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Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of
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 1

Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at

the End of the World
jan jagodzinski
University of Alberta, Canada

CHAPTER MENU

Prelude, 1
Desire as Lack: Designer Capitalism, 2
Art School Desire, 3
Desire as Social Production, 5
Valuing Thought of the Unthought: The Case of Design, 6
Valuing Thought of the Unthought: The Case of Art, 9
A Line of Flight?, 11
Notes, 12
References, 13

Prelude
Historically, art & design have had a rather tumultuous relationship. In the
eighteenth-century Romantic German Idealist tradition, Friedrich Schiller, draw-
ing on and arguing against Immanuel Kant, established what became (and still is)
a long-standing tension between the two spheres. Schiller, a member of the Junker
haute bourgeoisie, who, unlike the French bourgeoisie, were too weak to introduce
Enlightenment thought into Germany, sought another route to accommodate art, but
not in the service of the state. The fallout of the French Revolution, what became
known as the Jacobin Reign of Terror, furthered his disenchantment, encouraging him
to pursue an autonomous sphere for art and aesthetics alike. Unlike Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon in his The Principle of Art and Its Social Destiny (1865), which was quite
specific in presenting a socially engaged revolutionary realism, Schiller made a sharp
divide between an art of metaphysical idolatry and an art that was to be a social and
political tool, leading to the claim that true political freedom could be achieved through
an aesthetic education whereby a human can be both fully a “man” and fully a citizen
to become a “beautiful soul.”
In his 15th letter, as part of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793),
Schiller develops the notion of Spieltrieb – a sensual drive or force of play within an
autonomous sphere not subject to the pressures of use value, politics, and the like.

The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education, Richard Hickman (General Editor),
John Baldacchino, Kerry Freedman, Emese Hall, and Nigel Meager (Volume Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118978061.ead065
2 Histories and Philosophies

Such an autonomous sphere, specifically as the space given over to the artist within
the institutionalization of galleries and museums, was intended to allow for a utopian
impulse to be explored to make the social order a better place to live in – in brief, a place
to become “fully man” or a “beautiful soul.” This “useless” function of art was pitted
against the heteronomous forces that govern everyday life, the sphere of citizenship,
which became the realm of design, where the emphasis remained on what was practical
and useful. The ampersand in between was an exchange or overlap between the pure
creativity of aesthetics and the pure utility of design. Schiller’s contradictory position
exposed the two forms of aesthetics that Kant had established. In the Critique of Pure
Reason (1781, 1787), aesthetics becomes a sensuous “science,” while in The Critique of
Judgment (1790) it becomes sensuality itself as presented by the opposing experience
of the beautiful and the sublime. If the first “adds” to nature through human design,
the second is overwhelmed by nature, placing our species in its orbit of creaturely life.
Again, a tension emerges.
Crassly put, the dichotomy was between feeling and reason, or play and work, a con-
cession made to the laborer, who could become “cultivated” on his or her own spare
time or by “doing” his or her own art. It also set up a dichotomy between subject and
object: on the one hand free self-expression, and on the other the manufacture of objects
for the marketplace. Advertising, as it unfolded at the turn of the twentieth century,
became design’s handmaiden – a “crass” form of art. Autonomy of art and the heteron-
omy of design coexisted in an uneasy relationship throughout the various art & design
revolutions that followed: Art Nouveau, modernism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Russian con-
structivism, and so on until today’s design wars between the computer giants Microsoft
and Apple.
The tension between the two spheres can also be thought of as “art as life” and “life as
art.” The first presents the vicissitudes of design while the second presents the vicissi-
tudes of art. As is well known, the avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century tried
to bridge the two without much success. Duchampian ready-mades were a way to high-
light the contradictions that existed, and much later Andy Warhol in the 1960s accom-
plished the same contradiction, only in reverse order as the outside (everyday design)
came inside (art), rather than the inside (art) becoming the outside (everyday design).
Warhol’s “factory” of Pop Art could be seen as the pivotal point of the third indus-
trial integration of art and life through the rhetoric of applied design. Warhol famously
predicted that department stores would become museums and museums department
stores, which has now taken place: Coca-Cola, Guinness, Nike, and virtually every car
manufacturer (especially BMW, Porsche, and Volkswagen) have developed museums to
highlight the development of their brands. They offer a complete lifestyle that is attached
to each brand. This brief history of art & design brings us up to date with the current
situation, where designer capitalism1 (jagodzinski 2010) has managed to integrate the
two spheres in such a way that desire as “lack” rules the day.

