Unruly pedagogies; migratory interventions: unsettling cultural studies

Abstract

This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bal's (2007a: 23) notion of a 'migratory aesthetics' might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of 'sentient engagement' across disciplinary and other boundary lines. For Bal, sentient engagement, along its embodied and affective dimensions, is the constitutive condition of the aesthetic, since the artwork is considered 'to be empty as long as the act of viewing is not inherent to it, and that act is called upon to do political work' (ibid.). We sought to draw impetus from Bal to reflect on the terms of engagement of the sentient pedagogical encounter framed under the heading of 'Cultural Studies'. To what extent is our teaching in the cultural studies classroom predicated on the possible political transformation of teachers, students and the body of knowledge around which we meet? Considered from the vantage point of an ethical turn in cultural studies praxis, to whom are we responsible in the classroom? And beyond it? Is a sentient pedagogy necessarily unruly or disruptive? How might we weigh 'disruption'? Can a politicised pedagogy be said to 'fail' when its implementation catalyses effects and generates affect that seem to evade the control of the various participants in the teaching encounter? What does it mean to teach 'responsibly' when facing students brought together in the classroom across complex lines of migration or ongoing political conflicts? Our recourse to the migratory as an authorising trope has much to do with Bal--or rather, with what Bal does. The term 'migratory' in the phrase 'migratory aesthetics' foregrounds a mobility internal to Mieke Bal's politicisation of the aesthetic. If aesthetics is primarily an encounter in which the subject, body included, is engaged, that aesthetic encounter is migratory if it takes place in the space of, on the basis of, and on the interface with, the mobility of people as a given, as central, and as at the heart of what matters in the contemporary, that is, 'globalized' world. (2007a: 23-24) For all that Bal will insist that the modifier 'migratory' be understood in this relational sense, rather than as pertaining directly to 'migrants or actual migration of people' (ibid: 23), she animates the priorities of a migratory aesthetics through offering us the story of one discrete migrant. The speech-act of the man she names Daryush is central to Bal's critical reflection on her collaboration with Shahram Entekhabi, in making a video entitled 'Lost in Space'--an intervention based on interviews with people who had experienced displacement, or who had worked with the former. At one point in his interview, Daryush abandons the constraints of the interview form conducted in English to speak Farsi. While a certain range of affect passes between Daryush and Bal in the moment--empathy, recognition--Bal must await a translator in order to interpret the declarative content of Daryush's address, which turns on his sense of missing the experience of 'speaking his own language' (ibid: 27, emphasis in the original). This discrepancy is pivotal for the 'aesthetic event' which the movie becomes, as it orchestrates various displacements between speech as sound or noise, and speech versus image (see also Bal 2007b: 111-113). Viewed from a certain perspective, this discrepancy is the 'seizure/caesura' that returns differance to the conditions of racialised embodiment, in a constellation that Homi Bhaba sometimes calls hybridity but whose indebtedness to Derrida is seldom noted (Bhabha 1994[1992]: 193; see Bethlehem 2006). Bal's identification of the caesura enables her to determine, in a kind of ongoing retrospect, what the terms of her investigation will come to be, or had already been before they were fully known: 'How can we be culturally specific in our analyses of cultural processes and artefacts, without nailing people or artworks to a provenance they no longer feel comfortable claiming as theirs? …