and Desire

In a stimulating paper Simon O’Sullivan (2009, p. 158, 169, 163), argues that Badiou’s idea of subject as a subject of truth is barred from the very thing (truth) that it embodies. He claims that Badiou’s work in this area is based upon the Lacanian schema of the barred subject whereby the subject is never able to capture the object of desire, the lost object, arising in early childhood, as discussed in Chapter Two, when the child is separated from the union with mother, precipitating lack and simultaneously the process of desire. This is a process that continues through life, a process in which a subject achieves subjectivity and identity in the domains of the symbolic and the imaginary. The subject is barred in the sense that the he or she can never come to ‘know itself ’ directly (or others) because the medium in which such knowledge could be formulated, the symbolic, is always lacking. Hence in Lacanian psychoanalysis there are two fundamental ‘lacks’, the lack in the subject who constantly seeks to fill this lack, and the lack in the symbolic which can never capture what it attempts to embrace. The tricky aspect of such identificatory processes is that when I state that, ‘the symbolic can never capture the essence of a subject,’ this idea of essence relating to something fundamental that constitutes the subject is in fact a fantasy. There is no such thing as ‘the essence of a subject’; there is no substantial origin of a subject that can be captured by the symbolic. The idea of identity is a fiction generated by a desire for wholeness, something which however is always incomplete. Identity can therefore be understood in Lacanian terms as the lost object which the subject never had. Similarly for Badiou the subject never grasps truth absolutely even though s/he is produced and driven by it and this inaccessibility of truth exerts an ongoing pressure on being. O’Sullivan writes: Badiou produces a subject forever barred from the very truth that the event announces. Such a subject is then constituted by faith (and a logic of deferral) (p. 158). Though O’Sullivan views this barring as a problem or a shortcoming of Badiou’s theory of the subject, it seems to me that it is a barring from the infinity of truth and not from local points of truth established in the finitude of existence. The purpose of O’Sullivan’s article is to compare the philosophical ideas of the subject in the work of Badiou and Deleuze. I am mostly concerned with the angle that he takes on Badiou in order to consider its relevance for pedagogical practices of teaching and learning. However it is perhaps appropriate to acknowledge that whereas for Badiou events and their traces produce subjects of truth, for Deleuze events are 67

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immanent to the process of becoming. No matter how different these two philosophical positions, I believe they are both concerned with an emancipatory project through which marginalised or excluded bodies achieve existence, not according to accepted forms of recognition within a particular social context, but through asserting their difference and thus changing the frameworks of recognition and values of a particular context. Deleuze works towards ‘a non-fascist state of being’ (O’Sullivan p. 158) which implies a clear ethical project whilst Badiou promotes the notion of a fidelity to a truth which though originating within a local or singular space may have universal effects. SUBJECTIVIZATION

This is the name that Badiou uses to indicate the process of ‘becoming-subject’ which is situated paradoxically both within a particular situation but also outside of a situation. It is a concept that can be used to reflect upon processes of learning as processes of becoming. This paradox of becoming arises because a subject is called into being through a truth process arising from an event which happens within a situation but whose implications cannot be grasped therein, it is elusive to current knowledge. Perhaps we can conceive this paradoxical state in risky learning situations where learners are encouraged to take a leap into the unknown by following paths of enquiry, hunches or hypotheses whose solutions do not pre-exist for them in their current epistemological frameworks but rather, lie in the unclear horizons of future action (see Being and Event, pp. 393–409). I hinted at such a process in Chapter One when describing Luca’s painting practice. The process of subjectivization is therefore a testing out of future actions in line with the disruptive beginning of a challenge to learning. Thus subjectivization equals a formative mapping of action/ learning through emerging percepts, concepts and affects. This entails a different process to one in which a pre-existing knowledge provides a metric to evaluate new encounters; here the learning process cannot predict how future action will be related (or not) to the driving force of the hunch, or in Badiou’s terminology, to the logic of the truth procedure driving the learning. Such action is premised on the concept of not-knowing and thus learning is both a militant and an aleatory process in which a subject emerges (Badiou 2005a, p. 395). This act of faith driving learning into unexplored territory raises the issue of the transcendence of the truth of learning and its local situatedness. For Badiou a subject never attains truth absolutely simply because truth is infinite and local learning processes constitute local points of truth which are finite. The truth of learning is concerned with perseverance, with beginning again at the beginning, with failing better next time, whilst local truth-points of learning consist of these beginning, succeeding and failing functions that in a sense are analogous to way stations on an endless journey. Local events of learning can be viewed as those moments of insecurity when something happens in the learning process which precipitates a struggle for comprehension that assimilated knowledge does not facilitate, and where the struggle is driven by a hypothesis, a naming process which is unclear of what it names, an indiscernible-yet-to-appear. So the learning subject is constituted both by the enquiring 68

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process, the real of learning, since it is projected into a gap of knowledge, but also by a hunch that it will enter a new state of knowledge in its local situation. A subject is thus by the grace of names, both the real of the procedure (the enquiring of the enquiries) and the hypothesis that its unfinishable result will introduce some newness into presentation (ibid, p. 399). FORCING

Another key notion connected to the process of subjectivization is ‘forcing’ which Badiou extracts from the mathematical work of Cohen. Forcing is a concept which denotes the future-oriented trajectory of enquiry and learning. More specifically it is concerned with a future state which is already anticipated and brought about by a driving hypothesis; thus the outcome of enquiry ‘will always have been.’ This logic of future-anterior constitutes the logic of forcing and it is not uncommon in artistic practice, indeed it is central to it. We can state in line with Badiou, that a subject is able to volunteer partial descriptions of a world to come (truths) and test these out so that such descriptions (truths) add to a situation and changes it (2005a, p. 406). Badiou thus offers the following definition of a subject: That which decides an undecidable from the standpoint of an indiscernible (ibid, p. 407). In attempting to unravel this dense statement and make sense of it in the context of learning we might suggest that apropos of a learning challenge, a situation in which there is no clear solution or outcome, the learner, precipitated by this event and its uncertainty, is able to formulate a hunch (an indiscernible) which is tested in future action and which consequently changes the situation or, alternatively, fails to do so. If we conceive and initiate learning situations through the parameters of assimilated knowledge, which prescribe established targets then a commensurate pedagogy would consist of creating learning pathways dominated or predicated by outcomes; this would constitute a didactic pedagogy where learning is subordinated to knowledge. Such pedagogies are not necessarily to be spurned but they do tend to presuppose recognisable patterns of learning and set procedures to accomplish prescribed tasks and outcomes; they elicit assessment processes predicated equally upon such outcomes. In a very crude analogy, such pedagogies act as moulds in which learners are produced; those who are unsuccessful are viewed as possessing impurities in the productive material. In contrast if we advocate learning situations that do not begin from a prescribed outcome (except to initiate processes of learning and to create more effective learners) but with an open investigation through which learning travels on a number of levels as enquiry proceeds then it seems that Badiou’s ideas on subjectivization and forcing can help to provide a formalism for this unpredictable process. Thus we might see the pedagogic enterprise itself as situated between knowledge and truth. Pedagogy and learning (they are in a sense the same) becomes a journey of making connections between actions and their outcomes as the journey proceeds. In a learning situation offered to me by a fellow traveller, Tony Brown, concerning a mathematics 69

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investigation where a group of learners were exploring the track and angles created by a snooker ball on different sizes of table, the mathematics created emerges from the language-action interactions in the group in relation to the specific contents of the enquiry. In other words the mathematical investigations had no set outcome except the local exploration of forces, directions, angles and space and consequently mathematics was created as a consequence of the pathways of enquiry (Brown 2010). Although I am unable to do so I would anticipate that if we were to look more closely at the linguistic interaction and diagrammatic actions of this particular learning situation then it is probable that there would be moments of uncertainty when speech and visual signifiers hover around particular conceptualisations or projections that have no specific anchorage. In other words the learning would consist of processes of speech and diagrams, where signifiers precipitate signifiers into unknown levels of enquiry. Lacan defines the subject as the ‘effect of the signifier’ (1979, p. 207), ‘a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier.’ Signifiers function in the field of the Other, the symbolic order and, as such, derive their signification. A word becomes meaningful in relation to other words within a particular linguistic code that constitutes a situation. I have already referred to the example provided by Zizek where the signifiers on the medical chart that used to be placed at the foot of a patients bed do not refer directly to the patient in-herself but to the symbolic order of medical knowledge where they achieve signification and through which the subject is represented as a medicalised subject. But this definition of the subject might be nudged a little when, in a learning situation, for the learner signifiers in the form of speech or visual practices are not clearly attached to a particular symbolic order but are somehow adrift in the flow of exploration. In this situation the learning subject entering an unknown world of enquiry is equipped with what might be termed protosignifiers but no security of ground, no certainty of how to apply them. This only arrives, (or does not), through the process of future action and symbolisation. Is it the case that in such uncertain situations where signification struggles for meaning the learner-as-subject is precipitated into a place between being and being-there, between being and truth (Badiou)? Is it the case that the process of interpretation induced by enquiry is, ‘directed not so much at meaning as towards reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behaviour (Lacan 1979, p. 212).’ Is it here in this non-place, this place of lack in the enquiry, this lack in the signifier, desire functions to return the subject to stability? In the context of more open-ended art practice learning emerges similarly as ideas and affects generate material responses and the interaction between these change the nature and direction of the art enquiry as it proceeds. I refer to a video of an art lesson (Teachers TV, 2008) where the teacher, Sophie Leach, initiates a learning process with groups of learners who are asked to develop enquiry around a series of objects of their choice. The enquiry challenges learners to work collaboratively with everyday objects, visual arrangements and language. There is no clear outcome in the teacher’s mind but the teacher does have a way of organising learning around specific phases thus, in retrospect, it could be argued there was some predictability 70

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to the way in which learning was structured. But within this structure the pathways each group took were unpredictable and open. The video does not depict a remarkably different kind of art practice but what it illustrates for me is a pedagogical framework that conceptualises learners as producers of meaning rather than one in which learners become surrogates of knowledge. The students are asked to consider how objects can be inscribed with different meaning from their everyday use, for example, the teacher demonstrates how an upturned toy train might represent an accident for a nurse. As a primer students are given objects and asked to discuss how they might represent some aspect of their lives. After looking at how artists use ready-made objects and language in their work each group selects a group of objects to work with to transform their normal function into something quite different. The teacher encourages them to experiment and play with their ideas. They present their object sculptures and discuss the ideas behind them with all the other groups. One group positions a mattress onto a large map with a hat placed to the front. The arrangement reflects for them the pervading issue of world poverty. The next phase consists of thinking about a form of words that convey the ‘message’ of the piece. For the work described above the group selects the phrase, ‘poverty is another word for butter.’ A girl elaborates, ‘Poverty spreads all around the world like butter spreads on toast.’ A second group whose sculpture consists of a guitar placed inside of a wooden cage wrapped with red and white security tape explores the ideas of security and stability. Their message is, ‘security is meant to be opposed,’ which hints at the tendency or desire ‘to make things secure because you know its going to be opposed.’ The final part of the work explores the graphic form of the message for visual impact and to project it onto the sculpture. Through all phases of this work the students as learners were discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, though these crucial dynamics of learning are difficult to pick up from the edited video. An important aspect is the pedagogical relations that evolve as enquiry moves into the future, for here teacher and learner are formatting pathways of learning through the plays of language and action (discussion, testing things out, evaluating) as they happen. Here actions, for the student learners move beyond established frameworks of reference for art practice and enter a place in excess of their familiar understandings of art. Knowledge is renegotiated and new objects of knowledge are produced. In Badiou’s terminology for the student such renegotiations bring about a new count to the situation of learning. This applies equally to the teacher-learner in terms of pedagogical learning whereby encounters with student learning processes produce a renegotiation of pedagogical strategies. Thus in both student and teacher learning constitutes a finite process of renewal. In each of these group-learning contexts we witness processes of subjectivization and the forcing of local truths within each enquiry driven by an initial challenge (disturbance) that set the enquiry in motion. The learning process involves an interweaving of stabilising points, predictions, anticipations and uncertainties as the enquiry moves into the future so that the learner straddles past, present and future but there is a strong emphasis upon the future as learning precipitates a keen desire to 71

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explore. This process constitutes the infinite truth of learning within finite subject learning situations. The learner authorises partial descriptions of a world to come and through subsequent processes of learning brings about a change to the learning situation and to the learner as subject. The learner acquires the ability to evaluate the future through action, a future which it will have contributed to bringing about. But things are not so straightforward! Alternatively, a learning pathway may come unstuck or meet with incomprehension, there is a desperate struggle for meaning, it all becomes too exasperating! In this sense learning becomes a local productive process projecting towards an infinity from within finite locations. To echo Badiou we might then argue that ‘forcing’ is the modus operandi (O’Sullivan, p. 160) of the learner which is built upon qualities of resolute action, tenacity, perseverance; the ability to begin again at the beginning, or as Beckett proclaims, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” (Zizek 2009, p. 87). This leads into a consideration of an ethics of pedagogy, which will also be discussed in the final chapter. If we return to the more didactic model discussed very briefly above, we are concerned with an ethics of being in the sense of a prescribed formatting of learners and teachers along established routes of enquiry towards specific outcomes. In this scenario both teacher and learner are subjects of knowledge. I think we are all familiar with such pedagogical methodologies, where the teacher ‘who knows’ passes knowledge on to learners who do not. This process constitutes a subordination of learning to teaching. Ethical issues relating to such methodologies would be concerned with upholding values of reproduction and the techniques applied to this end. Deviations from such pathways need to be corrected or redirected to the desired outcome. Failure is a matter of a lack of ability, lack of attention, a disinterested disposition. Wider issues of a socio-cultural dimension enter the pedagogical scene as factors that affect learning performances within the institutional formatting of teaching and learning. The agenda for critical pedagogy, initiated by the work of Friere, and developed by Giroux, Maclaren, Apple, Britzman, hooks and others, is concerned with the dynamics of power, ideology and identity as they are manifested within educational systems, through performances of gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and class. Do such performances precipitate socio-cultural bias of a kind affecting subject matter or delivery by the teacher which in turn generate exclusory forces? I will not proceed here to discuss writing on critical pedagogy; I simply wish to note the importance of this form of critical theory within educational domains. Ethical issues affecting a more open-ended and less prescriptive learning situation seem to be quite different. These revolve around the respective positions of teacher and learner and the unpredictability of the learning-teaching process in which subjects are positioned across the finitude of the learning context and the infinity of learning. We are concerned with an ethics split between a known world and a world-whichis-yet-to-come. In Lacanian terminology we are concerned with an ethics of desire and the real (infinity) of learning which, for the learner, interrupts established knowledge. (This is the same for the learner who enters the space of exploration with uncertainty and for the teacher who will know the subject material but will be 72

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uncertain about the pathway of the learner and appropriate pedagogical support). Here learning is dealing with breaks and disruptions in knowledge as enquiry leads to new productive states which renew and reconfigure the situation of the learner… or, alternatively, enquiry is stymied by blockages and incomprehension and the need to begin again. We might say that the learner, in real learning processes is an exception, is in excess of his or her current situation as the truth of learning projects a new configuration of the learner and his or her world. The pedagogical dilemma which has troubled education in England and other contexts in recent years concerns the compulsion to educate students into traditions of knowledge and skills, with a view to personal and national advancement. In this pedagogical atmosphere curriculum content is rigorously structured and assessment of learning (and teaching) is a predominant and revered feature. In contrast if pedagogy adopts a more creative and critical approach to learning whereby its initial premise is not the transmission of knowledge but the initiation of learning which prioritises investigation, exploration and experiment to achieve knowledge through the truth of learning then we open a potential for a constant renewal and reconfiguration of learners and teachers that enriches our social and cultural spaces and institutions. In the chapters on the artist-teacher and art education I argue that some frontier contemporary art practices always incomplete art by expanding what art can be and this evolution challenges how art practices and the ‘art curriculum’ in schools or other educational sites are conceived. Put in another way this incomplete process creates the potential for pedagogies against the state. If therefore pedagogy involves processes of learning and teaching that are oriented towards a future which is ‘notknown’, as in the illustrations of learning activities above, then art practice in a practical and critical sense allows students to follow finite pathways of learning (truth points) within the infinity of the truth of learning and art. This suggests that future learning will inevitably, in Badiou’s terms; puncture holes in knowledge (2005c p. 9). If we adhere strictly to a pedagogy of knowledge transmission, to promoting established values and skills this position is likely to prevent alternatives and possibilities for learning that are ‘out there’ but remain obscure and, consequently, out of reach for students.

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INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I continue the theme of art in education but introduce practices of contemporary art. I am using this term simply to denote those practices that disrupt established conceptions of practice in their respective historical situations, those practices that push the boundaries of our understanding of practice. I begin by considering our relation to art and how we might understand the nature of this relation in terms of human subjectivity and the art object, practice or ‘experience’. To do this I describe particular dissensual art practices that have broadened social conceptions of art, which in turn, then become part of art itself and reconfigure performances of understanding, learning and practice thereby creating possibilities for new aesthetic and pedagogic vectors and distributions. Such vectors can be understood in terms of affective and cognitive forces and fields of relations that Deleuze and Guattari describe using the terms deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation and lines of flight in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987). These denote processes of change in which new connective pathways between bodies, which were previously only virtual, precipitate new capacities for thinking and acting. For Deleuze and Guattari the potential for change is immanent to all situations or territories. We can view some contemporary art practices as deterritorialising events and processes which rupture and reorganise relations between artist, practice and viewer thereby precipitating transformative vectors in the field of art practice. Put in terms employed by Ranciere (2004), such practices precipitate new distributions of practice: viewing practices, making practices and speaking practices. Implicit to this discussion therefore is a change in how artists, art practice and engagement with art are conceived. After discussing a brief selection of contemporary art practices in relation to notions of rupture, reconfiguration and subjectivity I proceed to consider some art objects and events in school art education, at the risk of repeating elements in Chapter 3. I analyse how human subjects, art practices and objects are generally understood in this context. Whilst many practices in contemporary art challenge our comprehension of the artist, objects and practices of art, the context of school art education tends to be more conservative, though by no means exclusively so as I will show, and reproduces teachers and learners, objects and practices within a more homogenous genealogy. This leads to further remarks about how learners and practice in school art education, and other educational sites, might be discerned in the light of the preceding discussion, and in particular in relation to the challenge of contemporary practices in the art world. I describe and evaluate some pedagogical practices that 75

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engage with contemporary art and a research project that investigated the impact of contemporary art practices on teaching and learning. A centralised curriculum and its supplementary regulatory processes incorporate and advocate a particular formatting or assemblage of the realities of teaching and learning which promote and disseminate particular (conservative) vectors of thinking and construing such realities. Put another way such centralising processes generate a certain kind of appearing of teachers and learners in this particular world of school education. The term appearance is used by Badiou (2009, pp. 118–122 & 173, 2010, pp. 26–32) to denote that whose intensity is governed by a particular transcendental; put in simpler terms, things appear according to the regulatory frameworks that govern and make possible their appearance in particular contexts. I have already discussed how assessment discourses generate ‘degrees of appearance’ in their evaluation of practice. From an interesting and somewhat corresponding position Ranciere (1999, 2004) discusses the term appearance in prospective terms in relation to his notion of politics which he uses to denote a process in which marginalised or invisible elements come into appearance and disturb current social orders sufficiently so as to create a more emancipated reconfiguration. In pedagogical contexts this translates into the possibility of learning communities to come that emerge from currently unseen, unimagined, overlooked or marginalised practices of teaching and learning, which, in gaining recognition disturb and reconfigure the status quo ante. Thus this idea of appearance can be employed in art in education to consider the tensional relation with contemporary art practices. For Ranciere the notion of appearance is very important in that it denotes something that disrupts a consensus of the visible or the speakable, a regime of the perceptible in which there is general agreement about ways of seeing and speaking, forms of practice and their respective subjectivities (e.g. how we interpret learner’s art practices, what constitutes art practice, what constitutes learning, etc). Ranciere describes the governing consensus as the police order: The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another is noise (1999, p. 29) Appearance fractures the police order’s accepted forms of visuality, discourse, practice and subjectivity. In other words, according to Ranciere: Appearance, particularly political appearance, does not conceal reality but in fact splinters it, introduces contentious objects into it, objects whose mode of presentation is not homogeneous with the ordinary mode of existence of the objects thereby identified (ibid, p. 104). We can deploy a similar idea in relation to pedagogies against the state where real learning produces new objects and reconfigured worlds. The emergence of appearance is therefore equivalent to the flowering of new subjectivations, as discussed in the previous chapter, which, in turn, have the potential to reconfigure the existing 76

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states of consensus or existing police orders. I am interested in applying this idea of appearance to educational sites, including schools, universities, galleries, museums and other locations. The tensional relations between appearance and police order open the way for an ethical debate, to which I will return in the final chapter, relating to the becoming of learning and teaching. Here I am using the term ethics to refer to the relation of a way of being and principles of action that emerge from this ontological state. Localised formats of teaching and learning are likely to generate different ethics of practice and immanent to these will be a difference in aesthetic configurations of practice, that is to say a difference in the local formatting of teaching and learning emerging from local dispositions and initiatives. This is precisely where the notion of a politics and ethics come together; in a space of dissensus, of genuine debate, where it is possible for marginalised, overlooked or radical positions to be acknowledged and debated and so create the potential for a modified more equitable and participatory enterprise. THE NEGATION OF ORIGINS

We know that in many academic fields, philosophy, art criticism, aesthetics, cultural theory and art history, a hermeneutic of reproduction has been subjected to a sustained critique. The idea that the artist’s intentions, feelings or meaning are encoded in the art object and available for spectators to capture if they employ appropriate interpretational methods, has been largely abandoned within contemporary art histories, hermeneutics and aesthetics. This is not to say that the practice of making work does not involve affective or cognitive processes, it does, but once the work leaves the domain of production and becomes open to reception by others then many extra factors come into consideration relating to the viewer’s ontological and epistemological frameworks. The position of the viewer or spectator thus constitutes another domain of production. Of course, in some art practices there is no object as such where the work consists of artists organising a series of social events and relations (Bourriaud, 2002). In such work it is difficult to speak at all about any kind of transfer of prior intentions or meaning. Richard Wollheim’s (1987) analytical and psychological approach to interpreting artwork is a well known example where for the spectator the art experience is seen to be, ‘the effect of the intentional activity on the part of the artist,’ (Pollock 1995 p. 39). The art object is a sign, a trace of the artist’s subjectivity. Interpretation relies upon an assumed universal human nature that is expressed in and through the artwork and which can be perceived by the spectator. Griselda Pollock (ibid., p. 39) argues persuasively against this hermeneutic method, for a number of reasons, insisting that it assumes that the relations between artist, object and spectator are ahistorical, that the viewer is posited as a disembodied spectator and that this fails to consider, for example, issues of identity such as class, race and gender that might affect and challenge the proposed symmetry of the relationship. A similar challenge is levelled at the idea that the historical and socio-cultural context in which the artist is positioned defines the meaning of the work. For this 77

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idea assumes a comparable hermeneutic strategy whereby the meaning of the work can be traced back to particular socio-cultural origins. The ideas of style and progress are also associated with this hermeneutic tradition, suggesting that as the artist matures then the work attains its zenith of enduring meaning and expression. Essentially, the idea that it is possible to grasp with certainty the artist’s intentions or meaning, or a clear understanding of the socio-cultural ‘cause’ of a work is grounded in the notion of origin or presence. In the early part of the 20th century we know that Duchamp presented objects that challenged the idea of origin in the sense described above relating to discourses of the artist, the artwork and aesthetic judgement. I use the word presented guardedly in that terms such as made, produced or created seem inappropriate because of their resonance with presence that the placing of these objects challenged. His ‘readymades’ also challenged associated terms such as skill and technique. Equally terms such as expression and intention seemed redundant by the presentation of everyday objects in a gallery setting. These non-aesthetic objects confronted traditional discourses of aesthetics. In other words in time their appearance presented a radical challenge to established practices and discourses of art, they fractured the frameworks though which art as a practice was understood. They destroyed meaning relations between artist, artwork and spectator that were based upon ideas of essence or origin almost pre-empting the later work of Derrida’s (1973, 1976) critique of the metaphysics of presence and the notion of the death of the author proclaimed respectively by Foucault (1979) and Barthes (1977), and in a rather humorous coup de grâce, they banished ideas of self-expression and style as well as the language of formal aesthetics. A playful intervention precipitated a radical uncertainty about the value, status and meaning of the art object and consequently it problematised the notion of the artist, the object and the position of the spectator. These objects seemed to occupy a subliminal space between two diametrically opposed contexts – everyday reality and art gallery, but of course the challenge of the readymade required the institutional context of the gallery space to exert its effect. Different manifestations of the problematising of the concepts artist, artwork and spectator provoked by the Duchamp event can be witnessed in numerous art movements and the work of individual artists, for example, in the Fluxus movement, particularly Joseph Beuys, and the work of Joseph Kossuth. In more recent years, work by Julian Opie, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Mona Hatoum, Michael Craig-Martin and Richard Artschwager, to name a few, echoes the earlier challenge made by Duchamp. Many works in Tate Modern bear some allegiance to the Duchamp event. Julian Opie’s You are in a Car (Volvo 440) (1996) is not a car displaced to the gallery context as were Duchamp’s objects, rather it derives its status in being what it is not. It is not a fake car but as a three-dimensional object it seems to derive its form from cartoon illustration. It seems to echo Magritte, ‘Ceci n’est pas une voiture’. It does not challenge in the same way as Duchamp’s Fountain; it is not, I would argue, a real object because its visual form is directly metonymic to cartoon illustration. This metonymic link suggests anonymity of the artist, of style and in a different way problematises the relation between artist, art object and the problem of meaning. 78

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Artschwager’s objects are also mysterious and intriguing. The Table and Chair (1963–4) immediately suggests real life objects but any mimetic link is soon fractured when we notice that the space beneath the table is a white solid. The table appears as a white cuboid whose vertical edges are decorated as ‘table-like’ legs and upper horizontal edges like the edges of a table. The object tends to occupy a subliminal space; it is difficult to pin down because of the representational games being played. There is an uncertainty about the symbolic order; the symbolic and imaginary playfully interact. The objects produced by Fischli and Weiss appear to take Duchamp’s intervention even further. The untitled piece in their retrospective at Tate Modern 2006–2007 consisted of a room full of building and decorating materials and equipment as well as an assortment of discarded rubbish. The ‘magic’ of this work occurs when you realise that everything is painstakingly crafted by hand. Thus you could easily believe that you are in the wrong room of the gallery, one that is being prepared for an exhibition, until the realisation that everything is carefully planned and constructed. Here what appears as a readymade collection of workers’ materials and detritus is in fact a highly skilled production. In her video, Dancing in Peckham, Gillian Wearing (1994) dances in a shopping mall to music only she can hear. The video as an art object connotes the borderlines between inside and outside, the personal and the social, that which concerns embarrassment, which cannot be shared and the public avoidance of strange or eccentric behaviour. In the production of the video the relationship between artist, art object and spectator is blurred even further in that the audience become part of the work, they form the art object-as-video. Traditional ideas of authenticity and skill are challenged in that the spectator is immanent to the art practice and art object. Bruce Nauman’s (2004–5) installation in the turbine hall of Tate Modern in London consists of a series of loudspeakers placed opposite each other at intervals. The speakers emit various sounds of voices, conversations, exclamations and so on as you walk past them down and along the huge space. There is no art object here, no spectators, nothing visual. These are just a few illustrations of work that disrupted and continue to challenge more conservative or traditional notions of art practice, skill and a metaphysic of origins. ICONS AND THE NEW

Felicity Colman (2009, pp. 68–79) explores the idea of the icon producing aesthetic vector fields that affirm particular subjectivations but also, alternatively, the power to disrupt them and in so doing open new ontological possibilities. Acknowledging the work of Guattari (1995, 2000), she discusses the potential of art practice to engender new forms of being and, by implication, to puncture ‘authorial coding systems’ (p. 69) such as dominant ideological, epistemological or ontological paradigms, which for Ranciere would constitute a police order. Coleman states: The best aesthetic machines for Guattari are those that function as resources, offering choices in thinking the reconstruction of subjectivity, ones that engage 79

