The Art Education of Recklessness: Thinking Scholarship Through the Essay
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The Art Education of Recklessness: Thinking Scholarship through the Essay DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Stephen Mark Morrow, M.A. Graduate Program in Arts Administration, Education and Policy The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee: John Richardson, Ph.D., Advisor Jennifer Richardson, Ph.D. Sydney Walker, Ph.D. Copyrighted by Stephen Mark Morrow 2017 Abstract This document has been (for me, writing) and is (for you, reading) a journey. It started with a passing remark in Gilles Deleuze’s 1981 book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. That remark concerned the cliché. The psychic clichés within us all. The greatest accomplishment of the mind is thinking, which according to Deleuze means clawing through and beyond the cliché. But how? I found in my research that higher education art schools (like the higher education English departments in which I had for years taught) claim to teach thinking, sometimes written as “critical thinking,” in addition to all the necessary skills of artmaking. For this dissertation, I set off on a journey to understand what thinking is, finding that Deleuze’s study of the dogmatic image of thought and its challenger, the new image of thought—a study he calls noo-ology—to be quite useful in understanding the history of the cliché and originality, and for understanding a problematic within the part of art education that purports to use Deleuzian concepts toward original thinking/artmaking. This document is both about original contributions to any field and is my original contribution to the field. A critique and a proposal. ii Acknowledgements Thanks to Dave and Connie; David and Ashley; Ethan, Quinn, and Emerson; Jaina; Jack and Jennifer; Sydney; and all the others who have helped along the way. iii Vita 2004 B.A. Psychology, Ohio Wesleyan University 2009 M.A. English, Creative Writing, Poetry, Ohio University 2009-2013 Adjunct Instructor, English, Ohio University (multiple campuses) 2013-2014 Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 2014-2016 Graduate Administrative Associate, Wexner Center for the Arts Fields of Study Major Field: Arts Administration, Education and Policy iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Vita ..................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .................................................................................................................... vi Prologue ............................................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1: Conceptual Framework ..................................................................................... 1 I. Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 II. The Post-Qualitative ............................................................................................................... 4 III. Philosophical Inquiry ........................................................................................................... 10 IV. Transcendental Empiricism ................................................................................................. 13 Chapter 2: Selected Glossary ............................................................................................ 16 Chapter 3: What Is an Original Contribution? .................................................................. 26 I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 26 II. What Do Schools Say? ......................................................................................................... 31 III. Recklessness ........................................................................................................................ 46 IV. Cliché .................................................................................................................................. 50 V. Noo-ology/New-ology .......................................................................................................... 78 VI. The Image of Thought ......................................................................................................... 99 VII. Limitation ......................................................................................................................... 109 VIII. The Essay ........................................................................................................................ 111 IX. The Future? ....................................................................................................................... 162 Afterword (with Implications) ........................................................................................ 178 References ....................................................................................................................... 187 v List of Figures Figure 1: Sample Pages ................................................................................................... 4 vi Prologue Cinema is easily characterized as storytelling. Screenwriters, then, are easily characterized as storytellers. They show us a character (or characters) in the (or a) world. They give us a beginning, middle, and end to satisfy our unconscious craving for rising action and closure, the arc of our days and lives. The arc. Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of such remarkable films as Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008), has managed to carve a career out of a more complicated kind of storytelling that dissolves the false notion of a subject (one who thinks) traveling straight within time, interacting with others (who are separated from the subject) and objects (the practical outside). Kaufman blurs the outside/inside binary. Kaufman follows the rules to a degree: he shows us a character in a world. But he breaks the rules to a degree, too: he takes us inside his own head. At any one time within his movies, then, the viewer is both watching a story and watching the story being created and laid before them. Writing anything is essentially an enfolding. Writing a story is the epitome of enfolding, for the writer performs a doubling—enfolding her thoughts into those thoughts of the character and/or characters. What Kaufman does—and which is different from other writers—is to lay bare the illusion. Kaufman is Deleuzian to a degree, if only accidentally. We generally think time is linear because we look at all the daily occurrences that were actualized before us and line them up in order of appearance. We like to believe in order, in organization. Deleuze, on the other hand, was/is interested in potentialities, not actualities just, and in chaos, not organization. Any one actuality is vii just one of several potentialities unfolded before us. Kaufman’s work asks the simple question: What if the typical story were unfolded? What would we find there? Being John Malkovich was Kaufman’s first foray into this experimentation. Through a portal in the wall behind a file cabinet in a nondescript office building, the protagonist—Craig the puppeteer, played by John Cusack—is transported inside the mind of actor John Malkovich for roughly fifteen minutes per trip. Kaufman challenges the notion of a Whole mind, preferring instead the fracture, the dislocation, splitting the inside/outside. When Craig goes inside Malkovich’s mind, he must still be inside his own mind, as it were, on the outside of Malkovich’s mind. He is both Craig and John, seeing what John sees, thinking what Craig thinks, aware of each person’s thoughts. Subjectivity gives way to potentialities. The subject is split open, spread out, flattened. When Malkovich catches on—i.e., when he feels someone inside his head—Craig understands that he has been caught because he knows Malkovich’s thoughts, but he knows them as Craig. He is both. Looking back on the film years later Charlie Kaufman (2011) had this to say: Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it’s a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event. viii That final sentence is telling—the reconstruction, the retelling, versus the event. The retelling bears little resemblance to the event. An explanation is not an event. What if a piece of writing could rise to the event? Could it transcend the form to become what jan jagodzinski (2017) via Ziarek calls forcework (p. 267)? Kaufman adds: “it’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if