Creative Spaces

oh my god, a blog

2009-04-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

At different moments in life I have really wanted to keep a blog. I consistently don't. And I am not sure that I am equipped to do so in an enduring fashion. Its complicated! but I would love any thoughts on my recent writing ... if any thoughts arise ...

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This chapter considers ethics of practices involved in the production and recognition of difference in the three-dimensional (3D) virtual world known as Second Life. We take up a Deleuzian ontology as a means for thinking about difference and desire in, what we argue is, an ethical way. Such a perspective also offers a fresh approach from which to engage with cultures of difference sutured to the avatars (3D representations or personas) of individuals who identify as having a disability in Second Life. We contend that disability should be appreciated as an articulation of difference: as a dividuation of the life-force that constitutes all human beings. Within a Deleuzian ontology people are varying modifications of difference and as such, ‘disability’ per se can not be conceived as located in a single body or subjectivity. Rather, difference is seen as inherently valuable and as being expressed in bodies in diverse ways. We explore what the world of Second Life might look like from such a perspective. In so doing, we draw on interviews with prominent identities in Second Life who identify as having a disability and who have a social profile as activists in the disability rights community in Second Life. We consider our interview data in relation to Deleuze’s ethics, positing ‘ethical assemblages’ in Second Life as 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 & Guattari, 1987, p. 257).

Re-conceptualizing disability as an interplay of desire and difference opens up possibilities for new assemblages of subjectivity and ethical community in Second Life.

A note on method

This chapter is grounded in qualitative interview data generated through ethnography and in-depth interviews. Following Boellstorff (2008), we take the activities and words of the residents of Second Life as ‘legitimate’ ethnographic data about embodied difference, disability and culture in a virtual world. Boellstorff defends this research methodology, arguing that the requirement to meet interviewees in actual life would presume that virtual worlds are not in themselves real contexts.

While we have not met interviewees in ‘actual life’, our ethnography has not entirely been conducted within Second Life. We chose to allow the interviewees to define the context within which they are most comfortable meeting. Some participants in the study chose to meet via Skype. For example, Simon Stevens, who is a regular in Second Life, and has a noted identity in this virtual world, preferred to meet using text chat via Skype. Others sent instant messages from within Second Life in preference to responding to emails. Some participants chose to use voice in Skype and others expressed a preference for text in Skype, even though their speech was intelligible. Such flexibility in modes of aural and/or visual communication is specific to the Internet as a medium and allows research participants to determine the mode of their involvement in the research. As researchers, we did not question the interviewees' preferred medium for interviews; what was most important to us as the facilitators of interview process was that all interviewees felt comfortable with the channel of communication utilized. Interviewees responded to a notice placed in Second Life inviting those interested in issues relating to disability and technology to take part in interviews either via email or Skype or in Second Life itself. We bring these practical methods together with particular methods in thought that we position as Deleuzian ethics. In ‘everyday’ understandings, ethics can be understood as principals of conduct that govern or bind a community. In some philosophies, such as the work of Nietszche (1973, 1979) and Deleuze (1983a) ‘morals’ (rather than ethics) govern and bind, and morality is a performance of ‘one rule for all’. In contrast to such a moral idea (of ‘one rule for all’), ethics is understood by Deleuze, and the scholars upon which he draws (including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Leibniz, Foucault) as a matter of developing individual rules for individual situations. Every situation, day, moment, person, life form, is different from those around it (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262). As such, new methods of practice need to be crafted in order to engage with the realities of differences.

Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the scholars to have articulated most clearly the role that ethics holds in Deleuze’s thought. He argues:

A notion of ethics has to be seen not as an incidental element of Deleuze’s project but as one of its most fundamental and essential elements. Deleuze is, in fact, compelled by the very adventure of thought to think ethically and even to think an ethics of matter itself (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 11).

This quote highlights the relationship in Deleuze’s thought between ethics as a practice of developing individual rules for individual situations, and the task of thinking about matter as being exactly such a project. In this chapter, we employ Deleuze’s ethical conscience to move beyond the violence of lack embodied in the term ‘disability’.

What is Second Life anyway? And what’s wrong with first life?

Aleja Asturias: having now experienced Second Life (SL), I wouldn't take it back.

Denise: what makes it special?

Aleja Asturias: Lots of things ... many people talk about using SL [Second Life] as a way to do things they couldn't or wouldn't otherwise do, especially those who have disabilities.

Aleja Asturias: I discounted that for a while. Until I got here myself. (Second Life interview 1^st August 2008)

Second Life is a 3-Dimensional (3D) virtual world. It enables participants to create identities in the form of 'avatars' that are visual and auditory bodies (personas) projected on and through the computer screen. These bodies interact with each other in ‘real time’ using text chat, instant messages and/or voice. Virtual worlds such as Second Life are based on three areas of technology: World Wide Web, multi-player role-playing games, and avatar worlds (Ondrejka, 2007). They are distinguishable from simulation games because, unlike simulation games, virtual worlds are built and owned by the players (who are known as residents) and there are no fixed rules. For some participants or ‘residents’ of Second Life, 3D virtual worlds have allowed them to interact socially, shop, run businesses, and access information in ways not possible in their 'real life'. For example, Cassidy (2007) argues that Second Life has provided residents David Wallace and Niels Schuddeboom, both of whom are wheelchair users, with ‘an outlet for creative expression’ (Cassidy, 2007). For many, Second Life has also proved to be a viable alternative to 'real life' employment, enabling residents like Nanci Schenkein to operate their businesses through a virtual medium (Deeley, 2008).

As the experiences of these individuals suggest, 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life can facilitate rich user experiences and change the roles of producers, providers and users (dubbed ‘produsers’ by Bruns, 2008); the ‘residents’ of virtual worlds are the creators and no longer clients or merely users of these environments. It might seem that such virtual environments, which augment collaborative abilities by ‘removing the real-world limitations placed on social and /or collaborative behaviour (language, geography, financial status, etc)’, ‘compensating for human inadequacies in processing, maintaining or developing social and /or collaborative mechanisms’, and ‘creating environments or distributed tool-sets that pull useful end results out of human social and /or collaborative behaviour’ (Coates, 2003) provide an ideal solution to the accessibility issues experienced by people who identify as disabled in the actual world. Yet, as Mitcham pointed out over a decade ago, ‘the problems with design are not just technical or aesthetic, but also ethical’ (Mitcham, 1995, p. 187). Just as these technologies have the capacity to link users isolated by disability, geographical location and social circumstances, those who can benefit the most (socially and physically isolated people with disabilities) will be further excluded if accessibility issues remain of secondary importance.

In this chapter, we use the term ‘accessibility’ in its broadest sense; internet accessibility is about ensuring that anyone, using any browser or device, is able to access any content on the Web. This definition is consistent with Letourneau’s (1998) position that accessibility ought to be concerned with ensuring that all users (regardless of ability) should be able to access virtual environments using current and previous versions of browsers as well as emerging non-browser technologies such as mobile devices, Web TV and so on. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) and the recently approved version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) guidelines, and the US Section 508 Standards for Web accessibility provide designers with guidelines that can help them to create Websites that are accessible to a broad range of users, including those with visual impairments, hearing impairments, mobility impairments and learning disabilities. Comparable guidelines for virtual worlds such as Second Life have not yet been developed. Moreover, as Peters and Ball (2007) argue, when accessibility is a challenge in the first place (real world) and in its second place (Web 1.0), the problem of how we will meet the challenges of accessibility in the ‘third place’ (Web 2.0) is still to be solved.

There is generally widespread agreement that there are significant technological barriers associated with highly visual environments such as 3D virtual worlds and Web3D. Judy Brewer, Director of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, outlined some of the challenges during her presentation at an ‘in world’ public conference held in June 2007. Here, Brewer described the pleasurable experience of her acquired virtual abilities (cited in Qi, 2007, para. 4). However, in the same speech, as we have observed elsewhere (Hickey-Moody & Wood 2008b), she also articulated the limitations of this environment for users with visual disabilities, those with hearing impairments and users with cognitive or neurological difficulties. While acknowledging that accessibility software does exist, Brewer also noted the need for an environment that would enable Second Life content creators to create accessible spaces more easily.

Hiroshi Kawamura, President of the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) Consortium, has echoed similar concerns. Kawamura expresses unease about the fact that there is a potential split in the disability community over the new technologies, stating:

To some disability groups, Second Life is wonderful. They can participate in a world accessible to them without having a disability. Of course, Second Life is completely inaccessible to blind people right now. Whether or not it is just Second Life, it is emblematic of a handful of issues that surround the Web 2.0 phenomena. They are:

· Highly visual content, multimedia, maps

· User-created content (an increasing phenomena, with a wide variety of accessibility)

· Disproportionate cost compared to the benefit (we can’t ask Flickr photo sharing users to describe a billion photos) (Kawamura cited in Fruchterman, 2007, para. 2).

People with visual impairments often have additional reasons for wanting to access 3D virtual worlds, since such environments offer a rich channel of communication. So Second Life presents researchers with paradoxes relating to accessibility (Hickey-Moody & Wood, 2008a). The people who could gain the most from being involved in Second Life are those who frequently can’t access the technology. Or, if they can access the technology, often it hasn’t been designed in a way that means a visually impaired person can use it. But there is a third kind of barrier to accessibility, which is cultural accessibility. Being part of a ‘disability friendly’ community is a project that often raises more questions than it answers. Burnett (2007) argues that despite the ‘carnivalesque’ quality of virtual worlds, much of the activity and the architecture is banal and reflects the norms and realities of ‘first’ life. Similarly, Molesworth and Denegri-Knott (2007) describe virtual worlds as parodies of a consumer society and they argue that new explanations are required to understand the implications of these experiences for evolving culture. This chapter primarily explores this third issue, through examining the ethics of disability friendly communities in Second Life and asking how such insights might be used to envisage new possibilities in virtual and ‘actual’ life.

The examples showcased here are drawn from our ethnographic research, involving a series of interviews with the founders/coordinators and members of the virtual community within Second Life. As we have suggested, these are groups that hold an awareness of disability identities. The four individuals whose experiences inform this chapter (referred to by their virtual avatar names are: Polgara Paine (Manager of Wheelies), Simon Walsh (founder of Wheelies who is known as Simon Stevens in Second Life) and Aleja Asturias (GimpGirl)[1]. Our fourth research participant, Namav Abramovic, is a disability-rights activist in Second Life. Each participant (and the ethos of the groups to which they belong) can be seen as underpinned by different understandings of disability. Our research has shown that the most productive readings of disability tend to be those that mine sites of embodied difference and celebrate difference, rather than those that set out to ‘repair’ difference.

Deleuzian ethics: a brief exegesis

Before we further discuss ethical practices in the context of Second Life, we outline our Deleuzian conception of ethics and explain just why we think such a model of thought is useful when thinking about Second life. As we suggest above, ethics differs from morality, rules and prior judgment because these ideas invoke binary, inflexible systems of thought, such as senses of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Morality both implicitly and explicitly takes up histories of religious belief in a transcendent God as a being of supreme good; a being that is ‘better’ than the everyday person who can but hope to know God. Social rules can similarly become abstracted from physical realities in a manner that privileges transcendence. When this happens, social rules can lose meaning; they can become a performance of a historical social condition rather than a responsive engagement with a situation. Another way of expressing this point is to suggest that prior judgment discounts the potentiality of a situation. For example, to have decided that a situation is unworkable prior to entering it forecloses the possibility of success. To believe that a person is incompetent denies them the chance to act freely, or without oppressive pressure, and to be productive. In contrast to beliefs that abstract opinion from lived events, ethics is an engagement with practicalities.

More than this, ethics is an engagement with practicalities that performs an awareness of context. It is this awareness of context and acting in response to such awareness that makes an act ethical. No act can abstractly be considered ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. Rather, ‘ethics’ is a way of thinking that constitutes paying attention to practical details in relation to their political, historical and social context. There are possibilities for agency generated through the celebration of difference held within such an approach. These sentiments are echoed in Simon Steven’s celebration of ‘freak’ identity. Our transcript from an interview with Simon via Skype illustrates this point:

Denise: And what do you mean when you use the term ‘freak’?

Simon: Someone deemed by their appearance as socially 'other’. -- eg speech impairment, drooling, helmets, spasms etc.

Denise: Ok, so you don't see the term as offensive? I mean when I hear that term it conjures up those old freak shows - you know where people who were different were put on display as if they were a spectacle rather than just different.

Simon: Yes, freakism is a power dimension.

Denise: Power can be both ways, you mean?

Simon: Yes the freak can stare people into a position.

Denise: Some have said the medical profession treats people who are different as freaks by putting them on display like in medical rounds etc.

Simon: Yes

Denise: Are you saying that (like Foucault) where there is power there is resistance and resistance can be power?

Simon: Yes

This brief interview transcript suggests that the difference embodied in the subject position of the ‘freak’ can hold as much power than the medical gazes which initially generated the discourses that categorized/imagined the ‘freak’. Some brief examples of such a respect for difference, ethics, or practice of good conduct, in Deleuze’s writings follow.

Deleuze imagines ‘matter’, or the material world, as one substance. Everything is a different articulation of the same essential substance; a unique expression of the one material. Deleuze develops this idea from the writing of Spinoza. Taking up Spinoza’s philosophy, he argues:

The great theories of the Ethics . . . cannot be treated apart from the three practical theses concerning consciousness, values and the sad passions (Deleuze, 1988, p. 28).

These ‘three practical theses concerning consciousness, values and the sad passions’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 28) constitute building blocks for Spinoza’s philosophy.

His first thesis, concerning consciousness, is that our consciousness is an illusion. Spinoza argues that, rather than being the origin of our thoughts and actions, we are the affects that our thoughts and actions have on us. We act, and through acting, produce ourselves. For Spinoza, the idea that consciousness creates thoughts and actions leads to philosophies that are based in dualisms of substance. A popular example of such a dualism of substance can be found in Descartes' mind/body split.

Deleuze takes up this Spinozan belief that we are the affects that our thoughts and actions have upon us. He employs this idea to replace the thought that our consciousness is the location from which our thoughts and actions arise. For Deleuze, subjectivity is produced, not given (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007). His major critique of theories of identity (Deleuze, 1991; Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 1987) is that they can be based on the notion that we are causes and not effects. The second aspect of Deleuze’s thought that in which he draws significantly on Spinoza, as well as Nietzsche (1973, 1979), is in his critique of morality. We outlined the basic premise or logic of this critique above. Deleuze explains the difference he perceives between morals ethics, and morals as follows:

There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at all a morality (Deleuze, 1978, p. 7).

