Encountering Research as Creative Practice: Participants Giving Voice to the Research

Abstract

Don MacDougall’s death was a rupture in our community of artist scholar educators. After all, how can we imagine our death? Heidegger (1953/2010) argues that death is ‘eminent immanence’ (pp. 241–251). For Derrida (1993), it is an aporia as it is something un/imaginable as a living being. Attached to Don’s research at the time of his death brought about encounters we had not expected. We take up our own creative research practices in response to his writing, through memory work, attentive engagement, and a commitment to deterritorilizations of representation. We encounter and interrupt his text through our responses as we study art encounters that examine affect, territorialization, power and art.

Encountering the Margins of Creative Practice

Rita L. Irwin

Don MacDougall had just submitted a first full draft of his PhD dissertation when he was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away within two months, and seven months later his father received his son’s PhD posthumously (MacDougall, 2013). As a community of close colleagues we want to honour Don MacDougall by engaging with his work in a manner that resonates with his scholarly and creative concerns. With myself as one of his dissertation supervisors and Adrienne Boulton, Natalie LeBlanc and Heidi May as his PhD colleagues and his own PhD research participants, we embark upon an exploration of one section of his a/r/tographic (e.g. Irwin, 2013; Sinner, Leggo, Irwin, Gouzouasis, & Grauer, 2006; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008) dissertation: ‘Art encounters: Affect, territorialization, power and art’. To honour his enduring presence in our lives we give prominence to his work and use this opportunity to continue the intellectual and creative work we experienced together during his life. We want to defy the boundaries of text as we expose the intellectual ideas that linger amidst his text. We also want to defy the limits of formatted scholarly text by creatively resetting the margins of his text as we expand our text in order to view the entire text as an art form that is imbued with affect, power, and art reimagined to deterritorialize and reterritorialize our work in art education. Centuries ago, scholars wrote in the margins of scholarly texts as a way to extend scholarly ideas, to engage almost in a dialogical manner with the ideas previously written. Their texts were crafted by hand with attention to the ideas and the aesthetic appeal of the author’s calligraphy. Each note served to extend, reinforce, debate, or reimagine the ideas as reference points for future readings. During our lifetimes, some of us have experienced purchasing secondhand books with drawings, phrases, underlines, commentaries and more, all in the margins of the text – each inviting us to rethink our relationship with the text. More recently, many of us add comments to unfinished manuscripts with digital insertions.

What we haven’t explored is how we might reimagine engagement with digital text to extend the intellectual and creative life of the primary text by using digital tools available to us. As Don’s supervisor I invite you to participate in his work with us as we engage with his ideas. While we are not able to engage directly with Don, we can extend his ideas and concerns while also reminiscing about our time together as creative scholars eager to think differently. We can also, in many ways, engage with the person who was studying us, turning the text back on the researcher.

May our engagement with his work offer encounters that disrupt and rupture traditional notions of living in the academy beyond habitual boundaries and territorializations of representation differently.

The Pedagogy of Encountering Loss as Affirmation of Life

Adrienne Boulton

I worked alongside Don MacDougall as a PhD student and researcher while I was one of his PhD research participants. We became friends and in that time, he generously shared his knowledge and scholarship of Deleuzian philosophy with me. The event of losing Don as a friend, mentor and fellow Deleuzian has had a profound impact on my own work. As I work here with Don’s text, it is not the first time that I have returned to his work, including his penciled marginalia written in his many books by and on Deleuze. His engagement with Deleuze’s thought as it related to his own work, research and life created a marginalia dialogue as a process of encounter and rupture of thought. This is the engagement I hope to pursue with Don’s work as I consider the pedagogy of encountering loss of both my friend and a lack of assuredness found in the rupture of recognizable thought of which O’Sullivan (2006) described as an encounter.

In this space, I want to pursue generative loss, both in the personal loss that I have felt since Don’s passing, but also in relation to the pedagogical potential of the encounter and the loss of stability or deterritorialization of thought. Through particular affective experiences, processes of deterritorialization destabilize the normalcy found in recognition, but give way to the potential for new and creative thought. In doing so, loss becomes something other than that which produces feelings of sadness and despair, yet emerges from those very sensations. Through affective intensities, loss becomes a space of generative possibility as becoming more fully alive.