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and actively function within the socius to produce pedagogic pathways for living, new modes of communication for workers of all types (p. 71). Colman considers Guattari’s use of Peirce’s ‘icon of relation’ as a tool for exploring a territorializing affect, as a homogenising signifier which exerts its governance over social contexts. We might consider particular forms of practice and representation or deeply embedded ideas of subjectivity, such as ‘self-expression,’ in school art education (or other educational sites) as such icons, or educational icons such as the National Curriculum or Standards in teacher education in England that exert a particular form of governance or police order. Icons are regarded as symbols of things that hold within their dumb configurations enormous power and engender cultural-and gender-specific pedagogies. Icons are the products of social and historical movements, and provide powerful political components to modelled subjectivities and communal values through their collective activation and continual performance (p. 71). Deeply embedded within socio-cultural sites, icons exert powerful ontological relations; they can take the form of a photographic image, a symbol, a flag, a painting, a curriculum, a celebrity, a slogan (every child matters), a television genre and so on. But Colman is also interested in deploying the icon against such homogenising and hegemonic forces by thinking about it in more heterogeneous terms for producing new aesthetic regimes that precipitate new subjectivations. She draws attention to some recent examples in the public domain where they have been challenged and where heterogeneous affects ensue; the cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, the burning of national flags, the censorship of particular forms of dress (hijab) in schools. Such events hold the potential, she argues for new collective subjectivities (p. 72). How then, Colman (p. 72) asks, might we begin to consider the productive force of new iconographies, new iconic machines? Again citing Guattari’s (1995) emancipatory and pedagogical project for art, The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation or a reinvention of the subject itself (p. 131) The ambivalence of the icon suggested by Colman where it can function either to affirm established practices and subjectivities but also as a subversive force to disrupt such practices and subjectivities can be employed to consider art practices in educational contexts which I will discuss shortly. To give a brief example: we can witness affirmative iconographies functioning within assessment practices which deploy ‘authorial coding systems’ to assess the art work of learners, drawings, paintings, three-dimensional work, lens-based work and so on. But it is possible for such coding systems in relation to particular practices to be punctured by practice that does not conform if, in the conservative context of school art education, pedagogical approaches such as those described by Henry Ward and John Johnston in Chapter 3 are employed so as to reconfigure practice and subjectivities. More recent disruptions to the aesthetic field in contemporary practice that have affinity with Guattari’s conception of art as an emancipatory and pedagogical project 80

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can be discerned in the practice of Tino Seghal who creates work by involving the public in specific situations within the gallery or other sites. In 2006, This Success or This Failure, at the ICA in London he brought lots of schoolchildren into the gallery and encouraged them to respond to visitors as they chose. Some visitors found themselves playing games with the children. Another piece at the Venice Biennale 2005 involved the gallery guards dancing and singing when visitors entered the gallery space. Both of these practices as aesthetic devices expose the governance and power existing within normal relations within institutional settings such as schools or galleries. Put another way, they expose the dominant iconography of such relations, a point to which I will return shortly. Rainer Ganahl also exposes the structures and formatting of learning environments which create exclusory forces through a series of practices that are essentially pedagogical. His most familiar work consists of a series of photographs of seminars and lectures given by leading academics. He also arranges reading seminars in which groups study specific texts and he charts his own learning processes. Other artists, such as Artur Zmijewski involve a more orchestrated participatory practice which often involves confrontation and conflict. The video piece entitled, Them (2007) shows a series of painting workshops, organised by the artist, which involved four different political or religious groups: young Jews, young socialists, Polish nationalists and the Catholic church. Each group was asked to make a symbolic representation of their beliefs which could then be worked on by the other groups. All groups had to agree from the beginning that their piece could be reworked or even destroyed by other groups. The video ends, as might well be imagined, by work being burned and groups exiting the site. Though the artist is I think attempting to organise an emancipatory project through such encounters we might ask if the confrontational outcomes tend to demolish such intent. Socially-engaged art practices, public or community art are not new and traces can be seen throughout the last century from the Futurist movement, Dada, the performance work of Kaprow and others in the 1960s, the Situationist International influenced by the work of Jorn and Debord. The turn to participatory practices and a relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002, 2010) is a more recent development during this decade and the work of Seghal, Ganahl and others are often cited as exemplars. Ranciere (2009 p. 122) comments that the programme of relational art is, ‘to create community situations that foster the development of new forms of social bond.’ Such participatory practices also directly involved pedagogical contexts such as schools. Part of the Art of Change project, involving Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson involved a collaboration with pupils from George Green School in London and the Tate Gallery in 1995–96 to construct a piece entitled Awakenings, based upon the painting Resurrection (1924–27) by Stanley Spencer. The project was concerned with public participation in sites of regeneration which adopted a proactive and inclusive approach. George Green School is located on the Isle of Dogs, an area that experienced heavy community disruption and relocation for many families due to the construction of Canary Wharf business centre in the 1990s. Pupils were encouraged to create their visions for new awakenings which were then transcribed upon the format of Spencer’s painting. 81

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The work of Casco, established in 1990 in Utrecht, as a platform for experimental art involving public spaces involved work on the school as an institution. The project entitled Hidden Curriculum (2007) led by Annette Krauss (see Casco website) explored how learners negotiated the formal systems of the school environment. The central aim of the project was to try to unpack how the normalising structures and procedures of schooling and other institutions control how teachers and learners function, according to which categories of knowledge and how these affect human relationships. The outcome of these explorations was a series of art-based workshops in which students (15–16 yrs) produced visual and other forms of response. SCHOOL ART PERFORMANCES AND ICONOGRAPHIES IN ENGLAND

Having discussed some contemporary art practices, their puncturing effects and affects and the idea of the new, I turn specifically to school art education to consider its objects, subjects and iconographies. If we consider the last two decades of art and design education in England a number of ‘curriculum objects’ have been initiated and disseminated amongst the teaching profession in schools. (A similar situation applies to teacher education). In this section I refer to some of these curriculum objects with a view to exposing their aesthetic vectors regarding the production of learners and teachers as pedagogised subjects. How are teachers and learners formatted or assembled within such curriculum objects? How are teacher and learner identities performed, or in Colman’s terms, what dominant coding systems inform the performing of teacher and learner identities in school art education? Which icons are constitutive of school art education and what kind of pedagogies transpire? The first curriculum object I want to reference is the National Curriculum for Art in England in 2000 (DfEE 2000), this document states: Art and design stimulates creativity and imagination. It provides visual, tactile and sensory experiences and a unique way of understanding and responding to the world. Pupils use colour, form, texture, pattern and different materials and processes to communicate what they see, feel and think. Through art and design activities, they learn to make informed value judgements and aesthetic and practical decisions, becoming actively involved in shaping environments. They explore ideas and meanings in the work of artists, craftspeople and designers… (p. 14). What are the key assumptions of this text? Art manifests itself according to particular kinds of experience (visual, tactile, sensory) that generate feelings and thoughts which are ‘communicated’ through the formal language of art in a variety of materials. The phrase, ‘pupils use colour, form, texture, pattern and different materials and processes to communicate what they see, feel and think,’ subscribes quite clearly to a series of normative assumptions, or a specific iconography, according to which a learner produces art that reflects his or her feelings and thoughts to others who are equipped to interpret and understand. This view of artist, art object and spectator affirms an essentialist or expressive aesthetic (see also Addison 2005). This language of formalist aesthetics in tandem with ideas of skill and effective expression also tend to underpin assessment discourses in school art education. 82

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The assessment of drawing practice is a good illustration of this point, where drawings tend to be assessed according to formal qualities (tone, line, composition, texture, etc). Art work based upon observational practices is frequently assessed according to criteria that presuppose a clear separation between a transcendent subject and an external world. I commented upon this regulatory process and its dominant signifying code in an earlier book (Atkinson 2002, pp. 102–3) when referring to a series of guidelines for assessment which we can take as a second curriculum object. These guidelines were provided by the Schools Council and Assessment Authority (1996, replaced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 2000) for teachers where, in a particular exemplification of standards for art practice, three paintings are compared and assessed. The key assessment criterion is the term accuracy; each representational painting is assessed according to its level of accuracy in representing the subject matter. The key point here is that this term functions iconically to construct the efficacy of the paintings, the pedagogised identities of the students who made them and the pedagogised identity of the person who makes the assessment. Put another way as mentioned previously, the term, accuracy, takes the form of a master-signifier, an icon, which interpellates individuals into pedagogised subjects. As an icon it models the subjectivities of learners through its (or similar terms) continual performance in discourses of assessment. A third curriculum object in England consists of the GCSE examination in art (16 yrs) which requires students to produce an examination piece with preparatory studies showing the development of ideas, including critical/analytical material on the work of artists that has influenced the student. This is accompanied by examples of course work the student produces during the time prior to the examination. All work is examined according to a series of assessment objectives set out in an assessment matrix. The work is given a grade for each objective and then these individual grades are levelled out to arrive at a final grade. Thus art practice and work are constructed according to the discourse of the assessment matrix which constitutes a pedagogical assemblage. The assessment objectives indicate those qualities that can be demonstrated in students’ work and which can be measured for the purposes of assessment. There are four main objectives. The first is to be able to record observations, experiences and ideas in forms that are appropriate to intentions. The second is to be able to analyse and evaluate images, objects and artefacts showing an understanding of context. The third is to be able to develop and explore ideas in a variety of media and to be able to review and modify work as it progresses. Finally the fourth objective concerns being able to present a personal response through the work in order to realise intentions and also to make informed connections with the work of others. Terms such as ‘personal response’ and the ability to ‘record observations, experiences and ideas’ construct and position students’ work within a particular perceptualist and expressive understanding of practice. Again we can see that these assessment objectives constitute an iconography of assessment that models the subjectivities of learners through repeated performance. Another curriculum object, discussed in Chapter Three, concerns the research by Downing and Watson (2004) entitled School Art: What’s In It? Exploring Visual Arts in Secondary Schools. Although not extensive this research indicates that the 83

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content of the curriculum in many of the secondary schools surveyed consists of a strong emphasis upon developing skills and techniques. Painting and observational drawing were found to be dominant practices. Reference to artists tended to be restricted to the early twentieth century and consisted mainly of European male artists. Few references were made to late-twentieth century and early twenty-first century or to artists working before 1800. The research did reveal art departments that were engaging with contemporary art but they were in a minority, the main difference in these departments was that they embraced a wider practice (collage, printmaking, 3D), they made reference to more current artists, international artists and women artists. In these schools, although this was not found to be extensive, pupils are more likely to make art to explore meaning. However the research found that in most schools art was not viewed as a means to interrogate or to explore meaning. Generally speaking art in schools and its examination practices adopts a predominantly traditional paradigm of practice that assumes the notions of creative individuals, personal expression, the development of skill and practice and the production of an art object. Many schools have been successful in this enterprise. There is abundant evidence that in many art departments in secondary schools pupils acquire particular skills and make work that is visually expressive and refined. In art examinations art work tends to be read according to a particular process discourse (GCSE matrix) in which art practice and understanding are construed, regulated and normalised. The way in which the art object, the relation of the artist (student) to the object (as well as the examiner’s relation to both) are understood is through this particular iconography of practice which produces the pedagogised identities of learners and teachers. The effect of this regulation of practice tends to result in a particular methodology of teaching and learning (see Binch in Steers 2003 p. 23) often beginning with observational drawing and analysis and the use of sketch books in which to develop ideas, leading to a ‘finished’ piece of work. This linear process of production is reflected within the programmes of study and assessment levels pertaining to the National Curriculum for Art in England, though the new curriculum introduced in September 2008 has the potential to reconfigure practice and assessment. These curriculum objects constitute in Ranciere’s terminology, a particular distribution of the sensible (Le Partage du sensible), in which art practice, teachers and learners are subjected to the governance of a particular knowledge/representation vector that produces, in many schools, a series of surrogate identifications according to traditional iconographies of practice and objects. Ranciere provides a detailed account of this notion in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), it refers to the modes of perception and representation (and attendant values) that are immanent to social relations and practices, how such relations are inscribed with modes of practice and representation. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done. Strictly speaking, ‘distribution’ therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion (2004, p. 85) 84

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I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it (ibid, p. 12). For Ranciere the idea of the common refers to what constitutes a community, a consensus, such as its value systems, modes of representation, practices, rituals and so on, as well as to the particular social relations that exist therein. It is also important to acknowledge that the term sensible does not refer to common sense, but to what can be comprehended or apprehended by the senses in a particular community, by what is visible and speakable within specific social contexts. Thus we can consider the community of art education in schools as a particular distribution of the sensible in that particular forms of knowledge, practice and representation tend to define its general space. Put in more Foucaultian terms, the distribution of the sensible has some correspondence with processes of normalisation which format social or institutional contexts. Such distributions not only apply to school or university contexts but also to other educational sites such as galleries and museums wherein there exist particular distributions of the visible and the speakable that constitute their specific police orders. A disruption or intervention of the school art curriculum which precipitated new forms of practice would constitute a new distribution and new subjectivities, which is what I move onto discuss in the next section. THINKING THE PEDAGOGICAL SPACE DIFFERENTLY: ADDRESSING THE TENSIONS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ART AND SCHOOL ART PRACTICES

When we compare these two sites of performance whilst much contemporary art practices are concerned with a radical redistribution of the iconographies of art practices, the artist and the spectator, school art practices tend to reproduce and confirm (though not exclusively) a particular conservative distribution of understandings and attitudes towards objects and subjects of practice. Whilst much contemporary art questions the frameworks and boundaries within which art practices and objects are conceived, a great deal of school art education appears to reaffirm established values and practices, and perhaps there is a failure to mourn past/traditional practices in the light of present-day socio-cultural worlds. For school art practice the expressive subject is still a pervasive and dominant discourse (Addison 2005). This might constitute a failure to mourn particular ideas about subjectivity and object which are psychically and socially embedded and performed as discussed in Chapter Three (Butler 1997). Such ideas, in Butler’s terminology, form an assemblage of passionate attachments that provide secure frameworks for practice and comprehension and it therefore becomes difficult for them to be relinquished or redistributed (Atkinson 2005). An excellent visual metaphor that captures ideas of self-expression combined with natural perception and imagination, the transcendent artist interpreting the world before him through conscious, unmediated processes of perception and inscribing them into expressive form, is provided by Pollock (1995) when describing a sequence 85

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from Vincente Minelli’s film about Van Gogh entitled, Lust for Life (1955). The camera pans across an orchard zooming in on the blossoms which transform almost imperceptibly into the painted blossoms on the artist’s canvas. Here pure unmediated perception is transformed into artistic form. This clip demonstrates a particular distribution of the sensible, a particular aesthetic and affective vector of ontological relations which invoke a mute world of nature and the human world of sensation and cognition. In school art the efficacy of such inscription frequently relates to the degree of skill or technique employed by the student in the production of the art object. In much contemporary theory and art practice, as I have mentioned above, the perceiving human subject is conceived quite differently, as someone who emerges, reflexively, as a consequence of social relations and through the discourses, practices and their inherent power structures in which such relations are constituted and transformed. In these ideas there is no ‘natural unmediated perception.’ Here subjectivity is more transient, contingent and less tangible, the distinction between the subject and the social is blurred, the subject is formed according to and dependent upon identifications and relations with others. Such identifications do not provide true or accurate views of the subject but rather they can be seen as conceived within social imaginaries, iconographies or ideologies that structure understanding and which have powerful effects (Zizek 1989). Whereas in the former description of subjectivity the artist (and the art student) is seen as an independent being operating on the world and where the art object is a direct expression of such operations, the latter sees the subject emerging through social discourses and practices including gender, ‘race’, class, and sexuality. Here the subject’s body and psyche is formed through social and cultural processes but also as a body and a psyche that can invoke resistance so as to work on such processes and change them. If we adopt the latter notion of subjectivity in relation to school art practices we are able to inspect how institutional discourses such as the curriculum and examination discourses construct practice and thereby produce and regulate subjectivities of teachers and learners. This provides an opportunity to challenge the ideological ground and iconographies of such discourses. For example, the critique of subjectivity assumed by discourses of authenticity, originality, natural perception and selfexpression implies that a particular distribution of the sensible and its aesthetic governance becomes redundant. Such critiques encourage us to consider how artist, object and viewer are socially and culturally produced and conceived. How then is the art teacher constructed, that is to say, how is his or her practice formed, which ideologies of practice inform their teaching? What desires are driving their practice? These questions implicate a dynamics of power and fantasy within the pedagogical space. Similarly, regarding students, how are their perceptions of art practice constructed? How is the learner formed as a pedagogised subject? What desires inform his or her practice? Could it be that the learner performs in ways that are not recognised/valued by the hegemonic dispositions of the teacher’s habitus of practice and understanding (Bourdieu 1977)? Such questions demand extensive elaboration and thought. A socially and historically contingent notion of subjectivity also allows an examination of wider issues of art as a social performance and how 86

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such performances might lead to extending the ways in which, through art, students can explore and learn about themselves and their world and to develop visual forms that facilitate such exploration and learning. If we take on board recent developments in how we might understand subjectivity in order to rethink teaching and learning contexts of school art education it seems that we need to construct a new narrative space that breaks free from, but is able to incorporate, a modified or radicalised idea of the expressive subject and all the attendant notions pertaining to that ontological scenario. Is it possible or desirable to utilise the practices and ideas of contemporary art to produce a more effective pedagogical space so as to reconfigure the latter according to a new and more effective distribution of the sensible? Any change to the narrative space invokes a shift in forming and understanding subjectivity. Butler (1997) discusses Foucault’s work on the relations between power and desire: If, following Foucault, we understand power to be forming the subject […] as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are (p. 2). I have already hinted at the effect of such power-desire relations in school performances and their normalising curriculum objects that invoke a particular production of art practice and, by implication, processes of desire to attain a particular subjectivity on the part of teachers, examiners and learners. Such practices confirm their pedagogised identities through the distribution and dissimulation of institutional power. The power of the norm for Butler is that which operates the trajectory of desire and the production of subjectivity. It invokes a specific psychic reality for both teachers and students. The key point is that power is something on which we depend for our existence; to be a subject involves a desire to be subjected to particular effects of power through which we understand our existence, for example, as teachers or learners. The power of a particular institutional production of subjectivity, precipitates a desire for such subjection. Paul Ricoeur (1991) is also concerned with narrative identifications: The definition of subjectivity in terms of narrative identity has numerous implications. To begin with, it is possible to apply the play of sedimentation and innovation, which we recognise in the works of every tradition to our understanding of ourselves. In the same manner we do not cease to re-interpret the narrative identity that constitutes us in the light of stories handed down to us by our culture. In this sense our self-understanding presents the same traits of traditionality as the understanding of a literary work does. In this way we learn to become the narrator of our own story without completely becoming the author of our own life (p. 437). Though Ricoeur does not directly touch on the relations of power and desire that underpin specific narrative productions of subjectivity he does hint at how such narratives, central to understanding ourselves and others, are always linguistic devices 87

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to which we are subjected and through which we become subjects. Though the narratives of unmediated perception/imagination and expressivity still dominate the school art curriculum it is important that other, newer narratives of practice are engaged with in that such contemporary narratives are likely to be those that are most relevant and commensurate with student’s lives today. Such narratives introduce a critical and transformational project for art education in which is made possible a constant interrogation of practice, skill, technique and, most importantly, meaning. Such narratives question what it is to be an artist, learner or teacher and the nature and status of the art object, they interrogate the relations between subject and object and in doing so may precipitate new forms of subjectivity. Of course Ricoeur’s take on narrative identity does not seem able to respond to the challenge of Badiou (nor does that proposed by Butler), which views the subject as emerging through the disruptive forces of an event and subsequent truth procedure. These are processes which cannot be captured by current narrative forms because their effect is to disrupt them. But it could be argued that Ricoeur’s take on narrative identity might involve ‘radical narratives’ that transform identity, in a similar way to Badiou’s event and truth procedure. Whilst in the world of art some artists are able to transcend or puncture existing frameworks of practice it is very difficult for teachers, though not all, and their students to do this. But it does seem important to engage in this struggle if school art education (and other educational sites) is not to be viewed as the reproduction of particular practices and subjectivities but one in which new kinds of learners and teachers emerge through the exploration of meaning in visual form. Moving into a new narrative framing of practice means understanding ourselves differently and dealing with all the difficulties and uncertainties that go with this (Atkinson 2005). It is a frequent irony in my experience of working with Art and Design studentteachers over many years that many students with a background of critical and radical art practice move into the institutional framework of art education and within a few years become compliant to this regime. This could be accounted for through Butler’s articulation of the power of the norm to effect and repeat a particular performance and psychic identification. On the other hand it could be explained in Lacanian terminology that within the teaching and learning space of the school a traditional master-discourse is encountered and this generates a desire to comply, a perverse kind of enjoyment (jouissance) to assimilate. The psychical effects of such assimilation are worrying in that they invoke the perpetuation of specific pedagogic identities, a hermeneutic framework of pedagogy that maintains and reproduces a specific cultural capital. A similar perversion arose when some teachers welcomed the introduction of a National Curriculum in England because it provided them with a clear framework within which to function, whilst others saw this as a complete abrogation of their professional practice. I believe it is crucial for art education in schools and other sites to be able to respond to the contemporary practices and debates in which art practice is understood, and how its meanings are negotiated and re-negotiated. This is because these art practices and discourses are largely related to forming, questioning and reconfiguring human relations with others and the world. Such practices and discourses are 88

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concerned with the development of meaning, or challenging established meanings; they provoke and challenge our understanding of skill and technique; they query the idea of the artist and the art object; they problematise the relations between the artist the object and the spectator (or the person who responds to the work); they encourage us to think about who we are, how our identities are formed and about our relations with others and our worlds; they call us to address issues of social, cultural and political awareness. Generally speaking such practices and their attendant discourses provide new encounters for learning and how learning can be understood and it is through such encounters new, critical and reflexive subjectivities emerge. REDISTRIBUTIONS OF PEDAGOGIC SPACES

I have described practices, objects and subjects in the worlds of contemporary art practice and school art education. Whereas the tendency of the former is to puncture the boundaries of practice and knowledge thus reworking subjectivities and relations between bodies, objects, processes and practices, establishing new aesthetic and affective vectors; the latter tends to be a more conservative assemblage grounded in knowledge and established practices of cultural reproduction, though not universally, and a distribution of the sensible that manifests particular visibilities and ways of speaking about learning, learners, art and practice. Thus a general tension is immanent to the term ‘art education’ whereby the radical pursuits and iconoclasm of presentday art is awkwardly positioned alongside the more conservative ethic of education. Beneath this general tension both contexts are, in themselves, contested spaces when we consider, for example how the purpose of art education is defined, often quite differently, by teachers, researchers and government policy makers and similarly how the purpose of art is debated by different contingencies who might see it, for example, as an agent for social emancipation, a shock tactic or simply as an end in-itself. In this section I want to consider some pedagogical activities which incorporate a redistribution of the relations between teachers, learners and practice which, in turn, set up different affective and aesthetic vectors within which subjectivities and practices emerge. A redistribution of pedagogical relations and objects in line with a more participatory and emancipatory aesthetic project, in the sense referred to by Guattari above, institutes a reconfiguration of subjectivities and social relations that produce new and effective pathways for learning. A practical illustration of this can be witnessed in the birth and evolution of Room 13, an art studio established in 1994 and run by pupils in a Caol Primary School, Scotland (see Souness & Fairley in Atkinson and Dash 2005, Adams 2006). The really significant point about Room 13 is that it was largely initiated by the children themselves; they developed their own pedagogy. In Room 13 the children are responsible for their learning, the art studio is financially autonomous from the main school and the pupils run it as a business, employing adult artists to work with them. The project has grown to include a neighbouring primary school and other schools in the UK as well as similar projects in India, Austria, Nepal, Canada and other international locations. Here is an extract 89

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from a presentation by Danielle Souness, Room 13’s managing director (11 years old) during 2002–3. Picasso made some of the greatest works of the last century. They are beautiful and tell me a lot about what it is like to be an old man but even Picasso could never paint what it is like to be an eleven year old girl. I am not comparing myself to Picasso, but I can make art about being an eleven year old girl. Your problem as an adult is that you look at my work in a different way to the way you look at late Picasso. This I think is the biggest difference between Room 13 and other ways of working. It teaches us how to think, it treats our ideas, our dreams and thoughts seriously and, perhaps even more importantly, it allows us to find ways of expressing them. Last Year I became slightly interested in what is called body art made by artists like Franko B. While I wouldn’t be interested in taking things as far as he does, I did realise that you could make statements about important things by using the artist’s own body … people like Gillian Wearing and Tracy Emin do it in their video piece. When I accidentally broke a blood vessel in my eye it became obvious that there was a really good piece waiting to be made. Your eye is part of your body you can never see, so that was interesting and although my eye looked very different from usual it still worked the same so that was interesting too. I am really into text art and this is actually a text piece, though everybody who has seen it has never actually seen the text! It is called Rivers of Blood for obvious reasons though it also intentionally refers to Enoch Powell’s racist speeches in the 1960s. (p. 44) One of the adults working with Room 13, Rob Fairley states; Room 13 is a meritocracy that places visual literacy, the ability to think and the skills of visual expression at its heart. Its core belief is in the importance of each individual’s integrity and the expression of that individuality being essential to the health and wealth of the wider community (pp. 45–46) We take all well thought out ideas seriously and we are constantly on the look-out for new ways of expressing serious ideas. We are a group of artists working together, with the only difference being that one or two of us are technically (and arguably emotionally – though this is dangerous territory) more experienced (p. 49). Each Room 13 site has developed its own approach to learning and has involved other subject areas such as science and technology. There is a growing international community of artists, educators, children working together in participatory pedagogical contexts. Room 13 creates a pedagogical space within which ontologies of learning and teaching are different from most schools in that power-knowledge relations that underpin traditional pedagogical spaces are radically transformed. In Badiouian terms, Room 13 occurs within in the situation of traditional school cultures but is not part of it. It proceeds independently of the norms of a national education system rather like a virus producing new distributions and ontologies of learning and teaching. 90

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It seems to me more important than ever today, in the light of increasing rates of social change, and the fact that it could be argued that the education system is not working for many learners, to emphasise the gap between the dominant pedagogical system that constitutes in Badiou’s terminology, the state of the situation (and its included subjectivities), and those existing on the margins of the situation who are not engaged by the system but may have ‘unknown’ potential. In England a new curriculum is beginning to emerge, ostensibly providing more power to teachers to design their pedagogical agendas, to initiate much more learner-centred practices and to design personalised assessment procedures. Yet this development is ensconced within the regulatory machines of audit, inspection and league tables which exert powerful forces driven by statistical hierarchies, predicative criteria and planning which work against a pedagogical space of difference and dissensus which may, potentially, produce new and more effective pathways of teaching and learning. In 2007–8 the research project, Teaching and Learning through Contemporary Art, was initiated and involved a collaboration between Goldsmiths University’s Centre for the Arts and Learning, Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, secondary and primary schools in London and Liverpool. The aim of the research was to explore the use of contemporary art practices in schools in order to study their pedagogical effect and, furthermore, to consider if such practices produced new forms of pedagogy and new pathways for teaching and learning. One outcome of this research was the book, Teaching Through Contemporary Art: A report on innovative practices in the classroom (2008, Adams et al.). The research was undertaken as a response to Downing and Watson (2004) and the study by Enquire, National association for Gallery Education (2006) entitled, Inspiring Learning in Galleries (see also Burgess and Addison 2006). It studied the introduction of new teaching methods using contemporary art. In other words contemporary art was viewed as a pedagogical vector that had the potential to effect new ways of teaching and learning. During the project teachers worked with contemporary artists, visited exhibitions and held regular seminars with gallery educators and the art education tutors from Goldsmiths. The aim of this preparatory work was for teachers to develop new pedagogical strategies for working with contemporary art in their classrooms. An indicative response to the idea of contemporary art and its potential value for reconfiguring pedagogy was made by one of the teachers (2008, p. 23): Do we have to say? [what contemporary art is]…I don’t think we do. …it’s about designing a forum in which ideas can occur, rather than saying ‘this is it’…I think there’s a real danger if we go down the road of saying that it’s contemporary if you use a video camera…well not really – people have been making video art for forty years; it might be just as contemporary if you use a pencil…but – it’s a mode of thinking. I just hope that we’re not going to end up with a book that you can give to a teacher that says if you turn to page 32 you can see how to teach contemporary art, because I just don’t think it’s going to do that. It’s about setting up an environment in which the teachers and the students can become comfortable with a contemporary mode of thinking. Teachers found that through the projects they initiated they became more uncertain of outcomes and were continuously reconceptualising their pedagogic practice, whilst 91

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their students and children were able to function independently, often taking the work in unanticipated and sophisticated directions. Such processes involved a reconfiguration of teacher and learner identities in which such distinctions became blurred. Both teachers and learners became researchers. This situation echoes the outcomes of the research entitled Critical Minds (Burgess and Addison 2006), part of the Enquire project mentioned above, in which learners and educators functioned within a co-constructivist pedagogical paradigm that facilitated a mutually productive and participatory practice. The blurring of teacher and learner identities has significant implications for a deliberation of future pedagogical strategies. Such blurring, I would contend, demands developing what I have termed a pedagogy against the state in which teacher and learner identities are continually reworked according to unanticipated directions of learning pathways and the need to respond and support these. In passing, an interesting phenomenon of the research was that teachers were adopting what were once termed child-centred and experiential approaches to learning, but these were quite new to them due to their age (many enrolled on teacher education courses when child-centred pedagogies were replaced by more didactic approaches) and the suffocating effects of a target and assessment driven curriculum culture, which formed the totality of their teaching experience. The research tended to disrupt traditional conceptions and expectations of the figure of the ‘teacher-as-the-subject-supposed-to-know’ as learners took ownership and direction of their activities and new kinds of learning communities began to emerge extending beyond the classroom to involve the wider school community as well as artists. Such pedagogical spaces raise the issue of assessment (p. 37) and the way learning tends to be formatted in schools. As one teacher participant stated: One of the things that struck me was the significant difference between the realities of making art myself, how I go through processes and create things, and the often stifling nature of working towards examination criteria: the need to tick boxes. I was particularly depressed at the emphasis placed on the idea of producing final pieces. As though anything was ever final. I wanted to find a way of breaking this down for the students…no more preparatory studies, no ‘final pieces’…this new approach could be summed up as “make something, talk about it, make it again or make something else. Sheridan Horn (2009) teaches art at Trinity Catholic School in Leamington Spa and has been developing approaches to pedagogy involving the potential of performance art and participatory practices. She leads an art department which, in her words, ‘has been resolutely challenging the confines of an audit based culture with some success (2009, p. 161).’ In recent years she has introduced performance art practices which involve the whole school across the secondary age span. These practices challenge learner and teacher perceptions of art practice and lead to a critical investigation of practice and meaning. The movement entitled Kids of Survival (KOS) was initiated by Tim Rollins in 1981 in South Bronx, New York as a means by which to engage disaffected youths in learning through art practice (see Rollins pp. 1–10 in Atkinson and Dash, 2005). Rollins and his group produce large scale works based upon readings of well known 92

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The invisible man (KOS 2008 courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York).

