Schizophrenizing the Art Encounter: Towards a Politics of Dehabituation

Abstract

We are at an impasse in education. In the name of past habits and future hopes, we have learned to hold the line, keeping ordinary routines locked in place. Put otherwise, within this space-time, we have learned to adapt as opposed to create. This thesis project flows from this impasse, looking to the specific phenomenon of the art encounter in pedagogical spaces. The following study investigates the ways in which the art encounter is conceptualized within the contemporary educational project, and in a concomitant move, seeks to identify and actualize potential rupture points that might help us to think art as a de-habituating force. Positioning the study within a current climate of economic, political, and social precarity, this project performs a schizoanalysis of the assemblages that teach us how to interact with art, while simultaneously questioning particular axioms that have become dominant within contemporary educational practice and research. Drawing on the conceptual toolkit developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in concert with contemporary philosophical thought and artistic practices, this series of thought experiments seeks to challenge and refresh the dialogue surrounding commonsense understandings of both educational research and what an encounter with art might do. In this way, this research aims to draw attention to the social impact of art as an event that has the capacity to expose the potential inherent within our current impasse, providing an opportunity to break with already-established frameworks of knowledge and develop new ways of thinking in and of education.