As Don discusses, becoming more fully alive involves affect with varying degrees of intensity as a pre-cognitive response to stimuli. Don worked with Deleuze and Spinoza to understand how both teaching and learning art would involve a process of becoming more fully alive in order to counter the ways in which teaching and learning art have become mechanically structured in capitalistic modes of production. The event of loss produces affective intensities that register physiologically on the body and as Bennett (2005) argues may compel profound thought because it forces us to engage involuntarily and disengages, momentarily, rational forms of inquiry. As such the pedagogy of loss is not located in knowledge produced through loss, but in the ways in which it unseats stability and provokes new potentialities. In these moments where we become untethered to certainty and recognition, new lines of thought are produced. The pedagogy of encountering loss becomes less about imagining the continuum of presence and more so about the affective intensity of the present absence. Loss produces a space of un-knowing yet the pedagogy of this is not filling the space with knowledge, but attending to the affect of loss as it registers of the body, as Don has described, the sensation of loss becomes an affirmation of life.

Pedagogy becomes an affirmation of life as individuals resist the immediacy of knowledge production, interpretation and meaning making in favor of the loss of certainty found through their own affective encounters with thought. In this space, a premature rush to closure to shore up feelings of sadness and uncertainty is suspended. In being more fully alive we ‘disrupt and rupture traditional conceptions of living that take living beyond the habitual boundaries and territorializations of representation’ (MacDougall, in text). In doing so, ‘when the speculative nature of the affirmative life is coupled with the actions of practical experience the affirmation becomes an experience of joy’.

Realizing Potential through Rhizomatic Research

Heidi May

During the time that I was a fellow PhD student and friend of Don MacDougall, my interest in collaborative forms of research deepened, particularly processes of reflective co-inquiry as artists and researchers. Within Don’s interview methodology he allowed for a temporal understanding of knowledge as opposed to a representational or static sense of knowledge by recognizing the interviewees as individuals with multiple identities, existing with/in multiple territories, and interacting with one another. Exploring his work now using a rhizoanalytic¹ (Alvermann, 2000) and self-reflexive form of inquiry, I have chosen to ‘encounter the self’ (Pitt & Britzman, 2003) through Hannah (my participant/interviewee self) with the understanding that this process may lead to ‘difficult knowledge’ (Pitt & Britzman, 2003). Alvermann (2000), referring to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), suggests that rhizoanalysis provides a ‘freeing’ way of looking at data, which makes it possible for the researcher to ‘see’ something other than what he/she went looking for.

Her own lines of flight:

My interviews with her explored the territories she moved in and out of through her experiences with art practice and pedagogy. While talking with Hannah, I had the feeling of encountering someone who had an intuitive sense of how territories easily entrap us, become cages of our own creation as we become complicit through our habits and thought patterns of restricting our own movements and ability to experience life in an open way or creative way. In the patterns of her speech in our interviews, Hannah would often break away in the middle of a thought and move off in another direction, toward another territory. Her way of expressing herself seemed to be continually interrupted by her own lines of flight, her self-imposed deterritorializations and her attempts at not being defined completely within one particular territory (MacDougall, 2013, p. 147).

Encountering a new space of relationships:

I observed Hannah in a classroom at her art college, where she seemed both relaxed and structured within her teaching practice. She seemed cognizant of the power structures at play within the classroom setting, and gently nudged certain individuals to challenge themselves, left others alone when they seemed to need space, and guided those who were open for advice and instruction. The atmosphere was one where the students seemed engaged in defining themselves in relation to their work. A portion of the class was devoted to dialogue, and the students seemed engaged as they commented on their own and each other’s work. Hannah seemed to enjoy helping the students talk about their work and ideas. At one moment one of the students mentioned seeing something outside, on the classroom balcony, and everyone went out to look. It was interesting how the atmosphere seemed to change when the boundaries of the class changed from the walled classroom to the open-aired balcony; immediately, the feeling was that everyone was on equal ground, and the hierarchical setting (although not too rigid) suddenly changed to what felt like a level playing field. The outside encounter and the affect it engendered brought everyone to the same place and the same experience; barriers, even in the loose structure of the art school environment, seemed to momentarily dissolve, as if everyone entered the rhizome of a less hierarchical space simultaneously. This type of experience, which breaks hierarchical boundaries, brings about a new space of relationships and allows for connections to learning to take place on a new ground, in a new territory, as old habits and patterns are dissolved in the temporary break down of formal relationships (MacDougall, 2013, pp. 211–212).

