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

52 Visual Arts Research Volume 39, Number 1 Summer 2013

© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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)negotiat-ing 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, singu-lar frameworks, and grand narratives of what is pre-supposed by being disciplinary. The postmodern world is contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indetermi-nate, and disunified (Dalton, 2001). “Critical postmodernism is seen as a continu-ation 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-be-tween 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)construc-tion as a disciplinary body in Arts Education. Experience and performance, as

Courtnie N. Wolfgang University of South Carolina Art Education

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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 inves-tigate 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 know-ing as a site of productivity and potential—and the values of recapturing that po-tential 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 Femi-nism promotes unblock patriarchal, hierarchal notions about society, identity, and institutions that are (re)presented in the coding of visual language. Without care-ful 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 curricu-lum 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 de-territorializations, 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 famil-iar, and embracing “minor” discourses to unhinge oneself from dominant organi-zations: becoming minor. I claim that understanding difference from a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective and its intersections with Feminist theories is a movement toward disrupting sys-tems that bind, restrict, and limit new images of thought as a disciplinary body. In other words, perhaps unhinging oneself is merely a matter of allowing oneself to be-come unhinged. Borrowing a concept from botanical root structures, the rhizome—

Courtnie N. Wolfgang Productive Uncertainties

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a decentralized networking structure—within Deleuze-Guattarian ontology oper-ates as an alternative to the arborescent, or one that restricts growth or movement linearly from a central point. Instead, the rhizome allows for an infinite (or finitely infinite, as it is not random and occurs within and due to constraints) growth in any direction, without one dominant or centralizing root. “Deleuzian concepts keep the field of play open . . . rhizomatic, with science springing up everywhere, unrecog-nizable according to old rules, and coming and going in the middle ‘where things pick up speed’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25; St. Pierre, 2004, p. 287). The Deleuze-Guattarian (1987) rhizome provides a new model for organiza-tion and thought. The decentralized rhizome expands in all directions, networking outward and building upon itself. Similarly, the Deleuze-Guattarian notion of be-coming is the production of a new assemblage of thought (Bonta & Protevi, 2004), which “[taps] into the ability of self-ordering forces of heterogeneous material” (p. 54). In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), becoming is characterized by constant proceed-ing: X or Y or Z or . . . becomes X and Y and Z and . . . For example, gender is not man OR woman, but a spectrum of ands; discipline is not hard OR soft, but flex-ible and plural. If something is not one or the other, its potential increases. Like-wise, Deleuze and Guattari caution against being—that it is inert, unproductive. Feminist theories also provide a framework of resistance and re-negotiation that is fruitful in re-imagining disciplinary performance. “[Feminism is a] con-stantly shifting and diverse project. . . . [It] represents ‘theory in the making,’ always on the move, open to re-examination and new possibilities” (Dalton, 2001, p. 15). In Gender Trouble (1997) and Bodies That Matter (1999), Judith Butler pres-ents a queer understanding of identity based on principles of performance and repetition: that to achieve the semblance of identity, the subject depends on repeat performances. We mask difference in order to create a more stabile identity, what Case (2003) calls the masquerade. We perform a set of refrains—the identity “do-over.” Or, perhaps, over and over and over again. The naming of a discipline is the product of regulatory ideals and regula-tory practices. A regulatory practice “produces the bodies it governs” and creates a zone of uninhabitability (Butler, 1999, p. 235). “This zone of unihabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain” (p. 237). Operating within a domain reifies the regulatory practices that determine performance, or being. But if one believes Butler, identity is not natural or given, which means one performs identity within a symbolic hierarchy or primary structure. This also means one has the power to perform a productive crises of identity around and through symbolic hierarchies and primary structures. One might inhabit the uninhabitable deliber-ately by re-negotiating disciplinary identity through new refrains. I acknowledge the tensions that arise at intersections of Deleuze-Guattari and Feminist theories, most notably in regard to representation and particular

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ways of understanding becoming as a minoritarian practice. Deleuze-Guattari’s (1987) use of becoming-woman has, in particular, been subject to critique through a Feminist lens. I posit a rethinking of the usefulness of both Deleuze-Guattari and Feminist practices of questioning performance and representation. Borrow-ing a productive positionality from Grosz (as cited in Kontturi & Tiainen, 2007), I approached these intersections as sites of creative tension and of great potential in that critique might “[affirm] the primacy of what is being critiqued, ironically producing exactly the thing it wants to problematize” (p. 255). It is also my belief that in the re-reading and re-application of ideas, they become different, but only if one resists the primacy of what one “knows.” This paper does not attempt to map out the practices of Arts Education as a discipline. Rather, I suggest re-negotiations of disciplinary identity through inter-sections of the arts and theoretical frameworks that route paths toward becoming minor, of deterritorializing performances that mark one as a disciplinary subject and limit productive growth as Artist/Educator.