Desire as Lack: Designer Capitalism

Desire as lack explores the negative or unfulfilled side of life, the striving for equality and
justice. It is a discourse whose fundamental principle lies within a Hegelian dialectic of
master–slave locked in battle. In this scenario, the slave is always attempting to even up
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 3

the score, by stealing a little bit of jouissance in the Lacanian paradigm. Jacques Lacan
(1988) mapped out desire as it circulates in all forms of capitalism. His early maxim
“the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (85, original emphasis) points to a sym-
bolic order that is hierarchically structured, shaped by the fantastical formations that
circulate endlessly to continue the perpetual motion machine of profit-making. Debt, of
course, is the way the slave is held at ransom, the future and mobility closed off. Within
its machinery, lack is continually filled in by what Lacan (1988) called objet a, the missing
magical element that ensures psychic wholeness. Think here of a card-wielding member
of the National Rifle Association of America, where a gun harbors that magical element
of objet a. Without a gun, such a person feels weak, unprotected, psychologically vulner-
able, and so on. With a gun, the person becomes powerful and secure. Desire, as lack,
in brief, establishes identity and belonging. The addiction to drugs, especially opiates, is
perhaps the paradigmatic example of desire as lack, where the “fix” provides the illusion
of control over the world, although the opiate is ultimately the master.
Designer capitalism requires such a desire to sustain itself. It does so currently within
“control societies” (Deleuze 1992) through what can be called the oxymoron of mass
specialization, or mass customization, wherein the differences between art & design
are breached so that any object may be aestheticized. Design education is generally
human centered; what is forwarded is a “universal design” whereby the designed world
is supposed to reach all types of bodies (including niche markets that target the aged
and the specific circumstances experienced by people who are disabled) in order to
phenomenologically grasp these “worlds” so as to make life better. This is perhaps
the better side of the designer ethic; some call it “design wisdom,” where empathic
design research is undertaken (McDonagh 2015). Differences from the “ideal” body are
researched and explored through various forms of simulation to gather a better feel for
particular impairments (hand tremors, hearing and seeing impairments, various forms
of mobility impairment, and so on). Such practice-based design education is not always
the case; more common is preparing students for industry or the entertainment fields,
which fit designer capitalism’s interests more closely. Here the usual approach has
been a more “scientific” or reasoned research account where divergent and convergent
thinking is used. In Design Thinking for Educators, a curriculum program developed
for teachers by the global design company IDEO (2013), the design process is rather
straightforward. The designer (or design collective) starts with a “discovery,” which
includes a “challenge” that has to be researched to gather inspiration. Then it has to
be interpreted by telling stories so that meaning can be unpacked and opportunities
framed. A project plan then needs to be created. Once that is in place, there is an
“ideation” stage. Here the designer generates and refines ideas that lead to “experi-
mentation.” In this phase, the designer builds on the idea by making prototypes and
receiving feedback. Finally, they move on to an evolutionary stage, where they record
and track their learning and move forward. These five phases are basically there to
overcome a problem, generate an idea, and see it successfully emerge.

Art School Desire

Comparatively speaking, the pedagogy of art rather than design, because of its loose
creative potentialities, is focused more on what the student desires, often seen as a form
4 Histories and Philosophies