My work as an artist and researcher deals with network art and pedagogical practices (May, 2013) that exist in everyday life as dynamic and messy connections interweaved between art, learning and teaching. By experiencing this text beyond the printed page of a research handbook it is intended for the complexity inherent to those practices and to the territories and relationships described in Don’s writings to be better understood by the reader. As readers contemplate these ideas, it is expected that new ideas and interpretations emerge in the process and in the aesthetic experience. The aesthetic form of this chapter is an attempt to show the potential of research as a rhizomatic process of inquiry, which may be paired with methodologies of active co-inquiry, narrative inquiry, and practice-led research. Perhaps there exists a future for research that extends beyond theories of plausibility and possibility to potentiality (Triggs, Irwin, & O’Donoghue, 2014). In ‘Following A/r/tography in Practice: From Possibility to Potential’, Triggs et al. (2014, p. 256) with reference to Massumi (2002) argue that the concept of ‘potential may offer more helpful criteria for research objectives that do not want to narrow results to what is reproducible or to the bounds of what is possible’.

The Difficulty of Bearing Witness: The Affect of Becoming through Don’s Research (and Death)

Natalie LeBlanc

As a colleague, research participant, and friend, Don and I had many spirited conversations about art and pedagogy many of which were interjected with ideas and quotes by Deleuze, Guattari, and Spinoza – the philosophers whom he greatly admired and the philosophers who were informing my own work at the time – Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Hannah Arendt.

‘How Does Heidegger’s Concept of ‘Dasein’ Differ from Deleuze’s Concept of Becoming?’

I once asked Don, eager for an explanation. For Heidegger (1953/2010), the primordial ontological ground of Being is temporality. It is always ‘not-yet’, it is forever incomplete and lacking ‘wholeness’ – and it is something that is always coming to its end, and not yet at its end. Don’s answer revealed that Deleuze’s concept of becoming counters Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, in that, similar to Arendt’s notion of appearance, it is an affirmation of life rather than a being-towards-death. Don’s reply was simple. ‘There is nothing insufficient about becoming’, he said.

Don’s work has greatly informed my own understandings of ontology, the study of being or existence, through Deleuze’s notion of becoming that challenges the field of ontology by situating Being as an assemblage, something that is in a perpetual state of movement and flux, always ‘making connections beyond itself’ (MacDougall, 2013, p. 61). Contingent on the concept of assemblage, becoming takes into account all of our relations – with people, places, spaces, phenomena, and ideas. And it encompasses all of the ‘mysteriously unfolding processes of the unconscious … the dreams, schemes, and hopes of one’s virtual future’ (MacDougall, 2013, p. 26). Don’s work, punctuated by his death, reminds me that nothing in the universe or in nature is fixed – that ‘fixity’ and ‘territorializations’ are human constructs.

Yet Don’s untimely passing also presents me with a challenge associated with appearing in the world and of bearing witness to this appearance. As an ‘encounter’ (O’Sullivan, 2006), Don’s passing has presented me with the difficulty in which we exist as temporal beings, ‘limited by a beginning and an end’ (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 97). Thinking differently and thinking beyond representation asks that we position ourselves in our research and in our art practice. It calls on us to navigate with/in a messy, convoluted space so that we may allow ourselves to feel the immanence of life so that our work – as an intensity – can become a provocation for questioning assumptions that we have about the world and our place with/in it.