Letter from Birmingham jail: 2 KOS 2008, (courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin gallery, New York).

literature that are made relevant to their lives. Feeling frustrated by the school system Rollins and some long-term members of KOS opened an after-school and weekend programme entitled the Art of Knowledge Workshop in a local community 93

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centre. This work expanded into a series of travelling workshops to disseminate the ideas behind KOS and the work has now expanded nationally and internationally. The images below are entitled The Invisible Man and Letter From Birmingham Jail:2. The first draws upon Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous novel and uses the text to explore issues of identity and invisibility within a contemporary context. The second image refers to the life and work of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and his confinement in Birmingham, Alabama. Beyond the school community, other forms of engagement with art practice offer a rich source for expanding our comprehension of participatory pedagogies. John Johnston, whose work was mentioned in Chapter Three, has been developing approaches to practice in community contexts in sites of conflict. He employs art practices as a means to promote social emancipation and mutual understanding and has worked in Northern Ireland, Palestine, former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The image below comes from a project he conducted with refugees in the Shatila Camp in Palestine. Many of the people in the camp had no or little experience of living in their own home. They decided to work with the symbol of a key and write about what the concept of home meant for them. These brief pieces of writing were then attached to each of their keys.

‘Home’ project at Shatila: Courtesy of John Johnston. CONCLUSION

In each of these pedagogical and practice spaces there appears to be a blurring of the boundaries between teacher/facilitator and learner and there is some affinity with Badiou’s notion of the subject emerging as a consequence of event-like processes that are precipitated by innovative practices. For Badiou the subject is always partly in the future, an excess, in contrast to the subject constituted by existing and assimilated knowledge and practices. Many of the above pedagogical practices discussed in this final section treat learning as a risky process, as something concerned with questioning 94

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assumptions and representations, as puncturing a hole in current knowledge and understanding within each specific learning context. In Badiouian terms each pedagogical practice attempts to move beyond the limits of a pedagogical situation in order to explore the potential for new pathways of learning. Encouragement to challenge assumptions and representations raises the potential to puncture a hole in them and so reconfigure practice. This challenge introduces a subversive approach to learning and is symptomatic of approaches to practice taken by many contemporary artists. Put another way initiating such opportunities for learning creates a subversive vector that has the potential to evolve new learner subjectivations. The interesting point for me about the more risky practices outlined above is that they prioritise the learner being challenged to direct his or her learning. Thus the emphasis is not upon knowledge (though obviously this has importance) but upon supporting pathways of learning that lead to knowledge and practice relations and also to a critical and reflexive awareness and interrogation of these processes. Spaces of teaching and learning are therefore open to dissensus, disagreement and debate. We cannot afford to allow such spaces to be simply spaces of knowledge or knowledge transfer if we are to encourage pedagogical subjects to experiment, challenge and so develop the potential for new local pathways of learning; nor can we assume that current forms of practice and understanding provide an adequate preparation for learners’ futures. This chapter has described a tension between contemporary art practices and more conservative school art practices grounded within a traditionalist curriculum (as reported by Downing and Watson 2004, for example). It has also considered other pedagogical spaces where this tension seems not to exist as keenly and which offer insights for more effective pedagogical practices and relations than those held by the grip of tradition and its attendant vectors of representation and practice. In thinking about this tension an important set of questions emerge which are implicit to the discussion above. Is the purpose of teaching and learning concerned with a distribution of the sensible (Ranciere) that is concerned with passing on established knowledge and practice? Or should it be concerned with acknowledging tradition but encouraging local curations of learning and practice that allow new pathways of learning that extend what it is to learn. Here the relation between education and emancipation is political in the sense described by Ranciere as a process in which that which was invisible or not yet known comes into existence so as to produce a new subject and its world.

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LOOKING AWRY AT ASSESSMENT AND THE ABROGATION OF BECOMING

Sometimes a curious contradiction exists between our everyday practices of communication, action and relation and those which inform our critical exploration of such practices and relations. This contradiction is summed up by Zizek’s (1989) reference to Manoni’s statement, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand meme,’ ‘I know very well…,’ (e.g., that money in itself has no value, that you are not a fully autonomous being), ‘but all the same…’ (in my everyday practices I act as though it does, I act as though you are). This indicates a striking disavowal between belief and practice. In the context of assessment we might venture that: ‘I know very well..,’ (that to assess art work is problematical, perhaps even undesirable), ‘but all the same...,’ (I continue to do it). The discrepancy between belief and practice is infused with complicities of power whereby although we may not believe totally in our specific social mandates the demands of our institutionalised practices suggest that we do. INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I explore the tensions between art practice and assessment in educational sites, the latter being a secondary form of practice in relation to the primary space of production and learning. In assessment practices the prior ontological domain of the learner’s practice becomes formatted according to a series of epistemological parameters and degrees of identity. Putting it rather simplistically, in assessment practices the outcomes of a learner’s practice are transformed into textual and statistical objects; they become inscribed within an assessment text. Boughton (1995) reminds us of the ensuing problem: Any attempt to use written statements intended to describe the range of complex and subtle characteristics of visual expressive work at any level of schooling will be less than adequate…The qualitative nature of the arts… cannot be effectively captured in words alone. Linguistic representation of the arts is at best reductionist and at worst misleading (p. 146). Lacan (1979) provides us with a similar statement concerning the relationship between language and human subjectivity: The signifier producing itself in the field of the Other (the symbolic order), makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as a subject (p. 207, my bracket). 97

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Once we move beyond the boundaries of prescribed action and a strictly anticipated form, assessment in school art education and other sites has always raised lots of issues for debate. There are those who believe that assessment is anathema to the very purpose of art action in educational contexts, which should be concerned with providing learners with an opportunity to explore and give visual and expressive form to their explorations. The argument runs along the lines that if each learner’s expressive practice is legitimate to their exploration then to impose external judgement in the form of assessment criteria would be inappropriate and would disenfranchise both action and expressive form. Put another way this argument prioritises the immanence of the practice-form relation including the important dimension of affect. If art is concerned with what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a bloc of sensations that are extra-discursive, to an intensive dimension, or what the Greeks termed aisthesis (force of affect) then how can this be measured by or reduced to discursive formats? There are others who would argue that as long as the assessment criteria are clear, precise and relevant to a learner’s practice then there is no problem. There is no doubt that in recent years school art assessment in England and elsewhere has become a problematical issue in that frameworks of assessment have been continually reworked and refined. In the case of GCSE examination (16yrs) and A Level examination (17–18 yrs) in England, as discussed in Chapter 5, they have taken the form of complex assessment matrices ostensibly purporting to effect a more rigorous, precise, objective and fairer form of judgement. The development of these systems of assessment are a clear manifestation, since the late 1980s, of the wider exponential growth of audit cultures which precipitated what I would call, the suppression or abrogation of becoming, or put another way, channelled becoming along prescribed routes. That is to say, this cultural phenomenon in seeking to quantify and standardise areas of practice in order to produce more effective systems of teaching, assessment and evaluation has effected a serious malaise; a darkening shadow beneath which we have been required to relinquish, and are therefore ceasing to acquire, key human skills and values that allow us to make effective judgements upon and responses to how processes of real learning and their affective dimensions occur, and focus instead upon final outcomes (see the comments made by Jon Thompson in Chapter 2). The notion of ‘effective judgement’ does not imply a direct relation between language and reality but refers to judgement that is grounded within the accumulation of wisdom from the poiesis of personal practice. I will consider the notion of poiesis shortly. This lies in stark contrast to current assessment practices that are now constructed and imposed more than ever through the grids, matrices and banks of criteria upon which we rely, slavishly and submissively, to inform our judgement. Mason and Steers (2006) refer to an initiative in 2002 by National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) to ‘consider the impact and effectiveness of formal assessment procedures in art and design, and to make recommendations for development and change where appropriate (p. 125).’ The initiative was adjourned due to the development of the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre’s (EPPI Centre) review of evidence of research into formal assessment, (The Effect of Formal Assessment on Secondary School Art and Design 98

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Education: A Systematic Description of Empirical Studies, 2005), but it did ask a series of indicative questions about assessment to generate debate: …is a national structure for assessment in art and design necessary? Can a wholly objective standardized system of assessment ever be designed for art and design education? Is effective standardization possible? Do attempts to achieve this affect course content and teaching and learning styles for better or for worse? What do we wish to assess? Student capability? Student potential? Student attainment/achievement? ‘Effective’ teaching? Do prescribed criteria tend to fragment knowledge, skills and understanding? Can the language of criteria ever be sophisticated enough to encompass the possible range of creative and visual outcomes? Should assessment be more holistic, authentic, negotiated? Is a ‘terminal test’ necessary? What does an examination assess that cannot be assessed through a coursework portfolio (Ibid, p. 25)? The scope of these questions is symptomatic of a lack, of an endless spiral of signification seeking to pin down an elusive quarry. This is reminiscent of the Lacanian objet petit a, the object cause of desire that fuels the drive for effective assessment, it is an object we seek but which we never attain (Atkinson, 2002, p. 125). The old story of Zeuxis and Parrahasios exemplifies this point in which the latter painted a veil on a wall and Zeuxis is so deceived he asks what lies behind the veil. The key point here, according to Zizek (1989, p. 196), is that the very ‘act of concealing deceives us precisely by pretending to conceal something.’ It is this ‘something behind,’ this elusive object which constitutes the objet petit a. The objet petit a therefore constitutes the object-cause of desire it is an object which does not exist but whose lack is covered in by fantasy. Similarly the idea of essence, in seeking the essence of a person, an art work, a piece of music or a novel, is an example of the Lacanian objet petit a, something we desire to grasp but which does not exist. During the practice of assessment are we driven in a similar way to look beyond the art work to an idealised object, to seek for this object in the work (an object which does not exist) in order to give meaning to the work? Do the assessment matrices and criteria constitute a fantasy framework that covers the lack of this object? Art in education is a socially defined practice in schools, higher education and other sites of learning, which is constructed around a series of supporting discourses that include subject knowledge and its interrogation, assessment discourses, ‘personal’ beliefs, programme or curriculum structures and pedagogical strategies. Such discourses come to form the boundaries within which art practices are conceived and policed. Therefore, we can ask in relation to assessment: Is the learner’s practice construed and performed according to such discursive parameters? Is the identity of the learner (and teacher) a product of such discourses? And if the answer to these questions is ‘yes,’ then we need to consider carefully how learners and teachers and their objects are constructed or commoditised and how such processes prescribe learning and teaching. Furthermore we might ask what desires are latent to such commodification processes. In the next section I take an oblique perspective on assessment in order to illuminate this practice as a form of commodity exchange and fetishism. The purpose 99

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of adopting an oblique perspective is, ironically, to try to obtain a clearer view of this regulatory process which is frequently viewed as an a priori function of education. A key question emerging from this awry gaze is to consider why traditional forms of assessment take the form that they do – and in order to answer this question I will try to unpack important assumptions relating to representation and identity. ZIZEK: SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek (1989) draws together Marx’s notion of commodity exchange and commodity fetishism with Freud’s interpretation of the dream. Zizek’s interpretation and analysis has relevance for a critique of the practice of assessment in school, college or university art education and helps to construct a somewhat unorthodox interrogation of assessment which I develop in this chapter. Zizek (Ibid, p. 17) discusses the abstractness of commodity exchange in which values are attributed to objects in the exchange process; this has developed in modern capitalist contexts into the exchange of money for goods whereby money is the ultimate value signifier. I would like to develop the idea that assessment practice can be viewed as a form of commodity exchange where assessment grades, value signifiers, are exchanged or substituted for work produced by the learner so that the value of the work lies, not in the work in-itself, but in the grade awarded (for which it is exchanged), in other words the value of the work lies not in-itself but in the Other, Lacan’s term for the symbolic order. The notion of the ‘real abstraction’ of commodity exchange outlined by Zizek (1989, pp. 17–21) is important in relation to its fetishising properties; it is not real in the sense of pertaining to specific material properties but in the sense that particular qualities are imputed to lie in the object. That is to say the idea of value has no specific material properties as such but it is taken to lie within the object. In assessment practice, where grades are awarded to art work, the real abstraction is not real in the sense of the art work possessing real properties, the work does not actually contain properties attributed by assessment criteria but assessment proceeds as if the objects of such criteria are found in the work. It is as though the art work is subject to a sublime material (p. 18) … a body within a body which is sustained by the symbolic order, the symbolic authority of assessment discourse within which particular skills, practices and objects are valued. For example, when we assess a drawing produced by a student we might use a fairly traditional terminology such as, texture, composition, tone, proportion, line to comment on the ‘qualities’ of the drawing. These terms are not in the drawing but applied to it from within a specific discourse of representation and practice which produces a particular visuality. They constitute the symbolic screen of assessment through which the drawing is viewed and constructed as a drawing; equally this screen constructs the drawer as a drawer. These terms constitute the real abstraction of assessment, they appear to lie within the drawing and, as such, constitute the fetishism of assessment of the art object. 100

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We are concerned with the ideological fantasy which structures social reality; in our case the social realities of assessment of learning and practice. Zizek illustrates this by comparing Marx’s formula for ideology, ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it,’ with the idea, from Manoni, that ‘they know very well what they are doing and still they keep on doing it.’ In relation to the the former the idea is that we can develop a critique of ideology and therefore remove the ideological illusion which will then allow us to see reality as it is. In other words once this false representation of social reality is removed we obtain a clearer understanding of this reality. But this fails to take into account the fact that in the example of commodity fetishism relating to money, at the level of practice an illusion still functions. We know very well that when we use money, (and in order to survive we must), that it has no magical properties, it has no value ‘in-itself ’, that it is symbolic of the social relations of production and so on. But in the actual practice of using money we act as if money is a direct embodiment of wealth. The problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such. They are fetishists in practice, not in theory. What they ‘do not know’, what they misrecognise, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity – the act of commodity exchange – they are guided by the fetishist illusion (1989, p. 31). Thus what gets overlooked is not ‘reality itself ’ but the ‘illusion which is structuring their reality, their social activity (p. 32).’ We might ask a parallel question, what is the illusion structuring the reality of assessment? There are some direct parallels here concerning assessment practice in art education and the fetishist illusion. We know very well in a general sense that awarding grades to art work is problematic, as indicated by Boughton above, and many would view this practice from a healthy scepticism and interrogation, hence the series of questions from Mason and Steers (2006) above. However the fact is that even though on the level of knowledge and debate many are uncertain and wish to question the value of assessment, in practice we still do it as though such questioning or irony did not arise. As assessors we are fetishists in practice. What becomes repressed in the practice of assessment is not that assessment is based on some kind of truth but that the authority of assessment is without truth. We behave as though convinced by the illusion that truth (of the work) is revealed by assessment procedures. This is very close to the psychoanalytical idea of transference which implies that meaning, in this instance as designated by assessment discourse, is to be found in the art work rather than conferred upon the work. Zizek (2009, p. 65) claims that, ‘the fetish is the embodiment of a Lie that enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.’ He suggests that in the case of fetishism, we are fully able to conceive reality rationally, but yet we somehow cling to the fetish object which disavows our rational understanding; otherwise the entire fabric of our particular form of existence is likely to dissolve. Here, he argues, the fetish allows us to cope with reality and mitigate its full impact. In assessment performances we might argue that although we are well aware of their inadequacies, ‘[we] embody [our] disavowed beliefs in the [assessment] fetish (p. 65),’ thus, as a fetishising 101

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process, assessment embodies the belief that we rationally renounce. If assessment and its fetishising processes were severely challenged this could entail a radical disruption to the fabric of pedagogical practices as they currently exist. Thus many participate in the practice of assessment saying, “Well, really we do it because we have to, but in reality we know that it’s very difficult to do and what really matters is that the learner has the opportunity to express herself through art practice.” Taking this perspective we should not be so concerned with the content of the artwork contained in its form, as ‘revealed’ through the assessment process, but with why the assessment process itself has assumed such a form. This of course relates to further questions: why does our desire to have art on the school curriculum become expressed as a desire to have an art curriculum of a certain form? What are the dominant commodity forms of art practice in schools and other sites and how do they govern and police learning (and teaching) and our assessment of learning? These questions could also be asked of art practice and education in colleges or universities. Equally in our construction of the art tutor, how is this a reflection of a desire for a particular commodity and how is this commodification of identity transferred into teacher education programmes? Brown and McNamara (2005, pp. 133–147) ask similar questions regarding the production of mathematics teacher identities in England. In discussing the fetish object Zizek draws attention not only to its form and underlying content (the art object signifying the learner’s ability as defined in assessment) but also to the domain of desire, the desire for the particular form-content relation. He draws an analogy with Freud’s tripartite structure of the dream: the story of the dream, the underlying or latent content of the dream and the unconscious desire of the dream manifested in the dream work. These three divisions can be transposed onto art practice respectively to produce first, the art work, second, the underlying content of the work as defined through the assessment process and third, the unconscious desire of teacher expectations; discourses, assumptions and values that prescribe art practice. I want to return to the question, ‘why has the assessment process itself assumed such a form?’ This leads into an exploration of assumptions underpinning the form which I believe are linked to the notions of representation and identity. In other words traditional practices of assessment in art in educational contexts are grounded in the concepts of representation and identity. I have often referred to the video produced many years ago by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA, 1986) in order to offer guidelines to teachers on issues to consider when assessing pupils’ work for the new GCSE examination (see Atkinson 2002, also mentioned in Chapter 2). It seems to encapsulate an almost eternal feature of more traditional criterion-based assessment that still persists today, some 20 years later. At one point the discussion focussed upon two drawings of a chair and the panel of teachers were asked if they could identify the most successful drawing. The universal response was that they could and they proceeded to say why, that is to say, they identified qualities ‘in the drawing’ which they believed made one more successful than the other. In making such judgements these teachers were positioning the drawings in a hierarchical relation to each other in terms of the qualities they 102

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perceived to be present or lacking in each drawing. They were also casting judgement on the respective levels of ability each pupil possessed. Finally these teachers were also positioning or producing themselves as particular kinds of teachers through the language of assessment they were employing. We can employ Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible (2004) here to consider how these two drawings were positioned by the discourse which produced a particular way of speaking and seeing these drawings. It is interesting to note that all the attention was given to one drawing and its particular qualities whilst the other drawing was completely ignored, it did not enter this discourse. Thus according to the distribution of the visible and the speakable promoted by the assessment discourse only one drawing was recognised or given value whilst the other drawing remained anonymous. Put another way the ‘other’ drawing did not appear in the teachers’ discourse. An important aspect of this assessment process is the fact that it presupposes established forms of knowledge and practice that proceed to inscribe drawing practice. In other words established forms of representation in the assessment process identify (or do not, as in the ‘other’ drawing) each drawing, drawer and, by implication, teacher or facilitator. More recent developments have introduced assessment matrices (eg, GCSE and A level) in which the ability and attainment of pupils can be plotted in relation to specific assessment criteria (see Chapter Five). In the worst scenario this has resulted in work being dissected according to a series of independent criteria and awarded a separate mark for each, the total of marks being collated to produce the final grade. Experienced teachers (Hardy 2002) have complained vociferously about these recent assessment systems, describing the ludicrous position whereby some students receive high grades simply due to the mechanistic form of assessment and not the work itself. The holistic process of art action is reduced to a series of discursive or conceptual elements; in other words this system of assessment is in great danger of creating a situation in which what is assessed is not the student’s art practice but a retrospective conceptual reduction of practice according to a series of almost axiomatic criteria. I can best illustrate this point through the difference between the terms experiencing and experience. The term experiencing refers to a temporal process, a series of temporal flows, whereas the term experience suggests a more substantial entity, something that happened, which is a reduction of the flow of experiencing temporalities to the form of a series of signifiers. The more we become concerned with experience by dissecting it in language the further from experiencing we move. I believe that this is what has happened in more recent assessment procedures. I suggest therefore that we prioritise the notion of experiencing with the understanding that we can never access this temporal flux ‘in-itself ’, and try to reduce the bureaucratic objects of current assessment procedures in order to create a more poietic approach to assessment. With Ranciere’s notion of distribution in mind, it is important to consider how specific distributions of visuality, practice and discourse constitute assessment and how then these create a prior framework which totalises art practice. The essential dynamics of the assessment process as outlined in the anecdote about the video above still persist though there are, currently, moves to address assessment 103

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to introduce ‘personalised assessment’ procedures as part of the new curriculum in England (for a more recent discussion see Addison 2010). The fetishising gaze and power of assessment is focussed not only on art practice but also upon the subject of assessment, the learner; in other words the learner is fetishised as a particular kind of learner. Lacan (1979) hints at this process when he writes: I must to begin with insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the function found at the heart of the institution of the subject (of assessment) of the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside (the assessment gaze). It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which – if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form – I am photo-graphed (p. 106, my emphasis and brackets). Thus the fetishising gaze of assessment produces not only the value of the art practice but also the learner (and teacher) as a subject/s of assessment, they are both photographed or configured by its discursive light. Some questions emerge from the previous discussion. Do we want a pedagogy in which learning is subordinated to teaching prescribed bodies of knowledge and assessed according to criteria which determine how well children have performed or, do we want a pedagogy in which teaching is subordinated to learning, which would demand a more flexible space for learning, where teachers themselves learn, from the different ways in which children learn, how to be more effective teachers/ assessors? These two pedagogical positions will determine quite different approaches to assessment. The first outlines a prescriptive pedagogy and established assessment criteria in which teacher and learner identities are clearly configured around established bodies of knowledge and teaching methodologies. The second is more complex and more unstable because it remains open to acknowledging and responding to the different, sometimes unexpected or mysterious ways in which learning is manifested and thus has to adjust any assessment practice to such difference. These are stark contrasts and it is probably the case that what actually happens or is desirable in effective teaching and learning contexts is that a blend of these two positions, and others, is developed, whereby the teacher makes room for the learner’s interests and individuality whilst offering skills and knowledge from cultural traditions. In England though, it is arguable that since the introduction of a National Curriculum, teaching has become more teacher directed and less responsive to learners’ differences of practice and assessment has become more prescriptive and normative though there are now signs of change as the new curriculum is introduced to incorporate ‘personalised learning’ and ‘personalised assessment’ processes. A reasonable and pragmatic approach to assessment might argue that once work has been set, initiated, or agreed and pupils understand their task then it is up to the teacher or tutor when assessing a learner’s art practice to try to understand the latter’s intentions, procedures and outcomes so that judgement is not pre-determined by 104

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established assessment criteria. If learners are given the opportunity to negotiate and identify their local learning tasks and objectives within a framework of enquiry then assessment similarly needs to be negotiated and flexible in order to respond to local diversity. The eternal difficulty is that any interpretation of the learner’s practice is always likely to be formatted within a predicatory framework of understanding by those charged with the task of assessment. WHY HAS THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS ITSELF ASSUMED SUCH A FORM?

In order to answer this question I will provide a series of tensional points, sketches in which practice is infected by the power of supplementary orders. These include reference to traditional aesthetic discourse, Ranciere’s three regimes of art, the Greek terms praxis and poiesis and Agamben’s notions of transmissibility and intransmissibility. Conventional assessment practices are concerned generally with making a ‘prescribed’ reading of the art practices and objects produced by learners, usually by reference to stipulated criteria produced by Examination Boards or programme criteria or in the more informal practices of teachers’ professional judgements. In this sense assessment constitutes an aesthetic discourse in that it aims to make critical value judgements about the learner’s art practice. Put in Ranciere’s terminology, assessment discourse articulates a specific distribution of the sensible in specific educational contexts. That is to say it presupposes particular ways of speaking about and organising visual practices. It constitutes a representational practice within which learning, learners and teachers are positioned and inscribed. Assessment aims to measure the progress and ability of learners within a particular course or field of enquiry; to assess degrees of learning, development of skills, capacities for invention and creativity, aptitude and capacity for study and practice. Equally criteria for assessment tend to be underpinned by established knowledge and forms of practice which form a predicatory screen. Put another way, common forms of assessment that employ banks of criteria as tools are grounded in the twin notions of representation and identity. In ontological terms such assessment practices are grounded in the certainties of being rather than the uncertainties of becoming. THE RISE OF AESTHETIC DISCOURSE

We can trace these ideas of representation and identity very briefly in histories of visual practices and productions and their associated discursive practices, from medieval contexts of religious imagery which performed an iconic function, the birth of aesthetic discourses, to the iconoclasm of current practices and critique. Giorgio Agamben’s (1999) writing on aesthetics in his book, The Man Without Content, supplies a parallel with assessment discourses in art education in the sense that the birth of aesthetic discourses he describes initiated a supplementary practice whereby a reflective discourse developed a powerful, almost hegemonic relation to art practice. It could be argued that it is from this discursive tradition that assessment of art practice as a discourse has emerged and thus it is from this tradition that we might gain some understanding of the current situations in which learners’ art work is assessed. 105

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Agamben provides a description of the rise of aesthetic judgement in the mid 17th century, associating this with, in his terms, the birth of the ‘man of taste.’ Prior to this time he argues that there was no correct or incorrect way through which to understand art (p. 13). Artists had always been involved in all kinds of making including what today we call works of art. A key transformation arose when the artist began to be perceived as the ‘creative genius’, the person who through his or her unique ability and skill was able to produce works of art which viewers could only respond to through their judgement and admiration, though of course only certain social groups would participate in such reflective engagement. This was no longer a time in which the artist, viewer and work existed in a kind of unified state for which the work imbued a religious or world conception, the expression of a universal, holy or eternal value. With the emergence of the idea of the ‘creative genius’, the artist’s creative subjectivity was separated out from the material of its expression. This illustrates the shift from an art that expresses a world view common to both artist and viewer, a view in which all are unified, such as religious iconography. The separation of the artist’s subjectivity from the material and form of the work, paralleled with the cultivation of reflective discourses precipitates a changed relation to the art work for the viewer. Critical judgement replaces the immanence of the object in which artist and viewer were unified. This critical stance towards the art work in the form of aesthetic discourse developed and became so powerful that the prior stance of penetrating the immanence of the work is totally replaced by a desire to represent the work within the discourse and framework of aesthetic judgement. …the work of art is no longer, for modern man, the concrete appearance of the divine, …but a privileged occasion to exercise his critical taste, that judgement on art which, if it is not actually worth more than art itself for us, certainly addresses a need that is at least as essential (Agamben, p. 41). This introduces a tricky paradox: are judgements on art worth more than art? Agamben notes that in Kant we see aesthetic judgement attempting to determine what the beautiful is but in doing so, ‘it holds in its hands not the beautiful but its shadow (see also Perniola, 2004), as though its true object were not so much what art is but what it is not: not art but non-art (p. 42).’ So that each time we exercise our critical judgement on a work of art this judgement belongs not to the art object itself but to the shadow of aesthetic discourse. In our desire to know and understand art we do not penetrate the reality of art in-itself but we become seduced by the discourse of critical reflection. This of course has direct implications for assessing the art practices of learners and we might want to consider the question: upon what basis does such assessment proceed? Here we enter the difficult terrain of the state of representation in the sense that aesthetic discourse or, for our purposes, assessment discourse, is a representation of a prior action and production. However, the state of representation defines the parameters through which we know and understand art action, or more pertinent to our interests, the learner’s practice and product. It is as though the state of representation acts as a superego controlling the limits of understanding. 106

