Performing Art and Its Pedagogy of the False

Abstract

An extremist, political will to truth has been driven by pernicious falsifications in recent election campaigns in the United States and worldwide. The fake, post-truth logic of this nationalistic zeal slanders and defrauds the empirical research of art, and its pedagogical potential for thinking otherwise, by its retrograde purpose of making traditional understandings and foundational methodologies great again. In this article, the nostalgic resolve for epistemological predeterminations is positioned alongside Nietzsche’s concept of the will-to-truth, and Deleuze’s cinematic regime, powers of the false, to argue that artists and teachers create empirical truths by encountering the contingent events and circumstances of living in the world—not to be confused with baseless, petty lies or merely reproducing past representations. Within this adjacent positioning, art’s pedagogy of the false, and its destabilization of real world ascetic actualizations, will be conceptualized according to the experimentalism of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Deleuze’s regimes of cinematic narration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first iteration of this article was presented as a keynote lecture at the 7th Annual Symposium of the Hollo Institute, “Back to the Senses—Exploring Future Directions of Arts Education,” at the University of the Arts Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland, and co-sponsored by the Department of Art, Aalto University (October 2017). Subsequent iterations were presented at the Department of Art Education, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (November 2017); the Department of Art & Design, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois (February 2018); and the D. Jack Davis Endowed Lecture in Art Education at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas (March 2018).

Notes

¹ An approximate demographic of my art students at the high school: 80% White, 10% Mexican-American, 10% international; middle class; 55% female and 45% male.

² Our disobedience was aimed at the historical assumptions and representations of art and educational practice; the formalistic elements and principles of art and design; object-based art forms that overlooked performance and installation art; and, discipline-specific approaches to art learning that discounted interdisciplinary, intermedia, and intercultural experimentations.

³ Every effort has been made to locate the copyright source of the photograph in this collage. Should you know the source, please contact the author.

⁴ Considering the misappropriations and abusive systemization of Nietzsche’s concepts, will to truth and will to power, as callous, reactive forms of self-assertion and the wresting of power by the National Socialist Party (Nazis) in Germany, the National Fascist Party in Italy in the first half of the 20th century, and subsequent fascist organizations including the recent rise of alt-right politics in the U.S., this writing offers an opposing understanding based on the scholarship of Gilles Deleuze. Contrary to such repressive interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings, Deleuze (2006) focuses, instead, on his concepts of multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation (pp. ix-xi), each of which is a characteristic of the active force of artistic creation. It is through the self-emptying, disinterested practice of art that new images of thought emerge, the untruths that constitute art’s power of falsehood, its will to deceive and unmask the ascetic ideal and its denial of life affirming experiences (pp. 102–103).

⁵ In differentiating between Nietzsche’s concept of the real world and that of the apparent world, the former, based in reasoned, deterministic representations, falsifies our sensory experience of the material world, whereas the latter, which is ‘apparent’ to our senses, unsettles real world representations and affirms our relationship with the dynamic multiplicity and continual transformation of the material world. To have faith in the ascetic ideal distorts and falsifies the apparent circumstances of the material world according to pre-existing, reasoned determinations.

⁶ Jason Wallin (2011) characterizes “a people yet to come” as the conceptualization of difference for “a people for which no prior” representational image or concept yet exists. While fabulation evokes differentiated pedagogical spaces for a people yet to come, Wallin cautions “one must be careful to avoid those microfascisms that would render [reduce]…becoming-other into yet another [ideological] tyranny” (pp. 285, 299).

⁷ The name used in reference to this student is a pseudonym.

⁸ Citing Nietzsche, Deleuze (2006) reminds us that “calling the will to truth into question (its interpretation and evaluation) must prevent the ascetic ideal from replacing itself by other ideals which continue it in other forms… [and to] deprive this ideal of the condition of its permanence or its final guise” (p. 99).

⁹ For an early example of the organic|kinetic regime of the movement-image, see “Is Deleuze’s Film Theory useful? Department of Film Theory,” 7:24 minute video, [YouTube video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/zaXQdjMxG6E.

¹⁰ By “shock of cinema,” Colebrook is referring to viewers being affected by the sensation of having experienced a moving image for the first time as compared with the still movements of photography.

¹¹ For an example of the crystalline|chronic regime of the time-image, see Lady of Shanghai (1948), 3:35-minute film clip, “I’ve never seen an aquarium” [YouTube video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/nSvY8KcES5E.

¹² For an in-depth theorization of Deleuze’s powers of the false and its curricular implications, see Chapter 3, “Powers of the False and the Problematics of Simulacrum,” in A Deleuzean Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical life (Wallin, 2010).