In The Work of Mourning Jacques Derrida bears witness to the death of some of the greatest philosophers of our time – Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze – colleagues and friends whom he witnessed pass away before him during the span of 20 years (Brault & Naas, 2001). Responding to each death as a singular event, Derrida created a theoretical connection between friendship and mourning, arguing that even when the death of a friend appears unthinkable or unspeakable, it calls upon us ‘to speak, to break the silence, (and) to participate in the codes and rites of mourning’ (Brault & Naas, 2001, p. 5). Building off of the work of Heidegger, Derrida (1993) argued that lacunas or aporias in life emphasize the need for speech and for thought because the ambiguous and the unknown – the things that cannot be named or situated – the things that exceed and evade explanation – are testaments to life itself. As human life corroborates, things come and go, they live and die, and they appear and disappear.

Throughout our lives, we witness the people we love come and go, live and die, appear and disappear. We live with this knowledge, yet we still live not knowing where people go when they are no longer.

• How can we prepare for such loss?

• How do we live with such uncertainty?

♦ ∞ Conclusion

Leaving a profound mark on each of us, Don’s work has opened us up to difference and to multiplicity by encouraging us to see things in all their complexity. Challenging us to seek new encounters, Don reminded us to engage in art and in research as a potential for making our lives more meaningful. Although the body of Don, a friend and a great thinker, has been ‘spirited away’ (Brault & Naas, 2001, p. 28) his body of work remains – and it remains in us.²

Art Encounters: Affect, Territorialization, Power and Art

Don MacDougall

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139).

What connections does Deleuze’s work make to art?

Today, the arts suffer from a contemporary paradigm of education based in traditional economic and academic models that have their origins in the Enlightenment and in 19th and early 20th models of education connected to concerns with standardization and accountability (Taubman, 2009). According to Taubman (2009), this ‘audit culture’ approach to contemporary education continually pushes the arts toward the margins♦, often eliminating arts programs altogether (Taubman, 2009). In contrast to audit education, the arts are based in aesthetic experience (O’Sullivan, 2006), and in aesthetic experience one’s senses are more engaged and operating closer to reaching their potential (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). In conditions of aesthetic experience and encounters our senses are heightened and we operate in ways that make us more fully alive (Robinson, 2012). Our current models of education have moved away from aesthetic experiences and experiences that engage the senses; in other words, we have moved away from educational experiences and encounters that incorporate affect; or as Taubman (2009) suggests, we have moved away from an education of meaningful experiences and toward a numerical, standardized, and conformist approach to education. ∞ The question arises, what is the place of affect, encounters and art in education today. Deleuze, in his interviews with Clare Parnet (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007), often refers to art process and the making of art as a way of rupturing the dominant forms of power. He consistently used examples of creative and artistic works from literature and visual art in his writings – Artaud, Lawrence, Proust, Kafka, Carroll in literature; Van Gogh, Cezanne, Bacon in painting; Godard, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Jarmusch in film – and sees art processes and creative work as moving against rigid segmentations and dominant territorializations (Deleuze, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1997, 2000, 2004; Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). Art for Deleuze (in Deleuze & Parnet, 2007) was created from the margins of society and culture in what he referred to as minor art, and has the ability to rupture structures of power (pouvoir) and to increase the force of existence in the individual artist, increase her personal power (puissance) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Deleuze & Parnet, 2007).

Negri and Problematizing Art

In Art & Multitude, Antonio Negri (2011) draws the comparison between art, bodily affects and transformation or metamorphosis. In his text he examines the transformative power of art and art process. Negri (2011) was initially concerned with the role and function of art in the face of an increasingly consumerist society. His ideas here connect to Taubman’s (2009) concerns with the reach of economics into spheres of education. In the face of these changing trends within society, Negri (2011) came to be concerned with and question the function of art:

The problem I was posing myself at the time was how to get out of a perception of society which saw it as entirely compressed by the capitalist mode of production. The society around me seemed like an enormous piling up of commodities, a piling up of abstract values which money and the mechanisms of the financial world were rendering interchangeable: a capitalist world stamped with unilateralism, in which tensions were as good as eliminated. In that world I could no longer find anything natural – I mean pre-industrial and not manufactured. Marxism distinguishes the exchange value of commodities from their use. Of this use value – which, despite the systems of domination and methods of exploitation, also valorized exchange – I no longer found the slightest trace. The world had become completely reified and abstract. What meaning could art have in such a situation? Within this reality, what could be the process of artistic production, of alternative creation, of reinvention of the real? (p. vii)

As a product-oriented process, Negri (2011) felt in Modern times the world had become an abstraction and meaning had become elusive or ‘reified and abstract’. ‘What am I to say of this universe of market institutions which were closing their grip on us, as if to suffocate us, from the most local level to the most global, stripping life and imagination of every trace of innovation and solidarity’ (Negri, 2011, p. viii)? For Negri (2011), the contemporary model of the capitalist mode of production no longer offered an ‘outside’, and thus he felt art was implicated in the abstract manufactured reality that moves from the grassroots of local communities to the universe of global markets and globalization:

I was perfectly aware that art, too, belonged to that world. If the world which surrounded me was thoroughly saturated, so to speak, by industrial production, and if everything I touched, for all its seeming natural and concrete, was in reality manufactured and abstract, art could only move within that same horizon (Negri, 2011, pp. viii, ix).

Negri (2011) goes on to say, ‘the artistic mode of production was flattening out and aping the capitalist mode of production (although artisanal practices and a reified imagination)’ (p. ix). Negri (2011) felt art had lost its place in the world as a vibrant conduit of creative change and imagination, and as a constructive force of meaning. Negri (2011) explains:

Throughout the history of civilization, down to the end of the modern period, a large part of artistic imagination has consisted in expressing the real. But the real no longer exists, or rather exists only as a construction; no longer as nature, but as a manufactured product. It is a living abstraction. How is one to find oneself in this? (Negri, 2011, pp. ix, x)

Art as Encounter and Affect

Simon O’Sullivan (2006), in Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation, offers a way beyond Negri’s quandary, and in doing so, provides a bridge between Deleuze’s ideas, especially his work with Spinoza, and the field of art; a bridge which engages with Deleuze’s alternative to traditional representation. O’Sullivan begins his analysis of a new way of looking at art by examining this fundamental shift in thought away from representation and toward the encounter and affect.

Following Deleuze’s (1994) critique of representation in Difference and repetition, O’Sullivan suggests that the encounter challenges and disrupts traditional systems of knowledge – in particular, knowledge based in recognition and common sense. According to Deleuze (1994), an object of encounter’s primary distinction ‘is that it can only be sensed’ (p. 139), whereas an object of recognition may not only be sensed, but may be attained through the other faculties – it may be recalled or recognized, imagined, or conceived with the assistance of previous knowledge. Deleuze (1994) characterizes this type of thought contingent on something recognizable as thought that is conditioned through its associations to collective (common) thought. He states, ‘It therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and of the other faculties in a common sense’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139). In this regard, this type of common sense, what Deleuze (1994) refers to as the image of thought, predetermines and limits practical experience, and it is with the notion of common sense, the image of thought, that O’Sullivan begins his project. ‘Common sense operates here as the cornerstone of representation’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 158). Traditional representation represents our habitual ways of being in the world. It is indicative of our normalized reality, working within the territorialized knowledge and presumptions of a recognized and conditioned reality. For O’Sullivan (2006), ‘The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack’ (p. 1). The rupture or crack of the encounter characterized by O’Sullivan (2006) is that which opens up to alternative thought, that which enables us to think otherwise, to think different. This connects to Deleuze’s (2007) interpretations of Spinoza, where thoughts, rather than being contingent on common or collective recognitions, are instead based on continuous successive encounters which take place in the practical realities of daily life. When the encounter is taken as a mixture of bodies, as a composition of physical and/or non-physical phenomena, with little reliance on or conditioning by past experience or informed by previous presumptions and recognitions, then the thought assumes an open quality, open to new and immediate experience (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007). It is this type of practical and concrete engagement with life through encounters that disrupts and ruptures traditional conceptions of living that take living beyond the habitual boundaries and territorializations of representation.