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When we consider contemporary art practices whose purpose is so often to break the boundaries of representation another difficult scenario arises in that objects or events not considered to be art are employed subversively to make art, or rather, in the making process they challenge the way in which art is conceived or practised. That is to say, the practice of art itself involves its own negation through practice. Here production negates production and this transcends any aesthetic judgement tied down to established critical discourses. In fact such practice and its immanent negation runs ahead of aesthetic judgement by constantly opening up new possibilities for art. Art thus becomes radically other, beyond representation and open to the endless potential of becoming. What then are the implications of this rupturing process of contemporary art for the practice of assessment which tends to be grounded in established conceptions of representation and identity? RANCIERE’S THREE REGIMES OF ART

Jacques Ranciere (2004) describes three historicised regimes of art: the ethical regime, the representative regime and the aesthetic regime. Each regime arose during specific historical periods but all still exist in some capacity today. The ethical regime of images for Ranciere denotes the Platonic differentiation between images produced by the ‘true arts, that is to say forms of knowledge based upon the imitation of a model with precise ends (p. 21),’ which are of value for educating citizens and children in their respective positions in the community, in contrast to those images that ‘imitate simple appearances.’ According to Ranciere, though conscious of the value of the arts for educational purposes, Plato was concerned that their respective images, in poetry, theatre or painting, should advocate and support the existing social order and not be employed as a destabilising force. In other words the task of the ethical regime of images is to promote the ethos of the community, to know which images do this and which do not. The ethical regime could therefore be viewed as a form of cultural and social reproduction. The representational regime of art moves away from the promotion of a community ethos, though it is not disconnected, towards a more autonomous space of practice which establishes principles and rules for practice as well as criteria for evaluation. It is concerned with producing representational regimes which establish normative regulatory principles and practices of representation. It therefore defines ways of doing and making in art and ways of seeing and judging. ‘It is not an artistic process but a regime of visibility regarding the arts (p. 22).’ The representative regime establishes a particular distribution of the sensible in art and a particular police order consistent with this distribution. This regime can be viewed as concerning the establishing of a discipline of practice with its attendant principles and values, which evolve historically. Examples of the representational regime can be found in Western traditions of painting that once prioritised history painting over other genres such as landscape and still-life painting. Historically art school training advocated working from plaster casts before proceeding to life models. The early school art/drawing curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century was constructed 107

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according to a series of standards which began by working from geometrical patterns and then proceeding through a series of drawing exercises leading to working from real objects. In current assessment practices particular kinds of drawing skills tend to be valued which suggests the deployment of a particular representational regime. Following the establishment of particular representational orders and their respective disciplines of practice the aesthetic regime of art, emerging during the 19th century, does not act, according to Ranciere, as a regulator of quality and practice but, on the contrary, it interrogates the police order of the representative regime and its particular (normative) distribution of the sensible. In doing so it precipitates a reconfiguration in this distribution. In this regime art is concerned with the singular and with a distinctive mode of the sensible specific to art. However this produces a kind of contradiction in the sense that the aesthetic is concerned with dismantling the boundary between what is considered as art and practices that lie beyond. So although the aesthetic regime is concerned with singularity and a repudiation of normalising constraints, there are no criteria establishing singularity, no rules that circumscribe this singularity. Put simply the aesthetic regime questions what art is, it questions how we understand art. The aesthetic regime did not begin with decisions to initiate artistic rupture. It began with decisions to reinterpret what makes art and what art makes (p. 25). It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself (p. 23). The aesthetic regime establishes in one sense a radical pedagogic project in that the emergence of new form and a new distribution of the sensible expand our grasp of what it is to be human in this specific field of endeavour. The aesthetic regime can be construed as a material practice in which the invention or the appearance of new form points the way, or anticipates a coming community. This regime has particular relevance for art as material practice in a radical pedagogy which transforms the distribution of the sensible of the educational enterprise. Ranciere’s notion of the representative regime would appear to be consonant with assessment discourses predicated upon notions of representation and identity whereas the aesthetic regime if applied to discourses of assessment would appear to operate a disjunction in the sense of questioning the form in which assessment practice is manifested. POIESIS AND PRAXIS

The Greeks made a clear distinction between the terms poiesis and praxis. Praxis designates a will that finds concrete expression in an act, for Aristotle it meant ‘doing’ rather than ‘making,’ which denotes a practical activity in which ends are determined. Poiesis refers to a coming into presence, the unveiling of a truth or potential, an action that transforms and continues a world. Both are related to a production but they differ in that the production of praxis can be viewed as emerging from a prior subjective will whilst the production of poiesis involves the actual emergence of subjectivity through the unveiling of a truth (alethia). 108

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If we apply these terms to assessment, a poietics of assessment suggests that the ‘product’ of assessment lies beyond its practice, in that it denotes an emerging world. Here assessment has to contend with a becoming of practice and a new subjectivity; whilst in a praxis of assessment the product is pre-determined by a prior intention. Poiesis relates to the open pathways of becoming whilst praxis relates more to production linked to a specific intentionality prior to production. Agamben describes how the Latin translation of poiesis into agere shifted the meaning to a degree so that emphasis was placed upon the process of production, which entailed a move from an affirmation through becoming and the opening onto a world whereby the unveiling of a truth brings about the subject, towards the prior creative subjectivity of the artist which produces the work. If we travel forward in time to Marx and post-Marxist thought, we find the notion of praxis linked closely to the production of material life, and the evolution of a dialectical relation between practice and theory is encouraged for the purpose of developing social, ethical and political practices along socialist ideologies. In this context art practice becomes dominated by the notion of praxis and poiesis tends to be forgotten. The implication of this alignment with praxis is that art as productive action is viewed as the concretisation of a prior subjectivity and social vision; it involves a dialectic between the artist’s subjective skills, his/her reflective genius and the material through which the art object is formed. Thus the notion of poiesis, meaning the unveiling of a specific truth through which a subject emerges is submerged, lost sight of. The limits of praxis are defined by the established creative subjectivity of the artist, whereas the limits of poiesis lie beyond itself in the becoming truth of subjectivity. TRANSMISSIBILITY AND INTRANSMISSIBILITY

Agamben (1999, pp. 104–115) refers to the notions of transmissibility and intransmissibility which relate to changes in social and cultural organisations. Transmissibility relates to those social contexts where tradition is unbroken, that is to say where values and practices remain fairly constant so that in a sense there is no history, so that past, present and future run into each other due to an unchanging relation to the world and the social in general. Intransmissibility occurs when tradition no longer functions to inform the movement into the future so that instability and insecurity arise and the past no longer provides the secure reference points that are required for action. This characterises the state in which we frequently find ourselves today in the West where so many changes have occurred at such speed that it is difficult to maintain any sense of certainty. We only need to reflect upon technological developments, for example, to notice how much the world has changed and how much our relations to it and to each other have been transformed. Similarly if we consider population movements, Diasporas, asylum seekers, refugees, all have a significant impact upon and reconfigure our social contexts irreversibly (see Agamben, p. 108). If we situate art practice within this period of a loss of transmissibility Agamben argues that this becomes a new value for the artist as he or she seeks to break through the parameters of representation. Thus he insists that the task of the modern artist ‘is nothing other than the destruction of the transmissibility of culture (Ibid, p. 107).’ 109

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The artist is thus involved in producing work which becomes a vehicle for the intransmissible! HOW IS THIS RELEVANT FOR ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING?

The purpose of the forgoing discussion is to consider the social and epistemological backgrounds that impact upon assessment of learning in art in schools, Universities and other educational sites, assuming that assessment involves making readings and value judgements of art practice, and to consider the relevance of assessment discourse to the learner’s practice and production. Some issues arise which I will take in no specific order of priority. The discussion clearly points to an incommensurability between the ontology of art practice and the supplementary epistemology of aesthetic discourse, which, translated into the context of assessment of art in educational institutions, draws attention to a possible incommensurability between the ontology of the learner’s art practice and the teacher’s assessment discourse. If we conceive learning as a process of encounter then is an assessment process grounded entirely in representation and identity appropriate or effective (Ranciere’s representational regime)? Can we evolve assessment practices which do not abandon representation (that would be impossible) but which are more commensurate with local encounters of learning, with the idea of a poiesis of learning? What kind of practices and productions are learners engaged in? How do we deal with radically different or unexpected forms of production within assessment discourses? How are learners and objects of production conceived in assessment practices? How are learners’ and teachers’ subjectivities presupposed in assessment practices? If contemporary practice, which is pushing the boundaries of practice and presentation (of art as we know it); that is to say if, in Agamben’s terms, it is concerned with the destruction of transmission, then how can we attend to assessment of art practice which relies on transmissibility (representation)? A loss of transmission means a loss of reference points and so established aesthetic reference points become redundant. This seems anathema to a widely accepted conception of art education in schools, and other educational sites, where the intention is to introduce learners to cultural traditions and practices. Whilst it is perfectly reasonable to argue that learners should be introduced to specific processes, skills and techniques, it is also, I believe, important that such practices constitute encounters of learning and not simply reproductions of anticipated outcomes and form. There is nothing wrong with initiating learners into so called established practices if such processes are grounded in challenge and encounter which lead to poietic practices through which learners as subjects emerge. Though they may be grappling with traditional skills they ‘become differently’ as they are appropriated and deployed in each learner’s context of practice, in what I term their local curations of learning and practice. Could a modified re-emergence of the notion of poiesis provide a more commensurate pedagogical practice for responding to learners’ art practices? This would imply that in pedagogies against the state then pedagogy itself has to be poietic… so what does this require? 110

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If pedagogy becomes a poietic act, that is to say if pedagogy is concerned with the evolution of new subjectivities, emerging through learning encounters, as opposed to the re-presentation of prior or surrogate subjectivities, then its terms of reference must change. They must change in the sense that assessment can no longer attribute exclusively the process and production of practice to pre-established criteria but it should also be critically concerned with affirming new subjectivities emerging through learning encounters and expressed in new forms of practice and production that affirm the creation of new worlds. In other words assessment itself must become a poetic act! Here the notion of real learning as an encounter, as a movement into a new ontological state is crucial because it involves both a disruption of previous forms of understanding and action and an affirmation of new ways of thinking and acting. When learning is viewed as an encounter that precipitates new forms of practice, new worlds of practice, then new subjectivities have the potential to emerge. Thus assessment similarly could be reconfigured as an encounter with the ontologies of learners’ practices; with what in Chapter Nine, I call local curations of learning. It may be the case that more recent developments in approaches to assessment, advocated by the new curriculum in England are beginning to assimilate a more poetic function and these need to be considered, where the focus is placed upon the intentions and local pathways of learning. This idea of local routes of learning brings to mind the Peircian idea of the sign whereby: A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (Peirce, Collected Papers Volume 2. p. 228, my emphasis) This dramatises the poiesis of the ‘interpretant’ of the semiotic process, where the sign functions in some capacity for a becoming-subject, the potential to bring about a new or modified world. But this has to be set alongside the Lacanian notion of signification in which, ‘a signifier represents the subject for another signifier.’ The tension implied between local interpretants and the specific register of social signifiers seems to lie at the heart of the dilemma of assessment, and equally for pedagogical relations. For those charged with assessing work their ‘interpretants’ of practice are likely to accord with established grounds: discourses and codes of assessment (representation), whilst for learners their ‘interpretants’ in practice are likely to be grounded within more localised ontological parameters or grounds of practice and experience which may have no registered discursive ground. If we are to create a poiesis of assessment, a challenging notion, since the reduction implied by Boughton above is an endemic effect of language, then this practice has to be aware of the distributions of the sensible that a particular assessment practice endorses and perpetuates whilst simultaneously welcoming into the world new or modified becomings of learning and practice. This point does not simply apply to 111

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localised contexts of learning, though these are obviously very important; it has to be taken on board in the macro context of educational policies and how these conceptualise learners and learning, teachers and teaching. DIFFERENCE AND BECOMING: ASSESSMENT AND SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

How might we develop forms of assessment in educational sites that embrace the puncturing of stable but perhaps constraining regimes of representation and identity and which therefore allow the appearance of visual practices and their local truths which although present go unnoticed? In other words how can we create assessment practices which are aware of their constraining coefficients of learning and learners and which are able to transcend these? This would suggest a form of assessment that welcomes a dissensual, (in contrast to a consensual), process whereby previously ‘invisible’ practices and learners come into the light of recognition. Is it possible to develop assessment practices that avoid the predatory logics of representation and established pedagogies which exclude that which is not recognised within such logics? Can we escape the tendency to repatriate practice into the folds of existing worlds of practice and representation? Can we relax the language of assessment discourses that tend to indurate the practices of learners according to preconceived concepts which thus function as rigid control devices that constitute practice, learning and learners? Consider the following dualisms: experience-experiencing, thought-thinking, affect-affecting, representation-presenting, being-becoming. The kind of assessment process that I have suggested, a poietics of assessment, is primarily concerned with the second element of each dualism but does not discount the first element. It is simply that the first element emerges from the problematics, uncertainties and fluctuations of the second. The basic premise of this chapter is to insist upon the notion that learning is a process of becoming and that its assessment should try to avoid the petrifying tendencies of established patterns of being. If learning is viewed as an encounter then assimilated ways of being in a world are challenged; assimilated knowledge frameworks are punctured and the possibility of a newly configured world is affirmed. Yet we can imagine the argument, ‘but we have to have some criteria or some mechanisms by which we can assess learning, we need to know what students have achieved.’ This is difficult to deny within institutionalised forms of practice. However it is legitimate to enquire into the purpose of learning and therefore the purpose of assessment. For example, if learning in schools is geared towards those skills and forms of knowledge required for socio-economic development and its ever changing conditions then it is probably inappropriate to dwell within established, perhaps redundant, notions of teaching and learning that were relevant for previous epochs. It is undeniable that there have been changes in pedagogical practices and their technologies to accommodate social and economic transformations. Yet it is also undeniable that specific forms of knowledge and practice and their respective styles of teaching persist (Downing and Watson, 2004) and may prevent learners 112

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from engaging with changing socio-cultural worlds and, in relation to art practice, how the latter is used to explore the former. As mentioned above there may be some practices that we consider to have enduring value but the challenge is to work with these so that they ‘become differently’ through local processes and curations of learning. I have already discussed how Badiou’s notion of truth allows a way of thinking about learning in terms of local truth procedures through which learners aim to develop and evolve new forms of practice within their established frameworks of practice and understanding. If we consider real learning as a local truth procedure that attempts to move beyond the objectivity of a learner’s established forms of knowledge and practice, if we view real learning as a local process of curating, then our understanding of art practice, art education and pedagogy must remain unsettled and able to facilitate the new both in terms of learners reconfiguring their frameworks of practice and understanding and also in terms of the possibility of their local truth procedures transcending the frameworks of a teacher’s understanding of practice. In the previous chapter I described a learning situation in which the teacher had no fixed idea of an outcome when initiating a task in which the students explored the use of objects and their possibilities for art practice and exploration. The students’ discursive and practical interactions constituted a learning community in which they were able to discuss and share ideas and so develop and expand, with their teacher, their understanding of art practice and how it could be employed in this particular situation. In summary, do we understand the process of art education as initiating learners into existing practices and forms of knowledge, a tendency that Downing and Watson (2004) found quite common in their research? In this scenario assessment of learning has established predicates and is subject to the effect of the fetish as discussed earlier. It is also guided by the process of transmissibility as described by Agamben and by Ranciere’s idea of the representative regime of art. Or should teachers or facilitators engage in disturbing the securities and stabilities of established practices, that is to say, to challenge learners to explore what might be possible beyond such practices and so initiate unpredictable local truth processes of learning? In this scenario assessment is more problematic and more in line with the notion of poiesis and Ranciere’s ideas on the aesthetic process. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988, pp. 291–309) contrast the terms majoritarian and minoritarian in order to draw a distinction respectively between dominant and subaltern orders. I will conclude by considering these terms very briefly in relation to my concern with assessment and with the potential for a kind of autopoeisis of assessment both on the part of the teacher/facilitator and the learner; both conceived as two learning complexes. The minor is not to be viewed as outside or separate from the major but as constituting what are termed new lines of flight that deterritorialise major practices. An example would be the disruption of English language by dub poets or the constant creolisation of English. Young children’s drawing practices illustrate a remarkable facility for invention within acquired systems of practice and representation. We might regard new art collectives and practices or alternative educational sites as forming new learning communities - a 113

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becoming minor from within established forms of practice and representation. Thus the minor is not concerned with addressing established practices or subjectivities but with the invention and affirmation of the new; in the context of this chapter, new forms of assessment, new forms of learning/learners and new learning communities. An emphasis upon the becoming of learning is crucial to pedagogies against the state, or put another way, pedagogies of the event; pedagogies that attempt to anticipate new forms of life beyond the parameters of known forms. Equally a becoming of assessment needs the facility to oscillate between transcendent formations and their objects (established criteria, etc) and the local immanent processes of learning in which objects appear and through which the becoming of learning emerges.

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THE ARTIST-TEACHER

INTRODUCTION

The notion of the artist-teacher is not new and different versions of this couplet have occurred over time most commonly, though not exclusively, within higher education institutions in which artists have traditionally been employed as teachers on undergraduate and post-graduate programmes. We know that the Bauhaus, for example, employed many artists as teachers who each espoused an artist-teacher philosophy, including Walter Gropius and Paul Klee and different aspects of this pedagogical practice were employed by Richard Hamilton, Harry Thubron, Tom Hudson and Anton Ehrenzweig and more recently by Carolee Schneemann and Sonia Boyce. In each case artists have been able to bring quite distinct approaches to the pedagogical space in order to initiate and facilitate learning. However the development of practical-theoretical award-bearing academic programmes aimed at developing the notion of the artist teacher is a more recent initiative. In this chapter, following a brief overview and commentary of the Artist Teacher scheme in the UK, I provide a theoretical exploration of the relation of these two terms and how their fusion may constitute a new artistic-pedagogical configuration that has the potential to renew or reconfigure art practice, learning and teaching and their objects. For my purposes I will use the hyphenated form artist-teacher mainly to signify a potential for dialectic. THE ARTIST TEACHER SCHEME

In the UK the Artist Teacher Scheme (ATS) was established in 1999 by The National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) in conjunction with The Arts Council and it is administered today by a Management Group of stakeholders. In the scheme galleries and higher education institutions are able to provide a number of workshops, short and long term courses, including Masters Programmes. In his review, The Artist Teacher Scheme and Professional Development: some views and recommendations, Nick Stanley (2004) presents extracts from a Memorandum of Agreement for the scheme drawn up by NSEAD in 2001: Specifically the Artist Teacher Scheme aims to Provide opportunities for artist teachers to review and develop their creative practice in relation to the highest levels of contemporary practice in the contexts of higher education institutions and art museums and galleries; Widen access to specialist centres of art and design in higher education and provide rigorous, subject-based continuing professional development and, where 115

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appropriate, postgraduate certification for artist teachers, linked to postgraduate courses and research degrees so that artist teachers may take their practice to the highest level qualification appropriate; Significantly improve standards and teaching and learning in art and design in schools and colleges. The Artist Teacher Scheme is predicated on the simple belief that art and design teachers who maintain their own creative practice are significantly more effective in the classroom or studio and more likely to be satisfied with their work in education. Unfortunately too many art and design teachers lose contact with their own practice because of the pressures of every day life in schools and colleges (p. 3). Stanley makes a clear distinction between the artist teacher scheme and the ‘artists in schools’ initiative which often created tensions in relations between the artist and the teacher apropos of their respective functions whilst operating in the educational context. He continues: Against this historic background, the ambitions of ATS are to banish this sense of contradiction between artist and teacher. The combination of both roles in the single individual seeks to resolve the tension to be found at the heart of the artist-in-school approach. There is, in its place, a double articulation: the teacher as artist, and the artist as teacher. To energise this cyclical movement two major features are built into the scheme. The first is exposure to contemporary exhibitions of work during the course, and secondly, the input of contemporary artists and theorists both in the gallery and in the seminar room. This is a complex and constantly evolving relationship, [….]. At the heart of the ATS philosophy, and one which marks it clearly off from earlier schemes is a two-fold assertion: ‘first, that modern art holds the promise of change, and, secondly, that developing teachers’ subject knowledge through developing their skills as artists holds the key to unlocking the curriculum (p. 4).’ The impact of the ATS upon teachers, gallery workers, community educators and others has been significant as is demonstrated by further reviews (Galloway, Stanley, J. and Strand 2006, Hyde 2004, Adams 2003, Page, Adams and Hyde 2009, Hall, 2010). In each review there is a clear picture of students who are engaged in the ATS gaining a great deal both in terms of their own art practice and their pedagogical practices. The impact of the scheme upon children’s and older learners is generally positive, whilst some ATS students do not see curriculum development as the main purpose, others suggest that it has improved the quality of learning in schools and other sites. Hyde (2004) reports: Most participants in the level 3 ATS sample had changed their teaching practices (83%). Half felt they were now more confident as teachers (50%). Most felt that the course had changed the way they thought about their teaching (83%). The link between the grades of pupils in external examinations having improved as a result of being a participant in the ATS level 3 scheme is more difficult 116

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to quantify. However, a third said their pupils’ grades had improved but were unsure if this was linked to their participation in the scheme (33%). The responses given to the question, ‘Do you feel that maintaining your own creative practice makes you a better art teacher?’ illustrate that participants perceived that their practical work improves their art teaching. 80% of participants on the level 2 and level 3 courses thought this was the case. The same percentage also thought that maintaining their own practice made them more satisfied with their work in education. 90% felt it also kept them in touch with their students’ experience of learning (p. 4). In the more extensive report compiled by Galloway, Stanley, J. & Strand (2006) which evaluated the ATS scheme throughout the UK there is clear evidence of the impact of the scheme upon pedagogical thinking as well as artistic development. Interviewees cited effects on educational thinking and pedagogy, with examples showing teachers using their ATS experience in school (though for many this had not been the prime reason for doing the course). These ranged from simple replication of techniques, to referring more to contemporary works, to drawing on their greater confidence in discussion with students. Having regained their own zest for critical debate and/or studio language, teachers noted that the critical dialogue between students and themselves was much enhanced. Many found the experience of being a learner again stimulating (Ibid., p. ix) Though Galloway et al identified numerous strengths to the scheme some teachers were adamant that their reason for involvement was not primarily to serve their teaching but to develop their art practice. Overall the opportunity to work closely with galleries, artists and higher education institutions provides an opportunity for educators to interrogate their art practice and their approaches to teaching and learning within a supportive and critical community of enquiry. A more recent survey by Page, Adams and Hyde (2009) explored the impact of the MA Artist Teacher and Contemporary Practices Degree, offered by Goldsmiths University of London, upon participants’ art practices and the pedagogical strategies they employ in their respective educational sites. The study indicates that the great majority of participants believe that the Masters Programme has been hugely beneficial in both domains. They feel that their art practice and their pedagogical strategies have made significant developments. The chief reasons for this, they claim, relate to the fact that they are working together in a supportive but critical community of learners and teachers where they have been encouraged and challenged to explore their art practice and critical thinking. It could be argued that in both their art practice and pedagogical work many students on this Degree and other ATS Masters Programmes have extended their practice and pedagogical situations so that the ‘objects’ therein, learner, teacher, artist, practice, have been reconceived to produce a renewed ontological configuration. In other words it appears that many students have experienced processes of renewal that have moved them beyond their established configurations of practice and pedagogy into new and emerging configurations. Could it be then that the ATS 117

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programme is producing a new artistic-pedagogical configuration which, in turn, is precipitating new subject points or vectors? That is to say, is the artist-teacher initiative producing a new artistic-pedagogical configuration whose truth is being taken up diversely by educators in their respective situations? Put in terms employed by Ranciere (1999, 2004), is the artist-teacher scheme producing a redistribution of the sensible whereby both pedagogies and art practices are adopting new visibilities and discourses, new ways of doing, seeing and speaking? Both teaching (in schools, universities, galleries, museums, and other community sites) and art practice incorporate forms of action, affect and thought each functioning in their respective domains; the teacher working with learners, usually within institutional frameworks and the artist working with her ‘materials’ (ideas, plastic materials, social situations). There are those (Thornton 2005, Adams 2007, Shreeve 2009) who draw attention to a potential tension between the being of teaching and the being of art practice, arguing that the former is normally constrained by institutional pressures and demands, often from Government policies, whilst the latter, in contrast, is often concerned with breaking through the constraints of form and practice. Hall (2010, pp. 105–6) provides a detailed overview and analysis of the reviews and analyses of the ATS and he identifies five recurring themes, these are: 1. Professional identities - a re-framing of the teacher of art as artist-teacher; a hybrid identity fusing artist and teacher identities, but also highlighting tensions between the professional territories and cultures inhabited by artists and teachers. 2. Curriculum development - artist teachers generating innovation and increased confidence in curriculum content, delivery and assessment, engaging with contemporary art practice. 3. Teacher development - supporting personal and professional growth, developing new knowledge, understanding and skills. 4. Theoretical perspectives - the importance of artist teachers generating and using theory, conceptual frameworks for their work, analysing assumptions and beliefs, exploring art practice as research. 5. Reflective practice - the reflexive, learning dimension for artist teachers as they interrogate and problematise their own positions as teachers and artists; an epistemology of practice as artist teachers maintain a critical stance towards their practice. Hall acknowledges that the benefits of the ATS are not simple and straightforward and involve a series of tensions and dilemmas between art practice and teaching that need to be explored. But he continues: …the key concepts informing the ATS […] connected to what had for me been a deep-seated and long-standing issue: namely the rich conceptual seam of practice that lies in the interplays between one’s own work as an artist or maker and one’s teaching: a career-long concern that seems to me to be at the heart of art education (p. 106) 118

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The purpose of this chapter is to acknowledge such tensions, which are perfectly understandable in the light of recent years, which, in England, have seen an unprecedented increase in regulation and surveillance of the teaching profession and management of schools and also within universities. But I also want to acknowledge the double articulation signalled by Stanley above (artist-teacher, teacherartist) and the dialectic signalled by Hall that exists, as he states, in that space between art practice and teaching, and to proceed with a theoretical exploration of the potential of the artist-teacher considered as a vector precipitating a dynamic artistic-pedagogical configuration that has the potential to bring about a more effective redistribution of teaching, learning and practice through what I call local truth procedures, local vectors of truth arising from curiosity and disturbance. Crucial to the position of this chapter is the idea of truth expounded quite simply by Lacan (2008) in his short book, My Teaching, ‘the truth is always new, and if it is to be true, it has to be new (p. 17).’ It is crucial because I think it has great relevance for the work of teaching (and learning) as well as the practice of making art. Both are in fact dynamic learning processes. This little statement relates to the point that both domains, if they are to be effective, are concerned with processes of truth and renewal. We cannot say prescriptively that we know what teaching or making art is. We have to accept that we cannot be certain about such things and that new truths in each domain, through the consequences of action, will emerge and so change our comprehension and practice. In other words, put simply, teaching (learning), art practice and their respective objects are never fully known, they are always incomplete and always open to change and renewal. BADIOU: TRUTH, ART AND EDUCATION

Badiou (2005c, p. 9) discusses the relation between art and truth making the point that there are two categories of this relation, immanence and singularity. He asks a propos of immanence: ‘is truth really internal to the artistic effect of works of art? Or is the artwork instead nothing but the instrument of an external truth?’ In relation to singularity he asks, ‘Does the truth testified by art belong to it absolutely? Or can this truth circulate among other registers of work-producing thought?’ In order to answer his questions he discusses three historical schemas of art: romantic, didactic and classical which, he argues, in their respective schema only subscribe to either immanence or singularity, but not both simultaneously. He proceeds to develop a position between art and truth which is simultaneously immanent and singular by arguing that ‘art itself is a truth procedure,’ which is to say that truth is immanent to art in that its truth is presented in its immediacy in an art work and that such truth is singular to art because it is only to be found in art. Art is thus a ‘singular regime of thought,’ which is irreducible to other fields of practice and thought. Immanence: art is rigorously coextensive with the truths that it generates Singularity: These truths are given nowhere else than in art (p. 2005c, 9). I have mentioned above the tensions that are sometimes perceived as inherent to the notion of the artist-teacher whereby the function of art is to question, to punch holes, 119