of self-expression, an old standby that never quite disappears. The ironic film Art School
Confidential (see jagodzinski 2013) perhaps comes closest to pointing out the difficulties
of entering “art” school, where anything goes and the “old skills” of representational
rendering are lost or forgotten. There is truth to the film’s caricature for it presents art
students who are confused as to how they are to be assessed and graded and about what
is and isn’t acceptable, and the “obscene supplement” (an element that transgresses the
overt conscious elements; see Žižek 2006) that operates as to what is expected of them
but never stated. In his provocative book Why Art Can’t Be Taught, James Elkins (2001)
exposes practices such as the critique (which itself has come under scrutiny; see Foster
2012; Latour 2004). It is not quite certain what precisely is being explored in art schools
when the art market is as influential as the design market. Is all art meant for the inter-
national market – the biennales, major art galleries, and museums? He concludes that
teaching art is an irrational act. Similarly, in a far-ranging work by some 22 commen-
tators, Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Henry Madoff (2009),
addresses the teaching of art in art schools. While there are many examples in this
work supporting Elkin’s observation that art is “irrational,” the conversation between
two outstanding performance artists, Marina Abramović and Tania Bruguera (2009),
is particularly enlightening as to what can and cannot be done in an art school. Ques-
tions of liability, lack of an audience, and uninterested students emerge. Bruguera, who
is interested in “behavior” rather than “art,” claims that “performance is live art” (181,
original emphasis). In Abramović’s case, it seems to get at “naked truths” (181). It is not
acting and neither is it dancing. What it exactly “is” cannot be named since it is all “pre-
sentation” and no representation. What does come across is that Abramović created a
“smooth space” in the university where she taught (Braunschweig University of Tech-
nology) demonstrating the singularity of her own grasp of performance. There, every
month, one day would be an open class, eventually attended by around 100 people from
many countries to show their types of performance. When Abramović left for New York,
that space collapsed. Performance art was simply the “becoming” of Abramović’s exper-
imentation with her students. For her, part of the job was for her students to know how
to approach galleries and make it as a performance artist.
The collection of authors in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) seem to con-
firm the precarious nature of being an artist and how one legitimates oneself as an artist
after art school, and exposes the difficulties of an insular but transient body of knowl-
edge that is deeply shaped by an art world and its networks of global institutionalized
power. Suhil Malik (2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014) illustrates through his series of lectures
that there needs to be an exit from contemporary art – but to what? Boris Groys’s essay
“Education by Infection” (2009) in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) makes
the strong claim that today’s “art education has no definite goal, no method, no particu-
lar content that can be taught, no tradition that can be transmitted to a new generation
… just as art after Duchamp can be anything, so art education can be anything” (27).
What remains unchained, according to Groys, is the very isolation or autonomy of the
art school to “precisely prepare students for life outside the school, for ‘real life’” (27).
By “real life,” Groys points to the need to cope with the flux of contemporary change
that confronts students who are to become artists. Drawing on Malevich’s (1924) supre-
matist model of becoming an artist, the idea is to ensure health by directly addressing
the “infections” that besiege them. “The concept of the [art] school, then, is entering a
reciprocal relationship, infecting the world as much as the world infects it” (Groys 2009:
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 5

30, emphasis added). This state of affairs is fairly common as public/private walls have
been torn down, but Groys is suggesting something else, and that is an openness to this
exteriority and its infections, “to become Other, to become infected by Otherness” (32).
Similarly, for Gilles Deleuze (2004), “the artist is a symptomologist … the world can be
treated as a symptom and searched for signs of disease, signs of life, signs of a cure, signs
of health” (140). This requires a different grasp of desire.

Desire as Social Production

What infects us today is the ecological crisis, as exemplified by a general term: Anthro-
pocene.2 Whether in design pedagogy or art pedagogy, the shift of desire from one of
lack (as in the capitalist system) to one of affirmation or social production changes the
topological twist between “life as art” and “art as life” where the “in-between” of the
ampersand appears. Art & design’s pedagogies are no longer separated by a gap. There is
no hard and fast dividing line between them, only a membrane where an exchange hap-
pens. Desire as lack is challenged by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1983) notion
of desire as social production. If Groys’s (2009) “becoming Other” is to be met, art &
design pedagogy needs to shift its orientation. The Anthropocene demands this “be-
coming Other” as both nonhuman and inhuman (technology, artificial intelligence) are
now part of a differentiated subjectivity within an assemblage of forces. The human alone
is no longer the sole agent. As Nato Thompson (2015: 134–135) puts it, “sites of becom-
ing are absolutely important in producing a new kind of political agency … The sites
become an ongoing machine that produces a new kind of person.” Desire, as theorized
by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), is not a conscious endeavor; it is the state of the
unconscious drives operating at the pre-subjective level. As Daniel Smith (2007) elo-
quently explains:

Your drives have been constructed, assembled, and arranged in such a manner
that your desire is positively invested in the system that allows you to have a par-
ticular interest. This is why Deleuze can say that desire as such is always positive.
Normally, we tend to think of desire in terms of lack. But Deleuze reconfigures the
concept of desire: what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social interest,
because the social formation, the infrastructure in which we have already invested
our desire has in turn produced that lack. The result of this analysis is that we can
now determine the proper object of immanent ethics, which is neither my con-
scious will, or my conscious decisions, but neither is it my pre-conscious interests
(say, my class interest, in the Marxist sense). The true object of immanent ethics
is the drives, and thus it entails, as both Spinoza and Nietzsche know, an entire
theory of affectivity at the basis of any theory of ethics. (74)

Desire as drives and affects is part of the capitalist infrastructure and not simply a sub-
ject’s own mental or psychic reality. For design and art education to make an impact
on the Anthropocene requires a change of intensity at the level of the drives. There are
some examples of models to which art & design pedagogy should turn, which recognize
the infection that holds us all: climate change of a postnormal world (Sardar 2010, 2015),
the “end of the world” as we have known it.
6 Histories and Philosophies

Desire creates its objects. When designers “design” and when artists “art,” they desire.
The question is whether we abet desire as lack or desire as affirmative social production.
To address this, we now briefly turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s explication of such affir-
mative desire. They map out three lines or forces of desire. These are lines and not points
because desire is always in flow and flux; lines articulate, bisect, breach boundaries,
are compositional, and imply relation and connection. Lines are always in media res;
they map, territorialize and deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Such is a simplifica-
tion of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology of becoming, a constant differentiating
of life that creates the new. Molar lines territorialize, stratify, and organize; dispersive
flows of desire are relayed, both spatially and temporally, into various administrative
regimes and patterns; “molar,” in these instances, refers to both mass and concentration,
wherein a hierarchy is formed as an arborescent structure. Such molar desire is easily
imagined as categorical, hierarchical, and transcendent forms and functions. Molecu-
lar lines of desire are situated within the molar; they are forces and flows that “break
down” the molar structures, on their way to becoming-other (as Groys suggests), as
new affections and intensities are experienced virtually at a pre-subjective level. Such
deterritorialization is necessary for entropic/negentropic exchange. For Deleuze and
Guattari, molecularity faces a “body without organs” that is continually dismantling the
organism. Hence, desire is liberated at the molecular level. But these same molecular
lines are also captured (reterritorialized), reaffirming the hold of the established rela-
tions of power and semiotic categories. The final line is that of a spirit of desire that
breaks from the prescribed pathways providing a decisive escape. Such “lines of flight”
are a-signifying and anti-genealogical vectors; they defy any preemptive capture or cat-
egorization and containment. Such a line of flight has no predetermined trajectory, nor
a specific destination. Not subject to assimilation, or imitation, these lines desire the
radical movement of becoming. Such lines are not a flight from something as they are
the vectors of pure escape out of something; they liberate desire subjected to repre-
sentations that are cultural, familial, biological, or political. A “molecular revolution”
produces radically different experiences of becoming as desire is proliferated. These are
schizoanalytic delirious lines as they experimentally reconstruct the unconscious, and
hence the drives; but there are no guarantees as to whether such lines of flight are eth-
ically or politically freeing as the “unthought” is now opened up. There could well be a
breakdown rather than a breakthrough, as every artist knows when the new is created.

Valuing Thought of the Unthought: The Case of Design

In relation to the lines of desire Deleuze and Guattari provide above for the possible
transvaluation of values in a Nietzschean sense to generate a New Earth, what is the
pedagogical responsibility at hand if art & design turns its back on industrial production
and the marketplace that are the current molar desiring lines, which are unsustainable
if our species is to continue to dwell on this planet? What are the lines of molecular
desire in art & design that are capable of unnerving such a global entrenched structure
based on lack, which then assures us an identity? Is a line of flight even possible given
the state of the Anthropocene, which is symptomatic of our species’ survival? It seems
this is the pedagogical responsibility that needs to be addressed. Four of the nine plan-
etary boundaries have been crossed. The nine boundaries are climate change, change
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 7

