Being There and Becoming-unfaithful with Children Through Art: Deleuzoguattarian Embodiment, Subjectivity, and the Production of Difference

Open Access
- Author:
- Schulte, Christopher Mark
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 30, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Dr Christine Thompson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Dr Christine Thompson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Charles Richard Garoian, Committee Member
Yvonne Madelaine Gaudelius, Committee Member
Gail Louise Boldt, Committee Member
Brent Guy Wilson, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Being There
Deleuze
Children
Art
Art Education
Becoming
Embodiment
Subjectivity
Desire
Difference
Desearch - Abstract:
- My dissertation research explores how prevailing perspectives related to the art practices of young children continue to facilitate, accentuate and reinforce developmental, curricular, pedagogical and inquisitive models of representation (i.e., representational forms) that, in turn, cultivate deterministic ways of knowing the artistic and conceptual work of young children. My dissertation investigates how the many assumptions and attitudes composing these perspectives, but also sustaining them, situate young children within frameworks of certainty and thus, put forth organizational structures that delimit and overly generalize the complexities by which children move and multiply the worlds with which they struggle and desire to create. Furthermore, I challenge these prevailing representational qualities and forms of research, theory and practice in (early childhood) art education, and in particular that which sequesters the discursively disparate practices of young children’s artistic and conceptual play. The particular challenge that is taken up in this dissertation does not seek to destroy or disband these forms, but rather it is a challenge that sweeps these and other representational configurations into the intensive and elusive writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose thinking and abstract-prose function as networks of conceptual and theoretical dispersion, as mechanisms of connection, and as technologies of multiplicity and mobility, which in turn potentiates unforeseen and unpredictable opportunities to think and live differently. I do this by asking the following question: What happens when the prevailing representational forms of (early childhood) art education research, theory and practice are plugged into the Deleuzoguattarian machine? I must admit from the onset, though, that my dissertation research does not put forth answers, nor is it interested in trying to do so. Instead, my dissertation research continually invests in the problematic entanglements of how (early childhood) art education moves and multiplies—its intensive and incorporeal becomings. As such, my dissertation takes as its fundamental yet indefinite aim, the processual fluxes of experimentation that characterize what Brian Massumi (2012) calls “the qualitative how-now” (p. 4) of (early childhood) art education research, theory, and practice—its unstable and incipient events. My dissertation does not seek to put forth a new theory of children’s art, nor does it desire to think the field of (early childhood) art education away from its prevailing forms, only to offer it new forms that do similar work. My dissertation struggles to give rise to a new political mode—a politics of thought, action, and desire that, at each and every turn, articulates and regenerates revolutionary multiplicities, movements and experimentations. The question that my dissertation labors to create is this: What happens when (early childhood) art education enters into the political style that is produced by this dissertation? Furthermore, how might we come to experience the working processes of young children differently? And how will these differences passage through our classrooms, collide with curriculum, de-center our pedagogical pursuits, and re- and deterritorialize our inquiries and work with young people?