Productive Uncertainties: Deleuze|Guattari, Feminist Theory, and Disciplinary Boundary Crossings

This paper investigates the interpretive intersections of Feminist theories and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987) as they relate to (re)negotiating the Arts Educator's disciplinary identity as supple and fluid. This approach to understanding one's discipline encourages caution regarding classical notions of truth, reason, identity, and objectivity, and the questioning of universality, singular frameworks, and grand narratives of what is pre-supposed by being disciplinary. The postmodern world is contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, and disunified (Dalton, 2001). "Critical postmodernism is seen as a continuation of a kind of modernist thinking, which looks back and reasserts the hidden discourses of counter-modernism. It critically reflects on modernism, but is not a complete break with it" (p. 32). In determining productive boundary crossings within and outside of a discipline, a critical postmodern approach endorses the looking back onto one's own discipline in order to better understand the in-between spaces one might occupy in that crossing. Intersections between theories of performance, difference, and creative re-imaging of a disciplinary body make more transparent the terrain of subjectification, and potential to smooth striated spaces that bind and limit creative approaches to Arts Education.

As a new Arts Educator a decade ago, I found myself in a state of constant re-negotiation, brought on by the blinding realization that I did not, indeed, know everything. I questioned my practices in pursuit of a more engaging, more meaningful, and more successful process of inquiry and instruction. That time was one of experimentation, productivity, error, celebration, and identity (re)construction as a disciplinary body in Arts Education. Experience and performance, as well as instances of "success" in the classroom, served to stabilize my disciplinary performances and identity, and the energy of that pulsating uncertainty dissipates as I name myself as "this" or "that" within a discipline. I have attempted to investigate my ways of being Artist/ Educator through theoretical lenses as one way of reconnecting with the fruitful tensions that produced my disciplinary identity: the becoming Artist/Educator. I recognize that interstitial space of knowing/not knowing as a site of productivity and potential—and the values of recapturing that potential for creative use. The question remains: How does one unhinge oneself? I only begin to answer it through these intersections.

Feminist theory encourages the questioning of the dominant discourses that inscribe hierarchy and performance. Visual images—along with the written, the spoken, and the performed—are a language. The polyvocal pluralities that Feminism promotes unblock patriarchal, hierarchal notions about society, identity, and institutions that are (re)presented in the coding of visual language. Without careful intervention, our disciplinary identity and performance are mediated by those codes. Unblocking ourselves from those codes allows for a (re)reading of self and others through visual, spoken, written, and performed languages. According to Irigaray (1999), "If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over again" (p. 82).

In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari challenge stabilized systems of thought in search of creative lines of flight and potential. I borrow the term becoming from them, which they counter to being. Being is static, while becoming represents a state of constant proceeding. It is in the becoming that we inhabit in-between spaces, the imperceptible. This is especially significant when theorizing curriculum as disciplinary bodies. The term "curriculum" extends from the Latin "currere," meaning "to run" (Wallin, 2010). This positions curriculum as an active force, a force that creates lines of becoming that expand difference and creation.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, film, art, music, and performance are rich sites of investigating becoming, as they continuously undergo productive deterritorializations, or resistances to dominant discourses that both limit difference and the understanding of difference. Deleuze and Guattari advocate a process of learning to be a foreigner in your own tongue, becoming unfamiliar with the familiar, and embracing "minor" discourses to unhinge oneself from dominant organizations: becoming minor.

I claim that understanding difference from a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective and its...