The Suppleness of Disciplines

Disciplines can be defined as both “continuous yet changing through time; yet the extent to which this is the case varies by discipline” and that their “mutual inde-pendence” might not be upheld given “the extent to which disciplines also inform one another” (Kreber, 2009, p. 23). The methods by which knowledge is arrived at in a discipline are essential to the definition of that discipline. Limiting difference in a discipline makes clearer the disciplinary identity. Put another way, defining the limits of “what a discipline can do” maps the terrain of that discipline. Disci-plines also provide a basis for how performances within a discipline are organized and adorned—that is, in the symbols that can be observed and understood by a larger community. One identifies in and with one’s discipline. Disciplines exert strong influences on teaching, learning environments, and how students learn. Still, one might remain cautious, as Poole (2009) suggests. “Disciplines appear to help us make sense of our academic worlds while at the same time limiting our ability to do so” by establishing dominant organizations of what a particular disci-plinary body can do (p. 51). It is then also useful to imagine the discipline as a territory, marked by perfor-mance or refrain. Art-making is the refrain of the artist that forms the territory of the artist. Writing is the refrain of the author or academic that forms another terri-tory. Artist/Educator forms another. Too often, one passes through these territories as one or the other instead of one and the other and the other. The dangers of rigid territorialization, or the segmentarity of disciplines inhere assumption, reduction, and fixedness. For the purposes of re-negotiation, we might imagine disciplines as



supple segmentarities that can be modified, traversed, challenged, blended, and changed. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that we “deterritorialize the refrain,” a notion that will be discussed in more detail later in this paper (p. 350). A disciplinary body is determined by a process of subjectification. Accord-ing to Butler (1999), the subject does not simply exist but is repeatedly created/performed. The in-between spaces in such performances are the sites of resignifica-tion, or the repetition that constitutes the subject. One cannot refuse those terms, but neither should we obey them without question. Deleuze and Guattari allude to the interconnectedness of nature and relocate the subject within multiple affec-tive, ethical, and performative dimensions. “The Deleuzian figure of becoming is central to these considerations because it not only talks of the constantly creative evolution of the conceptual world but also of the world of subjectivity with which Butler engages” (Gale, 2010, p. 305). Becoming a discipline, therefore, could be imagined as more heterogeneous than disciplines are commonly understood to be. Acknowledgment and occupation of the in-between spaces sets in motion new im-ages of thought within disciplinary domains.

The Usefulness of Disciplines

One often understands disciplines as striated spaces one performs within. Disci-plines have characterized higher learning since the founding of the first universi-ties in the Middle Ages, institutions strongly influenced by the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialect, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (Wagner, 1983). Yet it seems there is the potential to operate within a smoother space of pedagogy. Historical features that determined disciplines as a powerful way of knowing the world, especially in the late 19th and early 20th century, become dis-placed in a pluralist society where multiple truths are favored over the search for an objective truth (Barnett, 2009). That doesn’t suggest that disciplines are no longer of any use. “[Disci-plines] are real and they exert real effects on lecturers’ approaches to teaching and also on the student experience. . . . [We might] make vivid the liveliness of disciplines as they are taken up, explored and experienced within the pedagogical relationship” (Barnett, 2009, p. xv). The methods through which knowledge is arrived at within in a discipline are essential to the definition of that discipline. Disciplinary comfort is a result of teaching theories and perceptions of self that align with the perceived disciplinary structure. Living with uneasiness within a discipline occurs when personal theories and perceptions diverge from given disciplinary approaches, in such ways that creative interpretations of disciplinary knowledge can occur.