Finally, Deleuze takes up Spinoza’s call to reject the ‘sad passions’. For Spinoza, ‘sad passions’ are forces which erode life. Deleuze explains this idea through saying:

“Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting. This conception will allow Spinoza to become aware, for example, of a quite fundamental moral and political problem which will be his way of posing the political problem to himself: how does it happen that people who have power [pouvoir], in whatever domain, need to affect us in a sad way? The sad passions as necessary. Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power. And Spinoza says, in the Theological-Political Treatise, that this is a profound point of connection between the despot and the priest—they both need the sadness of their subjects. Here you understand well that he does not take sadness in a vague sense, he takes sadness in the rigorous sense he knew to give it: sadness is the affect insofar as it involves the diminution of my power of acting” (Deleuze, 1978, p. 4).

We now examine exactly how Deleuze takes up Spinoza's Ethics in terms of this critique of morality. For Spinoza (2001) and Nietzsche (1973, 1979), good and evil are illusions-or fictions- created by a world-view grounded in transcendent religious beliefs, rather than in a belief in the practical world. Deleuze later argues that ‘transcendent’ thought is re-expressed with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Deleuze, 1983b). Such transcendent moralism reduces people’s power to act and it also encourages the experience of the ‘sad passions’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 25; 1990a, pp. 242-44, 260, 282). Indeed, for Deleuze, Spinoza’s Ethics is an invitation to consider encounters between bodies on the basis of their productivity for those involved. As beings are expressions of ‘modes’ (Spinoza, 2001) and all ‘modes’ of being are expressions of the same ‘substance’, a critical aspect of ‘joyful’, or positive, encounters is that they fold back into the broader context in which they occur in ways that enrich this context. An example of this principal can be found in some users experiences of virtual worlds. Many people who spend time in Second Life acquire new knowledges and extend their social networks, both increasing their own power to act and that of the people they associate with in Second Life. Such productive assemblages are made up of ‘joyful’ encounters; meetings between two parties that increase both parties capacity to act.

Taking cues from Spinoza, in Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze conceives bodies as ‘finite modes’. These are individual articulations of modes that are expressions of an ‘infinite substance’. Working with this conception of bodies, Ansell Pearson argues that, for Deleuze:

“The ‘great ethical question’ concerns whether it is possible for these bodies to attain ‘active affections’, and, if so, how.” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 13)

As these examples suggest, ethics, and the use of the word ethical to name practices that are a performance of ethics, differ from morality. Although ethics has preference for certain affects/outcome (specifically, for the enhancing of potentiality) ethical practice does not require the evaluation of an assemblage or body in terms of what is internal to it (inherently good or evil) or what it ‘is’, but rather, what it can do, or what it produces.

Deleuze draws on Bergson and Spinoza in developing his conception of ethics. Explaining the conceptual material that Deleuze takes up in drawing on these philosophers, Ansell Pearson (1999, pp. 11-12) states:

“This is not to say that Spinoza and Bergson’s thinking on duration are one and the same since clearly they are not. Duration (duratio not tempus) belongs for Spinoza to quite a specific realm of existence, namely, the domain of finite modes where it refers to the individuality of distinct things (Deleuze takes the line that there is no ‘instantaneity of essence’ in Spinoza and that the ‘continual variations of existence’ that characterise a mode’s power of acting and its constant passages to greater and lesser perfections are only comprehensible in terms of duration …). Duratio is to be understood modally rather than temporally; unlike infinite substance, a thing’s essence does not follow from its essence but is dependent on external causalities for its endurance …. Bergson’s conception of duration is radically different in that it refers not to the realm of distinct entities and things but rather to the virtual realm of creative processes and becomings” (Ansell Pearson, 1999, pp. 11-12).

So, for Bergson, his process of creative evolution, the relationship between organic and non-organic life, takes place through flows of time. The ethical question the Bergson asks of bodies pertains to their capacities to gain knowledges of themselves, that is, knowledges of how they evolve over time and how they are able to produce joyful passions in themselves and also in others. Ansell Pearson explains:

“Bergson separates his thinking from Spinoza’s conception of substance … arguing that Spinoza’s causalism and determinism are unable to allow a genuinely inventive character to be given to duration” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 12).

Another ethical question with which Deleuze, after Spinoza, is concerned, is that of how a maximum of joyful passions might be achieved by a body. The ethical nature of Spinoza’s work is derived from his belief that “we do not know what a body is capable of and what affections it can attain (what bodies can do always necessarily exceeds our knowledge at any given time, just as the capacities of thought always exceed the nature of consciousness” (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 13).

‘Ethics’, therefore, is an intrinsic part of Deleuze’s philosophical project and it plays a role in each one of his attempts to articulate a philosophy … and to think ‘beyond’ the human condition. Ethical life arises for Deleuze out of the context of naturalism, a particular philosophical conception of the world … The difficult challenge that ethics provides … is to think ‘ethics’ both transhumanly and germinally, that is, in terms of the ‘living beyond’ and the ‘living on’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999, pp. 14-15).

Moving on from this understanding of ethics, we take the idea of being ‘ethical’ as giving a performance of ethics; as offering an application of the principle of creating different ways of operating or acting that are specific to a given situation. This performative aspect (the doing) and the broader contextual change that is effected by this performance, is the ‘activation’ of ethics. Ways of acting can thus, to a certain extent, be seen as ethical or unethical in the respect that they do or do not extend the capacities of those involved both ‘in terms of the ‘living beyond’ and the ‘living on’’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999, p. 15). Deleuze maintains a strident focus on context; performing an ‘ethical’ action is not about making your self feel good, effecting immediate gratification. It’s about acting in a way that both allows one’s self and those in one’s surroundings–other people, animals, environment, ecology, to flourish. Here, Deleuze’s thinking becomes ethological.

Ethology, agency and context

“I just bought … a t-shirt with crotch strap, custom made, which reads 'as a drooling spastic, i am wearing my nappy with pride.” (Simon Stevens, Interview). This quote from Simon Stevens offers a humorous example of the relationship between agency and context. The ‘crip’ movement and the collective politic behind reclaiming signifiers of disabled embodiment could be argued to be the ground upon (or from) which Simon claims the agency to joke about wearing a crotch strap and a nappy. Such a statement would have been nearly impossible 50 years ago. We use this quote here to highlight the importance of context when considering the grounds for possibility and acting ethically. Ethology is grounded in exactly such an awareness of the politics of context.

Ethology has been thought about as the study of the formation of human customs or beliefs, or as the study of human behaviour. The term ‘ethological’ is derived from the Latin ‘ethologia’; the art of depicting character, and the Greek noun ‘ethos’ (custom or character) with the pluralizing suffix ‘logia’ (Logy in English). The logic of custom and art of character. Deleuze’s version of ‘ethology’ is fairly specific: he is concerned with understanding the nature or character of all organic life; “Deleuze’s conception of biophilosophy is, ultimately, and first and foremost, ethical” (Ansell Pearson, 1999 p. 9). So, Deleuze’s focus extends beyond understanding how people or animals or both operate, to examine how both operate in relation to broader ecosystems, how these complex systems are impacted upon by human, animal and non-organic life. Human relationships with waste, non-organic form and organic matter all constitute aspects of ethology.

“This ethological dimension of ethics, which concerns relations between affective bodies, operates both within the order of nature and also informs the ethical becoming of human bodies, to the extent that … Deleuze explores the possibility of a becoming-animal and a becoming-molecular of the human” (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 12).

Deleuze advances this very idea of ‘ethology’ as an ethics that extends beyond the human. If ethics is related to ways in which the self acts upon the self and upon others, ethology is an ethics of existence. Not human existence but all existence.

Deleuze’s notion of ethology is grounded in the concept of ‘creative evolution’, which he takes from Bergson (1998b) and Spinoza (1998a, 1990a). For Bergson, ‘creative evolution’ is the relationship between organic and non-organic life forms across the flow of time. Deleuze’s notion of creative evolution is grounded in a synthesis of Bergson’s conception of duration or Bergson and Spinoza’s conception of duration[2].

Actions have no transcendental scale to be measured upon (the religious or theological illusion), but only relative and perspectival good and bad assessments, based on specific bodies. Thus the Ethics is, for Deleuze, an 'ethology', that is, a guide to obtaining the best relations possible for bodies, bodies being considered in a universal sense that extends beyond the human form, to relationship between bodies and their environment (for example, the crip movement) the ways in which they manage waste (for example, nappies) and their impact on the world around them.

Difference and desire through an ethical lens

Disability can be seen as a transcendent notion in the respect that the idea of a dis-abled body automatically invokes the notion of an ‘able’, or normal body. Diprose (1991, p. 71) offers critical comment on this point:

To label something or someone defective or inferior relies on the assumption that the ‘proper’ stands alone. Yet, some notion of the proper as sameness does silently underscore the evaluation of differences with real effects (Diprose, 1991, p. 71).

As Diprose (1991) suggests, the ‘whole’ or the ‘proper’ can never actually stand alone. Indeed, nothing can be perceived as standing ‘alone’ per se. ‘One’ can only be known in relation to another (Hickey-Moody, 2006 p. 192).

Understanding the idea of the normal body and its binary opposite, the abnormal body, as transcendental constructs of medical discourses, allows for their contextualisation and their deconstruction. The medical construction of intellectual disability and abnormality is contingent upon a prior construction of normality and such medical constructions of normality are literally powerful abstractions (Hickey-Moody, 2008). The processes of classifying a body as disabled can be seen as acts of ‘territorialisation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 332-4, 317-323), in which bodies are mapped in terms of dominant medical norms. We now turn to examine transcript excerpts from our interviews with prominent identities in Second Life who identify as having a disability and who have a social profile as activists in the disability rights community in Second Life. We consider our interview data in relation to Deleuze’s Spinozist articulation of ethics, positing ethical assemblages in Second Life as opportunities for increasing or reducing a body’s capacity to act.

In the first of our interviews, Simon Stevens (AKA Simon Walsh in ‘actual life’) describes Wheelies, the club he founded in Second Life, as a community for ‘everyone’. When asked if many of the members of Wheelies are mobility impaired, Simon asserts ‘again, this is a myth, we all have impairments’. The attraction to Wheelies explains Simon, is the music, live artists, dance and contests. Simon goes on to explain that part of the attraction is also because Wheelies is a safe place to have fun with no pressure to disclose anything about one’s abilities or disabilities in actual life.

Polgara Paine, who has taken over the responsibility as Manager of Wheelies and relocated the club to a new ‘virtual island’ owned by Polgara and her partner Chade, shares Simon’s philosophy, emphasising that they don’t want a ‘disabled community’ but rather, an inclusive community that celebrates difference. Polgara explains ‘We want a community where everyone is welcome’, though she acknowledges the philosophy has caused some ‘interesting discussions’. Understandings of welcoming behaviour are indeed relative. The new virtual island that is home to Wheelies is called Taupo, and it provides a community for people associated with Wheelies with houses, apartments, shops, a hot tub, pool house/art gallery, workshop, garden, visitor's centre and planned facilities including an educational centre, plaza with games, beach area for swimming and floating. Wheelies also employs people who identify as disabled to run the club – positions include a Manager, DJs and a landscape gardener. Employees at Wheelies are guaranteed a minimum income and some choose to live ‘rent free’ in the Taupo community in exchange for their services to Wheelies. To our minds, Wheelies is a community that is not exclusive, yet performs a preference for supporting the work of members who live with specific kinds of embodied differences and identify as being ‘disabled’ in actual life. By bringing together people who do and do not identify as having a disability in actual life, Wheelies offers a space in which cultures of relation are not formed around disability identity or politics but, rather, around shared pleasures. People who do not have an actual disability might share experiences of being led by a guide dog, or dancing in a wheelchair, with the avatars of users who configure their virtual identity to reflect an actual impairment or disability. Alternatively, other users with actual disabilities can choose to leave visual signifiers of these embodied states behind in Second Life. Both demographics become different from their actual selves through their virtual involvement in Wheelies.

Simon explains the creation of Wheelies as an attempt to construct a disability friendly and supportive environment, through stating:

Simon… this is why wheelies is different

Denise: Why is wheelies different in that regard?

Simon: Wheelies, everyone gets on (SKYPE interview with Simon Stevens 2/08/08)

3D virtual worlds such as Second Life are clearly technological developments that are exciting and pleasurable for some users. On the other hand, in a repetition of enduring exclusions experienced in ’actual life‘, some people with certain forms of sensory and cognitive impairments can still denied opportunities for such participation. Arguably, the most significant barrier to accessibility in an environment that is primarily user-generated is not technological, but is rather, the attitudes of the community (Hickey-Moody and Wood, 2008b).

Virtual worlds such as Second Life can and should be made more accessible to those with cognitive and sensory disabilities. There are already some exemplary initiatives in place, many of which have been developed by the residents of the communities themselves. These include:

· The development of browser based alternatives that enable users to access these worlds via the Web rather than a special client application (for example Ajax Life and MovableLife).

· The use of Internet Relay Channel technologies (IRC) enabling those who cannot access the virtual world to still participate in meetings using IRC via a Website such as the system used by the GimpGirl community in Second Life.
Development of alternative accessing devices using technologies such as the Brain Computer Interface, Eye Gaze controllers, head tracking devices and a hands free movement controller to improve the immersive experience for all users.

· ‘In-world‘ accessibility solutions such as a virtual guide dog and virtual cane developed by resident members of the Wheelies and Virtual Ability island communities enabling visually impaired users to navigate the virtual world by issuing commands through the chat channel to the virtual dog or cane (for example to find an object or follow an avatar).

· E.V.A. voice chat which is an ‘in-world’ voice based system that narrates text displayed in the chat channel.

So on one hand, 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life are clearly technological developments that are exciting and pleasurable for some users. On the other hand, in a repetition of enduring exclusions, some people with certain forms of sensory and cognitive impairments are still denied opportunities for such participation. Arguably, the most significant barrier to accessibility in an environment that is primarily user-generated is not technological, but is rather, the attitudes of the community. Web content accessibility guidelines have been in existence for almost a decade (World Wide Web Consortium: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 1999), yet studies undertaken by the UK Disability Rights Commission (2005), Red Cardinal (2006) and the United Nations Department (2006) have shown that ‘there is a global failure to provide the most basic level of web accessibility for people with disabilities’ (United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility 2006).

