An Art School Schizologue [George Floyd, Rest in Power

Andy Broadey

doi:10.1344/jnmr.v2i1.33372

Abstract

This critical cartography surveys seven moments in critical practice/art pedagogy, which oscillate around the protests of 1968 and diffract the contemporary possibilitiesof art education in association with Halberstam’s (2019) notions of evacuation and wildness. The article reads across Deleuzoguattarian (1994 and 2007) schizoanalysis and Baradian (2007) intra-action to articulate struggles for racial justice as instances of Harney and Moten’s (2013) undercommons, operating as alternate sites of knowledge production and collective self-experimentation outside the neoliberal university. These moments of practice—Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol, the UK, the writings of Aimé Césaire, Audre Lorde, Mohamed Melehi, Benjamin Patterson, and Howardena Pindell, as well as a student occupation of Central Saint Martins, also in the UK—are aligned in series allowing the reader to appropriate each one in resonance with each other as a proposal for an art-pedagogy-to-come.

Highlights

In May 68 Did Not Take Place, Gilles Deleuze (2006) claims the protests of that year amounted to a “visionary phenomenon” awaiting “creative redeployment”
We contribute a critical cartography of struggles for racial justice cutting across fields of democratic pedagogy and critical practice
We return to the reading of desire as a driver of the social undertaken in Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (1994 and 2007) and seek to mobilise the transformative force of schizoanalysis in order to, as these two thinkers propose, dismantle Oedipalising forces and transform “the analytic machine into an indispensable part of the revolutionary machinery” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 82)

Summary

Introduction

In May 68 Did Not Take Place, Gilles Deleuze (2006) claims the protests of that year amounted to a “visionary phenomenon” awaiting “creative redeployment” (pp. 233234). Patterson’s works enumerate socioartistic potential that Fred Moten (2012) identifies with the genre of the recipe— enumerating and connecting of components rather than synthesising them into a singular artistic statement They invite mobile attention, moving between binary signification, through series in resonance, to the body without organs—whose criticopedagogic functionality seeds a capacity to diffractively read everyday contexts in a manner consistent with the onto-epistemological orientation of Baradian agential realism. Like the feedback structure of association comprising signifying chains, the historic recursion of racism, whose contemporary manifestation Saidiya Hartman (2017) identifies with dispossession, subordination, indebtedness, inferiority, and domination has led Patterson (1982) to develop a thesis of social death underpinning Afro-pessimism He claims colonial subjugation can be reproduced with shocking effectiveness at economic and ideological levels.

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