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The Limitations of Disciplines

Kreber (2009) notes: “[D]rastic changes in the learning environments over the past decade (e.g., types of students entering university, content to be taught, ad-vances in technology) not only invite pedagogical inquiry but make it a necessity. As a consequence, the scholarship of teaching and learning is an imperative today, not a choice” (p. 27). Arts Education and research can be a site for transformation. In order to access meaningful transformations in one’s own practices and with/for students, one might recognize the importance of the drastic changes that Kreber considers. Embedded practices within a particular discipline do not always engage in re-negotiations of environments, technologies, and student perspectives un-less the practitioners proactively seek those re-negotiations. “Once the disciplines have been defined and described in certain ways, it becomes even more difficult to break away from entrenched practices or traditions and engage in innovations in teaching” (Kreber, 2009, p. 27). Teaching and research are context-specific, and there are other mediating factors besides disciplinary codes in determining context other than discipline. Teachers’ and researchers’ subjectivities exert an influence beyond disciplinary or departmental influence. “These considerations invite serious questions about whether reluctance [can] . . . be observed among departments [by] look[ing] be-yond their own immediate teaching and assessment ‘silos’ as justified and about the potential of opening these up through exchanges of practices across disciplin-ary and departmental boundaries” (p. 27). This suggests that neither departmental culture nor disciplinary structure should exclusively determine performance. Rath-er, performance should be influenced by a combination of departmental culture, disciplinary structure, and other mediating factors: the in-between spaces.

Deterritorializing Disciplines: In-between Spaces, Naming, and Boundary Crossing

Haraway (1988) posits that passionate detachment binds one to seek perspective from multiple points of view. “One cannot ‘be’ either a cell or a molecule . . . if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. ‘Being’ is much more problematic and contingent. Also, one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question of the power to see” (p. 61). Therefore, one might also assume that the processes of becoming foster perspectival diversity, the ability to see. Further, in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway, 1991, Chapter 8), Haraway posits that the image of the cy-borg “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained



our bodies and our tools to ourselves. . . . [I]t means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories” (p. 181). The cyborg represents a “condensed image of both imagination and material reality,” that in their joined centers there is potential for transformation (p. 150).

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments. . . . [F]irst, the produc-tion of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science meta-physics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. (Haraway, 1991, p. 181)

I’m suggesting that perspectival diversity can lead to a rethinking, or a deterritori-alization of a structured space of thought within a discipline. The deterritorialized space, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), has been somehow unhinged from its territorial, coded function. A deterritorialized (smooth) space is one of multi-plicities: territorialized (striated) spaces limit and determine. Deterritorialization par excellence results when “there is no reterritorialization afterward. . . . [T]he land ceases to be the land, tending to become ground . . . or support” (p. 381). But the authors caution that one is not saved by smooth spaces alone. Systems of structure operate to orient negotiations in, around, and through structure.

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to return to them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 160; emphasis added)

Put another way, acknowledgment of the structured, striated spaces we operate within, around, and through is needed in order to navigate new thought, to ground oneself if only long enough to catapult in another direction. Striated, territorialized spaces provide the coded information that ultimately enables one to operate produc-tively within those codes as well as negotiate movement away from those codes.

In-Between Spaces

Because “disciplines appear to help us make sense of our academic worlds while at the same time limiting our ability to do so” (Poole, 2009, p. 51), I propose seeking out the in-between spaces between the codes of a discipline, those spaces that serve as a rich site for the reform of situated practices within discipline. “All of us come

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through or out of disciplines, so disciplines are supposed to be a kind of secure shell, like a place we know and something we are getting used to” (Garstenauer, Bueno, Caporale Bizzini, Kasic, & van der Turin, 2006, p. 38). If so, then leaving the shell necessitates one’s entering into uncertainty and accessing the energy and potential of the unknown. Ryan Raffa (www.ryanraffa.com) occupies the interstitial spaces between—and overlaps of—design, music, art, performance, and research in Urban Drifts (2009). Raffa describes the work as “a series of research-driven bicycle rides through New York City that make use of the Situationist International concept of the dérive (Debord, 1967) and tracks the course of the rides using GPS technol-ogy.” Those rides, according to Raffa, were determined by “architecture, sounds, smells” and not the “usual motives” for travel, like going to work or school. From his rides, Raffa created catalogues of photographs, soundscapes, drawings, visual diaries of the clothes worn, maps, and movies. Each method of record-keeping,

Figure 1. Ryan Raffa, 2009, Urban Drifts [Paper, colored pencil, ink].



according to Raffa, informed the other in unanticipated ways. By simply operating differently within a familiar environment, Raffa slipped into the spaces between the known and the unknown, and familiar forms of recording data and art-mak-ing took on new meaning.