Annable, Goggin and Stienstra (2007, p. 145) ponder the challenge posed by the fact that technologies that can be so productive for people with disabilities are often still disabling. Goggin and Newell (2007) extend this discussion further in considering the power relations of disability within the broader cultural and social context. They argue that, ‘people with disabilities still face a long struggle to be accepted in society, as equal members of their national communities and cultures’ (Goggin & Newell, 2007, p. 166). It is not surprising, in the wake of landmark court cases such as the Bruce Lindsay Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (2000), the National Federation of the Blind of California on behalf of their members, and Bruce Sexton v Target Corporation (2007) certifying a class action on behalf of users with visual impairments, that advocates for accessibility resort to political and legal activism to raise community awareness of the rights of people with disabilities. As Tremain (2006) points out, ‘a political movement whose organizing tools are identity-based shall inevitably be contested as exclusionary and internally hierarchical’ and it will also effectively extend the very power relations it seeks to contest (p. 194).

Above, we introduced Deleuze’s critique of morality as opposed to ethics; his assessment of the cultural production of values. For Spinoza (2001) and Nietzsche (1978, 1973), Good and Evil are fictions created by a world-view grounded in transcendent beliefs, rather than in the practical world. Deleuze argues that ‘transcendent’ thought is expressed via Kant’s philosophy[3], orthodox religion, and psychoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 1987, 1996). These three forums respectively create a ‘transcendent moralism’ that reduces people’s power to act - or engage with practical specificities as cause for action. We would like to contend that negative representations of people with disabilities as unworthy of ‘inclusion’, or as ‘holding back’ the mainstream, can act as transcendent knowledges of disability, in which disability is produced as ‘other’, as ‘special’, ‘scary’, extraordinary and in need of control or repair. Namav Abramovic, a disability-rights activist in Second Life, and Aleja Asturias, who runs Gimp Girl in Second Life both agree that online culture can be exclusionary. They devote considerable time and energy to making Second Life disability friendly and accessible:

Namav Abramovic: My first thoughts about accessibility ... perhaps text-only SL could be designed, or have you seen the IRC->SL relay that gimpgirl uses to include blind members in meetings? May I teleport you and show you the IRC->SL relay?

Namav Abramovic: we're here now.

Denise: Hi Aleja. Nice to meet you.

Namav Abramovic: this relay allows blind people to talk to those in SL, or, those who don’t have the CPU power to handle SL

Aleja Asturias nods. This is what an IRC user will look like in SL.

Denise: OK so do they login to the website somehow and then their chat is relayed here via Instant Messaging?

Aleja Asturias: If you go to our website (http://www.gimpgirl.com), you'll see a link to access the IRC channel right on the web. - We didn't create the relay service. For more information on how to get a relay visit: http://www.quickfox.net/services/slgateway] You buy a relay box here in SL and set up the channel.

Denise: Thank You :-). Here on your sim or somewhere else to purchase?

Aleja Asturias: It's made and purchased elsewhere.

Aleja Asturias: We found out about it through a community for people with autism and yes, the details should be there. You don't see that many groups using the relays specifically for accessibility purposes but it seems like a natural accommodation.

Denise: it is a great idea - do many people who visit GimpGirl use

it?

Aleja Asturias: It would be great to see all disability related groups have relay as an option. The number varies but someone is always on during a meeting or event.

(Interview with Aleja Asturias and Namav Abramovic in Second Life 2/08/08)

Aleja has ensured that GimpGirl is accessible to users who identify as having significant visual impairments and to those who do not have access to a computer with enough power to run Second Life. Clearly, as the interview transcript included above suggests, there are communities of users who identify as disabled working with new technologies in Second Life to further enrich the experiences of a wide range of people with disabilities.

Ethical assemblages in Second Life

The term Deleuze gives to connected bodies is assemblage. This is a term that enables social relations to be conceptualised as dialogic or interactive without prioritising some bodies (human) while ignoring others (for example, computers). It is also a term which emphasises the multiple nature of any encounter (which never simply involves two bodies interacting, but rather involves several/many) and which problematises any notion of sovereign agency (for each body in the assemblage affects the others, and none acts alone). Thinking social relationships as assemblages means moving away from the notion of the social being as individual to understanding social beings as always already connected to other bodies. It means thinking about all of the different forces from which bodies are composed, and those that they help to produce. It means conceptualising the social body through its material and sensory engagement with the world, rather than through its ‘rational’, or transcendent thinking or processing of the world. It means focusing on surface affects and connections more than interiorities, identities or psychological selves.

Subjectivity, for Deleuze, is therefore not an a priori feature of social relations. It is instead something that the body develops or produces in order to interact and communicate with other social bodies. It is through the process of becoming a subject, which Deleuze calls subjectivation, that a body develops an identity, a sense of self, and a position from which to speak. Subjectivation is necessary for social interaction to take place, yet it is also limiting for it reduces a body’s range of potential (its internal differenciation; its potential to become-other Deleuze 1994, p. 207). Understanding the socio-political affects that different modes of subjectivity produce is a central component of a Deleuzian ethics. The problem facing the ethicist is one of definition of the scope of evaluation, or of the assemblage. No assemblage is autonomous (as rhizomatic connections have shown (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 3-25). Any evaluation needs to take into consideration not only the impact of the assemblage on the bodies within that assemblage–but also on bodies which surround it. There is a continual process of folding, which is not always considered, but needs to be. Second Life constructs ethical assemblages which extend the capacities of the bodies that constitute the assemblages. This extension of capacity is then folded into the subjectivities of those involved, they are part of a continual process of becoming through which positive possibilities for both Second Life, and what it can be, and the development of those who spend time in Second Life, are actualised. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant:

Very specific assemblages of power impose significance and subjectification as their determinate forms of expression … there is no significance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 180).

Social codings of people are products of despotic and authoritarian assemblages of power (Hickey-Moody, 2008). Social discourses construct social faces of people and bodies through attributing particular significances to the physical features and capitalist market value and arguing that these are signs of a specific kind of subjectivity or cultural value. No space is provided for the proliferation of alternative, relational and sense based knowledges of people which would be ‘ethical’ or a performance of ethics. (Hickey-Moody, 2006, 2008)

Corporeal imaginings of bodies are described by Spinoza as bodily affect. Affects are a product of the contextualized, embodied nature of the imagination. Bodily affects are brought about through corporeal relations and the material residues of experiences that live on in the human imagination. These material residues are traces of experiences past that provide points of departure, and points of reference, for future experiences. These traces inform the construction of human passions. Passions either add to, or detract from, a body’s capacity. Joy, sadness and desire, the products of embodied relations, orientate a body’s thoughts and actions. Theorizing the embodied relations between individuals and wider collectives requires conceptions of affects, passion and emotion as physical events. Within such a framework, participants in virtual communities that include people with disabilities are part of a shared community by virtue of physical proximity. They share sensory tropes developed within Second Life.

Conclusion

Denise: You have chosen to project yourself as someone in a wheelchair? Why is that?

Simon: Self identity

Denise: So it is important to you to look authentic to your RL [real life]?

Simon: I haven’t got time to be someone else” (Interview with Simon Stevens via Skype)

As this quotation shows, Simon’s self-identity, in all of its embodied specificity, is inseparable from his sense of self and self worth. He is a unique articulation of difference. For Deleuze and Guattari, each body’s embodied mind is a performance of difference, the mind is the ‘idea’ of the body; human consciousness is a product of corporeality. So, just as every human body is diverse, every human mind is different. It is thus impossible to compare the individuality of each body; every person has ‘the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262). The fundamental relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body is evident in Deleuze and Guattari's (1987, p. 262) contention that every body is ‘…a longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between formed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects’. Here, the body is an extension of substance, a variation of the two universal attributes of substance: thought and extension. Deleuze and Guattari mobilize Spinoza’s ideas in order to think every body as unique and the mind as an extension of individual form. Human bodies are consistently re-making themselves through processes of becoming. Re-conceptualizing disability as a play of desire and difference opens up possibilities for new assemblages of subjectivity and ethical community in Second Life.

References

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Ansell-Pearson, K. (1999). Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze. London; New York: Routledge.

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Deleuze, G. (1991). Empiricism and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1983a). Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Althone Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1983b) Kant's Critical Philosophy Althone Press, London.

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Deleuze, Gilles (1998b) Bergsonism Zone Books, New York.

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Accessed 12/05/05

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Diprose, R. (1991) ‘‘A ‘Genethics’ that Makes Sense.’’ Cartographies: Poststructuralism & the Mapping of Bodies & Spaces. Ed. R. Diprose and R. Ferrell. North Sydney: Allen, pp. 65 -76.

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Hickey-Moody, A.C and Malins, P. (2007) Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, London.

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Hickey-Moody, A. and Wood, D. (2008b). ‘Virtually sustainable: Deleuze & desiring differenciation in Second Life’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22(6), pp. 805-816. Routledge, London.

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Peters, T. and Bell, L. (2007). Otherworldly accessibility: each physical or virtual space has characteristics that make it accessible or inaccessible to people depending on their physical abilities. Computers in Libraries, 27(9), 38.

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Spinoza, B 2001 Ethics England, Wadsworth.

Tremain, S. (2006). On the Government of disability: Foucault, power, and the subject of impairment. In L.J. Davis, (Ed.), The disability studies reader (pp. 185-196). New York, London: Routledge.

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[1] The GimpGirl community was established outside Second Life in 1998 by Jen Cole (AKA JennyLin Arashi) and a group of young women with disabilities who were seeking a community that understood their needs and provided a safe place for women and girls with disabilities to talk about their experiences. The community was initially established via a Website that provides a range of services including email lists dedicated to particular areas of interest, a printed newsletter and an IRC chat room. The virtual community was established in Second Life in February 2008 and provides regular meetings and seminars for members.

[2] Ansell Pearson (1999, p. 13) argues that Spinozan ‘duration’ operates modally rather than temporally (unlike Spinoza’s ‘infinite substance’ which operates temporally). An object or being’s existence does not follow from its essence. Rather, a thing’s existence is dependent on external causalities for its endurance. Bergsonian ‘duration’ refers to the virtual realm of creative processes and becomings (Ansell Pearson 1999, p. 13).

[3] See Deleuze (1984) on Kant’s philosophy.

Three Case Studies of Youth Arts Projects

2008-01-22T16:58:00.000-08:00

Different classes of people have long sorted themselves into neighborhoods within a city or region. But now we find a large-scale re-sorting of people among cities and regions nationwide, with some regions becoming centers of the creative class while others are composed of larger shares of working-class or service-class people. … Places are … valued for authenticity and uniqueness. Authenticity comes from several aspects of a community ---historic buildings, established neighborhoods, a unique music scene, or specific cultural attributes. It comes from the mix --- from urban grit alongside renovated buildings, from the commingling of young and old, long-time neighborhood characters and yuppies, fashion models and "bag ladies." An authentic place … offers unique and original experiences.[1]

… [The creative class is] a completely consumerist theory, this notion that people choose to live somewhere, this whole notion of locational choice, well hang on a minute, any geographer will say that’s really complex. It’s not a matter of ‘I’m an elite worker and I can choose to live anywhere in the world’… if you are the wrong race or the wrong colour and got the wrong passport or the wrong qualifications, you can’t choose to go anywhere. You’re completely boxed in where you are, you can’t leave … there are two sorts of highly mobile people in the world; there’s the very affluent and very educated and the very rich in global terms, and then there is the very poor and very dispossessed and very marginalised. And everyone in the middle, broadly, stays where they are.[2]

American economist Richard Florida has offered arguably the most popular and controversial writing on creativity and place of the 1990s. This chapter acknowledges a critical re-consideration of Florida’s idea of the creative class[3] as a dominant discourse within which contemporary discussions of place and creativity take place. I question the role that place plays in the production of the creative class. Perhaps obtusely, this departure is inspired by the lack of attention to the education of young people in Florida’s work. I am concerned with the way in which Florida offers very little indication of how young people might learn how to become part of the creative class. He implies that if one gathers a bunch of young people in a ‘creative place’, namely: a location with old buildings, a diverse population and enough I.T experts[4], that young people will acquire the skills to become members of his ‘Super-Creative Core’[5]. Such a wager places much stake in a seemingly osmotic process of place-based knowledge exchange, rather than offering imperatives for praxis. In critique of these broad theoretical brush strokes, I explore ways in which youth arts projects might be considered practical and sustainable ways of making creative places. Youth arts projects do not offer a utopian site of creative education, however, through the examination of three case studies, different practical ways in which education, place and creativity are linked in each of the respective projects are considered.

I examine two U.K projects and an Australian project. Each of these is unique and I do not adopt a comparative approach to considering the ways each site articulates education, place and creativity. I draw on research interviews conducted as part of a larger research project, ‘Making creative places: Geographical places in North America, Australia and the UK that foster creativity in young people’. This is a collaboration between the Faculty of Education, Monash and the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong. Team members include Mary Louise Rasmussen and Valerie Harwood. The project considers interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries.

Florida designed his notion of the creative class to evaluate the relationship between ‘creative capital’ and economically successful places. This concept of ‘creative capital’ is the capacity for people to ‘have ideas and find a better way of doing things’[6]. Florida further explains this through arguing:

Often it is largely the design and marketing that determines why someone will buy a Dodge Neon or a Hyundai, a Dell computer or a Sony. Emphasis on design and creativity is what pushed Target ahead of K-mart. … As an economy, [America is] … moving inexorably toward earning our keep by adding creative value. Thus creative work, no matter how it is measured in dollars and cents, is what we all rely on.[7]

He argues that places with a high percentage of ‘creative capital’ are the most economically successful. To my mind, what is more interesting here is that these places are also inhabited by communities with the highest levels of social and economic inequality. While Florida’s ‘creativity’ brings wealth, it does so at the expense of ideas of social justice.

