Abstract
This chapter returns to the central question of the book: What is thinking and how does it apply to art education scholars? Taking Elizabeth St. Pierre’s advice, the chapter looks at no-ology, or the study of the image of thought, from cliche to “thinking within thought,” and eventually to the rhizome, the image of thought upon which Deleuze and Guattari finally landed. The chapter draws parallels between the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the work of poet Dean Young, whose manifesto on what he calls Recklessness speaks to the kind of work art education scholars working in arts-based research could be doing.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “Negative Capability” may itself be a misnomer. The original letter in which the concept is named and defined is lost. It was transcribed by a man who married the widow of Keats’s brother, George, to whom the letter had been written. The transcriber made other mistakes, such as writing “insolated versimilatures” when, says Young, “Keats probably meant ‘isolated versimilutudes’” (Young, 2010, p. 84).
- 2.
Churches may be founded on architecture, not religion. Notre Dame de Paris is case in point. On April 15, 2019, the church roof caught fire. The spire collapsed. Journalists, Catholics, and others didn’t lament the loss of Saturday service; instead, they lamented the loss, or at least the partial loss, of historic architecture and relics within the building. It was this kind of thinking, and his reaction against it, that led Eero Saarinen to design North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. He thought that churches had begun to prioritize meeting rooms, offices, etc., all the accessories of religion, and sought to put worship at the center of the church. Saarinen wanted to “solve” the church problem once and for all:
I want to solve it so that as an architect when I face St. Peter I am able to say that out of the buildings I did during my lifetime, one of the best was this little church, because it has in it a real spirit that speaks forth to all Christians as a witness to their faith. (qtd. in Columbus Area Visitors Center, n.d.)
From the parking lot, which was itself thoughtfully designed, the church looks like a roof and spire and not much else. This was entirely intentional. What is seen from the parking lot is the sanctuary, a hexagonal building; and inside, at the center of the sanctuary, is an altar. The seating faces the altar from all sides. Natural light pours in from an oculus in the spire. Beneath the sanctuary, and beneath the earth, hidden in a basement, are offices and rooms, the likes of which could not be seen or even intimated from the outside, given that the structure looks to the observer like a one-room church and nothing more. So successful was Saarinen’s design, though, that it has become a modernist gem, if not a whole-hearted masterpiece, and one of the seven (three were designed by him!) National Historic Landmarks in the small town (roughly 50,000 citizens) of Columbus, Indiana, perhaps eclipsing the religiosity.
Even Baptist churches, the ones in the Midwest where I spent much of my youth, possess a unique architecture. They look like small white houses, sometimes ranches, with spires in place of chimneys.
- 3.
Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy (1956), claims that art is the utmost metaphysical concern of man, “a kind of divinity if you like, God as the supreme artist, amoral, recklessly creating and destroying, realizing himself indifferently in whatever he does or undoes, ridding himself by his acts of the embarrassment of his riches and the strain of his internal contradictions” (p. 9). Around the same time, Whitman (2004) wrote these famous lines:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) (p. 66)
- 4.
Robert Persons, about his process of making his award-winning experimental documentary General Orders no. 9,a. writes:
I was messing around with it a good bit before I got married, but it was a long period of collecting material and trying to figure out how to put it together, and not really knowing what I was doing, and not knowing what the next steps were. (qtd. in Scott, 2011).
a. Oddly for a movie about the Deleuze|Guattari concept of the smooth and the striated, the title is a reference to orders written by General Robert E. Lee after the confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. “After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude,” he wrote to his soldiers, “the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” He told them that the war was not a “useless sacrifice,” which by all accounts it was for them, and bid them “an affectionate farewell.” My best guess is that the film, which takes place in the south and was written and directed by a southerner, is haunted by a Faulknerian point of view: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner, 1994, p. 73).
- 5.
The French “carte blanche” literally means “blank paper” but figuratively means either “Full discretionary power granted” or a substandard hand in cards (“Carte Blanche”). The artist is both winning and losing before she begins. This is why we can say a writer suffers from writer’s block, but we cannot say a plumber suffers from plumber’s block.
- 6.
Scholar jan jagodzinski (2012) writes about the “avant-garde without authority” (p. 85), in which the prioritized “creative event” creates the fertile ground that finally “ruins representation” (p. 85). The “avant-garde without authority” is not limited to artists.
- 7.
Dean Young (2010): “Just because a thing can’t be done doesn’t mean it can’t be did” (p. 148).
- 8.