Dr. Crayon Lady or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Name

Naturalized verbal and visual languages often misrepresent the complexities of identity and performance, fostering misunderstandings that enable further mis-representation. During my first year as an Arts Education faculty member, I was greeted in the hallway by a colleague who said to me: “Hey, it’s the crayon lady!” Immediately I conjured images of what I was certain he meant by “crayon lady”: the frizzy-haired Bohemian at the end of the elementary school hallway, not un-like every creative (re)presentation of “art teacher” from popular media—yet the fact remains that I was, indeed, carrying an enormous tub of crayons. Upon reflec-tion, I decided that being called “crayon lady” was less a failure on my colleague’s part to recognize the complexities of my disciplinary body than a failure on my part to allow myself to feel limited by an image of Artist/Educator that, in my resistance, I agreed to construct. I am, at the very least, complicit in that construc-tion. Pushing back against that misrepresentation of Artist/ Educator is not to deny the media (the crayon) but to understand that media differently. To deterri-torialize, one must come out of that spoken and visual language, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call becoming a stranger in one’s own tongue: to make a deliberate effort to misunderstand the familiar. Those who study foreign languages become accustomed to unhinging their ways of knowing language. Assumptions about meaning, structure, and even the gendering of language must necessarily dissolve, given that languages vary in their organization. It is often taken for granted that the constructing of language in a native tongue must engage in deconstruction in order to understand speaking in another. Knowing this, what might one learn from a determined deconstruction of our systems of naming, of showing, and of knowing? Additionally, understand-ing language as plural and flexible is, at times, difficult. “We haven’t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity. To do that is to speak improperly. Of course we might . . . exhibit one ‘truth’ while sensing, withholding, muffling one another. Truth’s other side . . . stayed hidden. Secret” (Irigaray, 1999, p. 85). My example might seem over-simplified, but were I able, in that moment, to allow the crayon plural codes, to resist its singularity and my own as marked by the crayon and the embedded codes of grade school art materials within the environment of “Univer-sity Arts,” my reaction would have been much different.

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In broader terms, resisting over-coded understandings of “Artist/Educator” also increases the potentials of practice. Haraway’s (1991) concept of the cyborg—neither machine nor organic—encourages one to resist naming in those restric-tive ways in which one has been taught. “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (p. 175; emphasis added). Naming can limit understandings of multiplicity and fail to acknowledge what is excluded in such naming. “Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial and strategic” (p. 155). In the course of developing a new language or confronting inscribed ways of knowing through language, one resists blockages etched out by patriarchal systems. One can, as Irigaray (1999) says, do without patriarchal models, standards, or examples. The commanding, prohibitive world has no place in a new image of thought: one that is plural, flex-ible, and foreign. The spoken, the written, the produced, and the consumed are no longer limited to inscribed meaning. They, too, are plural, flexible, and foreign. Like naming, the refrain relates to the coding of information that serves to mark or name a territory. Territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorial-ization are not three successive movements in an evolution, but three aspects of a single thing: the refrain. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state: “The refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges itself there or leaves” (p. 323). In other words, the refrain is a block of content organized to form a territory—or to deterritorialize and reterritorialize somewhere else. “The [new] territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently” (p. 322). For the Artist/ Educator, the crayon has lodged itself within our terrain. Deleuze and Guattari use birds’ songs as an example of a territorial refrain, as well as repeating mottos that establish nationalism, patriotism, or ordering. Dif-ference is inherent, but unity and territory are established through the refrain. The refrain does not assume a territory that becomes of the refrain. Rather, the refrain is a part of pre-existing circumstances. In other words, new territories are, at least in part, determined by their difference in relationship to other existing codes. In their discussion about art, Deleuze and Guattari state: “[T]hese three ‘ages,’ the classical, romantic, and modern . . . should not be interpreted as an evolution, or as structures separated by signifying breaks. . . . [E]verything we attribute to an age was already present in the preceding age” (1987, p. 346). The difference was established, and informed, by what came before and what would come after. Arts Education does not precede nor follow any other field of study of the arts. How might one extract “education” from a study of the arts? And yet, the refrain of the Arts Educator as a disciplinary body and the refrain of other disciplinary bodies outside of Arts Education have determined a territory named Arts Education or