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to break boundaries etc., whereas the function of teaching is often constrained by established forms of knowledge and tradition, regulated by curriculum bodies. This tension, echoed in some of the artist-teacher narratives below, is I believe due to a predominant understanding of education which, for brevity’s sake, we might term ‘reproduction,’ and the fact that learners need to acquire specific forms of knowledge and skill for their current and future lives. This form of education has been reinforced over the last two decades by the emphasis upon targets and assessment to the detriment of considering and developing other, perhaps more creative forms of education. Badiou proceeds to enquire into education and the pedagogical function of art (which I believe has direct relevance for the artist-teacher) and states: Art is pedagogical for the simple reason that it produces truths and because “education” (save in its oppressive or perverted expressions) has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them (ibid, p. 9). ….the only education is an education by truths (ibid., p. 14). An important following point is that we have to consider Badiou’s ideas on what he terms an ‘artistic configuration’ to gain a clearer grasp of the immanence and singularity of art as a form of truth. Badiou again: In the final analysis the pertinent unit for thinking of art as an immanent and singular truth is thus neither the work nor the author, but rather the artistic configuration initiated by an evental rupture (which in general renders a prior configuration incomplete) (ibid, p. 12). Badiou is referring to his notion of event from which a truth procedure emerges in the form of a human subject. In earlier chapters we have seen that for Badiou an event and subsequent truth happen in a situation but are not part of the situation, that they transform existing knowledge and practices of a situation. Such transformations are taken up locally through what Badiou terms ‘subject points’. In the field of art practice a truth is an artistic configuration initiated by an event which is then manifested through time in the form of artworks which act as the truth’s ‘subject points’ or vectors. This configuration constitutes an excess that lies beyond established frameworks of knowledge and has an infinite number of subjectivation points, in other words points whereby truth is taken up locally through individual (or group) practices. A particular artwork is therefore a local instance of the infinity of a truth procedure, Badiou states, ‘An artwork is the subject point of an artistic truth (ibid, p. 12),’ and further, ‘A work is a situated inquiry about the truth that it locally actualises or of which it is a finite fragment (ibid, p. 12).’ In the end, a truth is an artistic configuration initiated by an event (in general, an event is a group of works, a singular multiple of works) and unfolded through chance in the form of the works that serve as its subject points (ibid, p. 12). Can we apply these ideas, whereby the creative function of both art practice and pedagogical practice is to puncture holes in the knowledge of their respective domains 120

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in order to allow new truths to emerge, to the idea of the artist-teacher? Is it possible, in respect of the artist-teacher, to combine the immanent and singular truth of art, as described by Badiou, which is manifested through new subjectivations of practice, to the idea of a pedagogical practice which aims to facilitate local truths of learning and their diverse outcomes for learners by puncturing holes in knowledge? Can we anticipate the idea of the artist-teacher as propelling new artistic-pedagogical configurations whose truth is taken up differently in local sites of making, teaching and learning? The artistic-pedagogical configuration would thus be infinite, that is to say it would be open to an infinite potential of subject vectors. Such transformative processes applied to the notion of artist-teacher would involve an accommodation of different subject vectors relating to art and pedagogy which puncture holes in their respective domains and so produce processes of reconfiguration and renewal. It is important not to think of subject here as a unified concrete being but as a process evolving through the emergence of and experimentation with new forms of practice and understanding in both domains, art practice and pedagogical practice, which have the potential to transform and renew artistic-pedagogical configurations and their respective objects. CREATIVITY: NEGATION, DESTRUCTION, SUBTRACTION

Badiou discusses the importance of the notions, negation, destruction and subtraction, in relation to creativity, which I believe has relevance for this exploration of the theme of the artist-teacher. For Badiou creation in the sense of the new involves both a form of destruction in which the new dismantles existing orders and practices, and a form of subtraction whereby an event allows something indiscernible in a situation to come to light and the new to emerge. In a lecture on September 5, 2007, at the European Graduate School, he provides a meaning for these three terms which I will summarise. All creation, he explains, is the affirmation of a negation because the new cannot be reduced to the existing knowledge or laws of a situation in which the new occurs. Thus paradoxically the very sense of the new implies a negation. We can say that the new is akin to a negative exception to existing knowledge and practice. Thus it is important to understand that creation is an affirmative part of negation. Destruction, on the other hand, consists of the negative power of negation, that is to say it performs the dismantling or modification of existing forms of knowledge/practice. Badiou provides the example of Schoenberg’s ‘destruction’ of the existing tonal system of music through the introduction of the new dodecaphonic system. Here the new involves the dismantling of the dominant order of an old world; this is the negativity of negation. Perhaps destruction is too strong a term because it does not imply that older or current forms of knowledge or practice just disappear. They do not. Rather they are overtaken by newer forms of knowledge and practice. Subtraction refers to the affirmative part of negation; it is the process through which something which is not part of a situation, not recognised within a situation, provides a new possibility, subtraction is therefore close to the Lacanian Real as 121

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discussed in Chapter Two, which relates to a point of impossibility as viewed from the perspective of the dominant order. In Ranciere (1999, 2004) this element is described as ‘that part of no part’. This novelty is not simply a consequence of transcending an existing order; it is novel due to the fact that it stands outside of existing frameworks of knowledge and practice and comes, in time, to transform them. The new is therefore ‘indifferent’ to existing knowledge; it is subtracted from the latter. The new is not to be viewed as part of the negativity of negation. The most difficult problem, according to Badiou, is to maintain the concept of negation from the perspective of subtraction. It may be possible to consider these ideas in relation to the development of the artist-teacher programme in order to open new configurations for pedagogy and art practice. The development of this approach to learning, the notion of the artistteacher, creates a form of subtraction, (though not in the full sense in which Badiou employs this term), from existing norms and general configurations of art practice and pedagogy, in the ontological coordinates of the student, that affirms a new and more effective direction for learning. Put another way, the artist-teacher makes a potent intervention into the general organisation and ideology of teaching and learning, the existing state of a situation, for a particular artist-teacher, which has the potential to reconfigure the situation and its objects. The notion of the artistteacher has to embrace a double puncture, of art and pedagogical practices within local spaces of action. Does the hyphen in the term, artist-teacher indicate a gap that opens a possibility for renewal? Does it hint at a ‘materialist dialectic’ (Badiou 2009) from which new configurations of practice and pedagogy can emerge? Can we consider the artistteacher subject, that is to say a local vector faithful to the artist-teacher configuration, as a series of torsion points through which artistic-pedagogical sequences are renewed but always incompletely? Thus the subject of the artist-teacher is to some extent synonymous with the idea of a disruption of dominating conceptions of ‘artist’ and ‘teacher’. The artist-teacher as a subject constitutes a series of local enquiries which remain faithful to the intervention of the artist-teacher configuration and whose actions progress the latter’s truth. In a nutshell the notion of the artist-teacher suggests a subject of dissensus within prevailing orders of practice and pedagogies. The artist-teacher points to a gap, a torsion point which figures the possibility of a subtractive renewal. It does not point to the complete dismantling of teaching, or of the artist, but towards a reconfiguring which precipitates a new potential space for an artistic-pedagogical configuration where new subject points or vectors emerge to carry forward this new potential (truth). Badiou provides an extract from a poem, written by Malevich prior to the painting of White on White, which renders the importance of renewal and the need to avoid being constantly sucked back into established or worn out traditions and ideals; the poem advocates keeping alive the newness of the new. Try never to repeat yourself – not in the icon, not on the canvas, not in the word; if something in its act recalls an ancient deed, 122

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then, the voice of the new birth tells me: Erase, be quiet, stifle the fire if fire it be, so that the corset of your thoughts may be lighter and not rust, so that you may hear the breath of a new day in the desert. Cleanse your hearing, erase the bygone days, only thus will you be more sensitive and more white, for like a dark stain these days sagely lie upon your vestments, and in the breath of the wave you will find the furrow of the new. Your thought will find the contours and stamp them with the seal of your advance. (Quoted from Badiou, 2007, The Century p. 57) I believe this poem has direct relevance for the intervention of the concept of the artist-teacher into current pedagogy in art educational (and other educational) practices. In many ways it can be taken as a pedagogical position statement. And, as I have already hinted above and will demonstrate below, the effect of the more sustained artist-teacher programme at Masters Level, on a limited scale, is transforming local sites of practice and pedagogy. In these programmes educators are encouraged to interrogate the principles of their art practice and their pedagogical frameworks; to look more closely and challenge assumptions, ‘the corset of their thoughts,’ about teaching, learning and art practice and in a kind of ‘cleansed’ space to develop the potential, ‘the contours’ for new, more effective practices. Such programmes could be said to be encouraging processes of negation, destruction and subtraction in the domains of pedagogy and art practice that precipitate a redistribution or reconfiguration of relations between them. Here we return to two questions, what is a truth of pedagogy, what is a truth of art practice? To answer we need to revisit Badiou’s notion of event and think about this in relation to pedagogical events and art events. …an event, in affecting the world, always has a local rearrangement of the transcendental of this world as its effect. This modification of the conditions of appearing may be seen as an alteration of objectivity, or of what an object in the world is. The problem is then that of knowing to what degree this transformation of objectivity affects the beings of this world in their very being. […] The precondition for becoming a subject in a determinate world is that the logic of the object be unsettled. (2009, p. 222). This requires some unpacking in relation to art practice and pedagogy. A truth procedure following an event reconfigures the world in which an event occurs. In the book, Logics of Worlds, Badiou substitutes the term ‘world’ for the 123

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term ‘situation’ which he employed in his earlier book, Being and Event. I take the ‘local arrangement of the transcendental of a world,’ to mean the local ways of structuring a world, local processes of identification and difference in relation to how things appear in a world. In more general terms we can think of this as the underlying structures that allow someone to make sense of or give order to his or her world. This could be the specific world of a learner, or a teacher or an artist, for example. An event is something that happens to disturb this structuring of order, this ‘transcendental,’ or sense-making and whose consequences may create a modification or transformation of the appearing of objects, and the logics in which we understand objects from how they previously appeared and were understood. The term objects here can refer to teachers, learners, artists and their respective practices. Thus how does a specific learner (or learners) appear for a teacher? If we think back to my anecdote in Chapter Two about the student-teacher who experienced a serious disruption in his teaching, a local event, the appearance of learners before the event was quite different to how they appeared after the event. Equally this teacher’s conception of teaching and of himself as a teacher was transformed. This teaching incident can be unfolded into wider pedagogical contexts in order to reflect upon how learners, as pedagogised subjects, appear to their facilitators or teachers, what are the logics or assumptions that permit and police such appearing and how are such appearances changed as a consequence of pedagogical disturbances that interrupt the teacher’s performative logics? Furthermore, as Badiou indicates, the problem then is how this transformation of the learner (and teacher) affects their very being as learners and teachers within the pedagogical relationship. In relation to art practice similar issues arise, whereby a teacher’s assimilated conceptions and practices of art, the transcendental of his or her ‘art world’, are disturbed by a learner’s practice that does not register with the teacher’s conceptions. This can have the effect of modifying the conditions of appearing of learners and their practice for the teacher and so reconfigure his or her understanding of learners and their art practice. Equally for learners their conceptions of art practice can be expanded or reconfigured through being introduced to practices and ways of thinking about art that, for them, are new, challenging and sometimes intimidating in that their zones of security and comfort are disturbed. In relation to the artist-teacher, engagement with new or challenging forms of art practice can have the effect of transforming their understanding of art objects, practices and processes, in other words the appearing of these is transformed and has subsequent impacts upon their own art practice and their pedagogy. In summary a short answer to the questions concerning a truth of pedagogy and a truth of art is that in both cases a truth, following an event, is something that disrupts current understandings of practices and objects in both domains, and as a consequence changes our logics of understanding and the appearance of objects in each domain. But the truth, according to Badiou, is infinite and all we can perceive are finite instances of these truths. The infinite truth of pedagogy, I would suggest, lies in the evental sites and ideas of equality and emancipation as manifested in different historical periods by Socrates, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Dewey, Steiner, Montessori, Kergomard, Macmillan, Friere and others; whilst the infinite truth of art can be seen in the 124

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sensible form of an idea as manifested, for example in the ‘Duchamp event’ initiated in the early 20th century and still continuing today. Feltham (p. 110) argues that Duchamp introduced the radical idea of art as gesture rather than work, thus disrupting the count (local transcendental configuration) of its present situation of art practice. We can plot subsequent ‘subject points’ through the twentieth century where fidelity to this ‘Duchamp event’ is manifested, for example, in the work of Kaprow and the Fluxus Movement and more recently perhaps, some of the work of Michael Craig-Martin. The implications of these ideas concerning the dynamics of event and truth for the artist-teacher suggest a constant encounter in which art practice and pedagogy are renewed as a consequence of punctures and reconfigurations of both domains impacting upon each other. ARTIST-TEACHER NARRATIVES

In the following extracts from MA Artist-Teacher Programmes former students, all experienced teachers, articulate this renewal of artistic and pedagogical practices I have been discussing in relation to Badiou’s ideas on event and truth. I made contact, through a series of e mail ‘conversations’ with several students from different MA Programmes in England and they were kind enough to convey their thoughts to me. My initial request was quite direct, to ask if they could tell me about the effect that pursuing the MA had upon their art practice and their teaching/pedagogy. Did changes in art practice, for example, effect changes in pedagogy or vice versa? Did doing the MA establish a new dialogue between art practice and pedagogy? Were there any epiphanies that led to change in both art practice and pedagogy? I will present these narratives as blocks of text in the form in which they were sent to me and then try to summarise their content, though readers will see that these narratives ‘speak’ lucidly and concisely for themselves. ANNIE DERBYSHIRE

First of all, just getting the MA has been a boost to my self esteem and having the work in an exhibition and the gallery book was an unexpected bonus, a symbol of achievement. What I actually made I could not have told you I would have, I guess that there was a longing to be recognised for what I felt I had done (medals for mums) going against the grain of my own early experiences. Choosing to investigate textiles made me very aware just how much the art world had moved on and has given me added impetus to use it to investigate issues to do with women and other issues. It has also assured me that textiles was not a second rate craft activity as I had been encouraged to believe - therefore question everything! I am also more likely to link everything I do to broader issues, for instance, drawing and printing shoes is also about investigating identity e.g. conformity, status. In terms of students’ achievement, I have a much more open mind. I try not to use my preferences to influence what I think is good. I look much more carefully for areas of interest even if the initial appearance is a bit daunting. I am much more 125

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aware of the condition of the student in the classroom - their lack of autonomy. I try very hard to create projects that allow autonomy and experimentation, even though it can be exhausting. Maybe most of all, I have mostly stopped regarding the students as my surrogates, well, guess old habits die hard but I TRY! Because I now realise I have to create my own work and facilitate the students to make their own, and the best and most painful is as I read, when they don’t even realise that you did. DANNY MURPHY

I’ve been increasingly surprised by how ‘fixed’ I’d become about such a wide range of things. I’d like to describe the process of ‘enlightenment’ as being like someone switching on a light and suddenly everything was clear. Sadly, this is not the case and I’m not sure if I am enlightened or if one can actually attain this state or even if it’s desirable. The best way of describing the last two years is one of ‘unfolding’. I feel as if I’ve been actively involved in an act of unfolding myself. And what’s interesting now is that this process is continuing. Looking back, this capacity to change seems remarkable. I remember listening to someone else’s views quite dismissively, in the then sure knowledge that my ‘judgement’ was correct. I’m now astounded by my arrogance and the very idea of making a judgement on someone else’s thoughts now seems completely alien. At the time, when I suddenly thought that perhaps there might be ‘something’ in what they were saying, I felt as if this was a major shift in my psyche. I now realise that this was simply the start of the unfolding process and as more and more layers were deconstructed it became easier to ‘try on’ other ideas and to shift my thinking. One could liken myself to being a bit like an origami box, tightly folded by a hidden system, closed, and very certain about my ‘boxiness’. This opening up or unfolding might destabilise my ‘structure’ but it presents me with new possibilities or potentialities. Whether this closure relates to gender or age misses the point. Rather, the methodology would appear to benefit everyone. On reflection, I’m fairly sure that the period when I was formally educated coincided with the end of modernism. I was probably the last student to leave the last University or College prior to post modernist thinking entering. If I was a victim of modernist thinking then what was the root cause? I actually enjoy modernism and retain at my core a liberal/Marxist view of the world. However, this kind of broad brush political thinking inevitably results in one ‘adopting a position’ and, without recourse to new ideas, things tend to calcify. The ‘position’ hardens and what was once a challenging way of viewing the world turns into a pair of dogmatic spectacles that simply confirms a prejudicial outlook. With the absolute intention of avoiding the appearance of being too hard on myself, what caused this hardening of the intellectual arteries? Age, gender, my own history and, I’m sure, a pigheaded bloody-minded stubbornness are all contributing factors. But what I really think made me so entrenched in my views was that I worked in schools. And that I’m part of the ‘education’ system and therefore part of the problem. Schools tend to be inward looking and insular. They are governed by regimes that value the ratification of target driven policies by outside agencies who appear in our ‘communities’ with a prescribed view based on data generated by statistics. 126

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And as the head of an arts faculty, I’ll be actively promoting open ended programmes that emphasise creativity and offer students the opportunity to succeed within their terms and to work with real artists. I recently sat in on a very refreshing discussion with other art teachers, which was observed by a lecturer from this University, and after we’d swapped similar stories, the lecturer commented that we sounded as if we were in some way like ‘guerrilla’ art teachers, ‘succeeding despite of the difficulties of working in schools’. I think we are. Within the arts it’s essential that we promote a sense of mutual support and that we try to remain open to change. A key part of this is encouraging colleagues to maintain or renew their own creative ‘practices’ JUDE THOMAS

The ATS gave me the confidence to pick up a practice that was much neglected, due to the pressures and demands of a full working life. I really felt that I benefited from the discourse and critique of the scheme and was able to redefine a direction of work that was complimented by a renewed incentive to look deeper at different approaches to learning (including that of my own). It also gave me permission to make work and suddenly I had to make work and not allow excuses and distractions get in the way. It definitely gave me confidence with my teaching and learning practice. Alongside this practice I was exploring how questioning can be used as a scaffold to understanding contemporary art. I was working at BALTIC, with the Education & Public Programme (now the Learning team). Questioning is the approach that I used (and still use) when teaching or encouraging groups or individuals to connect with artworks. This aspect of the work sat alongside the visual research in a very significant way. The Artist-Teacher MA gave me the chance to look into learning theories in a way that I had not had the opportunity to do before. During my PGCE (Teacher Education Course) there was not time to research things thoroughly and during my time spent as a teacher, professional development was all very much related to immediate issues and activities. As a gallery educator I had detached myself from theory based learning it was becoming more action-based learning (again time played a big factor in this). This opened up a relatively new world to me, the world of academic research. It made me feel that I really knew, comparatively, very little. This was not a bad thing, it was very exciting and it made me consider my approaches and attitudes with much more scrutiny and understanding (instead of just getting on and doing with little time to reflect on pedagogy). It gave me more conviction in what I was doing. I think it justified the way that I worked with groups (and with young people especially). I think the impact that all of this learning had on my own practice was very subtle. I really struggled with how to correlate the two aspects of the MA, for quite a long time. I couldn’t see how they connected. However, it did impact, I began questioning my own work as an educator much more and the work of others this ultimately fed into my artistic practice. There was no event or disturbance as such but at some point I was able to value to this, although this took time. 127

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What has definitely had an impact is how the relationship between learning and doing develops. I have now started a PhD research. This is practice based and the same challenges are present about the relationship of practice led learning and how this sits alongside the academic learning. The only difference is I feel less worried about than I did during my MA. Ultimately the two are interconnected but it can be very invisible. I am able to appreciate this now instead of worrying about it. TESSA HODSON

Education in England is focused mainly on target setting, written through policy documents, which don’t seem to take chance or free will into account. Art is mainly created through experimentation and through a subconscious process but should not be stuck in that process whereby the end result seems to fail in terms of aesthetic beauty, artistic skill and narrative thought. As a teacher in England one battles against ideas that teaching art should be attainable through the assessment process which determines if the child is excellent, good, average or a poor artist. How do you measure progress? As artists we constantly battle with medium, the transfer of ideas onto a visual format and our own lack of skill, which we relentlessly strive to perfect. These are some of the reasons why I never wished to mark my pupils work because sometimes we fail and don’t succeed and my art room was always a place where everyone was an artist experimenting with mediums and thoughts. The Artist-Teacher course guided my focus with these matters, analysing what I wanted to achieve as an artist and a teacher enabling me to concentrate on expression, which was alive and individual, yet beautifully crafted. Pupils were given the opportunity for discourse and encouraged to become free thinkers working within their own abilities. The essays that I wrote during the MA course encouraged me to analyse the art making process and centred my attention on enhancing the creativity of my pupils no matter what the topic or material. ***** In each of these narratives these artist-teachers are confronting their scenes of recognition as both artists and teachers, they describe entering new ontological and epistemological spaces in which they negotiate between established paradigms of practice and pedagogy and emerging new sites - and in doing so negotiate new or emerging subjectivities. The narratives indicate personal changes in and attitudes towards practice and pedagogy; they do not specify moments of encounter or epiphany, more a process of gradual change and reorientation but which is clearly powerful and significant. However in each narrative, I would argue, there is a searching for ‘truth,’ as discussed by Badiou, in the sense of perseverance, sometimes revelation and often a reconfiguration of pedagogy and practice. In many ways they are quite remarkable testimonies to complex transformational experiences. Each narrative indicates a relational change towards pedagogical objects such as: Learner: “I have mostly stopped regarding the students as my surrogates, well, guess old habits die hard but I TRY! (Annie Derbyshire).” 128

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Teacher: “The best way of describing the last two years is one of ‘unfolding’. I feel as if I’ve been actively involved in an act of unfolding myself. And what’s interesting now is that this process is continuing. Looking back, this capacity to change seems remarkable. I remember listening to someone else’s views quite dismissively, in the then sure knowledge that my ‘judgement’ was correct. I’m now astounded by my arrogance and the very idea of making a judgement on someone else’s thoughts now seems completely alien. At the time, when I suddenly thought that perhaps there might be ‘something’ in what they were saying, I felt as if this was a major shift in my psyche. I now realise that this was simply the start of the unfolding process and as more and more layers were deconstructed it became easier to ‘try on’ other ideas and to shift my thinking (Danny Murphy).” And further: “I recently sat in on a very refreshing discussion with other art teachers, which was observed by a lecturer from this University, and after we’d swapped similar stories, the lecturer commented that we sounded as if we were in some way like ‘guerrilla’ art teachers, ‘succeeding despite of the difficulties of working in schools’. I think we are (Danny Murphy).” Practice: “I think the impact that all of this learning had on my own practice was very subtle. I really struggled with how to correlate the two aspects of the MA, for quite a long time. I couldn’t see how they connected. However, it did impact, I began questioning my own work as an educator much more and the work of others this ultimately fed into my artistic practice. There was no event or disturbance as such but at some point I was able to value to this, although this took time” (Jude Thomas). Assessment: “These are some of the reasons why I never wished to mark my pupils work because sometimes we fail and don’t succeed and my art room was always a place where everyone was an artist experimenting with mediums and thoughts.” (Tessa Hodson). COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Galloway, et al, (2006) in their extensive review, The Artist Teacher Scheme: Practice and Prospects, a national evaluation report to the artist teacher scheme management group, suggest that an apposite pedagogical model for the scheme is that proposed and described by Lave and Wenger (1991) in, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Most interesting however for the ATS is the concept of situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Chaiklin and Lave, 1993). This moves away completely from conventional notions of learning as a passive process of digesting factual information. Learning, say Lave and Wenger, is essentially social and involves participation in communities of practice as well as complex processes of incorporating theory into everyday work practice. The fundamental aspect of 129

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situated learning is the process of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ through which newcomers become part of a community of practice. Starting from notions of apprenticeship, and exploring the interaction between ‘newcomers’ and ‘oldtimers’, they trace ‘the gradual process of fashioning relations of identity as a full practitioner’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 121, in, Galloway et al 2006, p. 63). The popular term, ‘communities of practice,’ stemming from Lave and Wenger (1991) and from Wenger (1998) has become almost a byword today for investigating learning environments and it has some relevance and consistency for the artistteacher configuration. Characteristics of such communities seem highly appropriate. They are defined by a common field of interest in which members value each other as fellow travellers and learn from each other. Members of a community actively participate in discussion and debate which, stimulates, recasts or reconfigures learning and its objects. Galloway et al. remark that, What we know about the ATS experience aligns well with this model. Artist teachers stressed how they valued contact with other artists, and especially the teaching, criticism, comment and support of professional artists who are well established and able to bring their own work to bear in their teaching (ibid, p. 63). And further: If, as appears to be the case, artist teachers are comfortable to see themselves equally as teachers as well as artists when they learn together, then it is likely that their learning will be carried forward in both spheres, since learning for teaching will be as legitimate as learning to exhibit or to curate or for personal expression. We have seen that some (though not all) are very able to move between their artistic and their educational roles, and to transpose their learning from the former to the latter arena (ibid, p. 63). The four narratives presented above confirm the value of working together in a supportive, exploratory and critical community of artist-teachers and they highlight the personal dialectics between pedagogy and art practice that have produced beneficial developments for individuals in both domains. Thus the idea of communities of practice has clear resonance with the function and purpose of the artist-teacher programmes as they have been developed within the UK and, as a pedagogical concept, it opens up new and stimulating ways for configuring spaces of learning, which are hinted at by Stanley (2004) above. However I am not entirely convinced by this model. This is because it does not appear to take into account the disruptive or subtractive aspect of truth or the real which cannot be conceived within the knowledge of a community. It does not seem to account for the puncturing of a community, that is to say in this case, the immanent and infinite truth of the artist-teacher configuration which endures and which renders previous configurations incomplete. The idea of incompleteness is crucial here, art always incompletes art, teaching always incompletes teaching, learning always incompletes learning, the subject always incompletes the subject and communities always incomplete communities. In other words the notion 130

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of community of practice, though providing a very helpful model for learning, fails to take into account that unknown element or void within it which has the potential, through the trace of an event, to destroy or dismantle it, whereas immanent to the artistteacher configuration, as I have already described through the ideas of Badiou, is the possibility for radical renewal and a recasting of ontological domains. Communities of practices as envisaged by Lave and Wenger embrace a process of induction indicated by apprenticeship and the interaction between newcomers and experienced members. Such communities would thus appear to emphasise the acquisition of established customs, practices and knowledge, as well as openness to their evolution. But my concern here, to repeat, is with the Badiouian notion of truth which is in excess of established forms of practice and knowledge and bores a hole in them. It involves an ontological struggle through which new subjects emerge; through which worlds, objects and their values are transformed. I am not convinced that the notion of a community of practice is able to accommodate such subtractive processes. To the extent that it is the subject of truth, a subject subtracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation, (Badiou 2009, p. 9). The existence of truths, according to Badiou, is indiscernible to established communities and their bodies of knowledge and practice, therefore, is Badiou’s transformative theory of event and truth incommensurable to the theory of communities of practice? Or should we try to incorporate in some way the idea of rupture into this model for learning? KEEPING THE ARTIST-TEACHER INFINITE

It is important not to become entangled in essentialist forces in relation to the idea of the artist-teacher and to remember that this term, as indicated above, refers to an infinite process which is manifested in finite local practices. Peter Hallward, in relation to Badiou’s work on the subject, makes the important point, “Every subject persists insofar as it resists its conversion to an object (Hallward p. 16, Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice, Culture Machine on-line Journal). This hints at a political struggle against the ossifying tendencies of identity, institutional collectives, communities of practice, and so on. In this case the desire to pin down the meaning of artist-teacher, to give more precise definitions, is likely to reinforce established conceptions and what Ranciere (1999, 2004) calls their ‘police order’. Stephen Wright (2008a) takes a similar approach to the term ‘art’ in order to counter policing tendencies which he believes exist even in the world of contemporary practice: Every year, more and more artists are quitting the artworld frame – or looking for and experimenting with viable exit strategies – rather than broadening it further through predatory expeditions into the life-world. And these are some of the most exciting developments in art today, for to leave the frame means sacrificing one’s coefficient of artistic visibility – but potentially in exchange for greater corrosiveness toward the dominant semiotic order. 131

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Wright argues (2008b) that there is still a predominant framework or consensus that informs how art is perceived, that constructs what he terms art’s coefficient of visibility. This consensus is structured around three key ‘normative assumptions’ …that art necessarily and almost naturally manifests itself in the world in the form of an artwork; that art takes place through the intermediary of an artist, whose bodily presence and creative authority – upheld by the signature – guarantee the artistic authenticity of the proposition, underwritten by authorship; that art takes place before homogenised aggregates of visual consumers that make up the institution of spectatorship. He proceeds to ask how it might be possible to envisage an art without, artwork, authorship or spectatorship because, by implication, then art would become invisible as such and if this were to happen then there would be direct implications for those institutions that impact directly upon how art is conceived and perceived. …if it is not visible, art eludes all control, prescription and regulation – in short, all ‘police’. In a Foucauldian perspective, one might argue that the key issue in policing art is the question of visibility (ibid). And it may well be for this reason that ever more artists today are quitting the art world, sacrificing their coefficient of artistic visibility in favour of a more corrosively dissensus-engendering capacity in the dominant semiotic order. For to see something as art according to the dominant performative paradigm of the contemporary art world, is to acknowledge something terribly debilitating: that it is just art – not the dangerous, litigious, real thing (ibid). He provides an example of an art cooperative working outside of the art frame in Buenos Aries where the emphasis moves from performance to competence…a problematic term for many who remember the introduction of ‘teacher competencies’ in England during the mid-90s as the initial intervention of today’s burgeoning audit culture into the world of teacher education, which was renamed teacher-training! But Wright is employing the term competence in relation to those competences that artists and designers can use individually or collectively in contexts that are not framed by the ‘art world’, that is to say they employ their particular competences as artists to ‘non-art’ situations or contexts. These remarks by Wright upon recent developments in the use of artistic competences illustrate a fairly radical redistribution of practice and destabilising of the term art which are also discussed extensively by Bourriaud (2002, 2010) in his work on relational aesthetics and the radicant and by Kester (2004). In a parallel move is it possible or desirable to adopt a similar approach to pedagogy and its policing orders? Is it possible to do this in the light of the power of institutional formatting and norms? Is it possible or desirable today for educators to sacrifice their coefficient of pedagogic visibility in order to corrode current policing frameworks and establish more productive, equitable or emancipatory spaces for learning? After all not all policing orders are bad! Is it possible or desirable to interrogate the predominant frameworks in which teaching and learning are conceived, which construct their coefficient of visibility? What are the normative assumptions which underpin the coefficient of pedagogical relations? I suspect that these consist of knowledge/practice, 132

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teacher and learner; that the educational project is for those who know (teachers) to induct those who do not (learners) into bodies of knowledge and practice that are deemed to be of value. If we acknowledge that, to use Wright’s terminology, the coefficients of visibility of what it is to be an artist, a teacher, a learner, are always determined by a series of constructed relations and performances which converge and reform within social and historical locations, it becomes possible to interrogate the substance of these coefficients in order to expose complacency, cultural bias, social inequities and then reconfigure a more enlightened, equitable series of performances, competences and relations. I believe that the notion of the artist-teacher I have argued for above has the potential to conduct such interrogations and to renew processes of practice, learning and teaching. SO WHAT DO RECENT MOVEMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART AND PEDAGOGY IMPLY FOR THE ARTIST-TEACHER?

