Abstract
Berlant (Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2011) argues that one response to the discomfort caused by an encounter with difference is to ease that tension by reproducing normative identifications that are comfortable. Halberstam (The Queer Arts of Failure. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011) argues along similar lines suggesting the potential of arts-based strategies that deconstruct comfort and discomfort to stall the tendency to opt for normative identifications. Both writers are interested in the use the arts as a tool to support the political work of non-normative and expansive identifications generally. In this chapter we present an arts-based method that we developed and that aims to do such political work. We call this method ‘reading aloud like a playscript’ and we demonstrate and elaborate how as a political strategy it can support non-normative identifications and promote change in educative environments. The chapter focuses on the authors’ experience of presenting the narratives of queerly identifying tertiary students which were generated in a recently completed research project. This chapter takes a triptych form that we name a beafto (before/after/towards).
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Notes
- 1.
The method used to generate these notes has been part of a long-term project involving over 20 years of activist and academic work. The history of the production of this chapter involved dialogue undertaken over time in order to produce a book chapter on the generative potential of the ‘reading aloud like a playscript’ method (see Crowhurst and Emslie 2003, 2017, 2018; Crowhurst 2004, 2009 ). The authors were invited to present a paper on this method and did so with reference to the narratives of queerly identifying tertiary students that they had collected as part of a research project. After facilitating this presentation the authors met and engaged in a conversation about that presentation, and this conversation was digitally recorded and transcribed.
In this presentation/chapter we take the idea of ‘reading aloud like a playscript’ as a strategy to unsettle normative identifications, and apply it to the academic project of presenting a paper at a conference. This method differs from how others have described similar methods involving the performance of qualitative data (Salvatore 2018). At the same time this method resonates with participatory arts-based methodologies that blur the distinction between the researched and the researcher, disrupt power relations and seek to transcend such hierarchies (Mannay 2016, p. 6).
We want to note that while there are various affective strategies outlined in this paper (taking a shoe off to experience the sensation of touching the floor for instance) we don’t assume that people are going to copy these strategies identically in order to create affect—we imagine people will develop their own strategies relevant to their own contexts. This method aims at opening possibilities to other ways of thinking, doing and being that work against compliant, normative and linear ways of thinking, doing and being.
- 2.
In Cruel Optimism Berlant (2011) suggests that affect (what we will think of as sensations) is the sensory space that precedes identification. The space before the subject identifies and names a sensory experience. Berlant suggests that the subjects’ relationships with the sensory are typically unconscious and often produce normative identifications—that sensory experiences are quickly made sense of so that they align with that which is normative. In the interests of difference and expansion Berlant calls for a conscious stalling of normative identifications—a stalling of the tendency to identify and name the sensory in usual ways—whether those usual ways are comfortable or uncomfortable.
Berlant’s account of affect resonates with the perspective of affect typically associated with Deleuze, Massumi and Thrift (Ott 2017).
- 3.
In the final chapter of The Queer Arts of Failure, Halberstam (2011) suggests an arts-based politics of affective (sensory) ambiguity that aims to interrupt normative identifications. Halberstam proposes that shifting into expansion requires recognizing that normative identifications are affectively enabled and that we might use this knowledge to move beyond the normative. The usual way we make sense of the sensory realm forecloses unusual ways of knowing, doing and being—and part of the usual way that we make sense of the sensory is that it is done quickly and often unconsciously.
Arts-based strategies that interrupt normative affectivities—affectivities that we no longer notice—may function to support multiplicity and expansion. Halberstam suggests that curating arts-based experiences that deconstruct the binary that separates comfort and discomfort—that leave people in places that refuse easy sense making—can in turn support non-normative expansions and differences.
Subjects might agree to the invitation to inhabit arts-based spaces and to sit in these spaces (Black et al. 2017; Cramer and Harding 2017; Faulkner and Crowhurst 2014; Joy 2017). The arts can be deployed to provoke affectivities that connect subjects with historical and contemporary affective situations that generate comfort and/or discomfort—that generate affective ambiguities.
These ideas resonate with the work of other thinkers who are also exploring the relations between the arts, affects, subjectivities and politics, and who are also exploring the potentialities afforded by arts-based research and practice (Hickey-Moodey 2013; Leavy 2018).
- 4.
In Variations on a Blue Guitar Maxine Greene (2001) writes about pedagogy and aesthetics. Specifically she discusses the nature of aesthetic objects. She argues that while aesthetic objects lend themselves to multiple open-ended readings and that while they are produced with this intention that an aesthetic object achieves its aim on account of the work done by the viewer of the object. Viewers of aesthetic objects engage with those objects via various symbolic systems that have the effect of thickening the object under investigation. Language, and the symbolic when consciously bought to objects can thicken those objects. This aligns with Patti Smith’s call for increased awareness of the sensory in the interests of thickening ordinary experiences such as engaging with the city (Sebring 2007).