There are many extant critiques of Florida’s concept of creativity. I briefly canvass some of these, as they provide apposite points of reference for the critical and strategic manner in which I position his ideas as a dominant discourse framing current enterprises of making creative places. Gibson and Klocker[8], argue that Florida’s work: ‘subsum[es] … creativity within a neoliberal regional economic development discourse. … [in which] creativity is linked to the primacy of global markets, and is a factor in place competition, attracting … 'creative class' migrants to struggling regions. Creativity is positioned as a central determinant of regional 'success' and forms a remedy for those places, and subjects, that currently 'lack' innovation.’ They critique Florida’s work by arguing ‘that neoliberal discourses [in which creativity is subsumed by market value] ignore the varied ways in which 'alternative creativities' might underpin … articulations of the future of Australia's regions.’[9] - Florida’s creativity is read here as being too tightly coded to be of use. Terry Flew[10], argues that the creative class thesis is:
… perpetuating two myths, which are the mirror-image of each other. The first myth is the classic sociological conception of the services sector as the repository of low-paid, unskilled ‘McJobs’ (Ritzer, 2002), whose proliferation is symptomatic of an unbalanced and unsustainable economy. ... The second myth is that jobs in creative sectors necessarily have high degrees of autonomy and are well paid. Florida defines the ‘Super-Creative Core’ of the US economy as involving “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, as well as the thought leader-ship of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers” (p. 69). If we examine the list of occupations in Florida’s Super-Creative Core more carefully, we … find highly variable degrees of autonomy, stability, and likely income. [There is] danger [in] … conflating growth in these ‘creative’ sectors with greater individual autonomy and cultural openness.

For Flew, Florida draws too long a bow in arguing that engineers and artists should be considered in the same economic milieu. It is here that the importance of perspective is made plain. For Florida, engineers and artists are both members of the ‘Super-Creative Core’ of the US economy, because they both perform creative labor, which is the powerhouse of financial growth. Service industry employees, such as KFC workers, do not perform intellectually creative labor in Florida’s eyes, and as such cannot be considered part of an economic ‘Creative Core’. For Flew, who writes from a less romanticized position, the relationship between engineer and artist is not so plain, and not so far removed from the service industry. Artists are, perhaps, more beholden to market demands and funding body policies than are some engineers. In collaboration with their advertising teams, motor vehicle engineers can arguably make a market for a new car. Often, an artists’ work is limited by its market before it is created. This is not to say the artist is any less creative than the engineer, but rather that their positions are too far apart to be equitably compared. And, while some KFC workers may not by creative, many of them may well be. Again, social context needs to be considered. Young men in Morwell (Victoria), for example, who reject their father’s trade, who don’t (or can’t) work in the power industry or the mines; look to move into the service industries. Working in KFC, sporting a visor hat and colored uniform, smiling sweetly at your customers and telling them to ‘have a nice day’, when your Dad, granddad and all their mates, think that real men should be out in the mines getting dirty, is surely a labor of creative gender development. Questions of social scale are lost in Florida’s broad-brush strokes.

The much-vaunted freedoms associated with work in the creative industries[11] are, then, too idealistically construed by Florida’s suggestion of recognizing that we live in an ‘Eminem economy’[12], where workers will sacrifice security for creative reward. While cities with rock bands and rappers do fare well in economic terms, this regional success does not necessarily inform the labour of those creative workers who live in the shadows of a possibility of financial reward. I concur with these critiques of Florida’s ideas, along with the polemic advanced by Stevenson[13], who has highlighted the tensions implicit in contemporary cultural policies that perceive creative social and economic development as being synonymous with ‘social inclusion’. - While Eminem might be an inspirational figure for Aboriginal Australian boys who are learning to rap, the places in which these boys live, the social systems that articulate their educational contexts and the Australian music market, are not necessarily equipped to support their rise to global superstardom. They may well make creative capital and not be afforded the basic right of social inclusion. The work of many traditional Aboriginal dot painters can be taken as a case in point.

Nevertheless, Florida’s notion of the ‘creative class’ continues to hold wide reaching appeal for cultural development, urban and regional renewal. In Australia, cities such as Melbourne and Sydney and regional areas such as Shepparton (Victoria); the Northern Rivers district (Qld); and the Illawarra (NSW) have explicitly taken up the ‘creative class’ discourse. Although increasing attention is being paid to the ‘creative class’ and how to encourage it in terms of the economic growth of places, there has been less attention paid to how young people’s entry into this ‘Creative Class’ might be facilitated. The one significant exception to this silence is the work of Erica McWilliam and her colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. McWilliam is the program leader for a creative workforce research and development program run through the Centre. Her work on changing education to respond to the ‘creative’ turn stands out as a critical intervention into the area of education and studies of creative economy. McWilliam states:

The clear message from creative economy research is that we can no longer afford to think of play, symphony, design, story, empathy and meaning as optional ‘extras’. We need to bring them into the centre of the education of all students. This does not mean throwing out traditional subjects, but allowing for new combinations of curriculum (maths and music, digital and print literacy, design and economics) to take the traditional disciplines out of their silos. It means valuing opportunities for adapting and recombining cultural forms in unanticipated ways to serve different purposes[14]

Working alongside McWilliam, Stewart Cunningham and his colleagues[15] have argued the importance of redesigning the tertiary sector in order to respond to the demands of the Creative Industries. Florida[16] has also highlighted this issue in his critique of the current US education system, arguing that a reliance on ‘post-industrial education’ and its associated lack of creativity leave little space for the production of creative workers. Florida goes on to argue that: ‘as society diversifies and specializes, more and more different kinds of education and teaching styles must be made available’[17]. Such sentiments are a far cry from Julia Gillard’s[18] recent call for a common national curriculum.

More in line with Florida’s call to begin ‘training’ a creative class is the Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal’s[19] focus on the importance of teachers and policy makers in thinking through the pedagogical implications for producing a creative class. However, theoretical work of this nature, while often lauded as significant by Florida and those who follow his lead --including the Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal --has yet to be undertaken in relation to young people under 18 by theorists other than McWilliam. I see this project as having utility, in the respect that it takes up discourses that carry weight in political and policy-making frameworks.

In contexts such as Australia’s current political climate, audible strategies for promoting creative curriculum development and for considering the cultural implications (and complications) of moves for regional renewal are greatly needed. Of interest is the relationship between place and creativity that lies at the heart of Florida’s work. I agree that places and the cultures that inhabit them cannot be considered mutually exclusive. While policy makers have taken up Florida’s argument for an economic relationship between creative cultures and financially successful places, his ‘creativity index’ and associated scholarship on creativity and place, only argues an economic case for the production of creativity. Florida does not provide any tools with which one might consider the located-ness and the micro-politics of making creative places and –as a contributing factor to this project- of fostering aesthetic sensibilities in young people.

I focus on interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries. Such a cross- disciplinary focus is intended to contribute to understanding the educational, social and economic benefits associated with different places. I advance this project via theoretical means that allow a more nuanced consideration of the politics of place-making and fostering creativity in youth than those afforded in Florida’s work. Specifically, I take up Deleuzian concepts of creativity and spatiality to explore two exemplary UK arts companies and one Australian youth arts company, each of which seek to foster creativity in young people through particular place-making projects.

Creativity as the Differential Becoming of the World

Deleuze argues that the context in which creation takes place is problematic, or difficult to ‘define’ in located terms. However, his philosophy is highly responsive to environment. For Deleuze, society grows through affirming the fact that the slippery nature of creativity -and life- can leave us ‘blind’ to understanding the central features of environments in which creativity is produced. We know that environments impact on creativity, but our set, or ‘striated’, conscious means of understanding creativity and the world, obscures our chance to see environments as creative triggers. Deleuze and Guattari describe striation as a process: ‘… which inter-twines fixed and variable elements, [and] produces an order and succession of distinct forms[20]’. For the most part, our consciousness occupies a striated space-time relation. In order to counter the capitalist model in which fixed modes of financial value are bound to the becoming of creativity, social formations must grasp the creatively significant aspects of our environments, by expressing them in new ways. Expression will also inevitably change these aspects of our environments[21].

Deleuze adopts becoming as a way to affirm the processes of differentiation, or constant change, which are misapprehended in our perception of apparently static things. He puts forward an ontology of becoming, in which ‘reality’ is in a permanent state of flux, or continual differentiation. This true ‘flux’, or the differential becoming of the world, is obscured by the illusions of fixity and identity that become key features of our subjectivity. The aspects of our environment that are necessary to creativity are an inseparable part of these processes of becoming.

A creative endeavor combines an unconscious registering of the reality of flux and change with a conscious recognition of this process. Because reality is primarily in flux, a creative affirmation of this becoming is a resistance to our acceptance of a determined world around us. This positive resistance is activated, when, for example, an architect expresses the becomings at play in an actual site through the design of a new building[22]. Or when an artist actualizes possibilities for new aesthetic vocabularies by painting an image that evades the clichés embedded in a blank canvass. This creative engagement with potentiality, and resistance to unconscious clichéd perceptions, is also referred to by Deleuze as a ‘resistance to the present’[23]. The ontology of becoming turns against ‘progress’ as development towards an ideal. Instead of progress, there is an expression of pure movements, defined as variations, or differentiations. Reality is a flow of variations that need no relation to different identities or fixed reference points. It is the constructed human subject that needs reference to identities or fixed points.

Deleuze’s ontology -and affirmation- of becoming is justified on the basis of relations between actual movements or processes. He would contend that we are overly occupied with proving our imaginings of ‘the way things are’ and that because of this we lose the capacity to pay attention to what things are becoming. If we perceive our identity as embedded in place, we take away from our capacity to understand place and self as actualizing individual potentials. People and places are folded into one another at different points of their constitution, yet they are also part of assemblages in which they are not connected and, rather, become quite separate things. While we need to acknowledge and understand the points at which places fold in to constitute our subjectivity, we should not lose sight of the potentials held within places and ourselves, outside these points of connection.

For example, Australia is a sovereign nation. Yet if one was to believe that Uluru was only a tourist attraction, generations of Aboriginal knowledge and connection to country, and the force of these connections, would be discounted. Uluru is a multiplicity. In some social assemblages it is a tourist attraction, where it is connected to ideas of ‘authentic Australia’ and is positioned as an attractive gem in the crown of our ruling monarch. In other social assemblages, Uluru articulates knowledges that cannot be understood by whitefellas, let alone the Sovereign head of State, to whom they claim allegiance.

If creativity is seen, as Deleuze[24] presents it, to be an active engagement with the differential becoming of the world and resistance to cliché, then it is this awareness, this resistance to the present that we must nurture through social formations. New distinctions and new connections must be made between artistic technique, innovation, cultural capital, and social and economic value. In order to begin such a venture, I look to open up conceptualizations of the work of youth arts projects as forms of making creative places.

I begin this trajectory with the work of Creative Partnerships; an initiative that brokers placements for arts practitioners in socially and economically disadvantaged schools. I focus on a site in Margate, a coastal town in Kent; which is a place with an ethnically diverse population. The neighboring town of Dover is a primary entry point for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to the UK. Creative Partnerships explore issues of identity, tolerance and equality as articulated in the social fabric of Margate. The project I examine is one in which the public art organization Artangel collaborated with filmmaker Penny Woolcock in staging ‘The Margate Exodus’. As a contemporary re-working of the Biblical tale, this film explores a community’s search for a ‘Promised Land’ and the social pressures that such journeys can produce. The work offers a mediation of macro and micro social movements, as biographies, landscape, culture and traditions are pleated into one text through filming live performance. ‘The Margate Exodus’ was made in conjunction with the display of a photography project called ‘Towards a Promised Land’, in which banner photographs hung across the centre of Margate. This involved twenty-two young people who migrated to the UK from places affected by war, poverty or political unrest. With photographer Wendy Ewald, the children re-conceptualized their diverse experiences of moving. The photographs produced were shown on the walls of buildings in public spaces across the city, re-territorializing the de-industrializing architectural space of the town. Buildings became canvasses, and the faces of minoritarian children were accorded new levels of visibility.

Folding this re-inscription of town space into the social politics surrounding migration in Margate, ‘The Margate Exodus’ is a now a major feature film screening in cinemas across England, that has been created with, and features, the people of Margate. Across the film text, the contention that social policy on immigration needs to be rethought is articulated through the moving image and through community involvement.

I interviewed Anna Cutler in late 2006, when she was the (then) Artistic Director of Creative Partnerships. I began our conversation by asking her about how social context had been taken up as an inspiration for the ‘Exodus’ project. Cutler responded that:

When I came here (and I had come from Belfast) what I knew to do was to … just absorb for a bit and go around and talk to people and find out what was going on, so I could … see what kind of social situation was going on here and what kind of deprivations there were. And probably one of the worst ones here is lack of aspiration and hope. -And that is across the whole East Kent coast which, because it is next to the very wealthy rest of Kent, it makes it even worse somehow. … so the language that people use to talk about … [Margate] has lack of hope and aspiration associated with it. … I thought my whole program should be about place and identity because my feeling is that the place, it's geography, helps to shape and what has happened economically, shape the identities of those who live there - and the identities of those who live there will shape will the place …. And this is key to what we are doing in Creative Partnerships, … So we're working with young people … in a geographic place that is run down, things are boarded up, it's physically miserable, there are spikes on the pavement, there is a lot of wiring around, [outsiders] … know that they are not invited.[25]

Cutler is aware of the ways in which the suffering, de-industrializing economy of coastal Margate folds in to constitute a sense of isolation in its residents, many of whom are immigrants. She notes how this isolation is re-articulated geographically by ‘things being boarded up … spikes on the pavement … a lot of wiring around’. It was because Cutler was separate enough from these connections between economy, geography and community, having just arrived in Margate from Belfast, that she was able to see these connections so plainly, and to follow the trajectories they form; to inquire as to what it is that these connections produce, and what other assemblages they could become part of. As a way of resisting the inertia of the present, the re-telling of ‘The Exodus’ was taken up by Creative Partnerships to connect people and places in Margate with the Global market of media consumption and to argue that the politics of Immigration (and located feelings of disenfranchisement) have never been more meaningful than they are today.

Cutler continues, explaining that:

You have to inspire the imaginations of people, if you can't imagine an alternative, I don't know how you will ever get there. … If you can't see it, if you can't imagine it, … you won't ever do it. And people have lost that sense that anything is possible here. In Auston, they have been offered things and they haven't happened, so that is the history of Margate in particular, that offers have been made and they haven't turned out, … so there is a lot of frustration here and people feel that they don't deserve anything because it gets reiterated through people's practice.

As for the architecture of the place, it signals terrible poverty, there is rubbish in the streets; sometimes we don't get our rubbish picked up for … week[s] ….

