Becoming artist, becoming educated, becoming undone: toward a nomadic perspective of college student identity development

Abstract

In this article, I place my ethnographic project among undergraduate university art students and their professor in dialog with Rosi Braidotti’s figuration of the nomadic subject and her reflections on the importance of creating theoretical alternatives for mapping the embedded and embodied social positions that we inhabit. As educational interlocutors, college students must negotiate expectations and categorizations about age-appropriate relations, career paths, and identity passageways, which are always already framed by Western psychological development discourses. Interested in loosening the grip of these closure-seeking and normalizing discursive practices, I argue for a revision of identity development grounded in a nomadic theory of the subject and engage my data through an alternative analytic of arts-informed assemblage in light of Braidotti’s ideas. In so doing, I uphold my feminist commitment to do theory as both critique and creativity, bringing into view poetic-enough writing and imagery as a response to the question how is it to be in the process of becoming?

Keywords:

• educational subjectivity
• art as analysis
• Braidotti
• becoming
• college student identity development

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my appreciation to Corrine Glesne, Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont, for her review of an early draft of this work and for her ongoing support as a colleague, mentor, and friend. I also wish to acknowledge my writing group, Radical Trust, as well as Aaron Voyles, a doctoral candidate and student affairs professional for their insights and suggestions. My greatest thanks go to the students and the professor who generously participated in this project, inspiring me always with their artistic becomings.

Notes

1. While a full articulation of the theoretical, popular, and policy discourses that function to shape, explain, and regulate people between the ages of 18 and 25 and those among them who are in college is beyond the scope of this current writing, a review of literature points to continuing efforts in developmental psychology to forward the enduring humanist agenda to segregate, compare, and attempt to predict people via a binary or oppositional logic of normalcy vs. deviance. Befuddled by sweeping demographic changes and shifting power relations issuing from globalization, which have muddied the developmental lines for establishing what is adolescence and what is adulthood, one developmental psychologist has proposed the new developmental conceptualization of emerging adulthood (Arnett 2000, 470), ‘present[ing] evidence to illustrate how emerging adulthood is a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations’.

2. Scholarly and popular discourses of creativity are voluminous and deeply varied. Of particular interest to me is the recent work being done in the neurosciences: attempts to establish links between ‘biological vulnerability’ (Akinola and Mendes 2008), negative affective states, especially those evidenced by individuals exhibiting psychoses (Folley, Doop, and Park 2003), and creativity. My intrigue in this work lies in its potential for ‘clustering’ and powerfully feeding an already existing discourse (fueled by developmental psychology) that views the suicidal ideation of young adults, college students specifically (Barrios et al. 2000), and the identification of creativity as an indicator of higher self-harm risk (Westefeld et al. 2006).

3. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) conceptualize ‘minor science’ as a science of detail. It involves a ‘vortical’, distributed, positioning as researcher and works from a model for epistemology which follows flows and fluxes of the molecular. An especially pragmatic model for my theoretical interests (pressing open habitual understandings of young adult development) as well as my methodological interests, ‘the model’, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is problematic, rather than theoramatic … One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence’ (362). By way of contrast to what they refer to as Royal Science, minor science is described as ‘one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant’ (361). All of the movement, the followed and formed lines of flight during minor, nomadic science: ‘is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987, 362).

4. See, for example, Folio 34r-Chi Rho monogram, and Luke’s Geneology of Jesus, as well as other Folios in the Celtic Book of Kells at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells.

5. For a provocative examination of what feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2008) views as the very nature of the arts and their relationship to the natural world see, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.

6. A National Public Radio interview with neuropsychologist, Rex Jung, reveals the newest frontier in bio-creativity research, including efforts to map (using advanced brain imaging techniques – MRI technology) ‘creativity’ and its neurological difference with ‘intelligence’: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/creativity-and-the-everyday-brain/.

7. Pseudonym.

8. Text embedded in Figures 6 and 8: I am thinking with and drawing from the artistic, emotional, and conceptual contagion that spawned what we collectively agreed to call Androgytrons; the cyborg-like figures that roamed as a mob throughout the collaborative visual narrative. Originally conceived by one student, who worked primarily in three-dimensional form (metal sculpturing) and who self-admitted her ambivalence and lack of confidence with two-dimensional forms, especially drawing, these androgytrons were quickly appropriated from the collaborative sketch blog and dispersed into individual sketchbooks in new forms and under novel circumstances. Eventually androgytrons became the drawn site for collectivity, affectivity, mobility, and change in The Ballad of Saudade. In other words, they seem to function as both figuration and figure (Deleuze 2003), signaling the becoming “fantastical body” (Springgay 2008) in all its monstrosity and transmutative possibilities. Reference to them as cyborgian is my own and only in retrospect. Neither the students, the professor, nor I referred to the figures as such during the course/study. Yet the term cyborg is useful, because it suggests how artistic and visual subjectivities are constituted by and are involved in constituting an organic-technological hybrid identity via the material site of and incitement for new modes of self/other awareness stemming from, among other things, the impact of technology on human perception and relations. Our becomings-artists were dynamically enacted by first viewing (accidentally) the armless, faceless human forms and then provoking their reform via the inter-corporeal transmission and mutation of ideas, affect, discursive effects, and innovative techniques made possible via the blending of technology with traditional art materials and practice. The androgytrons, the emotional contagion that incited them, and our collective manipulation of them become a compelling means for us as cultural practitioners to explore and re-configure the edges of our developmental indeterminacy; to think anew forms and functions of social life, family configuration, reproduction, sexuality, race, and selfhood beyond recognition.

9. With roots dating to mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American psychology, college student identity theories and the student and academic affairs practices that they invest emerge from the neo-Freudian model espoused by Erikson (1980) that delineates the eight stages (and the universal series of developmental crises that mark our supposed arrival at or departure from them) through which individuals progress toward healthy ego identity. While numerous important revisions and expansions have been forwarded in the field (see Torres, Jones, and Renn 2009), common theoretical assumptions across this field of study continue to include an enduring and durable investment in the notion of development as a progressive, future-oriented process whereby individuals work toward an increasingly internalized and synthesized vision of ‘self’.

10. Cathy Roberts-Cooper (unpublished manuscript) critically identifies the under-examined set of power differentials circulating between the commonly-divided higher education organizational units of student affairs and academic affairs, as well as the misunderstandings, biases, and missed opportunities for positive affiliations and growth engendered by the division.