W R I T I N G
What’s in a Name? Reflections on Pedagogy
Elizabeth Perrotte
SolasArts – What’s in a Name? Reflections on Pedagogy
Elizabeth Perrotte, (July 2021)
‘Solas’ conducts static from other terms: solace, solar, solastalgia. Solastalgia brings with it a vibration of eco-anxiety: a feeling of mourning for something lost, a sense of displacement from environment, an existential dread about what is to come. Solar’s molten energy and solace’s tranquil relief reverb against this melancholia with imaginative intensity providing agency for transformative passage. In our current context of climate change and environmental catastrophe, eco-feminist, Donna Haraway sees the grief of solastalgia.’ as a path to understand entangled shared living and dying’ but also declares that the task is to ‘stay with the trouble’; ‘stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.’ (Haraway, 2016: 1)
We are an Arts/Education platform which is ecologically focussed, involving diverse environmental practices. We offer a unique Creative Network of educators, thinkers, creatives with very different interests and specialisms. We curate/compost Events and Projects, live and virtual, in relation with different environmental contexts. SolasArts Pilgrimages are, for example, one of our unique forms of creative fieldwork: pscyho-geographic journeys across coastal, rural or inner-city environments, opening thresholds to liminality where normative structures of the everyday are suspended.
We understand the term ‘ecology’ in the broadest terms as a form of operation, a way of looking at things in complex relation, a way of grasping material entanglements on multiple scales (Parikka, 2019: 44). Jussi Parikka lists some of ecology’s diverse formations: ‘ecology can be seen in words, interactions, political institutions, art practices, environmental situations, financial systems’; ‘ecologies of terminology and institutions, natural histories and cultural sites, embodiment and technology.’ (Parikka, 2019: 44, 56). Fundamentally, ecological practices are ambitious to trace and reveal relations but also identify potentiality and ‘emergent knowing.’ Through creative exchange and collaborative practice, we seek to understand ecologies through strategies of rhizomatic thinking and the experiential vectors/trajectories or ‘lines of flight’ famously proposed by philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 2004: 225-228).
Our work of curating events projects is understood as a form of composting, bringing the richest mix of fertile materialities and subjectivities together, entangling different theories and methodologies for productive and unexpected thinking. Ecological exploration involves intense focussing but also learning to un-focus, to become attuned to hidden relations; ‘to cultivate an understanding of the structural complexity and agency of our environment and its various layers of activity’ (Parikka, 2019: 42). What happens if we bring together a geologist and dancer, together with diverse participants (human and non-human), on a creative pilgrimage through a complex coastal site of industrial ruin, environmental transformation? What happens if we work with literature graduates, an arts educator and story-teller in a museum environment to interrogate curated collections of material artefacts haunted by colonialism? What stories could emerge here from an exploration of these materialities which have been de-contextualised, transposed, transported through diverse geographies and historic operations of globalisation, to be metamorphosized and reconfigured in new narratives as valuable art objects?
Our approaches to education are founded on diffractive thinking and practice. What does, this mean? Diffraction is a term, familiar in physics, now widely celebrated through humanities, to indicate commitment to material entanglements. Diffractive practices have been proposed through the eco-criticism of post-humanist writers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti. In her acclaimed book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad uses the concept of diffraction as a fluid, dynamic model for thinking reality (agential realism). In quantum physics, diffraction describes the diverse, swerving movements of waves when they meet an opening or obstruction. As a concept for educational practice, diffraction provides a model of intra-action within and between the material environment, humans and non-humans. Diffractive pedagogy seeks to de-stabalize boundaries of self and environment to release potential for transformative learning.
Educational theorist, Cher Hill, has provided important insights to diffractive practice in contrast to more traditional reflective models of education which assume stable and bounded subjectivities and learning contexts; ‘reflective practitioners (at least skilled reflective practitioners) should be able to act upon others to cause change to occur…. Becoming diffractive involves shifting the gaze from individuals to human and more-than-human entanglements, and attending to the emergence of phenomena and to how differences are produced and made to matter. (Hill, 2017:8). ‘Diffraction therefore, as a metaphor for inquiry involves attending to difference, to patterns of interference, and the effects of difference-making practices. Diffraction creates something ontologically new, breaking out of the cyclical, inductive realm of reflection. (Hill, 2017:2)
A diffractive practitioner will participate in learning situations much like a catalyst and encourage awareness of states of alterity, emergent forms of subjectivity, environmental entanglements; ‘who or what is becoming? how are bodies intra-acting and interfering with one another to shift boundaries and produce particular phenomena? what potential realities exist? and what other bodies might enter the assemblage to shifts and forces and flows? (Hill, 2017:8). Diffractive practice is not focussed on interpretation, attempts to bound and categorize materials. The question is not ‘what does it mean?’ but, ‘what is the potential? what can be produced? Diffractive learning experiences are conceived as hybrid assemblages of materials, participants, transient contexts which provide open ground for generative, speculative, creative experiences and process.