Many artists today, as Wright mentions above, are conducting their work outside of the framework of art and its institutional forces so that their work is difficult to conceive as art and this raises some difficult issues relating to recognition, objects and practice. Equally some artists have established independent schools or learning sites that are free from government regulation where volunteers offer their services as facilitators or teachers and where adult committees and learners propose learning programmes. There is a merging of art, pedagogy and politics in these recent movements. Whilst radical art practice precipitates a disruption and redistribution of regimes of practice and visuality, politics, as conceived by both Ranciere and Badiou, similarly disrupts current distributions of recognition, existence and belonging in that people not given the status of being recognised, except in terms of marginalisation, come into presence and as a consequence the social format is reconfigured. The possibilities for such redistributions come together in the pedagogical context in the form of the artist-teacher configuration whereby redistributions of art practice effect redistributions of teaching and learning. Here both the appearance of art practices, processes and objects and the appearance of teacher and learner have the potential to be transformed. In a reverse process the impact of such transformations is likely to produce learning practices and their outcomes that transform how learners are recognised or appear as learners and, consequently this will impact upon how we understand the tasks of teaching or facilitating learning. Ranciere’s (2004) notions of the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics indicate that art is political not simply because of its subject matter but because it reconfigures regimes of visibility and practice through which we comprehend art, and this is becoming more difficult today in the light of recent movements in practice. On the other hand political interruptions are, by implication, aesthetic redistributions of the social complex. In pedagogical contexts aesthetic and political redistributions occur through new approaches to art practice which in turn effect redistributions of the recognition of learners, and the being of teachers, in other 133

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words expanding our conceptions of practice has a direct impact upon the appearance of learners and learning, but equally the potential of such redistributions of art practice for learners may effect in turn learners producing forms of practice which have further impact upon teachers’ frameworks of understanding. Here the quasi-objects in the pedagogical space: teacher/facilitator, learner, practice, knowledge and so forth, precipitate social relations in which such objects form and transform, a process in which there is a configuring and reconfiguring of identities, teaching and learning, a ‘being-with’ where ideas and practices function in such a way that they impact upon and expand how we understand learning and teaching. In a recent interview Sean Dockray (see Elliot), who initiated The Public School in Los Angeles, and which is now established in other international locations, makes reference to the work of Michel Serres (The Parasite) and to the ideas of facilitator, quasi-objects and quasi-architecture. The key point made by Dockray relates to the notion of being-with and the objects that circulate between so as to form and transform this ontological relation. Quoting Massumi he talks about how the ball in a soccer game can be viewed as a quasi-object that influences how the players act; they don’t simply kick or pass the ball, the ball has a pull on the players, they follow it, watch it and so on. In this sense the ball as object attains a sense of agency, it has transformative effects So basically the way to think about it is there’s the quasi-object in relationship to the field and then the players are agents making active decisions, but at that same time they’re driven by the context of the game. If the ball goes one way they have to change accordingly, in that sense they lose some of their active agency. The players become objects controlled by the ball. And so there’s this back and forth between the object and subject nature of both the ball and players. It’s possible to think about pedagogical objects, mentioned above, in this way and consider how they impact upon and regulate pedagogical relations, and how we might change these objects to facilitate more effective relations. Certainly the notion of the artist-teacher as discussed above constitutes an interesting pedagogical object which has the potential to precipitate an ongoing dialectic between art practice and pedagogy so as to prevent ossifying tendencies. THE PEDAGOGIC TURN

In recent years education and pedagogy has become a major concern for some artists (Rainer Ganahl, Tino Seghal) or groups of artists (A.C.A.D.E.M.Y 2006), and the subject of conferences such as Deschooling Society (2010) and Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education (2009) as well as publications such as, Art School, (Madoff, 2009) and, ch-ch-ch-changes, artists talk about teaching, (Reardon, 2009). Much of this work is exploring alternative models of pedagogy and platforms for their initiation and development. Irit Rogoff (2008) discusses what she terms the ‘educational turn’ in relation to new economies of knowledge (its history, evolving technology, social organisation, distribution and management). Such work challenges us to imagine both what art can be but also what learning can be beyond the parameters of reproduction, packaged knowledge, traditional 134

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skills and the pragmatic and predictable application of knowledge. Thus what this work is attempting is a radical intervention into traditional sites and economies of institutionalised knowledge and a redistribution of such economies. Of course such interventions are not new, the 1960s and 1970s produced similar large scale protests and movements for change across Europe and elsewhere. But the key issue, argued by Rogoff, is to ‘separate thinking from its regulatory frameworks,’ which by implication means a transformation of desire and the desire for specific forms of subjection produced, according to Butler (1997) by the power of traditions and norms. The task is to relax the power of containment and the inducement of specific desires and to activate what we might term local curations of knowing and learning and their respective local epiphanies and vectors. Rogoff turns to Foucault’s work on parrhesia (2001) which is concerned with truth telling in a context of co-existence, and this returns us to the idea of truth employed by Badiou and the idea of real learning, in contrast to normative learning and its consensual and established norms or competences, as a struggle to move into a reconfigured ontological state. This idea of truth allied to real learning concerns what might be termed local epiphanies of learning that emerge centripetally from the spatio-temporal configuration of the learner (and teacher) and which invokes a complex of localised competences. Real learning then is concerned with a problem of existence, a move into a new ontological state, which, by implication means a puncturing of established and assimilated knowledge and competence on a local level. It entails processes in which learners (teachers, artists) are challenged to see beyond their current pedagogical or practice vistas and begin to create new and more expansive vistas and practices. Rogoff (2008) puts it this way: I think “education” and the “educational turn” might be just that: the moment when we attend to the production and articulation of truths – not truths as correct or provable, as fact, but truth as that which collects around its subjectivities that are neither gathered nor reflected by other utterances. Stating truths in relation to the great arguments, issues and great institutions of the day is relatively easy, for these dictate the terms by which truths are arrived at and articulated. Telling truth in the marginal and barely-formed spaces in which the curious gather – this is another project altogether: one’s personal relation to truth (Rogoff, 2008) CONCLUDING REMARKS

In relation to actual local learning processes the question about the truth of pedagogy is subtended by two concerns, firstly in any educational project traditionally there is a need to induct learners into established forms and orders of knowledge and skill, in other words those valued practices, knowledges and objects of culture that allow learners to have purchase within their world. But is this idea now out of touch with the worlds of learners, the worlds of artistic practices; does it assume that certain kinds of knowledge and skills remain unquestioned? Does it assume an idea of reproduction which might now be viewed as a redundant pedagogical project? 135

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If however we proceed from a position of production so that learning is not overregulated, constrained or dominated by a prior teleology, by already established targets, knowledge and objects to be reproduced, then this is where we might be able to work with local events and economies of learning as they happen and develop; which, for the learner, reconfigure the learner as a subject of learning. In this pursuit a new configuration has the potential to emerge for a learner within his/her world in a newly extended situation where ‘old’ or previous objects of learning are transformed and constitute a new function in the newly perceived and conceived situation. To repeat Badiou: an event, in affecting the world, always has a local rearrangement of the transcendental of this world as its effect. This modification of the conditions of appearing may be seen as an alteration of objectivity, or of what an object in the world is (2009, p. 222) Similarly for the teacher, present pedagogical objects, ‘learner,’ ‘ability,’ ‘assessment,’ can be transformed in a new functioning context where they are perceived and conceived differently and have a new function because pedagogy itself is transformed. Here learners, teachers, ability, assessment, are to be understood as homeorhetic systems (Waddington 1977), whose function and stability are determined within flows of temporality, that is to say, they are dynamic systems in place and time rather than static objects. So for the artist and for the teacher there are objects that function in a particular way according to how they are conceived or perceived within specific social and historical situations. In art education such objects, as mentioned above, are comprehended within specific ideological parameters (that change in time) within which the objects become meaningful. Such ideologies may refer to the child-as-learner as propounded by educational, psychological, psychoanalytical, philosophical or sociological theories of learning. Such objects may refer to theories and practices of visual representation, to particular skills and techniques and so on. The important artisticpedagogical issue, if we are to follow Badiou or Ranciere, would be not to allow such objects to ossify but to place emphasis upon the processes of learning and exploration, upon states of not-knowing, that produce spaces of potential for renewal or transformation of prior objects (and subjects) thus creating new artistic-pedagogical configurations. Thus for the teacher the truth of pedagogy is continued through the encounter of real learning through which more effective pedagogical relations evolve whereas for the artist the truth of art is continued through the disruption of established formaffect-practice relations to precipitate new relations, new forms, new affects. The truth of the artist-teacher therefore is the combination of each of these states of puncture so as to create an additional or supplementary dialectic between them that has the potential to propel new configurations in both domains. We might view the artistteacher configuration as an event which, slowly, produces the possibility for different subject points to amplify the truth of this event and so reconfigure the pedagogic space of art education. In pedagogical relations or practices as well as in the environs of art practice something has to happen in order for change to arise and project, as Malevich states, a 136

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‘new day in the desert.’ This would indicate the importance of decision in each space and in the conjoined space of the artist-teacher. A decision to go with the contours of an unclear but ‘engaging’ pathway of possibility and not be too constrained by established forms and practices. Many students on the artist-teacher programmes, as indicated in their personal narratives, hint at a personal recasting of ontologies of artistic and pedagogic practice that are triggered by the configuration of the artistteacher.

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MULTICULTURALISM, BEING-WITH AND THE RADICANT

The British Empire was the largest imperium of the modern world. The very notion of ‘greatness’ in Great Britain is inextricably bound up with its imperial destiny. For centuries, its wealth was underpinned, its urban development driven, its agriculture and industry revolutionised, its fortunes as a nation settled, its maritime and commercial hegemony secured, its thirst quenched, its teeth sweetened, its cloth spun, its food spiced, its carriages rubber-wheeled, its bodies adorned, through the imperial connection. Anyone who has been watching the Channel 4 series on The Slave Trade or the ‘hidden history’ of the West India Regiment or the BBC’s The Boer War will not need reminding how deeply intertwined were the facts of colonisation, slavery and empire with the everyday daily life of all classes and conditions of English men and women. (Stuart Hall, 2005, p. 27) YINKA SHONIBARE AND THE EXPANDED FIELD

Behind the hurly-burly of London’s Oxford Street in early December 2006 Yinka Shonibare opened a small exhibition of recent work at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. A single piece, a video entitled, Odile and Odette, made a lasting impression. Two female ballet dancers standing either side of a large clear screen resembling a mirror engage in a graceful choreography. One is black the other white and each mimics the other’s actions and expressions exactly, as if looking in a mirror. The video is of course drawing directly upon Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; to Odette who, under the spell of the sorcerer von Rothbart, is turned into a swan by day and a woman by night, and to the sorcerer’s daughter Odile who Prince Seigfried regrettably mistakes for Odette, his true love, and asks for Odile’s hand in marriage. The video is a striking work that raises issues of identification I will discuss in this chapter in relation to the idea of multiculturalism. In echoing each other’s movements there is no originator, no dancer leading and the other following, each movement is simultaneous with its counterpart; each movement is reflected in its other. The work reminded me to some extent of Lacan’s ideas on the imaginary first formulated in his work on the mirror phase. Here the very young uncoordinated child’s identification with the unity of the image of him or herself constitutes, for Lacan, a misrecognition of self in the form of the image. The child sees herself in the external idealised form of the image and takes on this identification. For Lacan this is the beginning of the imaginary, the birth of the ego; a process that continues throughout life in combination with Lacan’s other two orders, 139

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Yinka Shonibare: Odile & Odette IV (2005–06, Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London).

the symbolic and the real. The stories and images in which we identify ourselves are a little like this early process of identification which is grounded in misrecognition but these later processes are infected with plays of power that are sometimes overt but often concealed. For example, imaginary identifications directly inform undisguised racist practices and discourses but frequently they remain obscure within institutional practices. Sara Ahmed makes a similar point in an unpublished manuscript quoted by Zizek (2010, pp. 43–53); she is discussing the television reality series Big Brother when one of the celebrity contestants Jade Goody was accused of racist conduct by well-meaning liberal Channel 4 viewers. Here Goody comes to represent the ignorance of white working-classes in contrast to the liberal viewers who are ‘not racist like that.’ Ahmed makes the point: By saying racism is over there – “Look, there it is! In the located body of the racist” – other forms of racism remain unnamed, what we could call civil racism. We might even say that the desire for racism is an articulation of a wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named, or by operating under the sign of civility (Ahmed, quoted in Zizek 2010, p. 45). Attempts in art education to address the power of the image and the social construction of visuality can be witnessed in recent movements in the USA and the UK concerned with visual culture art education (Freedman 2003, Duncum 2006, Tavin 2003). This movement is based upon earlier developments in the creation of visual cultures as an academic field of study bringing together a range of disciplines including art history, sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies. 140

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We can read Shonibare’s video through a series of generalised remarks, as the black dancer filtering her experience through the actions of her white counterpart; suggesting that black experience is filtered through whiteness (see Dyer, 1997); that the world of the black person is a white construction; that what the black person sees in the mirror is an image constructed and hegemonised by white culture. But the work can be read symmetrically in the opposite sense in that the white dancer’s view of her mirror image is constituted by a black identity; that whiteness is produced through a black presence; that the white person sees herself in an image that is inclusive of black culture. What this general and somewhat essentialist analysis comes round to is the position that the other is in some way always a part of the self. We can take this idea a little further. In the video there are two dancers, one white the other black, yet in their actions there is no difference, it is difficult to make a separation into distinct entities, to identify one apart from the other. There is no subject-object division here in this work; rather it consists of a dynamic continuum. It is not possible for each dancer to define herself because they exist in a continuum of relations and transformations. MULTICULTURALISM

Since the 1970s in the UK multicultural policies have taken on different guises but they have been grounded in the notions of difference and identity, initially in the 1950s and 1960s in a fantasy of British identity, which still exists amongst some white groups today, and then in terms of identities and differences between cultural or ethnic groups. Multiculturalism appears to be a laudable initiative to respond to the conditions and needs of mainly black communities, it is grounded in a belief of respect for cultural difference, whereas for many black people it could be argued that their desire for political equality is based far more upon an idea of sameness, that they hold the same values and are entitled to the same rights as their white counterparts. The idea of the ‘Same’ in relation to Badiou’s work on ethics will be considered in the final chapter. When we look back to the 1980s the political struggles that dominated the fight against racism in the 1960s and 1970s turned eventually into struggles over cultural identity. Whereas the politics of anti-racism could be said to present a unifying force, a politics of culture presents a fragmented situation in which each group seeks to assert its particular identity thus creating reactionary desires for past traditions as well as precipitating new divisions. Kenan Malik (2002) writes: In place of the progressive universalism of James and Fanon, contemporary Western societies have embraced a form of nihilistic multiculturalism. We’ve come to see the world as divided into cultures and groups defined largely by their difference with each other. And every group has come to see itself as composed not of active agents attempting to overcome disadvantages by striving for equality and progress, but of passive victims with irresolvable grievances. For if differences are permanent, how can grievances ever be resolved? 141

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Thus some would argue, in agreement with Malik, that since the 1980s multiculturalism has created more and more divisions between communities than working towards a more respectful series of common values. Malik gives the example of Bradford where for most of the post-war period Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus lived together in relative harmony but since the 1980s these groups have increasingly attended different schools and live in separate areas of the city. He also describes how the business community has become divided along community lines and how the Asian Youth Movement, a beacon of anti-racist struggle, was destroyed by multicultural tensions. The development of multiculturalism in the UK can be viewed not as a demand from immigrant or marginalised communities but a response by the authorities to the discontent of mainly black and Asian communities in relation to their violent protests against racial inequality and social injustice. These underlying social inequities were not sufficiently addressed which, Malik argues, has led to deeper divisions that have made cross-cultural cooperation more difficult and less desirable. The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’ (Malik, 2001). Of course it is crucial to have some understanding of where we are standing when we make such comparisons and judgements and this in itself is not so straightforward. We are frequently unaware of the plays of power and ideology through which judgements are performed. Though Malik has a point about the failure of multiculturalism as an ideology, and the processes of cultural and religious retrenchment that have occurred in recent years, when we take a look at many social interactions happening in our cities, fusions of practice and ideas proliferate. In other words, the day to day reality in our cities is in many ways a multicultural translation where music, dance, language, debate, food, art and other activities involve a fusion and interaction of ideas and practices. Bourriaud (2010) puts this point succinctly: We must move beyond the peaceful and sterile coexistence of reified cultures (multiculturalism) to a state of cooperation among cultures that are equally critical of their own identity – that is to say, we must reach the stage of translation (pp. 27–8). Edouard Glissant (1996) writes: The world is becoming creolized, that is to say that the cultures of the world are furiously and knowingly coming into contact with each other, changing

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by exchanging, through irremediable collisions and ruthless wars – but also through breakthroughs of moral conscience and hope (p. 15). Shonibare’s video presents a more affirmative statement in which values are not reduced to cultural diversity, where difference is not ignored but can be transcended in order to work towards, but perhaps never fully achieving, more equitable and respectful social orders. Here, in this work, the black and white dancers do not exist independently of each other but as a series of dynamic relations and transformations where the being of each dancer is interpenetrated by the other, this constitutes a dynamic relational ontology of ‘being-with’ rather than an ontology of separate existence. EDUCATION AND MULTICULTURALISM

In educational contexts the social project of multiculturalism aims to influence the politics of social practices, such as pedagogy, in order to generate inclusion. The idea of inclusion seems to be based upon a general idea of respect for all. In the UK it is possible to look back over the previous half-century and identify particular approaches to cultural concerns each of which placed emphasis upon a specific sociopolitical project. Initially, before the term multiculturalism was deployed, the main strategy was concerned with assimilation into the dominant culture during the rise of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s; this was followed by the notion of social integration which sought to give recognition to different cultural or ethnic groups. Growing dissatisfaction, mainly on the part of those being ‘assimilated’ or ‘integrated’, with the failings of both strategies led to increasing social unrest and the emergence of a more politicised agenda to address inherent and institutionalised racism. Thus in the 1970s multiculturalism denoted a move by the authorities to address racist practices, particularly those occurring within institutions, such as educational institutions, but which went largely unnoticed. In the context of school art education multiculturalism as an educational project echoed wider socio-political movements and today traces of different approaches can be found in teaching and learning contexts (see Dash 2010). One very popular approach is concerned with developing cultural awareness and an understanding of cultures within and beyond the West in order to gain a broader grasp of people, their traditions and practices. This allows learners to see beyond their specific cultural practices and traditions in order to appreciate those of others. Much work has been done in this area (see Mason 1995, Chalmers 1996, Dash 2010) and this approach underpins many multicultural projects in schools. As I will argue shortly, such approaches tend to presuppose a metaphysics of the root (Bourriaud, 2010), they are underpinned by ideas of identity, difference and inclusion. This work attempts to eradicate cultural and social bias in that it aims to prevent the imposition of a curriculum that only celebrates and perpetuates the values and practices of the dominant culture to the exclusion or marginalisation of others. Another way of proceeding is concerned with translation, practice and understanding. Here the emphasis is not upon identity and difference or even inclusion, which sounds rather controversial, even heretical. This approach takes for granted 143

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that a curriculum has to cater for all learners irrespective of their social or cultural background. In other words it is based upon the notion of equality, not in terms of some goal to be achieved or a guiding principle, but which has to be continually verified in practice. Put another way, this approach does not assume inequality, because all learners are assumed to have experience, intelligence and the capacity to learn. The key factor concerns the facilitation of learning. This implies that we place less emphasis upon a curriculum that is grounded in representation (of cultural traditions, practices, rituals and values, etc.,) towards one that is grounded in becoming; through the encounter of learning. Similarly the ideas of identity and being that are central to much multicultural thinking in pedagogy have to be modified in favour of the notion of becoming. Whereas multiculturalism is based upon and celebrates the ideas of difference and identity, a more fruitful approach is to move beyond them and think about developing pedagogies, prompted by my reading of Shonibare’s work, where learners and cultures do not exist in quasiindependence of each other but as a series of dynamic relations and transformations. This constitutes a dynamic relational ontology of ‘being-with’ rather than an ontology of separate identities and existence. The book by Ingrid Pollard (2004) entitled, Postcards Home, gives a second exemplification of these ideas of inter-connection, transformation and homeorhesis. The term homeorhesis was coined by C.H. Waddington and described in his book, Tools For Thought (1977) to refer to stability in dynamic systems, in contrast to homeostasis, which refers to stability in static systems. Homeorhesis seems an appropriate term for describing changing stabilities of dynamic relations and transformations of individual and group inter-actions that occur in different social sites. In the section of the book entitled, Wordsworth Heritage, Pollard presents a series of images on a postcard format; it depicts a group of ramblers in the Lake District in North West England pausing for a rest. They are dressed in traditional hiking clothes and footwear. When I first encountered this work my initial response was of surprise; something seemed ‘out of joint’. All the walkers are black and this seemed out of place in this landscape. But why should I react with such feelings? It was a salutary lesson for me concerning the unconscious presence of (racist) presuppositions and how they shape perception. Pollard writes: Going to the Lake District over the years, collecting postcards, deliberately searching out England’s timeworn countryside ‘the way it’s always been’, searching the postcard stand for the card that shows a sunny upland scene with a black person standing, looking over the hills. Never finding it. I fantasise about encountering that image amongst the England of craggy rocks, rushing streams and lowly sheep (2004, p. 58). Pollard’s work disrupts what Ranciere (2004) terms the distribution of the sensible; the ‘system of divisions and boundaries that define among other things what is visible and audible in a particular aesthetico-political regime (ibid., p. 1)’. With this notion he is seeking to explore the ways in which social communities are formatted; how this formatting regulates and defines social spaces and positions; who is able to participate within this particular formatting and who is not, what parts individuals play according to the format of particular communities. 144

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Ingrid Pollard : Wordsworth Heritage. 1992 Billboard various sites UK. (courtesy of the artist). WE DON’T NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE OTHER!

Zizek argues powerfully that we should not be too concerned with the liberal attitude, springing from a sense of guilt, that we should try hard to understand the other, this, he argues underpins liberal multiculturalism. Working from another position, informed by psychoanalytical theories of the subject, he maintains that it is not possible to understand the other (given that we cannot fully understand ourselves), this should not distress us and that a better way forward is to accept distance and then try to establish codes of discretion and conduct that allow a working together to resolve conflicts and problems. Zizek often tells the amusing story of a man who thought he was a grain of corn and would be eaten by a chicken. After seemingly receiving successful treatment he immediately runs back to his therapist in an extremely distressed state. Asking what his problem was the therapist tells him that he should know by now that he is not a grain of corn. “Ah yes,” said the man, “But does the chicken know?” The key point here is that the chicken represents the Lacanian big Other, the symbolic order that regulates and allows people to function, this is the ideological function of the big Other which knows for us. Thus the problem today is not that we should understand the other, this is the liberal fallacy, (such understanding will, inevitably invoke an anamorphic vision that itself promotes exploitation and power), but that we need a new symbolic order in which we can work together at our problems and treat each other with respect and decency. The implications of accepting this idea for educational contexts relating to multicultural or inclusion policies is to accept the tension between distance and working together. This tension is manifested 145

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in Nancy’s conceptualisation of “We” which I will come to shortly but first I want to explore Nancy’s intriguing notion of being singular plural which I believe has direct relevance for the socio-cultural issues I am discussing in this chapter and which relate to Shonibare’s video. ON BEING SINGULAR PLURAL

In his extended essay, Being Singular Plural (1991), Nancy proposes an ontological state prior to being which he terms “being-with”. He argues that throughout the history of philosophy being-with has been subordinated to being. The ontology of being-with is markedly different from an ontology of “self ” or “other” or, indeed, an ontology of difference. This ontology would appear to rest upon that which constitutes “with” and, on one level, this must be constituted in and through language. On another level it implies co-emotionality, co-existence, co-appearance and on yet another level it must include a politics of the “with” and an ethics of the “with”. For Nancy being-with is also a thinking-with as such (ibid., p. 31). Being-with thus assumes a relational ontology. For Nancy the notion of ‘with’ lies at the very heart of being and this implies a co-originality that has potent implications for comprehending social practices, such as learning and teaching or, social policies such as multiculturalism or inclusion and their ensuing practices. The notion of being-with abandons traditional ideas of individuals or individual subjects and replaces these with the notion of singularities. However we are encouraged not to think of singularities as a collection or collective of separate entities or ‘simple singulars’ but as singularities that are indissociable from being-with-many (ibid., p. 32). We cannot think of the singular without simultaneously also thinking of the many, there can be no singular without the plural. In a nutshell we cannot think of being without an already-existing being-with. So that being-with is more originary than individuality, which rests upon a separation of self and other. Thus ideas such as originary, existence and essential are superseded respectively by co-originary, co-existence and co-essential, and this leads into thinking about being-together and how we might facilitate such co-existences within different social contexts. How, for example, might we think the notions of beingwith or being-together in educational practices such as teaching and learning? We live in a world context where many communities face real difficulties and where traditional figures such as ‘nation’, ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ seem redundant when referring to the globalised world of markets and capital, or they have retrenched within reactionary identitarian or fundamentalist positions. It is telling to note that current discussions of the effects of globalisation, global mobility and global communities, the free flow of goods and capital lie in stark contrast to new barriers being erected around Europe, in the Middle East and elsewhere to keep certain people ‘out’. This contemporary apartheid is described by Zizek (2008, 2010) as one of four instances where global capitalism is failing miserably. There seems to be in some cases a crisis of identification and in others a desperate desire for identification. Put another way it is as though the protective screens of such ideological devices, that Foster (1996, p. 140) alludes to in citing the Lacanian gaze, have been shattered 146

