According to Félix Guattari (2014), the post-industrial capitalist society of today is a society which “tends increasingly to decenter its sites of power, moving away from structures producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc. – subjectivity” (31). Educational institutions, as not only part of wider society, but as institutions that exist through the aim of preparing its members for life in wider society, hence exists as such in a tension between epistemologies of control and epistemologies of resistance to the very society that governs them. In other words, in a tension between the modulation of subjectivities with the capacity to uphold the status quo of current society, and the making possible of processes of minor subjectivities of resistance. This becomes especially poignant through media education and media pedagogical education where, following Guattari, a particular ethico-political articulation is in demand (ibid., 17f).

     In this talk I will discuss how minor pedagogies of resistance (cf: Mazzai and Smithers 2019) can be practiced in art and media teacher education. Speaking of a minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari proposes its three characteristics: the deterritorialization of language, the individual connection to the immediate-political and the machine of collective enunciation (from the Swedish translation 2012, 39). In later elaborations with Marie Maclean (1985, 591) they discuss the minor as that which “[…] begins by speaking and only sees and conceives afterwards”. Becoming-minor is thus a question of a micro-political practice that overthrows the given through invention. In my practice as a media teacher educator, this entails investigating conditions for the deterritorialization of mediatized language such as moving images, using the students own mediapractices as points of departure for inventive and re-volutionary collective enunciations.

References

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari (2012/1975) Kafka – För en mindre litteratur. Trans. Vladimir Cepciansky and Daniel Pedersen. Göteborg: Bokförklaget Daidalos AB.

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari and Marie Maclean (1985) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression New Literary History Vol. 16, No. 3, On Writing Histories of Literature (Spring,), 591-608.

Guattari, Félix (2014/200) Three ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Mazzei, Lisa A. and Laura E. Smithers (2019) Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy.

Qualitative Inquiry, 26:1, 99-108