As with Deleuze and Spinoza (Deleuze, 2007), O’Sullivan (2006) characterizes this type of living, though encounters and events, as an affirmation of life. Here, parallels can be drawn between life as encounters and Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of living within the quanta flows of life, in the interconnecting spaces between territorialization and deterritorialization, or in Nietzsche’s (Deleuze, 1986) space active forces. In contrast, living within the territorializations of traditional representation is a negative life condition, while a shift toward life as encounters moves living toward affirmation, and according to Deleuze (2007), when the speculative nature of the affirmative life is coupled with the actions of practical experience the affirmation becomes an experience of joy.

O’Sullivan’s next move is to connect the encounter with art. O’Sullivan (2006) couples the affirming and rupturing (deterritorializing) quality of the encounter with the character and function of art, and in doing so sees the encounter and art as the same thing. He states:

Art, in breaking one world and creating another, brings these two moments into conjunction. Art then is the name of the object of the encounter, but also the name of the encounter itself, and indeed of that which is produced by the encounter. Art is the complex event that brings about the possibility of something new (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 2).

For Deleuze (in Deleuze & Parnet, 2007), creative processes are forms of resistance (ruptures or deterritorializations) because they move against the grain of normalizing or territorializing processes (such as power/pouvoir embedded in institutionalizing processes), and are processes that must be active; it is through actions that creative potential becomes resistance (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007). Resistance, then, suggests rupture or deterritorialization and active, creative processes align with affirmation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) feel that human expressivity in terms of actions goes beyond the imposed limits of language, limits they feel are crossed, destabilized or broken down by artistic or creative encounters and events. Deleuze’s ideas support O’Sullivan’s assertions here, for although Deleuze does not directly state that art and the encounter are the same thing, he does suggest that life as lived through encounters is a creative (affirmative) or artistic engagement that destabilizes life as conditioned through traditional representation, suggesting art and the encounter share the same terrain (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007).

O’Sullivan’s (2006) project is to use the notion of encounters to provoke established ways of thinking within the field of art; to destabilize, rupture and suggest alternatives that ‘operate beyond traditional representation’ (p. 2). In this regard, part of his focus is on art that is both disruptive and affirmative in ‘questioning accepted assumptions about the world’ (p. 2). Here, he aligns his own project with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977, 1987) project of thinking difference – ‘thinking differently, beyond representation’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 2), replacing traditional representation with a new image of thought that is based in encounters, and the affirmations and disruptions or deterritorializations they entail. O’Sullivan (2006) goes on to say that in describing Deleuzian connections within the field of art he uses a variety of aspects of Deleuze’s work, although he feels to use Deleuze’s thought as a methodology or in a strict methodological way territorializes and limits it, or as he puts it, attempts to use it to ‘represent’ (p. 2).

O’Sullivan (2006) uses Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome as presented in A thousand Plateaus in order to set out three important aspects of his project, while attempting to shift away from the Modernist paradigm of art and art theory by moving toward a rhizomatic model. These three characteristics which are central to his work on connecting Deleuze and the field of art include (1) seeing life as an affirmative process, (2) looking at both life and art as creative and the analysis and examination of the field of art as a creative endeavour as opposed to a negative critical approach (embedded within the paradigm of traditional representation), and (3) opening up new ways of looking at both art and the world which begin from the position of Deleuze’s (1994) critique of representation (O’Sullivan, 2006). The following interconnected Deleuzian concepts also connect well to these three aspects of a rhizomatic theorizing of art: affect, encounter, immanence, motion, segmentation and territorialization. These Deleuzian concepts, and O’Sullivan’s (2006) use of them to theorize the field of art forms the ground upon which his reconceptualizing project is built. By attempting to go beyond accepted representational thought and traditional critical approaches to research in his examinations of art, O’Sullivan (2006) chooses to use the approaches outlined above as an alternative to traditional research methods; a rhizomatic and immanent approach opposing a transcendent, hierarchical approach. Affirmation and creative exploration, emerging from the background of Deleuze’s (1994) critique of representation, form an important aspect of how O’Sullivan (2006) explores art and art relationships in connection to the concept of the rhizome.