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and their respective symbolic orders no longer hold us or provide local states of stability. What we require, it could be argued therefore, is a new symbolic screen, new codes of conduct and new forms of praxis. Nancy’s discussion of the symbolic is important here. He argues that the value of symbolism is in, “making a symbol, that is, in making a connection or a joining, and in giving a face [figure] to this liaison by making an image (ibid., pp. 57–58)”. He reminds us that the Greek, symbolon, refers to a piece of pottery broken in two when friends or a host and his guest, parted, joining the two pieces would then later act as a sign of recognition. The symbolic is therefore synonymous with the notion of ‘with’ it gives a form to this relation which ‘in-itself ’ is not presentable but which involves a co-appearing. Nancy’s notion of co-appearing adds a further complexity in the sense that, for example, in a pedagogical relationship where teaching is subordinated to learning co-appearing relates to a relation which is not predictable or knowable in advance; which begins from a sense of uncertainty or unknowingness; but which relies upon a willingness to engage and explore potentials. Co-appearance, then, must signify [...] that “appearing” (coming into the world and being in the world, or existence as such) is strictly inseparable, indiscernible from the cum or the with, which is not only its place and its taking place, but also – and this is the same thing – its fundamental ontological structure. That Being is being-with, absolutely, this is what we must think (ibid, p. 61). Contemporary theory in the field of cultural studies is preoccupied with the idea of the other, the other outside the self but in relation to it (Levinas) which invokes a focus upon alterity. The other begins to be thought of from the moment the self appears to itself as a self. Self-consciousness involves the logic of a self known to itself as other than itself. What is lacking, according to Nancy, is the moment of the ‘with’. Emphasising self-other relations fails to acknowledge the more fundamental relation of being-with which demands a different ontology, a thinking of existence in terms of ‘with’. Nancy (p. 75) is therefore arguing for a knowledge and praxis of ‘we’, but there is no universal ‘we’… …on the one hand the “we” is said each time of some configuration, group, or network, however small or large; on the other hand “we” say “we” for “everyone”, for the co-existence of the entire universe of things, animals, and people that is mute and without “us”. “We” neither says the “One” nor does it say the adding together of “ones” and “others”; rather, “we” says “one” in a way that is singular plural one by one and one with one (p. 76). This is a key statement to consider the place-time dimensions of being-with and the implications of such dimensions for the place-time of pedagogic relations. For example the place-time (ontology) of real pedagogic relations involving teachers and learners is radically different to the place-time of these relations as anticipated or measured by audit discourses which pronounce upon the ‘quality’ of the former. For in the former the being-with involves a process of world-making within the 147

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co-existence and co-appearing of learner-teacher relations, assuming that ‘real learning’ occurs as opposed to normative learning; whilst the latter functions with a pre-conceived world of learner-teacher relations. The “with” is a measure of an origin-of-the-world as such, or even an originof-meaning as such (p. 83). What emerges from this philosophical exploration of being-with are issues of ethics and politics of educational practices to which I will return in the final chapter. The notion of being-with introduces a relational ontology that is echoed in Shonibare’s, Odile and Odette, and Pollard’s, Postcards Home, as well as in the quotations from Stuart Hall and Edouard Glissant. It demands a shift from a metaphysics of the root, which will be discussed shortly, towards a more dynamic and interactive understanding of social and cultural relations that are non-hierarchical and non-perspectival because they eliminate subject-object or self-other relations in favour of the idea of co-existence. NICOLAS BOURRIAUD: ROOTS AND RADICANTS

The relational ontology of being-with as discussed by Nancy has some resonance with Bourriaud’s explorations of art practices and socio-cultural change in his book, The Radicant (2010). Bourriaud presents an analysis of 20th Century art practices and the notion of multiculturalism which according to him are both grounded in a ‘metaphysics of the root’ (ibid., p. 44). That is to say, both these art practices and the development of multiculturalism are concerned with seeking out origins and new beginnings. A constant struggle in many art movements, from Dada, Duchamp’s ready-mades, abstract painting, the Situationist International was to effect, as Badiou (2007) describes in his book, The Century, a return to the real, which consisted of abandoning existing conventions and practices in order to begin again, to purify, to return to first principles and create a new visual language. Such movements were followed in the latter part of the century, from the 1980s, by the clutter and chaos of postmodernism with its endless proliferation of images and its attendant state of uprootedness that signified a metaphysics of flow but also a desire for identity which was (and still is) manifested in a range of movements concerned, for example, with gender, sexualities and ‘race’. In reaction to a world of globalisation and international conflict the idea of the root, according to Bourriaud (ibid, p. 50), defines a desire for identity, but not in the name of a radical new beginning, rather in the name of mythic identifications relating to nationalisms or religions (which appear natural). The crux of multiculturalism can be equally found in the roots of identity and difference; in the roots and celebration of an identitarian affiliation. Bourriaud proceeds to make the case that a dominant figure of contemporary culture relates to a precarious existence, a world of precarity which include immigrants, asylum seekers, exiles, tourists and so on. Such precarity does not fit with a metaphysics of the root but with what he terms ‘the radicant’ (ibid, p. 22, pp. 44–60). 148

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To be radicant means setting ones roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing (ibid, p. 22). The radicant, in contrast to the radical movements of art in the 20th Century which anchored their practice in the soil of a new beginning, develops, rather like the suckers of a strawberry plant, by responding and adapting to new host soils. The radicant is therefore in a flow of dynamic tension and translation as it needs to respond and adjust to its environment as well as forces of change; to the need to negotiate identity in relation to others. The stability of the radicant is therefore homeorhetic, (see Waddington, 1978)….it denotes a precarious existence, where the idea of mediumspecific art (a form of identity) is dissolved in favour of ‘transplanting art into heterogeneous territories (ibid, p. 54),’ where art practice is constantly renegotiated. It is important to distinguish the idea of the radicant from the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980,). The latter is concerned with a web of inter-connectivity, an infinite multiplicity which is fluid and non-hierarchical, (like the Internet), and as such the idea of a subject is dissolved in favour of a series of connections and interrelations. The radicant presupposes a subject who is constantly in negotiation with his or her environment, preventing any fixed identity, a subject in transit, what might be termed a chreodic subject, after Waddington (1978), where a chreod is a term denoting a pathway, governed by specific attractor forces, in space-time. For Bourriaud, the journey, the path, the wanderer, encampment and translation are key terms defining modern subjectivities. This does not mean that the radicant loses all trace of its social and cultural origins but rather creates a dynamic of translation between such origins and new relations such that the former are retroversively changed (see Zizek’s Introduction in Rothenberg 2009). This form of nomadic identification which relies upon translations in new environments and relations is not to be confused with globalising abstract identifications from the world of capital and commodification that are unconnected to any environment. A visual depiction of the radicant can be found in the work entitled Pacific (1996) by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi. The artist placed 49 flags made of coloured sand into separate perspex boxes which were arranged in a large rectangular grid and linked by plastic tubes. He introduced a colony of ants into the tubes and they proceeded to move from flag to flag carrying pieces of these national identifications to new destinations. The work interrogates the notions of national boundaries and identities. As the ants carry sand from one location to another new patterns are continually created whilst older formations are dissolved; new identifications form in the ground of older established ones. As a work, Pacific, clearly demonstrates the processes of movement, negotiation and translation that Bourriaud describes through his use of the term radicant. These ideas on the radicant which Bourriaud employs to discuss contemporary art practices whose form often takes that of the journey, and which disrupts sedentary notions of culture and the social manifested in multiculturalism, raise many issues for pedagogical contexts. Is it possible to develop practices of teaching and learning

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which do not relinquish cultural heritage but which scatters and sows this along new routes and relations with others? Surely one of the key issues today is to consider how the dynamic inter-connections and translations that arise from the relational ontologies of multicultural existence can provide, in Ranciere’s terminology, new affirmative distributions of the sensible. To be constantly vigilant, in Badiou’s terminology, for new and unpredictable truth procedures that have the affirmative potential to reconfigure our social worlds. Such redistributions arise not from recognising existing differences and identities but from indiscernible positions, excluded elements, exceptions, that which lies beyond the gaze of institutions, groups, affiliations or communities. Should we then be focussing our attention upon pedagogies that are in some sense anti-identitarian in contrast to pedagogies based upon identity and difference? This, in my view, is the function of politics and the aesthetic as proposed by Ranciere: to create new distributions of the sensible, perhaps we require new aesthetic translations, new ways of perceiving and experiencing our worlds that dissolve current distributions of interests and identifications, where equality is a constant struggle for verification. A key to addressing issues of culture and identity therefore is not to ignore cultural traditions and differences but to learn from their interactions, intermingling, translations; something which has always happened but which, it could be argued, has been derailed by a politics of identity in which too much emphasis is placed upon the idea of origins. We can get a handle on this by reflecting upon the notion of precarity, or precarious existence. For many people today their reality is one of movement, diaspora, migration, asylum, transition and so on. We have needed to change the way we conceive our social worlds due to changing populations, economic crises, natural disasters, technological developments, retrenchments into different forms of identity, globalising economics, and so on. There is no stable identity of what it is to be human, only a series of representations, practices, attitudes, beliefs that change in time; a being-with which is subject to social and political forces and which it is important to interrogate in order to maintain our struggles for equality.

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ETHICS AND LOCAL CURATIONS OF LEARNING

I maintain that there can be no ethics in general, but only an ethic of singular truths, and thus an ethic relative to a particular situation (Badiou, 2001, p. lvi). Operating exclusively in the realm of consensus, of the ‘self-evident’, ethics is intrinsically conservative. (Hallward, introduction to Badiou, 2001, p. xiii). The aim of this chapter is to explore relations between ethics and pedagogy. How might we conceive ethical matters in pedagogical relations? How do ethical issues arise within pedagogical contexts? Does this concern how we conceive the purpose and content of teaching and learning and how we should address, recognise and value pedagogical subjects (teachers, facilitators and learners) in accordance with these established conceptions? Thus is it a matter of contemplating the values of what we should teach (learn), when and how? Is it a question of interrogating what ‘polices’ learning (and teaching) and from which epistemological/ontological position or notion of community so as to reveal, for example, discriminatory practices and content? These ruminations tend to presuppose a prior or established idea of content and pedagogic practice or of contemplation within established frameworks of knowledge. They imply what Badiou and Ranciere refer to as consensus. The relation of ethics and pedagogy discussed in this chapter is concerned more with an ethics of the particular, an ethics emerging from local contexts of learning which invokes a disruption to established modes of learning or teaching, a disruption, triggered by an idea of equality, that leads to a reconfiguration of such processes. It deals with the relation between an ethics and a politics precipitated by an instance of equality emerging in a pedagogical situation. It is concerned with what Ranciere terms dissensus which is triggered by a demand for equality which refigures pedagogic relations and subjectivations. So with these preliminary remarks and questions in mind the question is: how might we conceive a notion of the ethical in pedagogic relations? In order to inform my discussion I will draw mainly from the work of Butler, Badiou, Lacan, and Zizek because of their particular approaches to subjectivity and social organisation I have discussed in previous chapters. In making this selection I recognise that I omit many other eminent thinkers in the field, including, Aristotle, Bentham, Kant, Levinas, Arendt, Irigaray, Spivak, Derrida and Foucault. Their inclusion would constitute a more substantial project than this chapter allows. Generally speaking we can say that pedagogical acts are relational processes; a ‘being-with’ that aims to promote learning, thus incumbent upon pedagogical action is a desire to initiate conditions commensurate for the kind of learning that is valued. Within traditional educational contexts pedagogy tends to be viewed as a reproductive process (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, Gallagher 1992, Bernstein 2000). In many 151

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institutions such as schools, colleges, universities, galleries, museums or other community sites, particular ways of learning and particular ‘objects’ of learning tend to be valued (though this is not the case in all the aforementioned sites). If we examine the way in which learning is organised and structured in these social spaces (and other, perhaps non-traditional contexts) and consider the goals and subject matter of learning, that is to say, what kind of learners such institutions are aiming to develop and what they wish learners to learn, then we can interrogate how such sites pedagogise learners (and teachers or facilitators). These pedagogising processes involve what Butler (1997, 2005) would term ‘scenes of address’ and ‘scenes of recognition’ through which learners and teachers are construed and produced as such. If the relation between scenes of address and recognition are unperturbed and function smoothly then it is unlikely, in theory, that moral or ethical issues will arise. Ethical issues relating to learning in traditional contexts are usually concerned with decisions about the content of educational programmes in relation to the kind of learners and learning that are deemed to be required. Here a circularity structures the relation between address and recognition so that in initiating a learning task (scene of address) a teacher or facilitator deploys a particular interpretational framework to comprehend learners’ responses (scene of recognition). What such pedagogical frameworks tend to neglect are local differences in learning ontologies in that it is not uncommon for scenes of address and recognition to fail to notice or legitimate ways of learning that lie beyond their gaze. As social contexts become more complex and diverse, perhaps due to population movements, socio-cultural identifications and new technologies, it is likely that these impact upon pedagogical spaces, processes and relations to the extent that the symmetry between address and recognition is often fractured, thus creating increasing degrees of unpredictability and misrecognition in relations between learners and their teachers. It is not uncommon for individual teachers or facilitators to be unsure at times how to act effectively with their students in pedagogical encounters. How does a teacher address or recognise a learner? For example, when the latter produces work or engages in practice that is incomprehensible within the teacher’s scene of recognition, how does a teacher respond? How do facilitators working in sites of community conflict and mistrust proceed to construct appropriate scenes of address to enable learning in its widest sense? How might a change in a scene of address produce a reconfiguration of scenes of recognition? If deemed necessary, how is the circularity of address and recognition punctured in order to create more equitable social relations both in pedagogic and wider social contexts? Can this be a planned process or is the reality much more contingent? Some contemporary art (or ‘anti-art’) practices disrupt the scene of recognition of art, (co-efficient of art), by performing activities or producing objects which are difficult to distinguish from other social practices. In socio-political contexts scenes of recognition have historically been disrupted for example by the abolitionist movement, the suffragettes, and in more recent times the removal of apartheid in South Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, the feminist movement, Turkish recognition of the Kurdish people. Most of these reconfigurations emerge through a premise of equality. 152

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So in these introductory remarks I am alluding to a difference between scenes of address and recognition which are homogeneous or circular, where factors of address generally agree with or accommodate those of recognition and those instances when this circularity is fractured so that a particular scene of address does not elicit recognisable practices or responses. I am working with the notion that in pedagogical contexts ethical issues arise not to reaffirm consensus but when the circularity of address and recognition is fractured thus precipitating an uncertainty of how to act on the part of the facilitator or teacher, how to accommodate that which confronts us which does not fit our pedagogical map. This rupture might arise, for example, as a consequence of a learner’s practice being difficult to comprehend, or it might involve incommensurability between the socio-cultural framings of the learner and the teacher. I am therefore concerned with the precipitations and affects of the coming together of two different worlds. I want to turn first to Judith Butler (2005) to consider her writing on ethics in which she explores in great detail the notion of ethical responsibility through the terms of address and recognition, which I have found deeply resonant with my thinking about pedagogical relations and responsibilities. Later I will consider the work of Lacan, Zizek and Badiou through key concepts that inform their approach to ethics which I have found relevant and informative for my interest in ethics and pedagogy: for Lacan and Zizek, the ‘Act’, for Badiou the event and truth. GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF ONESELF AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY

Judith Butler (2005) writing on ethics and subjectivity in her book, Giving an Account of Oneself, writes: Perhaps most importantly, we must recognise that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the selfsufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven (p. 136, my emphasis). This passage crystallises for me something about the nature of a genuine pedagogical relation and it concerns what Nancy, in the previous chapter, describes as ‘being-with’; a ‘willingness to become undone in relation to others,’ when our assimilated ways of knowing and practice differs from what we encounter, so as to extend our grasp of what it is to be human. If we can speak from this space of unknowingness, of being undone from our self-sufficient “I”, then we might extend pedagogical action and our comprehension of it, knowing that such comprehension is always incomplete. But this does not mean that in vacating the self-sufficient “I”, in being undone in relation to others, at moments of unknowingness, that we take up the position of 153

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the other. This would seem to be impossible. Rather, it suggests that we interrogate that ‘which forms us’, the scene of recognition, in relation to others so as to change the order of the space of engagement, the scene of address, to produce a more equitable distribution of the relations in this space. Put in other terms, this ethical risk-taking, this encounter with the unknown, involves an interrogation of the logic of place that keeps people (learners, teachers) in their place, a disturbance of this formatting of the space. Such risk-taking opens a gap in the situation through which a reconfiguration of the self-other relation becomes possible. We might see this misguided ‘taking the position of the other’ in those discourses that view the other as disadvantaged or deficient thus invoking a remedial task to provide supportive practices to educate the other according to valued knowledge and practices. What this particular pedagogical approach often misses is the fact that the other is educated but not according to dominant values or practices! In other words, the other already has particular ways of learning and making sense of his/her world but they may not correspond to dominant value systems inscribed in educational sites. The term pedagogy requires some elaboration; it comes from a combination in Greek of the words child and to lead. In Latin pedagogy morphed into education which subsequently referred to the entire panoply of institutional and extra-institutional practices and policies relating to teaching and learning. Historically and in general terms pedagogy refers to the development of effective strategies of instruction, or strategies of teaching. Previous educationalists have developed particular approaches to pedagogy and include Rousseau, Montessori, Steiner, Dewey, Richardson, Emma Freud, and others. Friere evolved a method of teaching adults that he termed critical pedagogy and this has been developed extensively by Giroux, Apple, McClaren, hooks and others. A key principle of critical pedagogy is to interrogate the socio-cultural/ideological forces that impact upon and police educational policies with a view to building more emancipatory and equitable forms of teaching and learning I am using the term pedagogy to refer to a generic state of learning, to local curations of learning; a social practice manifesting a multiplicity of form. Everyone has experience and everyone is able to learn but the routes along which learning happens and is locally curated are multiple and socially inscribed but some are more evident than others. In the case of what I call real learning, a disruption to such local curations occurs so that frameworks of learning are reconfigured beyond the learner’s assimilated experiences. For me pedagogy is concerned with a facilitation of learning in contrast to an instructional practice. Such facilitation often involves ‘moments of unknowingness’ to which Butler refers, where, for example, teachers/facilitators sometimes become undone in relation to learners whose practices of learning are obscure, (or when learners themselves come unstuck and find it difficult to proceed). In such moments we need to ‘confront what forms us’ our scenes of recognition, as teachers/facilitators/learners in order to interrogate the limits of our pedagogical practice so as to expand our grasp in order to support more effectively the multiplicity of learning practices and situations we encounter. Pedagogy therefore, I argue, can refer to processes of learning performed by learners and facilitators, it is a process of learning that involves a self, which emerges 154

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within a social formatting but also involves a critique of the latter so as to continue an expanded comprehension of learning processes. Another way of putting this is to see pedagogical practices as local curations of learning, local economies of learning. A self-monitoring of learning, taking into account issues relating to the social formatting and inauguration of self. Pedagogy can thus be viewed as possessing both aesthetic and political dimensions in the sense in which Ranciere employs these terms. This will be discussed later. CRITIQUE OF PEDAGOGISED SUBJECTS

How is the subject constituted in learning sites? Or put another way how is the pedagogised subject constituted? How does this subject act, according to what practices? How is this particular subject maintained, policed or transformed? What norms guide or inform practice and so legitimise how a successful pedagogised subject emerges? In what frameworks (scenes of address) do teachers conceive their responsibility to learners? In what frameworks (scenes of recognition) do learners (including teachers/facilitators) conceive responsibility for themselves as learners? Pedagogic relations usually involve an engagement between facilitators and learners which in turn involve a responsibility by the former for the latter. But teachers or facilitators are not transparent subjects fully aware of themselves, nor can such pedagogic relations be fully conceived or known. The desire to facilitate and support learning is trammelled with an indiscernibility of socio-pedagogic formattings that impinge upon, inaugurate and produce pedagogised subjects. When I started to teach in secondary schools many years ago I taught observational drawing regularly and assessed work according to a series of representational criteria common to this practice, still functioning in many classrooms today. I had little awareness of the fact that my teaching and assessment practices were governed by a particular ideological formatting that valued particular kinds of learners (and teachers) that were produced through the acquisition of skills immanent to a particular representational practice, whilst other learners were marginalised within such formatting. In other words I didn’t realise that my evaluations of drawings made by learners constituted a form of cultural imperialism. In an earlier book (Atkinson 2002) I discussed what Butler identifies as ‘moments of unknowingness’ when confronted with children’s art work which did not fit my schemes of reference and the need to tread carefully in any form of evaluation or assessment. In such teaching-learning situations the teacher risks becoming undone but in doing so has the opportunity to extend his or her grasp of learning both in terms of their practice and that of the learner. In such moments the teacher or facilitator becomes vulnerable, the pedagogical scene of recognition is disturbed and it is certainly not clear how to proceed. If a teacher acts according to a conviction for a particular form of practice or process of investigation, say a particular form of drawing or painting, writing an essay or solving a mathematical problem, does this unknowingly exclude or marginalise practices that do not fit?

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Butler discusses Adorno’s approach to ethics and his reflections on what it is to be human: If the human is anything, it seems to be a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms at the same time as we question the authority by which we make that assertion (ibid, p. 103). Transferring this statement into the pedagogical context we can argue equally that becoming an effective teacher or facilitator involves a similar double movement, in which although teaching may be informed by norms of practice, there is always a need to question the authority of the norm and its particular scene of recognition in the light of different and unknown processes of learning that confront us. Butler quotes Adorno: There has to be an element of unswerving persistence [Unbeirrbarkeit], of holding fast to what we think we have learnt from experience, and on the other hand, we need an element not just of self-criticism, but of criticism of that unyielding, inexorable something (an jenem Starren und Unerbittlichen), that sets itself up in us. In other words, what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility (Adorno, 2001 p. 169). We are fallible because there is something in us which we do not know (we are not fully perspicacious beings conscious of all the socio-psychic relations and traces that form us) and also there are things we meet which we do not know, which as it were, exist beyond our frameworks of ‘being human’ in a particular context such as a pedagogic context. Here it is legitimate to stretch the notion of the human to apply to those practices and ways of learning that lie beyond our comprehension. In other words such domains constitute the ‘inhuman.’ If in such a meeting we insist or impose our ways of understanding and practice are we guilty of a form of moral narcissism (Butler p. 105)? Don’t we become more effective pedagogically when we question the authority through which we become teachers and learners, when we become conscious of our fallibility, so as to extend our comprehension of learning and teaching? Such fallibility and questioning tends to arise when we are confronted with ways of learning previously marginalised or unrecognised, or when we become conscious of forms of discrimination in pedagogical contexts. So for Adorno the idea of the inhuman constitutes a critical space to critique the formatting of the human and this can be translated into the context of pedagogy whereby the notion of a pedagogy against the state, an anti-pedagogy is necessary to critique existing normalising formats of pedagogy in the light of fallibility to difference. Butler charts a number of ways of conceiving the inhuman. It can act as a critical device for an analysis of the social conditions that constitute the human; it designates, ‘the way social forces take up residence within us, making it impossible to define ourselves in terms of free will;’ it identifies how the social world, ‘impinges upon us in ways that make us invariably unknowing about ourselves (ibid, p. 106).’ This is not to celebrate the inhuman but to see it as a device through which we become more aware of what it can be to become human. Turning to Foucault, Butler describes his conception of ethics as a critique of the ‘regimes of intelligibility’ (ibid, p. 109) that structure the ontology of the subject. 156

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This implies that the subject’s ontology is historically constituted according to specific social forces and that therefore there is no pure relation to self or self-reflexivity outside of these socio-historically constructed ontologies. Both for Foucault and Adorno the key issue is not to consider principles for action but how our actions affect the social world and this consideration or critique constitutes ethics, a process in which we consider the consequences of our actions. Butler remarks: Both (Adorno and Foucault) are trying, in different ways, to dislodge the subject as the ground of ethics in order to recast the subject as a problem for ethics. This is not the death of the subject, in either case, but an enquiry into the modes by which the subject is instituted and maintained, how it institutes and maintains itself, and how the norms that govern ethical principles must be understood as operating not only to guide conduct but to decide the question of who and what will be a human subject (my bracket, ibid, p. 110). This has clear implications for pedagogy and the question of the pedagogised subject as well as the notion of the reflexive practitioner. How are such subjects inaugurated and come to exist? How do such subjects maintain themselves, and according to which normalising forces and principles are pedagogised subjects identified? As suggested above it is only through a sufficient disturbance of the ‘inhuman’ that we may become aware of the social formatting of the subject. Yet at the heart of any such reflection there is fallibility since there is no pure act of reflection either of the self or of relations in which it is engaged. In other words immanent to any ethical deliberation is an unknowingness. This returns us to the experience of being undone and of risking ourselves at moments of unknowingness in order to expand our grasp of what it is to be human, or, more precisely in the context of pedagogic relations, what it is to learn. In the final pages of her book Butler (ibid, pp. 133–36,) refers to an ethics of responsibility and Adorno’s deliberations on the need to consider the effects of an individual’s action on the social world. For Foucault, she argues, the practices of a subject are a site ‘where social conditions are worked and reworked;’ (ibid, p. 133) but rather than viewing the individual as an autonomous instrument of change, (because the subject cannot know its conditions of formation, it cannot know the impress of the social) new modes of subjectivity are produced when: …the limiting conditions by which we are made prove to be malleable and replicable, when a certain self is risked in its intelligibility and recognisability in a bid to expose and account for the inhuman ways in which “the human” continues to be done and undone (ibid, pp. 133–4). So we are concerned with the ways in which the subject is produced within the social, according to changing scenes of address and recognition constituted through norms. When we come up against the limits of our understanding others and their actions, say in a pedagogical context, when we come undone in the presence of others, its not a matter of ‘whether I can or will know you, or whether I can be known,’ both “I ” and “You” are part of the human and so we need to consider how I and You are constituted (teacher, learner,) in their social scenes of address and 157

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recognition, their ‘changing horizons of intelligibility (ibid, p. 134). Thus ethics requires a concern for both the discourses of address and recognition and how these are socially inscribed with norms that effect power and desire. But the key ‘ethical performance’ is to risk ourselves in those (pedagogical) situations where we are confronted with practices that do not accord with our understanding of practice (learning, making, speaking). Here the notion of the ‘inhuman’ functions in two distinct ways in the pedagogical context; firstly by confronting that which forms us as teachers we unpack the inhuman, that is to say those socially inscribed norms and practices that we have adopted as ‘natural’, secondly by confronting that which we find difficult to comprehend, that which lies beyond our formatting of the ‘human’ in pedagogic contexts, this ‘inhuman’ practice provides a potential for expanding or transforming our grasp of what it is to be human. Having considered Butler’s ideas of address, recognition and unknowingness in relation to ethics and pedagogy I turn to the work of Lacan and Zizek. LACAN AND ZIZEK: ETHICS OF THE REAL

Butler refers to the experience of being undone in moments of unknowingness and argues that the ethical act involves risking ourselves in such engagements with what lies beyond our frameworks of recognition or comprehension. It is our willingness to become undone from our ‘self-sufficient “I ” in order to reconfigure ourselves in relation to others so as to expand our comprehension of what it is to be human. This conception of moments of unknowingness, where our scenes of recognition, or symbolic frameworks, are disturbed comes close to Lacan’s notion of the Real and his idea of ethics. Zupancic (2000) writes: The heart of all ethics is something which … has nothing to do with the register of ethics. This ‘something’ goes by several different names — for Lacan, it is ‘the Real’; for Badiou, ‘the event’. These terms concern something which appears only in the guise of the encounter, as something that ‘happens to us’, surprises us, throws us ‘out of joint’, because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or an interruption. According to Lacan, the Real is impossible, and the fact that ‘it happens (to us)’ does not refute its basic ‘impossibility’: the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as ‘the impossible thing’ that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe. Hence the impossibility of the Real does not prevent it from having an effect in the realm of the possible. This is when ethics comes into play, in the question forced upon us by an encounter with the Real: will I act in conformity to what threw me ‘out of joint’, will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence? … For Lacan, the accent is to be placed, first, on desire (‘Have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?’), for it is desire that aims at the impossible, the Real (Zupancic, 2000, p. 235, my emphasis). Perhaps we might grasp Lacan’s and Zizek’s approach to ethics by considering briefly Zizek’s reworking of Lacan’s ideas in relation to politics and ethics. Following Lacan, Zizek’s ethics of the real amounts to a breaking free of the symbolic 158

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through the Act which then allows or forces a re-entry into a reconfigured symbolic order (see Kay, 2003, p. 111). Freud’s aphorism, Wo Es war, soll Ich warden, where it was I must come to be, is a pointer towards the ethical in Lacan, it suggests the idea that the subject (I), through the Act breaks through the constraints of the symbolic order in which he is trapped, and forms a new subjectivity whilst also reconfiguring the symbolic. Thus the Lacanian Act is central to his notion of ethics, the latter being concerned with action that is not judged according to established codes of conduct and values but which disrupts any such codes and value systems and in doing so reconfigures the subject and the symbolic framework or scene of recognition. Lacan’s well known exemplification of an ethical position in, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII), is to be found in his analysis of Sophocles’s character Antigone who takes an extreme or pure ethical position beyond the law of the state, as represented through the character of Creon who, as king, forbids the burial of Antigone’s brother Polynices. Antigone ignores Creon’s edict and buries her brother and as a consequence is entombed alive and subsequently hangs herself. According to a Lacanian reading, Antigone did not give way on her desire to honour her brother by burying him, (which he had previously requested), even though this meant transgressing the symbolic law of the community. As an ethical act the story of Antigone refers to action that remains steadfast to pursuing one’s duty in respect of one’s desire in contrast to following the desire of the Other, the established laws and practices of a community. The Act of Antigone represents a disruption of the symbolic by the Real (something indiscernible in a situation), a fracturing of the scenes of recognition and regulation that constitute the social with a view towards reconfiguring the social and subjectivities towards greater equality. For Zizek (2001, p. 85): The act proper is the only one which restructures the very symbolic coordinates of the agent’s situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agent’s identity itself is radically changed. The Antigone story illustrates an ethics of responsibility, judgement and reflection according to a logic that transgresses normal codes of conduct but of course it is possible to hold an ethical perspective which accords with established values and behaviour. But the latter is not what Lacan explores in his ethics of psychoanalysis which is concerned specifically with the psychoanalytical context and the possibility of the analysand confronting the symbolic orders that constrain, the fantasies of his or her identifications, in order to pass beyond them into a renewed relation to the symbolic and a reconfigured subjectivity. If the ethical remains within the parameters of established symbolic orders then, by implication, it also remains within established codes of conduct and therefore constitutes a normative ethics appealing to normalising values and traditions. In such an ethics the excluded element, that which lies beyond such norms would continue to persist. Zizek is keen to apply the ethical positions outlined by Lacan to wider social and political spheres. For him the ethical act constitutes a moment of liberation from the grip of the symbolic order and its superego pressures towards conformity manifested, for example, by the Althusserian notion of interpellation; the Act 159

