This brief essay reflects on the concept of expressionism in Gilles Deleuze's work on Spinoza, and addresses the relationship between forms of content and forms of expression as discussed by Deleuze and Félix Guattari when they introduce a minor literature. We address how modes of expression – expressing, expressed, expresses – can enable liberatory movements of creative resistance, and yet, how expression can be cut short thereby devolving into sad passions. We argue that a re-engagement in expressionism offers ways of collectively and creatively resisting what is most oppressive in this world, suffering as it is amid a polycrisis.

In this chapter, I argue for a documentary film pedagogy aimed at developing film and media literacy—that is the capacity to critically analyse, historicize and produce film, moving images and media. Through a workshop where the Swedish children’s documentary film The Quiet One (2011) is screened for two Swedish teenagers, a metamodal film pedagogy of iterations of seeing, talking about and making film is suggested. Metamodal as a concept is introduced to focus on how something can be explored through practice—in this instance, how the way that the camera expresses a certain point of view is investigated with the creative exploration of multiple views. The talking–seeing–creating pedagogy has been developed from a model championed by the Swedish Film Institute, ‘se-samtala-skapa’, and is here introduced under the English acronym of TASC. Considering the outcomes of the workshop, I suggest that working with the TASC film pedagogy develops the critical capacity to reflect on the constructedness of moving images while learning technical skills within the realm of moving image production. This approach also facilitates what Jenkins et al. call ‘civic imagination’, where the exercising of multiple viewpoints and perspectives constitutes an imagination of what a new possible future would look like and the belief that one can be part of such future.

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

Hur sprids bilder på nätet, vad är memes och hur kan man förhålla sig källkritiskt till bilder? Detta är ett pedagogiskt material i tre delar bestående av en introduktion med teoretisk genomgång, en lärarhandledning samt en powerpoint med lektionsmaterial. För grundskolan och gymnasiet med fokus på bildsanalys.

Co-published by FELD + HAUS and signs and symbols, Sculpting Time is the first volume in a series of two books that translate Jen DeNike's newest body of work into book form. Shot on location in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Berlin, the titular video work Sculpting Time follows a hypnotic cinematic montage of nude women walking public staircases. DeNike creates a liminal space, where women descend, ascend, cross, moving up and down, over and over.