- 5.
- 6.
Interesting to note that at the beginning participants recorded affective responses with words but as the session continued many moved away from using words and engaged with the butcher paper via the use of images, squiggles (squigglying) and so forth. Participants commented on this during the concluding discussion of the session and noted that this move away from words and into the more abstract terrain of squiggles, colour and the creasing of paper was consistent with the sensory affective pre-language genre space we sought to mine, occupy and raise awareness about in this session. We note here that we are aware of the awareness-raising potential of the arts-based strategy of drawing—of moving across different symbolic registers or genres. We also suggest that ‘squigglying’ is both preceeded by a gestural (Lyotard 1999) space and functions as a gestural space. We will return to squigglying, in an oblique way, at the beginning of the next chapter and to ‘the gestural’ in future work (Bird 2018, pp. 46–51).
- 7.
Watching and being watched provokes comfort and discomfort. Watching and being watched also plays out in larger disciplinary contexts. The practices, techniques and effects of observation and their links to governance and power/knowledge are explored by many theorists—Foucault (1997) ‘Discipline and Punish’, and Mitchel Dean’s (2010) ‘Governmentality: power and rule in modern society’ speak to these notions. The experience of not being watched is often enjoyed where the subject is occupying a normative position and visa versa.
- 8.
At this point we discussed the notion that affect is shaped, produced, structured and/or enabled within current contexts—contexts that support and/or discourage different affectivities. In turn we discussed that affectivities recursively shape, produce, structure and enable the reproduction, or disruption of contexts.
We also discussed that various affective responses have histories––histories of comfort and discomfort for instance. And we discussed that the socially just contexts located in the present and in the future that we hope for, may involve different affectivities when compared to those we experience in the present and have experienced in the past.
These signalling non-normative affectivities may delay or encourage change (Berger 2016). We notice as we write, in this place of drafting, that an element of the affective contexts we seek to promote is that they support subjects to straddle stasis and action i.e. they shape, produce, structure and/or enable an encouraging delay (Lean forward).
We note that our deployment of the word hope here is done so ambiguously—critically with reference to Berlant (2011) i.e. hope is misplaced, and critically with reference to idealistic judgements (Arendt 2005, pp. 99–108) about a better present and future.
- 9.
Refer to Crowhurst, M. (2009) ‘More conversations with queer young people: To be read aloud’.
- 10.
Fawaz (2016) argues that teaching for social justice will involve various affectivities. In line with Halberstam (2011) he argues that teachers might conceive of their pedagogical work not so much as being about the resolution of various non-normative affectivities but rather as being about the curation and exploration of a plurality of affectivities that can be explored, excavated, stalled and deployed for teaching and learning towards social justice. The idea that affects can be curated and that this is a useful thing to do has a long tradition (Plato 2007; Aristotle 1996) and see Chap. 4.
Similarly Zihan (2016) offers another take on this theme with an exhibition of objects—objects designed to provoke a multiplicity of responses and to interrupt the spectators’ normative sense of embodiment.
Other recent and contemporary artists, such as Michael Clark and Leigh Bowery, share an interest in exploring how the arts can function to support expansivity via engagement with all of the senses (Clark 2017; Atlas 2002).
- 11.
Learning spaces are often thought of in linear ways—i.e. that facilitators begin with objectives or intentions, design pedagogical strategies to achieve these objectives or intentions and then assess whether these objectives or intentions have been achieved (Biggs 2003). Such technicist and instrumentally rationalist ways of thinking about learning are dominant at this juncture in history. In contrast our chapter aims to unsettle this framing and highlights the layered, complex, unpredictable, temporal, spatial, messy, excessive, emergent, hybrid, flow dimensions at play in learning events and spaces. In order to represent this unsettling (Mannay 2016, p. 6) complexity we have opted to visually represent our learning session—as a musical score. Various events (with a history and a future) come together in the present to produce an assemblage of sounds (Fig. 5.2).
A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. When it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension which is uniquely theirs. A song while filling the present hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere.