Three years ago I was having a conversation with ArtAngel, about starting a project, I'd worked with Michael West from Art Angel before, … So Michael came down to have a look at the place to begin with, and I knew he would love it because it is a poor place with lots of boarded-up buildings, but it is also [eerily] beautiful. It has the most beautiful Georgian architecture and fabulous Victorian buildings … and the beaches are staggeringly gorgeous. And he really saw that juxtaposition between the mess and the arcades and the flashing lights, and these other … beautiful things. And it makes it a[n] … interesting place to be and it also has lots of natural theatre space to it … he came back and said that what he really wanted to do was to get this filmmaker … to come and make a film, and it was about the whole community, and because a lot of refugees and asylum seekers [are here]… it seemed like a point of entry and a point of exit …

… what we have been doing is planning it since then, and gradually bringing in the community and we've been working … in schools with 20 local artists … on the concept of ‘what a plague is’. The kids have been doing plagues of apathy, plagues of exclusion, plagues of cabbage locusts (because we grow cabbages around here), but it has been extraordinary because … we've got … professional gallery spaces to exhibit the children's work ... We are looking at bands who are going to join in, … we are going to have plagues songs that famous writers have written … we've got a layer of the international artists … working with the community to produce a broadcast film that will be shown ... [in cinemas and on BBC TV]. So it's … high profile, I think that … one of the important things is [having] high-stakes, because everybody moves up to them.[26]

After the broken promises, and the disillusionment that comes once opportunities have been lost, such a large invitation, and such a brave act of saying ‘stand up now because the nation is looking’ has certainly proved reason to rise to an occasion. ‘The Margate Exodus’ has been a critically acclaimed success and it has brought the community of Margate into the Public sphere in a range of ways. Margate, as a community, has been pushed to grasp the defining features of its environment – the juxtaposition between the mess and the arcades, the flashing lights and the boarded-up buildings, the Georgian architecture and the beaches. Paradox between possibility and historicity has become the creatively significant aspect of this community’s context. Expressing these paradoxes in new ways, folding virtual futures into the space of the present, the landscape of Margate has been modulated. It is becoming. The features of Margate’s environment that are necessary to creativity are an inseparable part of these processes.

Articulating the importance of links between place, community and creative industries is what Creative Partnerships does well. The exploration of such connections is socially significant because it generates broader understandings of interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries. However, it has been, and remains, a source of concern to me that the sustainability of the creative cultures generated by Creative Partnerships is limited. The programs they initiate do involve communities and certainly effect change in communities, yet they are not community driven and do not have the capacity to run without expertise brought in from outside the community. A similar critique of the lack of sustainability of the Creative Partnerships programs have been advanced by Hall and Thomson[27]. Certainly, this difficulty with sustainability is an enduring shortcoming of such specialist- run programs.

Now I would like to move on to discuss an institutionalized example of macro and micro scales of social value being re-imagined through a place-based aesthetic. I turn to the ‘NewVIc’, which is the Newham Sixth Form Arts College at Stratford Circus. The Circus is a centre for the performing arts and moving image, managed by NewVIc in collaboration with five professional arts organizations[28].

The Circus is a thoughtfully designed, well-equipped building in East London. It has a large, circular structure with three floors that circle around an open, central community space. One enters the well-lit community space in the foyer, to see that the ceiling goes up three levels, and one is automatically part of an open cafe space in the middle. The stairs to different levels run along the outside of this open space. The architecture pays attention to the importance of flexibility - in the respect that many of the regular studio rooms can also be rehearsal and audition rooms, meeting places, small exhibition spaces, but there are also large performance areas, Theatre stages, a capacity to cater for big scale events. So proximity and spectacle are both possible.

The Circus is run by an education provider (NewVIc) as a site of arts education, yet it also houses professional dance, music, theatre and new media studios, and facilitates a range of adult education programs. The companies that NewVIc leases the building facilities to are: East London Dance, a design and urban music firm called Urban Development, Theatre Venture, NewCEYS (which is the performing arts bloc of Newham’s community education and youth service), and the ‘Circus Media’ Centre. The Circus Media Centre is also affiliated with NewVIc and it supports emerging freelance artists and production companies in delivering broadcast media. Through the Circus, local community members, artists and educators are brought together.

In 2006, in a café on Canary Wharf in London’s East End, I spoke to Graham Jeffrey, a lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of East London, about the role that he played in establishing the Circus. Our conversation examined how social policy and political climate informed, and was also affected by, the Arts Centre at Stratford. The project at Stratford has taken on social context in a comprehensive way, in the respect that it is part of a broader push to creatively redesign London’s East End and Docklands. The local student community do not have a history of performing well academically, and the practical training offered by the performing arts and new media programs at The Circus, alongside the links to industry that are part of these programs and a part of the building itself, provide its students with a creative model of education which has been developed in response to their needs. I asked Graham to comment on this responsiveness to context, and he suggested that such reflexivity is:

… Absolutely critical. The idea was always … that every aspect of our work ought to have a really clearly articulated relationship to the communities that we were working in, … [and] that’s partly out of necessity, because we work in a borough like Newham, [so in terms of] the social context, you can’t take [any student engagement] as a given because
a) the levels of deprivation are really high, [and]
b) the level of diversity is … amazing,

so you can’t make any assumptions about the young people that you have to work with ... Some of them may have arrived in the UK in the last six weeks, others might come from families who have lived in the East End of London for generations, others might be second generation immigrants, [who are] profoundly religious, some of them might be profoundly … disadvantaged in all sorts of ways … that sort of … diversity leads you to be much more conscious of … social context than you would be if you just worked in a suburb, where … there is … a relatively “mono-culture”. … [C]ommunity education and around engagement, and certainly further education and UK further education has always been the sector in education that’s … done more than schools or universities to engage with learners that don’t fit the traditional mould.[29]

Here, Graham envisages the politics of community as inseparable from his art education practice. Furthermore, it seems that there are certain ideas of creativity associated with working in such a diverse student demographic. I am reminded that for Deleuze, the point of creativity is to break out of the everyday, the ‘familiar’. The question of producing creativity is the same question as ‘how difference is possible’? How can we go beyond the coordinates of our constitution? Graham takes up the political utility of creativity in a (perhaps unintentionally) similar manner, musing that:

…The other thing I’m interested in is that creativity, … inevitably, implies deviance, implies breaking the rules, implies criticism, and it implies challenge. It’s not about working within the framework of ‘what if [this actually]’ exists, except to say ‘what if’?. So, creativity to me is essentially bound up with the notion of social change, with the notion of trying to alter things, and of course that brings it inevitably into conflict with institutions, because that’s not what institutions are in the business of doing. On the whole, institutions … are in the business of regimenting, of disciplining, of ordering, of cataloguing and creating taxonomies and systems which bind people to certain ways of being. … you’ve got to understand how it works in order to subvert, you can’t hack an organization if you don’t really get [into] the politics of it …[30]

Decades before this statement is made, Deleuze quotes Nietzsche in Difference and Repetition[31] as an impetus for his definition of creativity, as a situation in which new values and the recognition of established values are both affirmed as having different utilities. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. In terms of accommodating this fractured and expanding experience of spatiality and folding it into the design of the Circus, Graham says:

We wanted to have an awareness of … [a fractured experience of spatiality] in the work that we were doing, and not hold up school or college as the centre of the universe, but to understand that in fact people have multiple places they identify with, and multiple kind of selves almost in relation to those places, so they’ve put on one face to do this thing and perform in a different way [and then another face for another thing] ... with somewhere like Stratford Circus, the idea was to create a … flexible sort of place, but it could be lots of different things, so that for example, Friday evenings are grind night, and it’s like the East London masses, … everybody comes down and it’s pretty … noisy and most people are between 16 and 22, … it’s really hardcore grind music, and at an earlier time that day, there might have been a tea dance in the same space, so it’s a hybrid space. … it becomes a place where it’s possible to bring groups of people together who otherwise would have sod all to do with each other.[32]

Intergenerational contact is difficult to facilitate outside families, hospitals and educational institutions. It seems to me that this is one of the ways in which the Arts Centre at Stratford Circus is exploring what a notion of creative place making might be. In the respect that the Arts Centre fosters exemplary teaching and learning practices that enable diverse groups of people, including young people, to become more innovative in the ways they think about their relationships to community, and supports them in producing creative capital, there seems to be a point of connection to Florida’s work.

I asked Graham to consider how the Stratford Circus might sustain and develop London’s Creative Economy through the support they provide young people in joining the ‘Creative Class’. This question prompted insights into the interface between industry and Florida’s research, more than it actualised any connections between Stratford Circus and theories of the Creative Class. Richard Florida’s capitalist striation of creativity holds little appeal for those at Stratford Circus. Graham explains that: ‘one of the more uncomfortable things … [about] Richard Florida, …[and] the universalisation of creativity discourse, [is] that creativity is just accepted as being a good thing, and it’s tied up with capitalist business innovation, creativity-innovation-knowledge society, and then if you are not careful, you’re not actually critiquing that whole.[33]’ I agree with Graham that, in Florida’s work, capitalist modes of production and consumption become inscribed onto all creative practices, and this robs creativity of its power for political alterity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the relationship between capitalism and striation as a process that is facilitated by State power. They say:

The physico-social model of Work pertains to the State Apparatus, it is one of its inventions, … two reasons. First, because labour only appears with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labour that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labour (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labour. Second, labour performs a generalized operation of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the State.[34]

Taking up this definition of labour as a State striation of space-time, in Florida’s theory of Creative Capital, fixed modes of financial value are bound to the becoming of creativity, by means that produce an order, in which creativity is accorded a set worth. Thus, the notion of ‘Creative Capital’ is the ‘distinct form’ in which Richard Florida’s work articulates the paradox of creativity. As a process of striation, the production of ‘Creative Capital’ necessarily constructs a particular spatiality. ‘Creative Capital’ is composed:‘… In [a] space, [where] lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points.[35]’Only certain kinds of movements are possible here: ‘one goes from one point to another’[36]. Material flows, the continual becoming of the present, is overcoded by set meanings. In Florida’s eyes, ‘Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’[37] while the experience and political significance of being gay, or being in a rock band becomes striated in terms of economic value and place development[38]. It seems to me that here the tension between established formations of power and emerging knowledge becomes central. The janus head of historicity and the future is set at the heart of working creatively. A similar paradox between industry and academy is articulated in the research of Stewart Cunningham and colleagues, who argue that higher education focused on the creative industries suffers from ‘splits and silos’ which make planning for practical skill development in tertiary institutions a difficult feat[39]. Places of learning such as the Stratford Circus can be seen as responding to this problem of ‘splits and silos in skill development’, through the creation of pedagogical strategies that are specifically attuned to the relationship between creativity and diverse places of learning.

Across the globe, in a starkly different physical and political environment, I spent some time researching a youth arts hub with parallels to Stratford Circus, yet the Courthouse Youth Arts is a regional youth arts centre, and has been designed specifically to respond to the social and environmental issues that are specific to young people in rural and regional Victoria. I now contextualize my discussion of the two U.K projects described above in relation to this regional Victorian case study. The time I spent at the Courthouse was in late 2004 and 2005 -- the Howard Government had been in power since 1996, arts funding had received unprecedented cuts during this period and rural Victoria was in severe drought. This social context holds in relief the value accorded to, and appreciation of, arts projects that became part of English culture under the late Blair Government. This stark difference was brought to my attention recently when I was speaking at a University Symposium that brought together Industry professionals and Academics. The Symposium was in Australia and one attendee was a British artist who had travelled to Australia on a U.K arts research scholarship. She made the point that the Australian Arts and Disability scene was ten years behind Britain at least four times across the course of two days. I was never sure quite what the utility of making this point was, though I assumed it was her way of expressing frustration and making quite plain the fact that she wasn’t feeling overly stimulated or excited to be there. Australian Arts practices have been remarkably under resourced in comparison to the United Kingdom. Yet, in my opinion, this has not led to a poor quality arts scene, rather, an unlikely arts scene: resilient, interesting and low budget.

The Courthouse Youth Arts Centre operates on the premise that music and movement bring people together. Community is formed through sense: senses of belonging, of being known and recognized. Music and movement are two media through which individual recognition and collective enjoyment are facilitated. Increasingly over the past three decades, street beats: hip-hop, rap, R n’ B and movement styles which have evolved with these sounds have brought together communities from a range of ethnic backgrounds and social classes. Wathaurong Koori people, Sudanese refugees, Lebanese, Greek, Italian and Anglo-Australian Young people in Geelong come together through street beats and dance styles under the umbrella of Courthouse Youth Arts. Here community isn’t about nationality, sexuality or money as much as it is about movement and style.

The Youth Arts Centre occupies a spacious 1950’s style courthouse. – Hence the name. The Centre’s pastel coloured art deco facade is one of the more eye-catching buildings in the heart of Geelong, as the refurbishment of the building celebrates the old with a contemporary flavour. A sense of place and an understanding of social context are critical when looking at the work Courthouse is doing. Local, regional sites are kept in focus through the Centre’s outreach programs and through the multi-disciplinary focal lens of the Centre, which has been designed to embrace a diverse cross section of young people living in and around the rural centre of Geelong. Courthouse runs programs that focus on music, dance, visual arts, film, arts management and theatre making. The Courthouse’s theatre making program currently includes street dance, break dance and MCing; tools of performance making with which young people are particularly keen to engage.

The Courthouse is an exceptional place, the heart of an active arts community in Geelong; a town that has come a long way since it began as a wool distribution port. A successful textiles trade built upon the wool distribution at the financial heart of Geelong and this is still reflected at times in the ways young visual artists approach their work here. However, the old Geelong wool stores are now campus buildings for Deakin University and while Geelong is still an industrial town; the focus of labour has shifted distinctly. Alongside Deakin’s growing contribution to the community here, the Ford engine manufacturing plant and local Shell oil refinery are, and have been, Geelong’s financial sources for decades.

Beyond the smoking refinery pylons, Geelong enfolds pockets of the 1950’s - alive and well in the new millennium - and a broad community demographic. In-between the production buildings there are cottages that sell home made gollywog dolls and potted irises. There are sushi shops, Lebanese restaurants, and schools for Sudanese refugees. Some people take break dance classes a few nights a week. Other people grow their own vegies and have chooks. It’s the country and the city at the same time. It’s an in-between place that feels pretty distinctive in comparison to the grey streets and over-filled trams of Melbourne. There are some pretty funky young people in Geelong. Many of their mums and dads’ work for Ford, and these young people are living on the cutting edge of a very different kind of cultural production – jamming acrobatics, street dancing and rhymes, sourcing new stories of their own and giving them platforms. These folks are making it pretty clear that while some parts of Geelong tell tales of car engines, petrol and gollywogs, there is another level of cultural production going on around here. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. Deleuze states:

Nietzsche’s distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner, as though the established values were new in their time and the new values simply needed time to become established. In fact it concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again , remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognized. What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new –in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the power of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita . What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central bad nature and ill does it spring, from what central ungrounding which strips thought of its ‘innateness’ and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint? By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition.[40]

Courthouse embraces and produces terra incognita just as much as it re-inscribes dominant discourses of the arts helping youth at risk. The centre publicizes itself as being concerned with engaging marginalised and disenfranchised young people and as offering opportunities for creative types to build their skills and excel. Courthouse is a community-based organisation – the concerns of Geelong’s youth community are reflected in its programs and in turn, the programs produce works that appeal to Geelong’s youth.

