Creative pedagogy & its media

Becoming-words-becoming-sound-becoming movement


This post examines Deleuze, and Deleuze & Guattaris’, theories of affect as a form of creative pedagogy. Affect is the concept of taking something on, of changing in relation to an experience or encounter. Deleuze employs this terms in differing ways and, for the purposes of this paper, I am interested in the notion of ‘affectus’ which is a kind of movement or subjective modulation. In his book ‘Spinoza, Practical Philosophy’ Deleuze (1988, p. 49) describes ‘affectus’ as:
an increase or decrease of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike.
He then expands this definition through arguing that ‘affectus’ is different from emotion, indeed, ‘affectus’ is the virtuality and materiality of the increase or decrease effected in a body’s power of acting. Deleuze states:

The affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage [or movement] from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. Hence there is a difference in nature between the image affections or ideas and the feeling affect.

‘Affectus’ is the materiality of change: ‘the passage from one state to another’ which occurs in relation to ‘affecting bodies’. ‘Affectus’ is what cultural theorists such as Giroux, Lusted (1986), Di Leo et al (2002), and McWilliam (1996) call ‘pedagogy’, namely, a relational practice through which some kind of knowledge is produced (both within and outside educational settings).

The image affections, or ideas, to which Deleuze refers, are generated by a specific kind of movement. It is the movement of increasing or decreasing one’s capacity to act that is the modulation of ‘affectus’: the virtual and material change that prompts the affection or ‘feeling of affect’ in the consciousness of the body in question. ‘Affectus’ thus differs from theorizations of subjective change as a kind of cultural pedagogy in the respect that ‘affectus’ has to be considered a post-human pedagogy. It is only grounded in terms of interpersonal relations as much as it is a response to, and part of, becoming in the world. ‘Affectus’ is a rhythmic trace of the world incorporated into a body-becoming, an expression of an encounter between a corporeal form and forces that are not necessarily ‘human’. Literature, sound, dance are creative media that prompt affective responses and generate ‘affectus’. In creating subjective change or a ‘modulation’ in the form of ‘affectus’, such media can be considered post-human pedagogies: material forces of change.

The various sensations which, in blocs form: words and syntax, sound and vibration, spatial and corporeal motion, are the different media of literature, music and dance. These creative mediums produce modulations that are different in kind, as they are sensory, post-human pedagogies that are very different in kind. Subjective modulations will always be specific to the art form in question. The enmeshment of individual, 'human' subjective traits with a non-human medium (word-sound-movement) is ‘affectus’, and it is this enmeshment that I am arguing is a kind of creative pedagogy: a rhythmic trace of sensation incorporated into the body-becoming.
In terms of art, an affect is an aspect of a work of art, which is made up of sensations: a certain collection of sentences that offer a particular atmosphere, a musical chord progression compounded with specific vocal changes, a combination of dancer’s bodies and choreographic movements. Deleuze and Guattari describe this specificity of materiality in terms of sensation and affect: another kind of affect, which differs from the human state of emotion and is a non-human, sensory component of art which is made through creative labour. They argue that:
sensation is not the same thing as the material. What is preserved by right is not the material, which constitutes only the defacto condition … Sensation is not realised in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept of affect. All the material becomes expressive (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 166).

Affects in art can effect ‘affectus’: they can be taken up as embodied (or subjective) modulations. This idea presents readers of Deleuze’s work with a pedagogical economy of sensation and aesthetics. As ‘affectus’ is a subjective change, and ‘affect’ a product of aesthetic labour that may cause subjective change, affect can be considered a vector of pedagogy. It is a media of change. I explore three different media of becoming in terms of the affects contained on the media, and in terms of the kinds of modulation and becoming they might effect.