, further and further. Without the persistence of this hope, songs, I believe, would not exist. Songs lean forward. (Berger 2016, p. 95)The final essay in Berger’s (2016, pp. 123–143) ‘Confabulations’ suggests that rampant capitalism has drawn citizens away from hope and towards a vacuum. Politicians make pronouncements, that are increasingly seen to be impotent and empty, and the media, with its emphasis on sensation, generates a sense of risk and uncertainty. An environment that masks complexity, that regulates the political space of productive in-betweens (Arendt 2005, pp. 93–204), that is hollow. An environment that is ripe for resistance. But how to resist? Berger calls for a waiting. A waiting that also involves realizations. As suggested in endnote iv the arts can stall and slow and build awareness. Sean Tan similarly suggests this in a recent account of his painting:
… I’ve found after I’ve spent a day doing these little sketches particularly of things that are very commonplace when I leave the studio and I go home my experience of the world outside is suddenly so much richer like everything is vibrant and buzzing and charged you know like the colours every hue of brown suddenly has a note and it sort of resounds and that sort of feeling lasts for a while and I guess it’s like it’s a kind of mindfulness a visual mindfulness that’s often missing because partly we’re bombarded by so much visual stuff our ancestors might have had a more appreciation of the hues of green in a forest and stuff like that but these days it’s difficult for us to afford the time to stop and study those things but when I stop and I paint it’s almost like a form of meditation where I get back into appreciation of everything and I love the realisation that there is no ugly colour, line or shape like they’re all beautiful but it takes quite a while to sort of tap into that and realise it …. (Tan 2017)
Reading aloud like a playscript might be thought of as a strategy that supports strategic waiting and realizing and that builds a foundation for other actions. Other actions that may remain localized or that over time might join up—that might hybridize.
Ganz (2012) articulates three strategies that support organizing for political action—including ‘relationships’ ‘story telling’ and ‘strategizing’. Ganz argues the potential of story telling to promote the type of joining up that we have just discussed. We are suggesting that ‘reading aloud like a playscript’ might be thought of as a use of story that encourages the emergence of further stories and joining up.
Povinelli (2011) also provides a productive avenue for thinking about the relationships between various assemblages of temporality, eventfulness and ethical substance. Questions relating to persistence are posed—as in—in which circumstances should an individual stay and fight a cause and in which should an individual fly and live to fight another day. Povinelli suggests that individual circumstances might function to provide an answer—some individuals will have the resources to stay and fight others will not. Collectively we also see that what is required to move forward is a mix of strategies—some involving staying others going. We would also suggest that the response, taken individually and collectively might be thought of via notions of hybridity—i.e. that individuals and collectivities on occasion might be thought of as subjects that come and on other occasions as subjects that go.
- 12.
At one point in School Trouble Deborah Youdell (2011, pp. 44–45) discusses Butler’s notion of discursive agency. She does so to provide a space for agency and invention—that might be consistent with performativity theories—theories that argue that seemingly natural and original acts are discursively produced (Crowhurst and Emslie 2018). What passes as new or inventive within such theoretical frames is the space or object that is an effect of a bringing together (of an assemblage) of pre-existing factors, all with histories and all from the present context, that when combined become something new (for a related discussion see: Hickey-Moodey 2013, p. 13).
Chocolate cake at one time being the discursively produced novel or combined or hybridized effect of an assemblage of cocoa, milk, eggs, flour, butter, sugar, heat, desire, hunger, existing knowledge, pleasure, anticipation, memory and time. Chocolate cake coming out of or sitting somewhere in the space between all of these elements.
Spaces that stall normative identifications potentially allow for various productive combinations to emerge.
The score we have illustrated also demonstrates various temporal hybridities connected to a single learning event or space. Hybridities that precede and flow into the event, hybridities that are present and happen during the event, and hybridities that flow out of the event and into a future that occurs after the learning event.
On this note we are curious to explore these ideas further in particular their relation to texts that try to capture similar ideas such as Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles and Johnathan Safron Foer’s, Tree of Codes.
- 13.
, further and further. Without the persistence of this hope, songs, I believe, would not exist. Songs lean forward. (Berger References
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Interlude: Absence—Pleasure
Interlude: Absence—Pleasure
Writing and thinking this chapter was fun and pleasurable. It was interesting to write, it was interesting to talk about, it was interesting to think about, it became an object that was different, it became a space that was a little bit like a spare room. A spare room that could be a study, or a storeroom, or a meditation room, or a play space, or a retreat, or a place of clarification, a place of struggle, a place of working out, a place of active forces, a place of enabling, a place of being light, a place for the lightness of being, a place of levity, a place of dialogue, a place of towards, a place of befores, a place of toward(s)zing, a place of squigglying. A pleasurable place that is often absent in some of the spaces that we have noticed and made present in this book.
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Crowhurst, M., Emslie, M. (2020). Reading Aloud to Support Non-normative Identifications and Affectivities—A Triptych. In: Arts-Based Pathways into Thinking. SpringerBriefs in Arts-Based Educational Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37507-2_5
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