My first class at the Courthouse was one of the weekly HeadSpin master classes held for eight young emerging visual artists, writers and theatre makers. The HeadSpin master class program had a focus on theatre making and it applied this focus broadly to encompass all aspects of theatre production. The project invited eight emerging artists to work in teams to devise and stage three short performance works, roughly twenty minutes each in duration. These works were then presented as a triple bill in May 2005. HeadSpin consisted of weekly master classes with the Courthouse coordinator of the theatre making program, Naomi Steinborner. Naomi mentored HeadSpin recipients until December, at which point specialist mentors in different disciplinary areas came on board the project. These additions to the artistic team individually supported the eight individual young HeadSpin artists through the finalisation of their performance concepts, auditions, rehearsals, design, production and presentation.

The HeadSpin class were an interesting and diverse bunch. After completing Drama Studies at Adelaide University, Naomi Steinborner studied animatuering at the VCA. Her background in thinking through space and visual, conceptual design is evident in her approach to fostering new talent. A sculptor, a design student, a visual dramaturge, two writers, a sound designer, a puppeteer and two directors made up the HeadSpin team. While I was on board, the community theatre company Somebody’s Daughter ran a workshop with HeadSpin that looked at working with disenfranchised people and sourcing performance material from community participants’ lived experiences. The HeadSpin team worked in a very welcoming and engaging way with Somebody’s Daughter; a company who offer a model of community theatre which has been slipping out focus a little since the late 80’s. After HeadSpin many of the young artists being mentored in this program wanted to turn their focus to community cultural development work. Indeed, some of the participants were already actively engaged in CCD work with young mums. HeadSpin produced some striking and diverse works: a puppetry fantasy about a young boy’s journey through a gypsy forest, a contemporary satirical perspective on parlour games and an affective atmosphere / soundscape of adolescence. These works appealed to a broad cross-section of Geelong’s community.

One of the most important things about youth arts work is the ways in which it can include, speak to and be modelled around, marginalised community groups, yet theatre work by its very nature is not marginalising. Making theatre is about getting along with people. It’s about working together and getting out there. It’s also about an irreducible humanness. Whatever the specific difficulties of people’s lives, people get along as people and laugh and cry at similar ‘human’ things. While some contemporary social theorists argue we are now living in an age of post-humanism, I think collectives like the Courthouse show us otherwise. We are living in the age of a new humanism, a place where your aesthetics are your ethics; where sense, atmosphere and affect take precedence over the binary ruts of identity politics.

* * * * * *
My consideration analyses of these three place-making projects gestures towards the respective utility and need for a critical reconsideration of Florida’s work. While the connections drawn together here span a broad range of discourses, I want to outline some of the force, complexity and cultural significance that lies at the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects. Deleuzian theories of creativity and place show us that the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects can be taken up in order to redefine -and speak back to- Floridian theories of place and creativity. As sites of public pedagogy, such youth arts projects promote diverse conceptions of creativity and place. They show up the instability of our everyday uses of these concepts. Perhaps most saliently, they involve many young people who can become imaginatively captured, skilled and inspired.

Notes

[1] Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Online.
[2] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[3] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
[4] In ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’, Online, Florida states:
‘The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth.’
[5] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p 69.
[6] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 1.
[7] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 4.
[8] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ pp. 93-102.
[9] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ p. 93.
[10] Flew, ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ pp. 89-95.
[11] Mc Robbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ pp. 516-531. & ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy? pp. 97-114.
[12] Florida, The New American Dream, online.
[13] Stevenson, “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way.’ pp. 121-130.
[14] McWilliam, Erica. ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’. Online.
[15] Cunningham et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ pp. 112, 174-185.
[16] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent.
[17] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. p. 255
[18] Julia Gillard in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, 2007, Online.
[19] Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal, A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation.
[20] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478
[21] Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture', p. 202
[22] Ibid, p. 203
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, ‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 108
[24] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 130-8, 158-61, 167.
[25] Anna Cutler Interview.
[26] Anna Cutler Interview.
[27] Hall and Thomson, 2007

[29] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[30] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[31] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
[32] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[33] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[34] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 490-1.
[35] Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. p. 1.

[39] Cunningham, et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ p. 184.
[40] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136

Select Bibliography:

ArtAngel: http://www.artangel.org.uk/ accessed 12/01/08
Arts WA (2003) Creative Connections: An Arts Education Policy Consultation Paper Western Australia: Arts WA
Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) (2004) Evaluation of School-Based Arts Education Programs in Australian Schools, Vic: ACER
Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) (2004) National Education and the Arts Strategy: Draft for Consultation, Sydney, Australia Council
ACA & NSW Ministry for the Arts (2003) Review of Theatre for Young People New Farm QLD: Positive Solutions
Bamford, A (2004) Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative, Fuel For Arts http://www.fuel$arts.com/ accessed 24/01/06
Cahill H & Smith G (2003) A Pilot Study of Arena Theatre Company’s Audiences conducted during the Melbourne Festival season of Play Dirty, October 2002 Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Creative Partnerships: http://www.creative-partnerships.com/ accessed 19/12/07
Cunningham, S., Cutler, T., Hearn, G., Ryan, M., Keane, M., (2004) An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D? Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 174-185
Cutler, T. (2003) Forword. In R. Florida The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press, vii-xi
Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (French 1988) trans. Tom Conley (English 1993: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French 1980) trans. Brian Massumi (1987: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles (1994a) Difference and Repetition (French 1968) trans. Paul Patton (English 1994: Colombia University Press, New York)
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994b) What is Philosophy? London: Verso Publishers.
Department of Culture & the Arts (DCA) (2003) Creative Connections: An arts in education policy consultation paper Perth: DCA
Di Leo, J., Jacobs, W. and Lee, A. (2002) The Sites of Pedagogy, Symploke 10, 1-2, pp. 7-12
Donelan, K. O’Brien, A., Martinac, K., & Coulter, K. (2005) Report on the Risky Business Research Project, Backing Our Creativity, National Education and the Arts Symposium, September, Melbourne
Ellsworth, E. (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, New York: Routledge
Flew, T. (2003) ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17(1) pp. 89-95
Flew, T. (2004) Fashioning an Entrepreneurial Creative Cultural Self, Cultural Studies of Australasia Annual Conference, Fremantle: December.
Florida, R. (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press.
Florida, R. (2005a) Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2005b) The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. New York: Harper Collins.
Florida, R. (2003) ‘The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love. The party that realizes this first wins.’ Washington Monthly March. Online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0303.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Florida, Richard. (2002) ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Washington Monthly. May, online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Gibson, C. & Klocker N. (2005) “The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ Geographical Research 43(1) pp. 93-102
Gibson, C. & Robinson, D. (2004) Creative Networks in Regional Australia Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 83-100.
Gillard, Julia (2007) in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22873861-12332,00.html accessed 07/01/08
Green, B (2003) Kids from the Local School…’? Tele-pedagogy and the Rock Eisteddfod, Discourse 24: 205-23
Hall, C., Thomson, P. and Russell, L., (2007). Teaching like an artist: the pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(5), 605-619.
Hall, C.J. and Thomson, P.L., (2007). Creative partnerships?: cultural policy and inclusive arts practice in one primary school. British Educational Research Journal, 33(3), pp. 315-329.
Hawkes, J (2001) The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s essential role in public planning Victoria: Cultural Development Network of Victoria
Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V., Wright, J. & Rasmussen, M. (2005). Artful Connections: Social Change and Embodied Affect Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Kretzman, J. and McKnight, J. (1993) Building Community from the Inside Out: A Path Towards Finding and Mobilising a Community’s Assets Chicago: Asset Based Community Development Institute and ACTA Publications.
Hunter, M.A. (2005) Education and the Arts Research Overview. Surry Hills, NSW. Australia Council For The Arts.
McRobbie, A. (2002a) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decilne of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ Cultural Studies 16, pp. 516-531
McRobbie, A. (2002b) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy?’ Cultural Economy eds Dugay & Pryke. London: SAGE, pp. 97-114.
Mc William, Erica. (2007) ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’ Speech for the 10thChina Bejing International High-tech Expo, Bejing 25 May 2007. Online: http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/webdav/users/siteadmin/public/fellowships_associatefellow_paper_ericamcwilliam_may07.pdf
Accessed 07/01/08

Margate Exodus: http://www.themargateexodus.org.uk/home.php online, accessed 19/12/07
Mills & Brown (2004) Art and Wellbeing Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts
Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (2004) A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation, Queensland: Department of Education and the Arts.
NewVic Sixth Form Arts College: http://www.newvic.ac.uk/sc.htm online, accessed 19/12/07
O’Brien A (2003) Art through pain–the panacea. Art and Pain Four, Winter http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_four/obrien.htm%2014/2/05
O’Brien, Alder, Donelan et al. (2001-3) Risky Business: The creative arts as an intervention activity for young people at risk ARC Linkage Project, The University of Melbourne
Osmotherly, J (2002) ‘The Highwater Youth Arts Program, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company’ Role of Schools in Crime Prevention Conference Aust Institute of Criminology, DEET, Vic & Crime Prevention Vic.
Peck, J. (2005) Struggling with the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 4: pp. 740-770.
PMSEIC (Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council) Working Group on ‘the role of creativity in the innovation economy (2005) Imagine Australia Report.
Rasmussen, M., Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V. & Wright, J.(2005) Artful Connections: Community Youth Arts Projects as pedagogical sites. Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Robinson, Ken (2001), Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Oxford: Capstone.
Stevenson, D. (2004) “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10, pp. 121-130.
Thomson, P and Hall, C J, (2008). ‘Dialogues with artists; learning about children’s self portraits’. In: Thomson, P, ed. Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge.
VicHealth (2002) Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation Victoria: Arts for Health
Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture' Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 9, 2000, pp 200-19.
Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) (2004) Young People and the Arts Fact Sheet: Helping Young People at Risk http://www.ypaa.net/ accessed 14/09/04.
Notes

[1] Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Online.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
[1] In ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’, Online, Florida states:
‘The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth.’
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p 69.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 1.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 4.
[1] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ pp. 93-102.
[1] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ p. 93.
[1] Flew, ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ pp. 89-95.
[1] Mc Robbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ pp. 516-531. & ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy? pp. 97-114.
[1] Florida, The New American Dream, online.
[1] Stevenson, “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way.’ pp. 121-130.
[1] McWilliam, Erica. ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’. Online.
[1] Cunningham et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ pp. 112, 174-185.
[1] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent.
[1] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. p. 255
[1] Julia Gillard in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, 2007, Online.
[1] Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal, A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478
[1] Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture', p. 202
[1] Ibid, p. 203
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, ‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 108
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 130-8, 158-61, 167.
[1] Anna Cutler Interview.
[1] Anna Cutler Interview.
[1] Hall and Thomson, 2007

[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 490-1.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478.
[1] Ibid.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. p. 1.

[1] Cunningham, et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ p. 184.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136

Select Bibliography:
ArtAngel: http://www.artangel.org.uk/ accessed 12/01/08
Arts WA (2003) Creative Connections: An Arts Education Policy Consultation Paper Western Australia: Arts WA
Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) (2004) Evaluation of School-Based Arts Education Programs in Australian Schools, Vic: ACER
Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) (2004) National Education and the Arts Strategy: Draft for Consultation, Sydney, Australia Council
ACA & NSW Ministry for the Arts (2003) Review of Theatre for Young People New Farm QLD: Positive Solutions
Bamford, A (2004) Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative, Fuel For Arts http://www.fuel$arts.com/ accessed 24/01/06
Cahill H & Smith G (2003) A Pilot Study of Arena Theatre Company’s Audiences conducted during the Melbourne Festival season of Play Dirty, October 2002 Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Creative Partnerships: http://www.creative-partnerships.com/ accessed 19/12/07
Cunningham, S., Cutler, T., Hearn, G., Ryan, M., Keane, M., (2004) An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D? Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 174-185
Cutler, T. (2003) Forword. In R. Florida The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press, vii-xi
Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (French 1988) trans. Tom Conley (English 1993: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French 1980) trans. Brian Massumi (1987: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles (1994a) Difference and Repetition (French 1968) trans. Paul Patton (English 1994: Colombia University Press, New York)
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994b) What is Philosophy? London: Verso Publishers.
Department of Culture & the Arts (DCA) (2003) Creative Connections: An arts in education policy consultation paper Perth: DCA
Di Leo, J., Jacobs, W. and Lee, A. (2002) The Sites of Pedagogy, Symploke 10, 1-2, pp. 7-12
Donelan, K. O’Brien, A., Martinac, K., & Coulter, K. (2005) Report on the Risky Business Research Project, Backing Our Creativity, National Education and the Arts Symposium, September, Melbourne
Ellsworth, E. (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, New York: Routledge
Flew, T. (2003) ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17(1) pp. 89-95
Flew, T. (2004) Fashioning an Entrepreneurial Creative Cultural Self, Cultural Studies of Australasia Annual Conference, Fremantle: December.
Florida, R. (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press.
Florida, R. (2005a) Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2005b) The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. New York: Harper Collins.
Florida, R. (2003) ‘The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love. The party that realizes this first wins.’ Washington Monthly March. Online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0303.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Florida, Richard. (2002) ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Washington Monthly. May, online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Gibson, C. & Klocker N. (2005) “The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ Geographical Research 43(1) pp. 93-102
Gibson, C. & Robinson, D. (2004) Creative Networks in Regional Australia Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 83-100.
Gillard, Julia (2007) in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22873861-12332,00.html accessed 07/01/08
Green, B (2003) Kids from the Local School…’? Tele-pedagogy and the Rock Eisteddfod, Discourse 24: 205-23
Hall, C., Thomson, P. and Russell, L., (2007). Teaching like an artist: the pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(5), 605-619.
Hall, C.J. and Thomson, P.L., (2007). Creative partnerships?: cultural policy and inclusive arts practice in one primary school. British Educational Research Journal, 33(3), pp. 315-329.
Hawkes, J (2001) The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s essential role in public planning Victoria: Cultural Development Network of Victoria
Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V., Wright, J. & Rasmussen, M. (2005). Artful Connections: Social Change and Embodied Affect Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Kretzman, J. and McKnight, J. (1993) Building Community from the Inside Out: A Path Towards Finding and Mobilising a Community’s Assets Chicago: Asset Based Community Development Institute and ACTA Publications.
Hunter, M.A. (2005) Education and the Arts Research Overview. Surry Hills, NSW. Australia Council For The Arts.
McRobbie, A. (2002a) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decilne of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ Cultural Studies 16, pp. 516-531
McRobbie, A. (2002b) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy?’ Cultural Economy eds Dugay & Pryke. London: SAGE, pp. 97-114.
Mc William, Erica. (2007) ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’ Speech for the 10thChina Bejing International High-tech Expo, Bejing 25 May 2007. Online: http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/webdav/users/siteadmin/public/fellowships_associatefellow_paper_ericamcwilliam_may07.pdf
Accessed 07/01/08