O’Sullivan’s (2006) initially engaged with a thousand plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) as he felt it offered an alternative to his involvement in traditional critical work which he saw as ‘an overly signifying register’ (p. 11). He sees Deleuze and Guattari’s project as a way to ‘think about the world in an affirmative and creative manner. In this sense a thousand plateaus might be understood as a box of psychic tools, or strategies, which helps us construct our lives differently’ (p. 12).

Central to this ‘box of psychic tools’ is the concept of the rhizome. O’Sullivan (2006) uses the concept of the rhizome in posing an alternative to the hierarchical thought of representation; he feels rhizomatics presents a ‘paradigmatic example of the invention of a concept’ (p. 12) and involves ‘the presentation of a new ‘image of thought’ in as much as it allows us to think thought differently’ (p. 12) and in oppositional ways to traditional representation.

O’Sullivan (2006), in reworking the conception of art into the rhizomatic image of thought, sees the arts as an interconnected field, where artists, artworks, art history and theory, art disciplines and fields, and art consumers all share in a diverse interconnectivity in what has come to be regarded as ‘relational aesthetics’, and within this field the rhizomatics of art operates between the connections of these diverse practices. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987):

Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything and must be … A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles (p. 7).

O’Sullivan (2006) feels it is vital to ‘map out of the parameters, via the rhizome, of an expanded art practice, between art and its participants, and between art and art history’ (p. 14). O’Sullivan looks beyond traditional conceptions of art and their orientations to the art ‘object’, and extends this conception of interconnectivity he associates with the rhizome to art itself. It is here his notion of art and the encounter as being the same thing begins to take shape. He states, ‘Although ‘art’ can name an object, we might also use it as a name for these pragmatic processes of connectivity and interpenetration’ (p. 17). Processes O’Sullivan (2006) sees, through their assemblaging nature, their tendency for mixing with external bodies existing in the spaces of connectivity within the rhizome, as processes where creative and artistic actions are ceaselessly at work. O’Sullivan (2006) elaborates:

Instead of pointing to a beyond, to a ‘somewhere else’, as is often the case with art positioned within aesthetic discourse, art might be a name for this moving sideways, for the fostering of specifically transversal connections. Here the experience of art is not one of transportation (art is no longer a vehicle in this sense) but one of more and more connectivity. Again, we might place here the recent turn to ‘relational aesthetics’ in art and in writings about art. This is a turn in those practices that precisely connect different semiotic regimes with different organizations of power as well as connecting practitioners and producers of art with spectators and beholders. Indeed, this turn to participatory practices involves precisely a paradigm of relationality and connectivity (p. 17).

In distinguishing a connective conception of art as separate and apart from the habitual practices and patterns of daily life, O’Sullivan (2006) sees a rhizomatic art practice as taking up the ‘production and utilisation of alternative or ‘counter’ networks outside those of the dominant’ (p. 18). Here, he brings his ideas of art as encounter and connectivity into the realms of ethics and politics, making associations to aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) social and political theory of segmentarity; segmentations aligning with structures of dominating power as opposed to the rhizome which refers to a counter space of forces (quantum flows or events) that are always at play within the spaces and spheres of the segmentations or structures (strata). In this regard, art works as a disruptive force to the over-territorializing, over-coding and normalizing (molar) practices of traditional representation. In their minortarian or marginal (molecular) nature these disrupting forces enable the practitioner (artist or creative individual, or engaged viewer) to play in the spaces between the boundaries of life’s habitual practices and the creative, disruptive flows inherent in and immanent to life’s active forces and flows – the interplay between territories and deterritorializations, or the negotiations between restrictive hierarchical segmentations and the open connective spaces of rhizomes. Rhizomatics, then, suggest an alternative to life as sedimentary, as stuck in habitual patterns endemic of representational thought, offering life as the connective interplay of encounters and events, life of creative actions that directly inform one’s immanent forces and intensities.