After discovering that his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained errors and exaggerations, most of which he wittingly included, Oprah shamed writer James Frey in front of millions of viewers and a television audience. Oprah had chosen the book for her book club and sales had exceeded two million copies in three months (Wyatt, 2006). Embarrassment, though, led Oprah to change her mind about the book. The discrepancies that she had before defended became too public. Oprah later apologized for the shame spectacle, but her initial reaction and its ensuing public support is telling and temporarily damaged Frey’s reputation. Frey is joined by dozens of tinkerers, such as Laura Albert (J. T. Leroy), Annie Dillard, Clifford Irving, and Frank McCourt, among others. Breton: “Our brains are dulled by the uncurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known” (qtd. in Young, 2010, p. 114).
- 9.
Late in life, Deleuze criticized Difference and Repetition for being too academic, saying “I like some passages… That’s as far as it went, but it was a beginning” (1990, p. 7). Part of the reason for his stance on Difference and Repetition possibly comes from its subject—one of criticism, not affirmation. He later said that if he ever “stopped liking and admiring people and (some) things,” he would “feel dead, deadened” (p. 4). Regardless, it was a beginning, as he says, in no small part because it defined, quite verbosely, the dogmatic image that the rest of his liking and admiring worked to outrun. Taken with his later thoughts, it also defines the central struggle of a scholar and this book—to marry affirmation and criticism.
- 10.
In a 2008 interview with American Art, Ann Hamilton describes her process like this:
What you’re doing all the time [is] trying to cultivate a space for yourself where not knowing is a really active, productive, intelligent space to work from. And that’s why it’s an act of attention. What you [the artist] hope is that you’re making a similar situation for someone else, so that instead of trying to tie it up and say what does all this mean and making a story out of your experience, you’re actually having an experience. (qtd. in Wallach, 2008, p. 57)
- 11.
One notable exception is The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which is widely agreed to be confusing in both its novel (by Raymond Chandler) and its subsequent adaptation (directed by Howard Hawks). In fact, it was not much clearer to the actors and director. Bogart in particular was mystified by a particularly confusing scene in which the chauffeur shows up dead without anyone or anything being tied to his death. Hawks asked Chandler if it was murder or suicide. “Dammit,” he said, “I didn’t know either” (qtd. in Ebert, 1997). This scene may be more confusing to the viewer who has the sound turned on than the one who has it turned off, but as Ebert says, the point of the movie is not who was killed but how the investigation proceeds.
- 12.
While not the originator of chiaroscuro, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who came before both Goya and Redon, did much to canonize it. Curiously, his life story, at least the end of it when he committed murder (allegedly) and went on the run, sounds a lot like the plot of a film noir.
- 13.
Brian Massumi (1987) calls A Thousand Plateaus “a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub sets and noology and political economy,” adding that the book is difficult to understand not the least of which because its authors devote chapters to music and animals while denying that these are chapters at all (p. ix). Their book is something else—“a network of ‘plateaus’” arranged as chapters but that can be read in any order with “a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities” (p. ix). The plateau does not amount to a book. Deleuze and Guattari recommend that we read their plateaus “as you would listen to a record” (p. ix). But recall, too, that Deleuze and Guattari admit to being unable to produce the multiple from the many plateaus (p. 22). But they woke up every day and went at it: “we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants” (p. 22). The book is still circular. This book cannot outrun the book-ness, in part because you have been trained to read it from front to back, but it could prioritize the connected but independent, luminous, multiple, the never one, the AND. So, too, I hope you can read this book in any order and lose nothing of its meaning.
- 14.
Much of what is called “nonsense” in art is not without sense but rather with different sense, an internal logic, an emerging sense. Take Gertrude Stein, the poet, as an example. Some of her most memorable works—Tender Buttons and “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso”—for instance, have been criticized as modernist nonsense. Stein: “I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible…. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them” (qtd. in Schuster, 2011). In 1905–1906, Picasso painted a portrait of Stein that has now become famous because it foreshadowed Cubism while touching on his then-obsession with sculpture. Stein, as the MET describes her likeness, is a series of dark masses, a tumor with a head, with a mask for a face (“Gertrude Stein”). Picasso was told that Stein would not, could not, like the way she looked. “Everybody says that she does not look like it,” he responded, “but that does not make any difference—she will” (“Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” n.d.). As a reply, Stein wrote a cubist poem that was a portrait of Picasso:
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. (Stein, 1924).
- 15.
Stevie Smith (2003):
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought.
And not waving but drowning.
- 16.
The sea returns to the wind and rush and salt and fish in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s 2012 Leviathan, but only for 87 min.
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Morrow, S.M. (2021). No-Ology & Recklessness. In: Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_3
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