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suspends the law of the symbolic and its moral code. It is from such singular acts that the potential for a more universal position arises that reworks the symbolic order, or in Butler’s terminology, the scenes of address and recognition. But what precipitates the Act? This revolves around a subject taking responsibility in moments of unknowingness, of deep uncertainty from which, if the Act is realised, the symbolic framework is fractured and subsequently reconfigured thus changing the symbolic and the subject’s identity as a subject. The function of what Zizek calls ‘the act’ is to blast a passage through the ontological blockage with which the subject protects itself, so as to expose its emptiness and make this transformation possible. And the death drive, he argues, is the domain of the pre-ontological, which alone can power this process (Kay p. 118). How can this notion of the Lacanian Act help us to develop our grasp of pedagogy? It is important to remember how I am using this term to refer to local curations of learning and the notion of real learning. The Act designates a place of encounter, suggested above by Zupancic, a place where we are thrown ‘out of joint’, a place of rupture which has the potential to turn our world upside down. The ethical concerns the choice we make in such situations: do I pursue that which has disrupted my ways of making sense of the world, which has caused me to question my practice and then subsequently reconfigure my world and how I comprehend it? As teachers or facilitators are we able to acknowledge such moments in our practice? Are we able to support learners in such moments? The notion of real learning which I have employed throughout this book is therefore a place where an ethics of the singular comes into play. THE ETHICS OF BADIOU AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR PEDAGOGY

For Badiou there can be no ethics in general only an ethics of specific situations. His discussion of ethics emerges therefore from a concern for particular social and historical processes and in order to consider his idea of a situated ethics he draws upon the central notions of event, fidelity and truth. He wrote his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) in part to offer a rather vitriolic response to what he terms the ‘ethical ideology’ of our times. This ideology is comprised of two major axes; the first which, as Hallward states in his translator’s introduction (ibid, p. xiii) is ‘vaguely Kantian’ and refers to the universalising of human rights and the idea of a ‘collective good’. The second, which is ‘vaguely Levinasian’, concerns the notion of respect for social and cultural difference. Both axes invoke an ethics based upon abstract concepts: human rights and cultural difference. In contrast Badiou argues for an ethics which is also universal but one that emerges from local contexts of practice, from singularities, where an event disrupts the existing socio-cultural order. The key Kantian perspective on ethics as we know takes the form of the categorical imperative, that it is the duty of individuals to fulfil their duty; it does not specify particular forms of duty. The emphasis is not upon an overarching moral 160

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law that tells me what to do, how to act in specific situations, but upon taking responsibility to act in such a way that my reason for acting might have universal application. I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law (Kant, Groundwork p. 402) Though Badiou agrees with the Kantian basis of ethical action grounded in a subjective capacity he departs from Kant, according to Hallward (ibid, p. xxi), because he believes that Kant is introducing a ‘transcendental norm of moral law.’ This goes against Badiou’s claim that every ethical act involves an exception to an established framework of rules. Badiou is therefore not working from an abstract universal maxim but from a place of puncture. Levinas is another target of disapproval in that he develops an ethics focussed upon the ‘other’, which incorporates an ethical opening to difference, an ethics that underpins multiculturalism, anti-racism or anti-sexism. Badiou has little if any respect for contemporary ethics and its grounding in culturalism which he views as ‘a tourist’s fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs (ibid, p. 26).’ He states in what Hallward claims to be the ‘most startling sentence of the book for many Anglo-American readers,’ that we should abandon an ethics predicated upon a recognition of the other and difference because difference is ‘what there is’ (ibid, p. 27) whilst the notion of the ‘Same’ is what ‘comes to be’. The notion of the Same is commensurate with Badiou’s notion of truth in that the site of truth emerges through that which was invisible or excluded and in achieving recognition through the pursuit of truth difference becomes insignificant. It is not that Badiou wishes simply to denigrate a politics or ethics of difference but rather to acknowledge that difference is ‘the way of the world’ and that if we want to be truly ethical we need to transcend difference and turn our attention towards his ideas of truth and the Same. Since differences are what there is and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose or render insignificant (ibid, p. 27). 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. (ibid, p. 27) This is a trenchant and, for some, a rather brutal denigration of multiculturalism and its key ideas of the other and difference. But it is grounded upon a philosophical idea of truth which attempts to negotiate difficult territory in order to invoke a politics and ethics of collective liberation. In order to move from the notion of difference to an idea of the Same in the spirit of developing socially universal, but not totalising, principles, Badiou introduces his idea of an ethics of truths. For Badiou the Same comes to be through a truth process which is ‘indifferent to difference’ and the same for all; it constitutes in his terminology, a ‘being immortal.’ This suggests an on-going process of emancipation from established orders driven spasmodically by singular puncturings that have universal potential. 161

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ETHIC OF TRUTH

The notion of truth is intimately connected to the idea of the subject for Badiou, because it is through following a truth process that a subject emerges. He makes a general distinction between ordinary life of everyday situations, opinion, exchange and communication, in which we must all engage, and a subject of truth precipitated by an event occurring in a situation but which is radically beyond the habitus (Bourdieu) of a situation. It is by deciding to remain faithful to the radical effects of the event (which itself quickly disappears) that is to say, its new discourses and practices, for example, and their implications for the situation, that a subject of truth emerges. A subject which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its firm foundation) needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what is there’. Let us call this supplement an event and let us distinguish multiple being, where it is not a matter of truths (but only of opinions), from the event which compels us to decide a new way of being (ibid, p. 41). Truth emerges from a decision to follow the consequences of an event which means that the situation in which it arose can no longer be interpreted as it once was and this implies that the subject enters a new mode of being in a changed situation. For Badiou then truth is the process of a fidelity to an event. It becomes evident therefore that a truth process is heterogeneous to established orders of values, knowledge, actions and so on; ‘it punches a whole in knowledge (ibid, p. 43).’ So the human subject is constituted as a being-in-relation-to a truth process. Fidelity to a truth, the process of ‘sticking with it’, is analogous to Lacan’s aphorism of desire; ‘do not give way on your desire.’ Whereas desire is a desire of the unconscious and cannot therefore be ‘known,’ being gripped by a truth process involves an unpredictable journey and it demands that the subject remains faithful to a truth he or she is following, a linking of the known to the not-known (ibid, p. 47). Badiou spells out his notion of the ethic of a truth: Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance (the truth you are following). Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you (event-truth process) (ibid p. 47, my inserts). How then might Badiou’s ideas of the Same and truth be useful for an ethics of pedagogy, bearing in mind his assertion that there can be no ethics in general, only an ethics of specific situations? It could be argued that during the previous two decades many teachers in England gradually adopted transmission-based pedagogies, in their efforts to deliver a national curriculum to pupils. The impact of the National Curriculum in the field of art education in England coupled with a rigorous inspection regime precipitated a transformation in the distribution of practices and discourses towards greater emphasis upon explication and exemplification according to specific conceptions and visibilities of learning and teaching. This audit-driven distribution of practices and identifications emphasised what I would term a subject of knowledge 162

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in contrast to a subject of truth. It was based upon a consensus, a normalisation of teaching and learning and yet this seemed to ignore the increasing diversity and complexity of socio-cultural and political realities beyond. Is the new curriculum’s emphasis upon ‘every child matters,’ which appears to be a laudable concept, driven by a desire to acknowledge real difference that leads to what is valid for all, indifferent to difference, and appropriate pedagogical strategies? Or is it informed by conceiving difference from within particular conceptions of ‘the child’ ‘the learner’, ‘the teacher’ and ‘the social’ that reconfirm particular social structures and identifications? Is it possible to conceive the key strategies of the new curriculum: ‘to develop successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens that lead to independent enquirers, creative thinkers, team workers, self managers and reflective learners (QCDA 2008)’ without specifying precisely how we conceive ‘learning,’ ‘citizens,’ ‘creative thinkers’ and so acknowledging the unpredictable and not-known? There are some who see the current world of education and learning too removed from the world of economic development and thus argue for greater alignment and emphasis upon appropriate knowledge and skills. There are those who view the recent Bologna accord in higher education and its emphasis upon modularisation as a dilution of learning, emphasising measurement and knowledge (see eflux journal 14 March 2010). We cannot afford to hold fast to old or redundant pedagogical practices and values in a changing world and changing life-world situations of learners. Neither should we ignore such life-worlds in our pedagogical contexts simply in order to pursue economic growth and stability. So how might we consider ‘pedagogies of the Same,’ in contrast to pedagogies of difference? The latter form of pedagogy has informed teaching, research and policy for at least the last three decades. It informs multicultural strategies concerned with cultural awareness and recognition as well as other approaches to pedagogy concerned with gender and sexuality. In earlier writing, for example, I explored ‘difference’ in children’s drawing practices. It is a pedagogy concerned generally with the recognition of difference and the need to provide appropriate and effective conditions for learning. However Badiou’s particular take on difference as simply ‘what there is’ and his insistence on the notion of the Same, which is concerned with what is valid for all irrespective of difference, (indifference to difference), makes room for an ethical approach to pedagogical practices that occur as a consequence of event and truth procedures through which ‘new’ subjects emerge without affiliation to existing socio-cultural identities. In other words such practices driven by local event-truth processes break with such identifications in order to become ‘immortal.’ It is from the singular places of real learning, both on the part of learners or facilitators, that we can gain a more expanded sense of what learning is that has universal implications. The site of real learning is a place of wonder, uncertainty and experiment, as we saw on the face and actions of Luca and the pedagogical incident with the caged heart in Chapter One The idea of the Same stems from a radical disruption of the situation and its composition of differences, so we could argue that developing action and comprehension that is indifferent to difference as composed in a situation does in fact 163

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depend upon a radical idea of difference, but one which cannot be understood in the existing composition of differences. So the idea of the Same involves a radical transformation and reconceptualisation of a situation through which a more egalitarian order emerges. In pedagogical contexts it is possible to consider disruption to a teacher’s practice, as I described in Chapter Two, that has radical transformative effects upon future practice and teacher-learner identifications. ETHICS OF WONDER

Earlier in Chapter Two I referred to Descartes notion of wonder in his work Passions of the Soul and the point that for him wonder constitutes the first passion. These ideas were drawn to my attention by Rachel Jones (2009) in a paper she gave at the On Not Knowing conference in Cambridge, where she makes the point that, Wonder thus remains the first of all the passions, not simply because it is the first we experience, but because it has an ethical priority. Cultivating wonder is a way of remaining open to the otherness of the other without seeking to appropriate or assimilate them (p. 2). Jones proceeds to consider the notion of wonder in relation to Kant’s ideas on the sublime (a sense of awe in the infinite presence of nature and at our own power of the mind to transcend sense) and in relation to Lyotard’s reworking of the sublime regarding the immediate world of sensations. Lyotard recognises, in a similar vein to Derrida’s critique of presence, that any attempt to capture a sensory event through representation will inevitably lose that which we attempt to capture. Thus rather than engage in such a fruitless struggle, doomed to failure, this inability to capture the infinite of sensory events, Lyotard focuses upon this temporary moment of impossibility, (similar to Butler’s moments of unknowingness) suggesting that only when we are, ‘undone as knowing subjects are we able to remain open to the singularity of the material event (Jones p. 3).’ I find these remarks highly relevant to pedagogical situations when teachers regularly encounter material practices of learners that leave the former ‘undone’ in moments of unknowingness. The event of encounter registers an ‘immateriality’, following Badiou, which teachers struggle to comprehend through their frameworks of understanding and desire. Jones makes the crucial point here reminiscent of Butler above, that this state of unknowingness ‘holds an ethical promise’ which entails an attempt to give an account of this encounter beyond our desire to categorise it within established orders of knowledge, (scenes of recognition), so as to allow the materiality of the learner’s practice to ‘speak’. I am reminded of the encounter described by Moore (1999, pp. 101–110) in which secondary students were asked to compose a ‘love story’. One student, a fourteen- year-old Bangladeshi boy who had been resident in the UK for eighteen months, produced a letter in a form which was not stylistically or grammatically commensurate with that presupposed by the teacher’s practice and expectations, but was perfectly legitimate according to the ‘oral’ traditions of writing in which 164

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the student was immersed. The teacher, for perfectly understandable professional reasons, encouraged the student to change or ‘correct’ his story to meet the requirements of the examination system. The consequences of this pedagogical action left the student feeling that he had to replace his way of writing with one that was more true to life and correct. In effect the learner in this situation conceives his learning as remedial; he is led to believe that his traditions of practice are inferior to those he is now required to acquire in his new social and pedagogical context. For Lyotard (Butler and others) allowing oneself to become undone is a crucial condition for learning, which means relaxing the power of established and assimilated forms of knowing and practice (not an easy thing to do) so as to reconfigure these in the presence of and subsequent to those material practices which disturb. This returns us to the ethical situation of making a decision in situations when we cannot rely upon established codes of action and practice, of making a decision to act or respond in a particular way in relation to others when we know that we do not know how to proceed but we allow the unknowing encounter with the other person and their practice/difference to inform a way forward. This would seem to suggest a relation between ethics, aesthetics and pedagogy in those moments of being undone by the wonder of encounter or event, such moments reveal both the limitations of our ways of understanding and practice which are illuminated by the irreducible difference of learners. Such encounters, initiated through wonder and ontological displacement, hold the potential for an emancipatory reconfiguring of pedagogical relations. Becoming undone is close to the idea of learning as an encounter with the real, or the idea of learning as an event. Here learning is a process of becoming in contrast to being. In this process learning involves a contingent unknowingness, a strangeness, something of the inhuman, that can lead to a reconfiguration of a world through a perseverance, a fidelity to an event and possibilities for the new. In Ranciere’s terminology such events involve an aesthetics and a politics whereby in the aesthetic process a new form, a new practice is precipitated and in political terms a new subject emerges. I argue that this pedagogical process consists of what I term a local curation of learning through the effects of a pedagogical event, or Act. If we return to young Luca painting, described in Chapter One, such local curations involve curiosity, experimenting, not-knowing, persevering…what Schiller termed Spieltrieb (play drive) which jan jagodinski (2010 forthcoming) refers to in a thought provoking book, a concept which he believes comes close to characterising an unprecedented artistic event. ‘this drive to play is the creative force of life itself – life as Zoë and not bios.’ Here jagodinski is referring to the difference made in Greek thought between life as common to all living beings and life as political existence, that is to say life as lived according to particular ways of life. We might use the terms natural life and social life to simplify this difference. But today, as Agamben (1998, p. 187) argues, it is impossible to separate Zoë from bios, from the way in which life is regulated and conditioned according to social practices and knowledge and yet somehow we need to be able to unshackle ourselves from their suffocating grip that prevents the potential of Zoë to emerge. 165

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A ‘true’ creative art education is one that cannot be taught! It is learning that takes places during the processes of becoming where the accident, the mistake, the misrecognition is taken and explored further into an ontological realm that both the teacher and the student have never been (jagodinski 2010 forthcoming). Hence my appeal for pedagogical practices that employ pedagogies against the state: against the foreclosures of forms of representation and practice that exist within our educational sites and institutions, against the capture of educational practices and policies by what jagodinski (2010) terms ‘designer capitalism,’ against the stultification of knowledge. In my call for local curations of learning I am thus arguing for pedagogies that attempt to embrace the aisthesis of local becomings of learners and how such forces of affect might be translated into action and form; for pedagogies that recognise the difference between thought and thinking and the primacy of the latter; for pedagogies that critique themselves; for pedagogies that accept that learning is an infinite process that involves not-knowing, mistakes, uncertainty and a reconfiguring of ontological realms; for pedagogies where learners (facilitators, teachers,) take power to change their worlds and, where possible, to reflect upon how such power is constituted; for pedagogies of dissensus and the indiscernible; for pedagogies that are indifferent to difference; for pedagogies that precipitate subjects of truth in contrast to subjects of knowledge, where truth is indifferent to knowledge. This will demand asking some serious questions about art learning, (or learning in other subject domains), which is typically seen as ‘creative’ or ‘original’ which appears to suggest something like an event in the local space of a learner, but which is in fact grounded in a prior plenitude of meaning of established practice and its police orders. The imposition of such orders may have two worrying results. The first is to indurate our understanding of practice and learning and thus create a calcified pedagogy. The second, emerging from the first, is that we fail to respond to ways of learning and forms of practice that lie beyond such controlling orders; we fail to accord constant vigilance to our understanding of terms such as ‘learning,’ ‘teaching,’ ‘art,’ (and other subject disciplines), ‘pedagogy,’ and the frameworks that sustain them. *****

In a very brief conclusion I want to extend these points in relation to prescribed distributions of knowledge and learning (teaching) practices in contrast to those neoteric or obscure processes of learning that lie beyond by developing the notions of bios and Zoë. Not all police orders, as described by Ranciere, are bad. Indeed many social structures relating to education, health, social care, law and other public services, though by no means perfect, are made possible through them. The central issue of this chapter is concerned with local curations of learning and an ethics of the singular and it can be summed up in relation to the balancing of the terms Zoë and bios within the framing devices of such structures. Zoë and bios are always intertwined but the power of bios (manufactured life, reason, logos, 166

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consciousness) to suppress Zoë, taken to mean a persistent and creative life force, is formidable. However the excess of Zoë always provides the body’s potential for breaking out of the order of bios, it is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the potential for new lines of flight. Braidotti (2006) comments on the intersection of Zoë and bios: That these two competing notions of ‘life’ coincide on the human body turns the issue of embodiment into a contested space and a political arena (p. 37). So the body as constituted through the orders of Zoë and bios can be viewed as a contested space, a space open to mutation as well as consolidation. In relation to learning practices we might speculate that Zoë constitutes an immanent creative force allied to poiesis in contrast to the techne and praxis of bios. In order to maintain a creative balance between Zoë and bios in learning processes therefore pedagogies of the event or pedagogies against the state, as described above, are imperative if we are to maintain a disposition towards learning which remains open and emancipatory.

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POSTSCRIPT

I completed the manuscript for this book in the Autumn of 2010 at a time when many in the field of education in England were optimistic about the new school curriculum since its introduction in 2008. I have made reference to this point throughout the text. Under the rubric of ‘every child matters’, the new curriculum established three underpinning concepts: to promote successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens. The previous version of the national curriculum was found to be too prescriptive and that in many ways teachers were de-professionalised because they had little input to its aims and design: they simply delivered it. Consequently the old curriculum was viewed in retrospect as producing too much orthodoxy and that it did not meet the needs of learners growing up in their contemporary worlds. It was also criticised for placing too much emphasis upon subject knowledge and far too little upon the all-round needs of learners such as learning how to live healthily, to become responsible citizens with the social skills for living together and who can make a positive contribution to society in modern socio-cultural contexts. In brief the new curriculum of 2008 recognises the importance of the professional standing of teachers to orchestrate curriculum design and appropriate modes of assessment that are responsive to the different ways in which learning happens. It argues for less prescription of subject content and more innovation as well as more flexibility for teachers to organise teaching and learning to meet learners’ needs. The focus is upon key concepts and processes that underlie each subject rather than specified curriculum content. Schools have the opportunity to design and develop their own locally determined curriculum that matches the ethos of the school, the needs and capabilities of its community of learners and the local context. Schools are encouraged to create links between subjects and cross-curricular learning; to promote an understanding of healthy life-styles, enterprise, global dimensions and sustainable development which cross subject boundaries. In late November last year the new coalition government published a white paper entitled The Importance of Teaching (DfE, 2010). This document sets out a number of government initiatives covering teaching and leadership, teacher education, behaviour, assessment, accountability, school improvement and funding. Under teaching and curriculum a further review of the national curriculum will be undertaken: the document draws attention to the importance the government places upon core subject knowledge (English, mathematics, science and technology) and it questions the value of many vocational and other ‘non-essential knowledge’ that has been introduced. Schools should be given more autonomy and be freed from over-burdening bureaucracy but be accountable for the results they achieve. As with previous versions of the national curriculum the impetus for change is economic 169

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competitiveness in the global market and a perception of slipping behind the educational achievements of economic competitors. It is remarkable that the white paper will probably lead to a fifth curriculum model within a period of two decades. Regarding the university sector the coalition is making radical changes to the funding of higher education and student finance, on the recommendation of the Browne Review of Higher Education, Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (2010). Most of the teaching grant for the arts and humanities will be removed but this will not affect such funding for science, mathematics and technology. This will certainly result in the closure of some departments and faculties within the arts and humanities and possibly institutions. The streets of London and other major cities in England have witnessed a growing tide of anger and frustration by students and teachers from schools, colleges and universities protesting over the government’s decision to impose a considerable increase to student tuition fees. The Importance of Teaching sets out the government’s approach to teacher education; the emphasis is to raise the quality of graduates entering the profession; to make sure they have a strong command of subject knowledge and that trainees are able to manage and promote good behaviour. There is almost no discussion devoted to promoting the importance of pedagogical inquiry or the relevance of extensive educational research into teacher education. The overriding emphasis for training is pragmatic: trainees should spend their time learning the craft of teaching in the classroom under the supervision of experienced expert teachers. The document fails to recognise the valuable contribution of universities to this task even though the new Ofsted report on Quality and Standards in Initial Teacher Education 2009–10, issued at the same time as the white paper concludes that the most effective and economic programmes by far are those run by universities in partnership with schools. Schools are to take a more prominent role in training with the development of teaching and training schools and it is possible at this stage of proceedings that universities will cease to play a major part in teacher education except that some of the best providers will be invited to establish university training schools. Teaching is conceived as a craft that is more effectively learnt in the classroom under the supervision of experienced and expert teachers. The importance of pedagogical discussion and reflection; debate over purposes and values of teaching; enquiry into processes of learning do not feature in the white paper. It would be reasonably straightforward to provide a critique of the use of the term craft and to illustrate its significant inadequacies for conceiving teaching. Similarly it would not be difficult to critique the absence of any serious deliberation of effective strategies for student-teachers to engage in critical reflection and debate on the purposes, aims and practices of teaching as developed within extensive fields of research in education in order to inform their thinking and practice. But such critique would, I fear, become ensnared in current organisational and bureaucratic frameworks which I believe need to be interrogated and changed for ones that are more emancipatory and socially equitable. Perhaps a more decisive position would be to reject a central premise of the white paper which is to view education through the lens of educational achievement and competition geared to economic development and prosperity; where although great 170

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emphasis is placed upon standards in teaching and learning in core subjects and other areas, this is all in the service of goods, in the service of economic growth and competition and the perpetuation of a specific social organisation of a population which has been systematically pedagogised according to this particular target. This is not to propose that the education system should not equip learners with appropriate skills and knowledge for life in the economic world beyond but, however important, this should not be the key purpose of education. Perhaps a different starting premise is required which, ironically, can be extracted from terms deployed throughout the white paper when discussing the future of schools: autonomy and innovation. The white paper’s use of ‘autonomy’ is conditioned by prescribed curriculum content and accountability through inspection so that teachers are given autonomywithin-limits. I want to propose that if the government wishes to give more autonomy to schools and other institutions then perhaps we might consider this term in relation to an idea of a collective will of those who work within them as an emancipatory, fully inclusive and egalitarian force, built on the axiom that education is a common right without predication. This displaces the white paper’s use of autonomy apropos freedom from over-burdening bureaucracy onto a plane of equality and self-emancipation. AUTONOMY AND SELF-EMANCIPATION

The intentions of the new white paper The Importance of Teaching concerning teacher education, the school curriculum, inspection and the socio-economic drivers are discussed briefly above. Running through the document is a concern to free schools, teachers and teacher-trainers from over-burdening bureaucracy so that they can create more effective teaching and learning environments for learners. The term autonomy is employed throughout in order to signal a desire for schools to become more autonomous in their management and curriculum design but to be accountable for their achievements. It is employed to anticipate self-managed units responsible for resources, quality of service and outcomes and which are responsible to a centralised series of quality controls and effectiveness measures. Autonomy can however be employed in a more emancipatory sense which does not abandon a remit of social responsibility and accountability for initiating and improving educational practices but remains at a distance from the State and the economy. My purpose here is to use this term to argue for the autonomy of educators/ teachers to generate self-emancipatory and self-determining learning practices with their students set alongside appropriate systems and structures for accountability. The axiom driving processes of emancipation and determination is quite simply that put forward by Ranciere in his exploration of the pedagogical work of Joseph Jacotot: the axiom of the equality of intelligence. This egalitarian principle can be found, in different manifestations, in the practices and writings of teachers and educators through time. A key point to configure immediately is that this principle is not conceived in teleological terms but rather as a principle that needs to be constantly interrogated and verified wherever it functions…which means a constant reflection upon the qualities, procedures and values of practice. This has to 171

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acknowledge an immanent capacity to innovate new futures of learning and teaching which are not yet imaginable. Though perhaps anathema to the new coalition government’s philosophical traditions, as they address the future of schools and teacher education, the Marxian notion that ‘humans produce and humans are produced’ would seem highly apposite. It prefigures a space for the new to emerge, which we have to accept might involve forms of exploitation but also liberatory practices that are able to transcend established or outmoded systems and structures. The egalitarian axiom above might well be met with varying degrees of cynicism (see Hallward 2010, p. 113... ‘be realistic!’ ‘too pie in the sky,’ ‘terribly idealistic and totally impractical, irresponsible,’ and so on) and yet it has to be maintained, kept in perspective, striven for realisation…to connect the impossible to the possible! This process is well known to be part of creative work which is driven by an Idea, something eternal, an infinite project rather than a clearly defined concept. (Being realistic is merely a term of conformity, to confirm the status quo.) COMMUNISM OF THE WILL

This is a term articulated by Hallward (2010) in relation to notions of selfemancipation and self-determination and it concerns the integration of a principled Idea with material practices for the benefit of all, a process that requires constant verification and periods of renewal. The idea of autonomy sits in opposition to that of determinism by cultural, historical or socio-economic forces; engaging the idea of agency as a subjectivation to an Idea to create a future even though subject to its historical and social conditions. Pedagogy (to lead the child) has traditionally been associated with instruction, direction, edification and so on, emerging from established traditions and values; it assumes an inequality between teacher and learner. Autonomy would therefore appear to be anti-pedagogical if grounded in the idea of an equality of intelligence and the collective will of teachers to organise and promote an Idea of education grounded in notions of self-emancipation and selfdetermination. Participation in such a general will by educators for more emancipatory and egalitarian educational processes and structures involves collective deliberations for social justice in this particular sphere of human endeavour which necessarily must involve events of dissensus that lead to new forms of consensus. Hallward (2010, p. 130) points to Beauvior’s critique of voluntary servitude where she bemoaned our tendency to be passive and acquiescent, resigned to the power of the State, to ‘think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer help to make history, we are resigned to submitting to it (Beauvoir 1976, p. 139).’ The power of state educational policies in recent decades has been answered with increasing passivity and acquiescence in educational institutions from schools to universities. It is time for a collective will of educators to argue their autonomy and to work together towards new social worlds and communities of teaching and learning grounded in the concepts of self-emancipation and social justice which I have attempted to discuss throughout this book; to renew the axiom of the equality of 172

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intelligence and the conviction that education is an education through the truths of local curations of learning and their future potentials. Can we take the terms autonomy and innovation that are key themes throughout the white paper The Importance of Teaching and use them to promote the ideas on learning and the collective will of educators I have developed briefly here? This would perhaps hijack government’s use of these terms but lead to educational convictions and values that emerge from a collective will of educators whose simple maxim might be… to enable learners to become more effective learners in their local pursuits of learning. It is really difficult to see beyond the diffuse power of prevailing government control of education in order to imagine and then create a political distance (not separation) that leads to establishing autonomous and effective organisational structures for teaching and learning. This would be an organisation, grounded in the axiom of the equality of intelligence that has the facility to act in relation to educational matters whenever injustices appear at any level affecting learners and teachers, grounded in a collective will that emerges from the authority of those who work in educational contexts.

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