Arts Educator. Inherent differences should not be masked by a refrain. Recogni-tion of the difference one embodies keeps channels open for re-negotiating iden-tity, the potential for change: to “[hazard] an improvisation” (p. 311). The impro-visation, or experimentation, is a creative line of flight. What if barriers between terrains (or disciplines) were easily deconstructed by re-imagining the tools with which those barriers were made? Christian Faur (www.christianfaur.com) resists the over-coded terrain of the medium, instead accessing a visceral connection to it in order to create visu-ally complex portraits and landscapes using an assemblage of crayons standing on end. In his series The Land Surveyors (2008), Faur recreates portraits taken by WPA photographers during the Great Depression by “pixelating” the images with hand-poured wax crayons. Faur says: “My earliest memories of making art involve the use of wax crayons. I can still remember the pleasure of opening a new box of crayons: the distinct smell of the wax, the beautifully colored tips, everything still perfect and unused. Using the first crayon from a new box al-ways gave me a slight pain.” One might argue that Faur’s work misunderstands the crayon or its use. Instead, perhaps Faur has deterritorialized the crayon. He changed the refrain of the crayon, maintaining it, in a way, as “still perfect and unused.” Faur demonstrates proceedings somewhat within and somewhat out-side of a territory.

Figure 2. Christian Faur, 2008, The Land Surveyors—detail

[Wax crayon].

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Boundary Crossing

To negotiate disciplinary boundary crossings, it might first be useful to attempt to further unpack disciplinarity. For the purposes of this discussion, disciplinarity might be considered a performance. Put another way, disciplinarity might be the performance of a refrain (repeated codes or behaviors) or a set of refrains—the more defined the discipline, the more constraints on variation (performance, objects, or methodology). Repeated performance of the refrain reproduces the discipline as a specific territory and its objects, studies, and aims: this is the arts classroom; these are the things Arts Educators use; this is what we study; these are our objectives. Poole (2009) suggests that “divergent views regarding the nature of thinking within a discipline should be encouraged because these views enrich the disci-pline,” and that, as educators, there is a need “to strike a balance between curricula that socialize students into a way of thinking and curricula that welcome new forms of discourse and thought” (p. 53). There exists a binding system of cultural codes. “Meaning is determined in part by cultural codes. These codes control us without intervention, trapping us on public stages as we ‘perform our lives’” (Deniston-Trochta, 2000, p. 52). Developing voice and agency as a disciplinary body means recognizing codes and how they construct meaning for, or intervene in that construction. Similarities exist across disciplines in the thinking processes developed. Identifying the context and recognizing organizing principles enables an ability to change perspectives. Interdisciplinary discourse is one way those similarities might be recognized. “Power arrangements shift and new social patterns emerge through discourse. Groups are excluded or included through discursive practices, and those with little power are given new legitimacy by adopting a ‘legitimate’ discourse” (Dalton, 2001, p. 22). Feminist studies help us identify those ideologies by chal-lenging dominant discourses in society. I often caution my students, as future Arts Educators, to be mindful of the canonization of “The Masters” in arts classrooms: the disproportionate reliance on white, Western, male-dominated, two-dimen-sional and three-dimensional work—and what that excludes. Taking a position on the margin can be exhausting, but it allows “the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine al-ternatives, new worlds” (hooks, 1990, p. 341). A position of marginality leads to a “new understanding of a strategic sense of knowledge [that] constitutes a pulsating oppositional stance to institutional mainstream rules” (Garstenauer et al., 2006, p. 49), but only with constant reframing of that position. Otherwise, the marginal position is at risk of becoming dominant and static: “[E]ach act of



engagement means tracing new borders and stepping out, as well as examining internal contradictions. Do we multiply our power by consenting to assimila-tion and to all the rules already established by the institutional, namely, the academic mainstream, and, if so, at what cost?” (p. 51). Additionally, position-ing oneself at the margins increases the potentiality of moving between/beyond boundaries. Using a critical Feminist approach to disciplinary boundary crossing is an emancipatory act, questioning unitary notions of identity that underpin the codes of a discipline. The concepts brought forth in A Thousand Plateaus are useful in positioning boundary crossing as a constant proceeding of ideas—not as singular moves from one ideology to another. By decentering structural ideas (the rhizome), acknowl-edging difference and repetition in the refrain, and allowing a path to determine the points and not the reverse, one approaches an image of disciplinary territories as supple and fluid. Brian Massumi describes A Thousand Plateaus as “an effort to construct a smooth space of thought” (1987, p. xiii). Smooth spaces of thought require rec-ognition of primary structures, subjectivity, negotiation, performance, repetition,

Figure 3. Jason Eppink’s, 2008, Pixelator changes the visual landscape of urban spaces [Video billboard, white foamboard, diffusion gel].