Margate Exodus: http://www.themargateexodus.org.uk/home.php online, accessed 19/12/07
Mills & Brown (2004) Art and Wellbeing Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts
Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (2004) A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation, Queensland: Department of Education and the Arts.
NewVic Sixth Form Arts College: http://www.newvic.ac.uk/sc.htm online, accessed 19/12/07
O’Brien A (2003) Art through pain–the panacea. Art and Pain Four, Winter http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_four/obrien.htm%2014/2/05
O’Brien, Alder, Donelan et al. (2001-3) Risky Business: The creative arts as an intervention activity for young people at risk ARC Linkage Project, The University of Melbourne
Osmotherly, J (2002) ‘The Highwater Youth Arts Program, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company’ Role of Schools in Crime Prevention Conference Aust Institute of Criminology, DEET, Vic & Crime Prevention Vic.
Peck, J. (2005) Struggling with the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 4: pp. 740-770.
PMSEIC (Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council) Working Group on ‘the role of creativity in the innovation economy (2005) Imagine Australia Report.
Rasmussen, M., Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V. & Wright, J.(2005) Artful Connections: Community Youth Arts Projects as pedagogical sites. Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Robinson, Ken (2001), Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Oxford: Capstone.
Stevenson, D. (2004) “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10, pp. 121-130.
Thomson, P and Hall, C J, (2008). ‘Dialogues with artists; learning about children’s self portraits’. In: Thomson, P, ed. Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge.
VicHealth (2002) Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation Victoria: Arts for Health
Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture' Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 9, 2000, pp 200-19.
Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) (2004) Young People and the Arts Fact Sheet: Helping Young People at Risk http://www.ypaa.net/ accessed 14/09/04.

2008-01-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

Creative Places- Manifesto

2006-04-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

There is a notable lack of scholarly investigation into the pedagogical strategies needed for young people to enter into, and contribute to, Florida’s ‘creative class’. This online blog addresses inter-related aspects of this significant gap in knowledge by investigating therelationship between place, young people and the ‘creative class’.

With a focus on youth, and the knowledges produced through place, we investigate how knowledges of innovation are constructed and shared. Given the extent to which Florida’s concepts of the ‘creative class’ and creative cities have informed cultural development and city planning across America, Europe and Australia, the critical application of histhought to young people will have significant benefits in the fields ofEducation, Youth Studies, Cultural Policy and Urban and Regional Planning. Our approach is also significant because of our focus on inter-disciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries betweeninformal educational sites, communities and creative industries and willprovide a significant contribution to understandings of the types ofeducational, social and economic benefits associated with different places.

2006-04-19T19:47:00.000-07:00

Thus far we have interviews with

Anna Cutler, Creative Partnerships/TATE Modern:
http://www.creative-partnerships.com/

Tom Bentley, DEMOS: http://www.demos.co.uk/

Graham Jeffrey, University of East London: http://www.uel.ac.uk/

We are slowly starting a blog on creative spaces at:
http://creative-spaces.blogspot.com/

___________________________________________________________________
Geographical places in America, Australia and the UK that foster future
members of the Creative Class

There is a notable lack of scholarly investigation into the pedagogical
strategies needed for young people to enter into, and contribute to,
Florida’s ‘creative class’. This engagement will address a specific
aspect of this significant gap in knowledge by investigating the
relationship between place, young people and the ‘creative class’. With a
focus on youth, and the knowledges produced through place, we will
investigate how knowledges of innovation are constructed and shared.
Given the extent to which Florida’s concepts of the ‘creative class’ and
creative cities have informed cultural development and city planning
across America, Europe and Australia, the critical application of his
thought to young people will have significant benefits in the fields of
Education, Youth Studies, Cultural Policy and Urban and Regional
Planning. Our approach is also significant because of our focus on
interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between
informal educational sites, communities and creative industries and will
provide a significant contribution to understandings of the types of
educational, social and economic benefits associated with different
places.
--

MORNING MISTS IN THE OFFSHORE FORTS

2006-04-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

Stephen Turners senses of time and of the pace of life are dissolved by the changing natures of unmediated light and dark. Isolation from human beings and human measurements becomes a confrontation with space, light, tempreature, sound and silence.

OFFSHORE FORTS

2006-04-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

The history of WW2 Britian is reterritorialized by art practice.
Creativity is folded into place through isolation.
See Stephen Turner's SEAFORT project: http://seafort.org/
Also see Redsand: http://www.project-redsand.com/history.htm

2006-04-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

'Offshore Forts' Public Art Project, UK 2005

Artist/Photographer: Turner

Funded by The Arts Council, UK

Creative pedagogy & its media

2006-04-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Spaces: Cultural & physical places, creative space & space/time foldings

2006-04-19T04:09:00.000-07:00

Spaces: Cultural and physical places, creative space and space/time foldings

Reappropriating cultural and physical places or increasing the number of spaces inhabited by people with intellectual disability is a key aspect of Restless Dance Company’s work (http://www.restlessdance.org/) . Just as Deleuze & Guattari's (1987, p. 9) principle of asignifying rupture performs a shameless re-appropriation, Restless Dance consistently reterritorialise the politics of the spaces they work in. These acts of reappropriation are inherent in the work of integrated dance theatre. Chance (2001, p.6), former artistic director of Restless, comments on the creation of ‘disability friendly’ creative space:

"I find it interesting to invite young people without a disability to enter a creative space which they do not automatically own because it is being driven by peers with a disability -- integration in a reverse way. For Restless, this approach challenged the idea that young people with a disability want to be more ‘normal’ by copying the dance of people without a disability."

In this quote, Chance explores the reappropriation of cultural and creative space in the rehearsal room. Reappropriation of physical spaces through rehearsal and performance is just as significant a task as the cultural, political and creative reappropriation that Chance describes above.

Spaces created by rehearsal and performance venues are of key importance when rehearsing and performing a piece of dance theatre. Factors such as wheelchair accessibility, adequate space, flooring, mirrored walls and ballet barres all determine what a space ‘speaks of’ and what it holds silent. Perhaps more importantly, what a space speaks of is also a determining factor in the kind of work that happens in it.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome can be considered in relation to Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992) sociological theory of the ‘effects of a field’, as both the effects of a field and the production of a rhizome are performative acts of territorialisation. These performances are context-specific, political reconsiderations of a situation’s possibilities. Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) notion of the ‘field’ is useful when thinking about the significance of spatiality and relationships between labour and space. They (1992, p.100) suggest that:

"...we may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is exercised, so that what happens to any object that traverses this space cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic properties of the object in question. The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease."

As this citation suggests, the concept of the effect(s) of a field is useful when looking at the reterritorialisation of a space as work. Part of Bourdieu & Wacquant’s (1992, p.100) conception of the spatial politics of reappropriation includes the construction of capital as an effect of a field. If economies of capital are considered as being the products of traversing a particular terrain, then capital, within Bourdieu’s thought, becomes an effect of a field. Restless can be regarded as a ‘field’ which accords bodies in it ‘with’ intellectual disability more cultural capital than those ‘without’, in a collective movement which constitutes a significant cultural reterritorialisation. This ‘effect of the field’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, p.100) of the Restless aesthetic is always an individual performance. Chance offers an excellent example of the performative nature of the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, an effect which is ultimately a political choice to privilege the styles of people with intellectual disability:

"Performance material is built from dancers’ personal responses to the director’s tasks. At this stage there is a free flow of ideas and possibilities leading, eventually, from the setting of material. The dancers agree on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of the imagery. Sometimes, however, the dancers with a disability make a subtle alteration of spacing or pacing. If the dancers without a disability sustain material which earlier had been ‘right’, then they are wrong, because they need to pay attention to the constant creation and re-creation of the dance" (Chance 2001, p.6).

The political awareness and choice-making which can be considered as an effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, is usually reframed as the production of difference within spaces developed specifically for contemporary dance culture. Dance spaces which are not wheelchair accessible, or which are framed by ballet barres and gymnasium equipment, suggest what dance could be and in so doing, delineate what dance cannot be. Restless rehearsal venues range from community halls and churches to professional dance spaces, depending on space availability and rehearsal requirements. The closer a performance piece comes to completion, the more physical space is required in which to rehearse it, as the performance text gradually increases in size as it is composed.

For people without intellectual disability, such as myself, the economy of work in relation to rehearsal and performance is somewhat reversed. Mediating the support needs of individuals with intellectual disability in spaces with mirrored walls, dance barres and sprung floors is a question of consistently challenging what the space suggests ‘dance’ might be. This involves performing the effect of the field of the Restless aesthetic, by tuning into the styles and support needs of people with intellectual disability. The effect of the field in rehearsal extends to playing the role of the director at times, in crafting the work of people ‘with’, and also producing and crafting your own work. Movement improvisation, as a creative practice, alongside the principles of mapping and tracing one’s own and other’s choreographic material, are once again evident in these processes of tuning into, dancing with and supporting performers with intellectual disability.

A more practical example of context specific processes of territorialisation can be found in the 2001 Western Australian project entitled Exile. Facilitated by DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia), Exile was a site-specific work developed and performed in a Gothic mansion once known as the Fremantle Asylum[1]. Hayden, the project’s director, discusses the power of re-appropriating cultural space through performance by referring to the Asylum’s history. In the following quotation, the feeling of incarceration that Hayden describes can be thought of as an effect of the field of the Freemantle Arts Centre as a performance space. The rhizomic qualities of reappropriation, creative connection and expansion can be seen in the way Hayden has mobilised the feeling of incarceration, inverted it and incorporated it into the performance text:

"A nice thing about this performance being so site-specific is that, just by the very nature of the environment and the fact that it is a promenade show, there are points where we imagine that the audience will actually experience the feeling of incarceration and scrutiny. So I guess the gaze goes both ways, and that’s always an interesting area for artists and audiences to explore" (Van Sanden 2001, p.13).

The notion that an audience’s gaze is site-specific is conceptually linked to the idea that different performance sites constitute different kinds of work[2]. Across outdoor performance venues, roving street theatre, proscenium arch stages, performers and audiences adjust their roles to fix their context. As such, the work of performers in delivering a text and the work of audience members in reading a text always exist in relation to a specific performance site, a space which inevitably contains certain effects of a field. The performers, as corpus and audience members, can also respectively be considered ‘fields’, often delineated or marked by effects such as the audience clapping at a performance’s conclusion, performers bowing in response to their audience’s applause, and so on.

Creative space is also a key concept in my research methodology and constitutes an important component of my research method. Restless directors are responsible for creating and maintaining a creative space in which Company members can work effectively. The maintenance of creative space is about attending to ensemble dynamics, addressing issues of trust and respect and acknowledging people’s work. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) suggest a field can reach a pathological state, which they liken to a totalitarian regime. In this instance, the effects of the field cease to be performative and cease to constitute a state of play (while they use precisely this term, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) draw a correspondence between the effect of a field and the rules of a game). An illustration of such an annihilation of creative space can be found in the following example taken from my work with Restless.

Working at the Ausdance Youth Dance Festival in Darwin in 1997, Restless performed their major new work for the year, Sex Juggling. After touring regional South Australia and the Northern Territory, working in schools and community centres, the Company arrived in a new performance space, with a day to rehearse before performing as a headlining act of the festival. Negotiating the performance space was a serious challenge, one that was further impacted upon by our director’s exasperation at our dislocation. The Company’s field of play stratified to form the kind of pathological state that Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p.102) suggest is ‘a limit which is never actually reached’. Our work maintained a static quality that veritably took on a disembodied life of its own. The dynamics of the Ensemble became quite dysfunctional. Domino chains of missed cues, spacing errors and anxious performances fed into stratified Body without Organs, an unbound nothingness which consumed the Ensemble’s creative workspaces and deterritorialised the productivity such space engenders. Lack of space and time lead to a creative asphyxiation in which creative flows resisted organ-isation. The once creative Company culture, in which the effects of the field supported people with intellectual disability, was atrophied into an uncomfortable and unsupportive state.

This example illustrates the fact that, in integrated dance theatre, the work of creating and performing a layered, detailed and cohesive show cannot occur in isolation from navigating the cultural politics of working with people with intellectual disability. The role of being a dancer without a disability within Restless is one of constantly mediating the politics of working with people with intellectual disability as colleagues. This involves respecting the power differentials within the situation while creating and performing dance theatre. When the ‘work’ of the dancers without a disability is considered as being purely that of performers, the Company does not work, as performance material grounded in a specific politics becomes totally dislocated from the bodies performing it. The situation in Darwin, described above, is an example of the detrimental effects of over-writing the political nature of Company members’ work in supporting people with intellectual disability. Dancers ‘without’ in Restless work to maintain their own ‘creative space’, as well as that of the dancers ‘with’. I also constantly mediate between the needs of RDC as a whole and my need for creative space with respect to my writing and research.

Dance theatre texts, alongside language-based texts such as this study, are assemblages of space/time foldings. A Restless performance text catalogues months, and at times years, worth of rehearsal work. In a similar fashion, the rehearsal and composition of a performance text collate the embodied histories of an entire ensemble into movement phrases that are repeated until they are etched into the dancers’ embodied minds. A dance theatre text is a space/time folding, just as a movement phrase, and this study, offer compressions of a range of spaces and places into one located text.