Becoming-words
“Writing for Kafka, the primacy of writing, signifies only one thing: not a form of literature alone, the enunciation forms a unity with desire, beyond laws, states, regimes” (Kafka, pp 41-2)

According to Deleuze and Guattari, literature can effect a kind of libidinal flow, or subjective machination, that cuts across laws, states and regimes. Such desiring-production is a kind of becoming-word, a machination of self which occurs in relation to word and cuts across forms of social order. The literary affects that prompt becoming-word are grounded in the milieu of sense that is established within a writer’s work. Because of this, affects are internal to a written piece. I offer a brief example to establish my point and draw upon Kafka’s Metamorphoses (reprinted 1992). The protagonist of this dark tale, Gregor, is constructed in relation to a specific milieu of language and sense. The reader thus imagines the air that Gregor breathes in his solitary confinement is different from the atmosphere of any other lounge-room. The imagined smells of uneaten food, an unaired room and insect-ness become part of the reader's imagining of Gregor’s imprisonment. This is because Gregor as a character is inseperable from the cold, dictatorial tone in which Kafka writes. His almost impersonal use of words: ‘Why didn’t his sister go round to join the others? Probably she had only just got out of bed and hadn’t even started to dress yet. And whatever was she crying for? Because he didn’t get up and let the chief clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the head of the firm would then start pestering his parents about those old debts? But surely these were unnecessary worries for the time being. Gregor was still here and had no intention at all of deserting his family’ (pp. 83) the movement here between protagonist and narrator gives the reader the impression that Gregor is disembodied, narrating his own imprisonment. The becoming-word that is effected is foreign-ness, lack of control, imprisonment, disembodiment.

Literary affect, produced by a being of sensation, becomes corporeal affect as the reader becomes-Gregor-becomes-nauseous, becomes – scared, becomes-hated and becomes- alone. Critically, Gregor’s metamorphosis forms a new point of reference within the set of subjective limits that the reader actualizes. As a result of literary affect and the modulation of ‘affectus’, the reader now understands isolation and self-hatred through Gregor, in a slightly different sense to the understandings they have gained via other means of relation. This is the beginnings of a pedagogical relationship between word, literary sensation and affect and ‘affectus’.

becoming-sound
‘i’m stuck in this dream
it’s changing me
i am becoming’ Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails (1994: the becoming)

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) read 'music' as a sonic performance of flux, liminality, becoming. Like Reznor suggests in the lyrics quoted above, music is, for Deleuze and Guattari, sound is a media of subjective modulation which can be experienced as a sonorous imagination, and effect sonic becomings. Deleuze & Guattari state: "Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorialising the refrain" (1987: 300). Music, sound, noise can act as a deterritorialisation of the voice. Music is a larger vector of deterritorialisation that than visual art and, I would argue, the written word. For example, visual art’s painting of the face can still be confined to facial features; language, confined to a semiotics of direct and indirect discourse, whereas the voice in music is always moving further and further away from ‘words’ or majoritarian language. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, sound is valuable for the way it initiates change, music is not inherently good or bad, they note that: ‘In no way do we believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogenous arts. To us, Art is a false concept…’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300). Indeed, ‘music’ as popularly defined in everyday life is quite different from the political sounds Deleuze and Guattari call ‘music’. Everyday, popular music can act as a totalitarian tool of fascist colonisation: National Anthems of totalitarian state regimes, Top 40 tunes that territorialize mobile phone ring tones, elevator musak playing loudly when you have a headache, the sound of opera to a home boy who ‘hates that shit’, sound can repress as well as open up. But it will also initiate a change. Sound is a non-human teacher, a pedagogue without flesh, a sonorous body of movement.

In her discussion of ‘liminal music’, Broadhurst (1999:139 – 167) characterizes a particular form of pedagogical sound, which she defines as music containing ‘predominantly destructive aesthetics’ (1999:152), characterized by live performances in which musicians and their music effectively operate as one, with performers embodying the qualities of their own sound. This notion of ‘neo-gothic liminal music’ (Broadhurst 1999:152 – 167) suitably becomes the work of artists such as Reznor (NIN) and also Marilyn Manson, whose sound is characterized by industrial noise coupled with bass-heavy goth-rock. On stage, Manson’s affrontingly gaunt frame convulses in a manner that mirrors and extends his music. He paces a spectacularly lit stage in rage and screams at his audience. His voice is mechanically re-produced through a synthesiser and alternates between machinic squeals and baritone chants. According to Broadhurst (1999:168):

