Mobilizing Powers of the False for Arts-Based Research

Whether they intend to or not, contemporary forms of education and modes of pedagogy presuppose the image of life that their subjects will live (Agamben, 1999). Evident in the legacy of developmental, taxonomic, and instrumental educational thought, such a priori images function to restrict thinking to its most orthodox referents, reinforcing particular habits of self-reflection and responses to the world. Today, we find ourselves continually captured by the stultifying habits of identitarian thought, effectively reducing difference as a matter of degree from the all-too-human representational images upon which efforts of dehabituation are continually reterritorialized. Against this spirit of reactivity rife in the representational thought of the West, arts-based research might today be mobilized toward the liberation of thought from the habits of repetition while fabulating new and less dogmatic images of life. What is at stake herein is not simply the cessation of novelty, but, rather, a future that does not simply reterritorialize within an image of the past. If we are to take such a task seriously, arts-based research must not simply aspire to the representation of life, but to the creation of new concepts (images of thought), percepts (sensations), and affects (capacities to act and be acted upon) that will aid art educators, curriculum theorists, and teachers to escape the gravitational pull of established identities and practices that unnecessarily limit the question of how a life might be composed. This task it is to make thinkable, visible, and haptic those unthought forces that might wrest thinking from the cul-desac of perpetual semiosis in which we are today caught. Put differently, the task of arts-based research might be thought in terms of palpating forces in the world but not of it. Herein, one might think of the filmic works of such directors as Goddard, Lynch, or Cronenberg, each of whom unleash the expressive potentials of art in a manner that concomitantly perverts common taste while producing mutant countercartographies for thinking.

The contemporary challenge for arts-based research is to open what it means to think the course of life "adequate to what is happening around us" (Deleuze, 2004, p. 138). It is, as Deleuze (2004) remarks, to explore the potential forms of nonintegration and refusal alive in challenges of art (1990, 2000), music (1987), film (2003a, 2003b), video, and youth culture: "It must adopt as its own those revolutions going on elsewhere, in other domains, or those that are being prepared" (Deleuze, 2004, p. 138). In this vein, arts-based research must begin to survey the affirmative potentials of posthumanism, postpsychoanalysis, and postvisual studies, producing in turn an experimental plateau upon which to rethink our most trenchant ontological presumptions. Perhaps more adequately, the antifascist task of contemporary arts-based research must take seriously a style of ontological thought that never ceases to undo the sedimentation of identities. In the course of such experimentation, arts-based research must not simply map what is, but set being back into motion by mobilizing new tools for thinking teaching, learning, and—ultimately and above all—living. Toward this, a new question must be mobilized beyond the representational impulse undergirding the all-too-familiar question "what does this mean?"—a question that most always finds its location in some a priori category or image. Supplanting this will-to-representation, arts-based research might be recommenced along the ethical question of "what does art do?" Following this ethical impetus, we might begin to think arts-based research as an artistic, political, and ethico-aesthetic attempt to transform the normative limits ascribed to pedagogical being. Yet, an important caveat must be posed here, for if arts-based research is conceived solely as a project of resistance, it might easily collapse back into prior habits of thought. Ostensibly, understanding art as a tactic of resistance against some prior thing renders it into yet another form of modern reactivity. Against this reactive impulse, arts-based researchers might instead begin to approach the notion of resistance as primary—continually beset upon by the fascistic thought of both State and neoliberal powers, in the image of which...