The Restless Dance Company practice of considering physique, movement quality and styles of inter-personal relation as sites in which cultures of intellectual disability are located speaks to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of corporeality as a site of transformation and becoming (1987, 1996). Within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, the human body is an effect of its own movements and processes of connection. The body does not precede the flow of time through which it becomes. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we do not begin as fixed subjects who then have to know a fixed world. Rather, they argue that there is experience and from this experience we form an image of ourselves as distinct subjects. All life is a series of ‘foldings’. Every cell, every organism (and the human body) are folds of the milieu of life. Our bodies are the becoming-actual of all our virtual possibility, a limit set in chaos that is a resolution of infinite speeds. Subjectivity is an effect of our processes of becoming. For Restless members, such processes of becoming, of becoming subject, incorporate dance theatre work into a performer’s subjectivity. In this example and when discussing embodiment and embodied subjectivity more broadly through a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, bodies cannot be understood as solely ‘fitting in’ to a mind/body divide, within which the ‘intellectually disabled’ body will always be constructed as an embodied deficit.

Bodies, ultimately the instruments that write dance, are living testimonies to the fact that all texts are a composition of different times. Physical features, such as scars, eye colour and a person’s walk, can function as signifiers of different temporalities and other geographies. People’s histories are primarily embodied, and the histories of people with intellectual disabilities are often solely embodied, their physicality constituting the only sites where their stories are recorded. Dance texts created by people with intellectual disability are therefore unique articulations of their histories, and are in themselves, like all texts, compositions of different times.

The concept of bodies as collections of temporalities allows the practice of integrated dance theatre to be seen as people with intellectual disability theorising their histories and experiences. This is not to say that the concept of corporeality as a collection of temporalities must necessarily play a central role in the lives of individuals with an intellectual disability. Cultural histories of people with intellectual disabilities are lived out through social attitudes, lifestyle options (or lack thereof) and modes of mainstream representation, all of which fold into bodies to create signifiers of histories. Hence the histories and identities of individuals with intellectual disability are specific aspects of these individuals’ embodiment. Points of a body that tell a particular story, such as prostheses, shunts, scars, tattoos, piercings, stretch marks and corporeal brandings of various forms, create different intensities and lines of latitude and longitude across which to read life stories.

I am also concerned with temporality as manifested in the different times that constitute rehearsing and performing dance theatre. Times of rehearsal and performance fold back to compose various elements of this study, as do the different times of writing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.3) theorise books as catalogues of spatio–temporal zones, suggesting that: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.’

As an accordion-like compression of a range of different writing, performing and rehearsing times, the study incorporates different modes of writing, such as journal writing, discussion and analysis, which have taken place across a four year period. I have worked to create a text that embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, p.3) suggestion that a book is a folding of time and space back onto itself.

Interstitial places: embodying issues of inter-textuality

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25).

In a manner akin to the intermezzo position of the rhizome, the RDC methodology consists of a series of interstitial places in which issues written across dance practices, disability politics, choreographic techniques and performance texts are embodied. The first interstitial space created and inhabited by the RDC method is the creative space of devising raw material through movement improvisation.

Movement improvisation can be conceived of as a rhizomic connection between a body and the body’s creative impulse, as acclaimed choreographer, dancer and academic, Leigh Foster (1986, p.194) explains here:

"… the dancers choreographed the dances as they performed them. Members of the company did share a knowledge of certain movements and phrases, material from previous performances … They did not, however, know precisely what they would do at any given moment during performance, and thus their work was endowed with an unusual spontaneity and openness … because the dancers never broke from their attentiveness to the activity of the moment."

Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.25) state that making a rhizome is ‘know[ing] how to move between things, [and] establish[ing] a logic of the AND’. This is closely analogous to the practice of movement improvisation which is about performing the logic of the ‘AND’, a connective, interstitial logic. Leigh Foster (1986, p.25) further explains movement improvisation as being

"another way of travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing."

Movement improvisation is often largely a practice of ‘pragmatics’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the sense that it involves being aware of the practicalities of ensemble dynamics. This involves balancing the rehearsal space, and mediating directorial concerns and one’s creative impulses.

The second kind of connective, interstitial space created by the Restless methodology is the Company’s choreographic process. Finding what ‘works’ and ‘does not work’ choreographically involves putting a tracing, or structured text, back on a map, or creative and fluid text (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, p.25) in the respect that firm orders and arrangements are written over improvised material, which is then performed again within the specified structure. This process involves combining the choreographer’s structurally focussed text, concerned with the logic of reproduction, with a more emotively focussed text, concerned with the logic of improvisation. This is a process of on-going mediation that involves the consistent overlaying of structure on free-form movement.

Restless Dance creates a third kind of interstitial space, through establishing connections between audience members and the performance text. This process of connection involves merging histories and experiences of the audience and the performers, in moments of rhizomic connection. Cross cultural theatre practitioner Brook (1968, p.156) describes this process of performer–audience connection in terms of a spatial envelopment, suggesting that in this liminal zone: "[t]he word representation no longer separates an actor and audience, show and public: it envelops them: what is present for one is present for the other." While I am not convinced that what is present for the performer is completely present for the audience per se, I agree with Brook’s argument that performances create spaces of connection between the audience and performers. Audience members make rhizomic connections with a performance text and when the performance text consists of material developed through performer improvisation, the connections are based upon the histories and experiences of both the performers and the audience. A director can craft a text so as to make it particularly ‘readable’, but the forging of connections is a person specific rhizomic experience. All writers ‘write’ themselves into texts, just as readers ‘read’ themselves into texts. However, there are very few texts that people with intellectual disability write themselves into, that are ‘intellectual-disability literate’, and that therefore serve as sites of projection and connection for and about people with intellectual disabilities.

I theorise the Company methodology outlined above as the ‘territory’ (1996, p.183) within which my research is located. I unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘territory’ and ‘habitat’ as they are constructed in What is Philosophy in order to discuss the work of RDC and articulate some connections between Company culture, Company processes and RDC performance material.

From body to house: an analytic re-consideration
The description of Restless Dance as territory undertaken in this section employs the conceptual tools of percept and affect, further outlined in chapter two, to theorise art as a technical skill and a revolutionary act of creation. I describe the Restless methodology as serving to extract material blocs of sensation, or percepts and affects, from a cultural territory.

I begin this section by ‘unpacking’ the ideas of the territory, and the house as a mode of embodiment shaped by lived habits, before distancing this cultural milieu from the process of creating percepts and affects. This distance is necessary in order to theorise the productive capacity of performance work, as what a Restless production ‘does’ is quite different from the way that Company culture works.

Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.183) suggest that ‘the animal … carves out a territory and constructs a house’. As this quotation indicates, the territory and the house exist in close alignment; they are part of the same habitat. A house is constructed upon a given territory. The territory and house form a nexus that is produced by the transformation of life habits, a process of change which is part of the production of ‘sensory qualities’. These sensory qualities, or notes in a territorial refrain, are compressed into a bloc of sensations, forming a plane of composition, which is a ‘compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.164).

Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of territories is inspired, then, by ‘the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.183). As such, the territory and the house exist in close alignment. This is because in being lived habits, the territory and the house are cultural habits, or habitats. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the territory–house is a site in which regulatory or disciplinary functions are often performed (such as sexual practices, thought practices and other lived, organic functions) these regulatory functions also provide the means through which the territory is created. The territory, or house, is a nexus produced through the transformation of habits of life, an alteration that occurs in the production of specific ‘sensory qualities’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183). Deleuze and Guattari describe this production of new sensory qualities as follows:

"transformation does not explain the emergence of territory and house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p. 183).

In the space described above as the territory and house, the sensory becomes ordinal. The production of sensations denotes a territory that is then actively (re)constructed into a ‘house’; a monument that celebrates the sensory as a powerful and productive entity, opening up lines for the production of art:

"This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already in art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory. It is an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive" (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).

There are some compelling parallels between expressive sensations as points of entry to a ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) that is identified through its own refrain, or collection of sensations and the production of art via an artistic method, namely the construction of percepts and affects.
An example of this complementary relationship can be drawn from the work of RDC and as such, the notions of territory, habitat and house can be employed to articulate the political, aesthetic and cultural significances of the work of RDC. Restless Ensemble members begin the process of creating art through moving. The tasks the Company director sets for the Ensemble and the way in which the Ensemble responds to these tasks, are always/already part of what eventually becomes a RDC show.

These stages of creative development are also ‘sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184) that reside ‘not only in the treatment of external materials’ (1996, p.184) such as directorial tasks and the conceptual development of the production, but also ‘in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out a territory’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184).

This ‘territory’ (1996, p.184) or cultural milieu, is a collection, or compression, of ‘pure sensory qualities’ (1996, p.184), ‘an outpouring of features, colour, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) of a particular cultural environment. As the passage quoted above illustrates, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘the refrain’; that which denotes a territory, is ‘already in art’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘art’ is a powerful singularity, an entity that exists upon its own terms, a ‘bloc of sensations’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.184) that has affective capacity and is composed of sensory affects.

In suggesting that a bloc of sensations has an affective capacity or ordinal power, I am arguing that art has the capacity to re-work a body’s limits, to reconfigure individual arrangements of structure/agency, to augment what a body is or is not able to understand, produce and connect to. As such, creating new senses allows for the construction of new thought. This enhancement of subjective limits is the process I refer to in suggesting that art has the capacity to rework a body’s limits.

I would like to elucidate the differences between a bloc of sensations (a work of art) and a terrain (or cultural habitat). As I have suggested above, the territorial refrain is not art by virtue of its own creation; a collection of bodies moving is not necessarily dance. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996, p.185) terms, the production of art is contingent upon opening up to chaos, a line of deterritorialisation which opens up a territorial refrain (acculturates sensory vocabularies) and connects it to other spaces (rhizome) and other melodies, forming a chorus:
Every territory, every habitat, joins up not only its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections: a posture and a song for example, a song and a colour, percepts and affects. And every territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species, or intercepts the trajectory of animals without territories, forming interspecies junction points (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.185).

These ‘junction points’ (1996, p.185) are created through artistic methods, specific and technical material workings. These practices draw on already acculturated material and craft compounds (blocs) of sensations. These are quite distinct from a general collection of bodies or, for example, an unstructured dance, or the singular bodies and choreographies that are worked together until they pass into a sensation. Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that it is artistic method that serves to extract the materiality of art, blocs of sensation, percepts and affects, from a territory. It is this distinction between territory and a bloc of sensations which becomes crucial to theorising the cultural significance of the work of Restless Dance Company. Deleuze and Guattari (1996, p.167) illustrate the productive nexus between embodied subjectivities and the production of sensation, through arguing that:

By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition of one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations. A method is needed, and this varies with every artist and forms part of the work (Deleuze & Guattari 1996, p.167).

I now explicate the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of percept and affect offer important opportunities for theorising the work of Restless Dance Company. This discussion of the process or labour of constructing artwork exists only in the context or territory of pre-eminent political and physical labour that constitutes the Company’s very existence. This labour folds in on itself in comprising the territory or habitat of Restless and it is this specific terrain which is crafted and opened out through the production of sensation.

A key aspect of the method of thought proposed by Deleuze and Guattari through the ideas of percept and affect is thinking about a work of art as being an autonomous reality. The miniature universe created in a work of art can perform a pedagogic function, in that it can remain with a viewer and expand their personal capacity after the artwork has been experienced. In suggesting that the viewer or hearer only experiences an artwork “after” it has actually been observed, Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting that art can create and imbue new milieus of sense; new methods for knowing; a new ‘reality’ that in atmosphere and rhythmic flow is unique to its individual consistency.

Elements of difference that are created through art can be retained by the viewer and integrated into what the viewer “is”, what they can or cannot do, how they work as a body. This method of thought focuses not on where the artwork comes from, but where it goes, what its affects are and what it can produce. For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is useful to consider a work of art as being ‘independent’ from its creator, in order to focus upon the future possibilities opened up through the artwork and the ways in which this process of opening up occurs. These methods of thought hinge upon the ideas of percept and affect, and allow me to focus upon the ways in which the work of Restless Dance Company (RDC) creates and presents sensory differences. Ensuing theorisations of the Company’s work, particularly in chapters five and six, explore the technical production of percepts and affects within RDC’s work. As I have suggested above, this process of crafting sensation occurs upon a territory or habitat that in itself requires a substantial amount of labour to produce.

The territory of the Company is the physical, cultural and political spaces it creates and inhabits. It is a field (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) that is defined by specific methods of behaviour and social beliefs. Viewed from a subjective perspective, this field or territory is a habitat, an environment in which the RDC members live. Habitats produce habits, embodied ways of acting and reconstructing one’s own subjectivity. Theorised from the perspective if a specific territory the bodies that populate the cultural landscape in question continually perform and reconstruct a territorial refrain, a collection of embodied habits. A territorial refrain is a multiplicity of embodied ways of acting, feeling and thinking which aligns its actors’ subjectivities in particular ways.

The refrain or multiplicity of embodied actions of RDC constitutes the raw material from which Company choreography is crafted. Choreographic material is then compounded with sound, light, the colours and textures of design and certain spatial locations in order to produce the sensory landscape that is a performance text. The concepts of affect and percept open up opportunities for theorising the ways in which processes of creating sensory landscapes or blocs of sensation occur.

Notes
[1] The Fremantle Arts Centre was known as the Fremantle Asylum from 1864-1909.
[2] For example, a culturally marginalised workspace may engender practical uncertainty regarding its on-going usage and an accompanying labour of hope and trust in order to keep the dance practice alive. AusDance (SA) has recently relocated the primary site for dance work in South Australia, after the Madley Dance Space at Adelaide University was closed down. At the same time, the World Dance Centre, the home of more marginalised dance communities was sold, and the future of leasing arrangements is uncertain. Practitioners displayed great faith in times of uncertainty, in continuing to plan programs for upcoming performance seasons and search for new lodgings.
[3] There are three possible meanings given to the term ‘Body without Organs’ although this is not a concept which can be definitively understood. The first of these is: matter resisting organ-isation. Here the Body without Organs (BwO) is a principle of immanence which has no structure. Desire resists organ – isation because it’s fundamentally anti-hierarchical. Potential meaning number two: immanent possibility. BwO is also the immanent possibility of matter – it’s an egg before any formation has happened yet. It’s unstructured possibility. Here the egg is fertility and freedom. The third meaning is: the outside. As soon as two desiring machines connect, a BwO forms. A BwO is present from the first connection you make and the total BwO is the end of all social connections – it’s the outside of everything. Because the BwO is the ‘outside’ of everything, the unformed mass we can never consume, there are infinite numbers of BwOs. They are constantly forming. Machines cling to BwOs. Here I use BwO in the first sense I have outlined.

References
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.
Kueppers, P 2003 Disability & Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge Routledge,