All liminal works confront, offend, or unsettle. However, unlike traditional avant-garde performance, the liminal does not set itself up as an opposing structure to dominant ideologies. In fact, it appears at times to be complicit with mainstream trends. Nevertheless, it does display a parodic, questioning, deconstructive mode which presents … resistance.
As such, the textual nature of Manson’s live performances can be considered ‘liminal works’ (Broadhurst, 1999). It is through sonic affect that Manson’s live performances transgress from a liminal position of edging the mainstream to constitute a modulation akin to Deleuze’s notion of ‘affectus’, a sonic machining of subjectivity that Artaud describes as an experience in which ‘… the sonorisation is constant: [and is composed of] sounds, noises [and] cries chosen first for their vibrant quality’ (Artaud, 1958:81).

The sonorous spectacle of a Manson concert offers opportunities for increasing or reducing a body’s capacity to act and shaping the ways in which a body
can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257).

It is in this respect that we can consider the sonic labors of Manson, like that of Reznor, to be a non-human pedagogy. A becoming-sound. Manson's work offers young people an accessible, embodied, aural and material means of thinking ‘otherwise’.

Becoming-movement
‘To witness movement is to witness that there is a changing, open Whole – more than just a system changing itself’ Petra Kuppers (2003: 131)

Within a dance-theatre work, crafting creative or artistic affect is critically enmeshed with the production of corporeal affectus. However, corporeal affectus in the dancer and creative affects remain two distinct entities. In 2002 I was a director of the dance-theatre work In the blood and, drawing on material from my ethnographic research journals in which I documented this process, I explore one example of a compound of affective material created within a the Restless Dance Company production in the blood . This sensory affect made up from movement was the sense of a ‘wish’. An excerpt from my ethnographic research journal illustrates the nature of this wish:

Framed as the host of a surreal and slightly dark birthday party, a disheveled looking man in a worn suit painstakingly lights 27 cup-cake candles. Slowly, he draws the small flame nestled in each cake to his chest. He closes his eyes and his shoulders rise as he makes a wish. Blowing out the candle, he returns the cupcake to its original position in a row of cakes stretching across the front of the stage.

He carefully kneels in front of the next cake.

He strikes a match.
(in the blood, assistant director's journal. Anna Hickey-Moody)

The sense of the ‘wish’ created here exists in relation to lived experiences of the birthday wish, yet this particular sense of a wish is specific to the dance-theatre text in the blood (RDC, 2002). Within this work the being of sensation that is ‘a wish’ is a difficult enterprise, a mixture of effort and tired resolution that is shot through with tiny, fragile flickers of hope. This wish is a sense which does not live on in words; it exists only as sensation created through the enmeshment of movement, light, staging, design and sound. The character, or ‘aesthetic figure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 65, 175) of the man who lights the candles is a defining feature of the world that is in the blood (RDC 2002). The essence or is-ness of the dancer's candle lighting is contingent upon the spatial and temporal facets of the chorography surrounding him, the desolate cathedral of a performance space looming above him, the specificities of his and other dancer’s bodies and the overarching themes of the performance piece.

In a different reality, but within the same temporality, Mark Tanner lights a row of candles. His embodied memory of the way that the ‘candle lighting’ happens is an extension of his personal style. Weeks of working with the other directors and myself have cultivated the corporeal affect of ‘the wish’ and have instilled a method for lighting the candles in his blood, flesh and bones. Drawing together the mechanics of candle lighting with an imagined sense of ‘wish making’ produces the corporeal affect that is ‘Mark’s candles’ and the ‘affective sensation’ that is ‘a wish’. Here corporal affectus is also a textual affect of in the blood when, as a birthday party host, Mark creates a cumulative sense of a somewhat forlorn and difficult wish. The feeling is similar to a desire you can never realize, something that is always slightly out of reach. Every now and then there is a sense that maybe he might get what he wishes for … but this sentiment is as short lived as the flames he extinguishes. The compassion to act and the kinds of relations the affect of ‘the wish’ creates in its beholders, the movement of self through becoming part of a movement machine in which one’s sensorium is machined together with Mark’s, this is one example of the ‘affectus’ dance theatre can engender.

