The Pedagogy of The Anarchive by Francisco Beltrame Trento

The Pedagogy of the Anarchive is a research proposal that aims to collectively build a hub for neurodiverse/crip/queer art and arts education practices. It is an in-disciplinary three-year project that will deliver multimodal outcomes, like an ever-mutating assemblage/installation, a film and publications. The boldness of the proposal relies on making visible underrecognized modes of perception and relationalities in arts education and artistic research, critically approaching them with pedagogies that deconstruct the archival neurotypical tendencies. To prototype the iterations of the material assemblage, we will use diverse materials and textures, like textiles, pieces of furniture and art supplies. Ideally, the space will be co-composed as we host activities. We will employ the anarchive as our conceptual and operational apparatuses. The anarchive emerged from the necessity to overcome the idea of archiving a past event or proposition. It understands the register or the objects not as representations or essences but through their traces that potentially can activate new propositions. Materials, like furniture, textiles, tape measures, acrylic tools, raw treated bamboo, paints and cardboard, are understood relationally. We ask: how can we assemble them to privilege underrecognized modalities of perception? It is “not documentation of past activity. It is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation (…) a cross-platform phenomenon (…) between media, between verbal and material expressions, between digital and off-line archiving, and most of all between all of the various archival forms it may take and the live, collaborative interactions that reactivate the anarchival traces, and in turn create new ones.” (Massumi, 2016). The theoretical framework we use is transdisciplinary, in the intersection of process philosophy (Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), Queer Theory ( Lee Edelman, Paul Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam), Critical Disability Studies, Neurodiversity and Neuroqueerness (Melanie Yergeau, Mel Baggs, Dan Goodley, Justine Egner) and the New Materialisms (Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett). What the scholars from this extensive bibliography share, besides different their theoretical affiliations, is the appreciation of the concepts of relation and relationality beyond the human scope, recognising the agency of non-human bodies. For us, it is urgent to foreground that to begin undoing the neurotypical ableist and functionalist dominion of arts and arts education. It is also critical to bring awareness to the complex relations of causality that entangle the anthropotechnical construction of the man at the cost of the consequences of the Anthropocene. At the same time, the concerns and concepts shared by these scholars must be "bent" and re-thought by the lenses that detour the dominance of the Global North onto-epistemologies. Pereira (2019, p. 64), while talking about Decolonial Queer Theory, affirms that bending implies "a rereading of the Global North’s theories in order to revise them, bend them, scrutinise their silences and obliterations, and to make them speak differently".

The assemblage will be co-created as a useless proposition. In a sense, disabled bodies defy the neoliberal temporality of productivism. The useless relates to the development of modes of sociality that understand the acts of failure not as the lack of success but as a style. Paraphrasing Quentin Crisp, Jack Halberstam says "failure as a style also involves his “career” as a “naked civil servant,” someone who chooses not to work and someone for whom work cannot be life’s fulfilment" (Halberstam, 2011, p. 96). On the one hand, the Oxford dictionary defines 'prototyping' as a first or preliminary version of a device or vehicle from which other forms are developed; the first, original, or typical form of something; an archetype; ‘these objects are the prototypes of a category of rapidly spinning neutron stars’. This idea of the prototype is thus based on an ideal of enhancement towards the final form of a product.

What we prototype when we co-construct the assemblage is not only the materiality of the space but modalities of sociality or a-sociality (Edelman, 2004) that do not centre the human (understood as the neurotypical able white male) as the possessor of all agency. Instead, we think the agency is distributed through several ways of touching, feeling, smelling, seeing, tasting and hearing the materialities in hand. The task is not to tokenise these modes of perception but already begin with them to develop critical understandings of the ableism embedded in the university, other arts education environments and, why not, the neurotypical world itself.

This old Rolodex is an outdated device for storing data like addresses and phone numbers if one complies with a binary concept of data that is categorised by the human point of view. The idea of “collecting data” is problematic “because it points to an ontology that assumes data are separate from human being and so can be “collected.” (St. Pierre, 2019, p. 04).

Several authors engaged in post-qualitative research also argue that the concepts of ‘data’ used by qualitative inquiries do not consider that data are not static entities but have agency and thus affect the researcher. Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (2015, p. 54) writes that “this approach to data and analysis also introduces a return to the data object, questioning the subject’s dominance over data and the one-directionality of knowledge”. MacLure (2013, p. 663) calls for an understanding of data as “non-representational, non-interpretive, a-signifying, a-subjective, paradoxical and embroiled with matter”. This comprehension of data also comes highly influenced by post-structuralist though and the crisis of the concept of representation, especially tied to authors as Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard; and lately, to scholars recognized as the new materialism movement, as Karen Barad’s (2003, 2014) take on the queerness and contingency of matter. While “a general distrust of data (and data analysis) as inescapably modernist, formulaic, naïve, and pointless permeates the post-qualitative inquiry” (Ellingson; Sotirin, 2019, p. 03), we vouch for a mixed-method approach that does not discard data, while we understand that the idea of “collecting data” is problematic and it deploys a binary cut between the scientist and the object of (artistic)-research.

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