Donna Haraway has indicated the critical and ethical potential of diffractive practice ‘where inference patterns can make a difference in how meanings are made and lived” (Hill, 2017: 2). Haraway proposes ways to cultivate ‘response-ability’ and ethical forms of ‘mattering’ through ‘collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices’: ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas’ it matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories’ (Haraway, 2016: 35). It is this type of ethical mattering that SolasArts seeks through our Creative Network of collaborative thinking and rich composting of our Events and Projects.
What can art contribute to such ethical diffractive education? Many contemporary artists’ research based, conceptual, performative, sonic, relational and situated environmental work has been consciously shaped by diffractive thinking and eco-criticism, situated within and responsive to, specific contexts of ecological change and politics. But historically, artists have always used diffractive process and material entanglements (different media, techniques and processes) to question, test, subvert and extend what can be sensed, thought and said within particular cultural regimes of knowing. It is significant that when Haraway first considered the potential of ‘diffractive practice in 1997, it was through the encounter with and conversation about inferences from a more traditional work of fine art, a painting, in which the figure of a woman was represented in a metamorphic state of becoming with multiple limbs (Hill:2017:2). SolasArts events introduce a wide range of artistic forms and practices, both contemporary and historical, into our learning assemblages.
Philosopher, Michel Serres, who has contributed much to critical and ethical thinking around alterity, has also recognised the diffractive potential of art experiences. In his book The Five Senses he explores several paintings by Pierre Bonnard for their extraordinary sensorial affects and haecceity; a complex term used by Deleuze to signify the way art can capture dynamic forces and sensations. Serres counters dominant optical readings of Bonnard’s Post-Impressionism with a diffractive phenomenological account of Bonnard’s representations of skin: ‘With his fingers of skin Bonnard makes us touch the skin of things’ (Serres, 2008: 35). ‘Sight is pained by the sight of mixture. It prefers to distinguish, separate, judge distances; the eye would feel pain if it were touched’. By contrast, Serres hails our skin for the way it ‘ ‘apprehends, comprehends, implicates and explicates, it tends towards the liquid and fluid and approximates mixture.’ (Serres, 2008:67)
Serres considers the term Coenesthesia as a complex form of knowing in the body and uses it as a counter to entrenched representations of mind-body dualisms and hierarchies. Serres suggests the soul might be discovered through mindful embodiment, ‘Metaphysics begins with, and is conditioned by gymnastics.’ (Serres, 2008: 23). SolasArts has been drawn to such posthuman phenomenology, seeking out collaborations with somatic practitioners such as walkers, dancers, somatic therapists and surfers. For example, longboard surfing champion and writer, Sam Bleakley, has shaped a poetic language to share states of becoming experienced through surfing ‘poised on a sliver of surfboard, I am both fish and bird’. His writing emerges from diffractive thinking about surfing’s specific embodiments and mindfulness which ‘orients us within the environment to find place. We are immersed in water and the salt-soaked zone just above the sea’s skin. Around us, terns dive and fish jump. We are active, alert and intent on balance. Mindfulness in surfing is, then, paradoxically, a moving out of mind into the world, moving against the grain of inner-directed thought and reflection into an acute sense of what the environment demands of us – where winds, currents, beach shapes, wave types and lunar tidal movements meet (Bleakley, 2016:8).
Reflecting on education in his book Difference and Repetition, Deleuze highlighted the specific frictions and dynamics of alterity for a beginner in sea swimming. In this intense and heightened situation, the body is, firstly, at odds with the many forces of a fluid environment: ‘when a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same – but involves the Other – involves difference’. For this reason, he concluded ‘There is something amorous – but also something fatal – about all education’ (Deleuze,1994. 23).
Lizzie Perrotte (July 2021) © 2021
References: Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2007
Bleakley, Sam, Mindfulness and Surfing, London, 2016
Parikka, Jussi, Cartographies of Environmental Arts, in Braidotti, Rosi, Simone Bignall, eds, Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. See chapter 3, pp 41-61
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University
Deleuze, Gilles, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004)
Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2016
Hill, Cher, More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner, Teacher Learning and Professional Development Vol. 2, No. 1, June 2017, pp. 1 – 17 * Simon Fraser University, Canada file:///C:/Users/eliza/Downloads/28-116-1-PB%20(1).pdf (Accessed 01.07.21)
Hughes, Andy, Dominant Wave Theory, London, 2006
https://www.andyhughes.net/
https://www.instagram.com/andyhughesphotog/
https://twitter.com/andyhughesphoto
Serres, Michel, The Five Senses: Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, London, New York, 2008
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