The devices of corporeal and textual affect are what give creative texts meaning: they are the way art 'works'. As such, the affective, pedagogical economy of sensation and affect that is created here is an economy modeled on what Deleuze and Guattari call 'nomos' (1987: 361 - 374), the interiority of a minor science; a province governed by the war machine. Like many of the subjective machinations effected by words, sound and dance cut across state apparatus, the war machine is also exterior to the state apparatus. Yet the war machine creates movement on a social level, its ‘outside’ or exteriority is constituted by epistemologies of ‘nomad’ or ‘minor science’, such as the micro-political economies of creative affects of word, sound and dance and the ‘affectus’ they create. The war machine operates through flows, and as such it can be thought of as partially comprised of modulations of ‘affectus’: a minoriatarian machining of subjectivity through creative media.

As a kind of war machine, the becomings-word, becomings-sound and becomings-movement theorized here as modulations, or a posthuman pedagogy, are vectors of smooth space that are bound to the creation of certain 'newness'. This war machine, here operating through words, sound, corporeal sensation and affect, reframes meta - narratives of literature, music, dance and dancers through consisting of meaning in a non-narrative form. This war machine quite radically brings 'connections to bear against … great conjunction[s] of … apparatuses of capture or domination.' (ibid, 1987: 423)


My consideration of a posthuman ‘creative pedagogy’ mobilises Deleuze’s Spinozist concept of ‘affectus’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996: 186) perception of art as distinct from, yet produced within, an embodied cultural space, because in this theoretical context, art has a politically effective capacity: the capability to re-work a body’s limits, to reconfigure individual arrangements of structure/agency, augment what a body is or is not able to understand, produce and connect to. Creative pedagogy thus facilitates moments of contact with an Other that allows thought and art to access what Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.218) have called 'the people to come ... mass-people, world people, brain people, chaos people', people who open up passages 'from the finite to the infinite ... ' (1996, pp.180-181, original emphasis). People who, indeed, beckon a 'moment of the infinite ... [of] infinitely varied infinities (1996, p.181). I would argue that such a political process of material re-imagining constitutes an enhancement of both art and everyday life.




Bibliography
Artaud, A.1958. The Theatre and It’s Double, Grove Press, New York.
Broadhurst, S. 1999. Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory. Cassell publishers, London.
Deleuze, G 2003 Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 232 - 309.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1996. What is Philosophy? London, Verso.
Deleuze, G.. 1997 "Literature and Life." Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1-6.
Gatens, M. 1996. Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference and Power. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. P. P. Oxford, Blackwell: 162-187.
Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana, Allen and Unwin.
Kafka, F 1992 Metamorphosis Penguin, London
Kueppers, P 2003 Disability & Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge Routledge, USA.
Stivale, C. 2000. "Becoming-Cajun." Cultural Studies 14(2): 147 - 176.

Discography
Manson, M. 1994 ‘Cake and Sodomy’ in Portrait of an American Family, Interscope Records, Universal Music, Australia
Manson, M. 1999. Marilyn Manson: the last tour on earth. Nothing/Interscope Records, Universal Music, Australia
Manson, M. 2000. Holy Wood (in the shadow of the Valley of Death). Nothing/Interscope Records, Universal Music, Australia
Nine Inch Nails, 1994. ‘the becoming’ the downward spiral halo eight/TVT/Interscope, BMG Music, Australia

Primary texts
Hickey-Moody, A 2002 in the blood Reflective/creative ethnographic research journal. Deaf Society Hall, the Queen's Theatre, Adelaide.
Hickey-Moody, A 2002 in the blood Critical ethnographic research journal. Deaf Society Hall, the Queen's Theatre, Adelaide.
Hickey-Moody, A 2002 in the blood, Assistant Director's Journal.
Restless Dance Company 2002 in the blood. Directed by I Voorendt, Assistant Direction A Hickey-Moody & P Channels, The Queen's Theatre, Adelaide, May 8-11.
Restless Dance, archival material, photographs and publicity information.