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and decentering. In a smooth space, one might rise up at any time and move to another space. Deleuze-Guattarian notions of the rhizome, the refrain, nomad thought, and territorialization are useful in determining those smooth spaces. A subterranean botanical rhizome is decentered. The rhizome within Deleuze-Guattarian ontology operates as an alternative to the arborescent that restricts growth or movement linearly from a central point. In their words, “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model” (1987, p. 12). A rhizome is a map, not a tracing. A tracing “has already translated the map into an image” (p. 13) that is organized, stabilized, and neutralized. The map, on the other hand, is susceptible to constant modification, has multiple entryways, and can “be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (p. 13). A rhizome fosters connectivity and the con-stant proceeding in multiple directions.

Figure 4. Tezuka Archi-tects, 2009, Woods of Net seems to grow in all direction and in no particular direction at all [Knitted fiber].



Nomad thought is not confined to “ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of repre-sentation, subject, concept, and being but it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds” (Massumi, 1997, p. xii). The nomad is part of a social formation dedicated to constant proceedings and deterritorialization of determined and over-coded space, resisting the sedentary State organizations that are stratified and stable. The State is defined by order and codes that order. The nomad, by comparison, “distributes himself in a smooth space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 381). “The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points . . . [A]lthough the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary” (p. 380). In other words, the nomad is not without territory, but differs from operations of the State in how that territory is determined—or, rather, how that territory is con-stantly re-determined. Disciplinary nomads, for example, might operate with objectives (points) determined by an active curriculum (path). In Arts Educa-tion practice, we might understand nomadism through Enduring Ideas (Stewart & Walker, 2005), or ideas and themes that reflect questions to explore, fostering emphasis on process and inquiry in art-making.

Figure 5. Jason Eppink, 2010, Twenty-First Century Bonfire [“Rescued” television sets, PVC pipe].

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Creative reimagining of performance, I believe, strengthens one’s abilities as an instructor to engage students from multi-perspectival positions in multi-perspectival ways: a disciplinary nomad. As Gale (2010) states, “the nomad is only passing through; s/he makes necessary situated connections that can help him/her to survive, but s/he never takes on the fully the limits of one . . . fixed identity” (p. 307). This multi-perspectival performance can be observed in Oliver Herring’s TASK. From the TASK website:

[TASK relies] on the same basic infrastructure: a designated area, a variety of props and materials . . . and the participation of people who agree to follow two simple, procedural rules: to write down a task on a piece of paper and add it to a designated “TASK pool,” and, secondly, to pull a task from that pool and interpret it any which way he or she wants, using whatever is on (or potentially off) stage. When a task is completed, a participant writes a new task, pulls a new task, and so on. (www.oliverherringtask.wordpress.com)

TASK events embody smooth space. Participants are nomadic. Tasks are rhi-zomatic, subject to growth in all directions. The disciplinary territory of TASK is undetermined, even considering its affiliations with the arts institutionally. One might assume its appeal to arts communities rests in some sort of familiar refrain as “of the arts,” yet the indeterminate identity and performance of TASK occupies the interstitial space that this paper claims is a site of creative potential.

Figure 6. NAEA TASK Event, 2012, New York.



I am suggesting that boundary crossing requires collaboration, reflexivity, and dialogue. In navigating those in-between spaces, we are able to critically in-vestigate objects and practices embedded within disciplines, determining what is useful, what is counterproductive, and where meaningful change can take place. Butler (1995) asks: “How is it that we become available to a transformation of who we are, a contestation which compels us to rethink ourselves, a reconfiguration of our ‘place’ and our ‘ground?”’ (p. 132).

Implications for Arts Education

I have the pleasure of working with future Arts Educators. Part of my performed refrain is my insistence that good pedagogy requires flexibility, thoughtfulness, and evolution. Consider the enormity of how one practices those things or how to describe those practices to a group of pre-service teachers. Or consider how to ac-count for the infinite possible experiences those students might encounter during their teaching. As artist/educators, what if learning to think differently about our acquired and experiential knowledge could lead us toward innovative, meaningful design for our students that fosters agency, strength, and voice, that pushes them to re-imagine what they already know as a line of creative flight? The arts have the potential to affirm difference, to oppose power, and to de-habituate normalizing discourses—processes that mobilize agency and cre-ate meaningful change. As Arts Educators, we access that same mobilizing force through the re-negotiation of our disciplinary practices and pedagogies. It is this reflexivity that allows continued shifting of thought and disallows fixity of identity markers that concretize performance within a discipline of Art Education, limit-ing its potential for change. That is not to say an Artist/Educator should not find comfort with process or practice, but simply not to rest there too long. With the (dis)ease of negotiating new territories comes an invigorating re-imagining of a disciplinary body as constantly becoming Artist/ Educator.

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

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