in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction), ozone depletion, ocean
acidification, biochemical flows (phosphorous and nitrogen cycles), land-system change
(deforestation), freshwater use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and introduction of novel
entities (organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).
The ones in italic have already been transgressed. Carbon dioxide, for example, is cur-
rently reaching a record high of 400 parts per million, growing at 3 parts per million
per year.
On the molecular side of desire there is the design work and teaching of Anthony
Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013), whose approach is developed in Speculative Everything.
Current design education is a long way from their approach, especially in art educa-
tion organizations for public schools such as the National Art Education Association
(NAEA) in the USA, where the approach remains molar. Any number of journals that
feature design education readily show a push toward the entertainment industry, as
did the national conference of the NAEA in New Orleans in 2015 with its theme “De-
sign: Form, Function, and the Future of Visual Arts Education,” which featured such
keynote speakers as Tim Gunn (fashion consultant to television shows such as Project
Runway: Under the Gunn) and D’Wayne Edwards (former Footwear Design Director of
the brand Jordan and founder of Pensole Footwear Design Academy). The molecular line
of desire, as developed by Dunne and Raby, former members of the Royal College of Art
in London, is based on rethinking the way the future is theorized and the development
of what is called in a broad sense “speculative design,”3 which supports such a futuristic
imaginary. The “future” that they are interested in is speculative in a special way, and
certainly separate from any forms of utopian thinking and capitalist mindsets. In rela-
tion to the Anthropocene, the future that they dwell on recognizes that the challenges
that are faced today are unfixable; the only way to overcome them is to change values,
beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, and that requires a pedagogical emphasis. Dunne and
Raby make a distinction between four forms of the future: probable, plausible, possible,
and preferable. A probable future, where new needs and new markets are catered to,
does not interest them; plausible futures, which are the space of scenario planning and
foresight that all companies do to cover all their bets as to what could happen in the
future so that they are prepared, are also of no interest; possible and preferable futures
are the territory that they seek. Possible futures link the contemporary world with a sug-
gested one. Following Deleuze (1993), we can say that their exploration of futures offers
the full range of “incompossible” worlds. Rather than adhering to a Leibnizian notion
where God chooses the “best” compossible world, Dunne and Raby move their design
experimentation to open up all these incompossible worlds for discussion and debate,
to collectively define a preferable future or an emergent future. The design education
they advocate is open and generates futures that act as catalysts for public debate and
discussion. While not all their experiments are directed toward the Anthropocene, it is
the thrust of their design pedagogy that interests me for it shows a line of flight out of a
very closed future that global capitalism has set for the human species.
The speculative design that supports such design pedagogy addresses the unthought,
which has many names: Lacanian real, Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence or
plane of composition, life as undifferentiated zoë, the Kantian noumenal world, and the
transcendent virtual world of Ideas in Deleuzian thought. It offers other forms of desire
through what is called a “minoritarian politics” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986), wherein
the potential forces within the molar system are explored to offer new imaginings.
8 Histories and Philosophies

Speculative design addresses the inhuman (technology) and the nonhuman (anorganic)
via a conceptualism that avoids the human, such as humanitarian design, and design
thinking. Rather, this conceptualism of potentialities deals with unreality. It is the
“ideas” of incompossible scenarios that are being explored. The aesthetics are not
human; they are postconceptual, a point that is developed later when looking at art
pedagogy.
Speculative realist design is aimed at the unthought (Lacanian real, Deleuzian imma-
nent plane) where Ideas are explored as parallel incompossible words that could coexist
within the present molar hegemony of capitalism when it comes to technology and
the marketplace. Such thinking requires a different design education where a partic-
ular form of design critique is forwarded. Such critical design has nothing to do with
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School; rather it explores the hopes, fears, promises,
delusions, and nightmares of industrial technological development and change, espe-
cially within capitalist markets, where scientific discoveries move from the laboratory
into everyday life via the marketplace. Hence, material conditions are questioned so that
spaces for discussion are opened up. Pedagogically, this offers challenges to existing val-
ues, ideas, and beliefs.4 It raises consumerist consciousness, not of a high moral ground
as in critical theory, but as in parallel possible imaginaries.
Here is where an “accelerationist aesthetics”5 comes into play in what is called a “dark
design,” which questions capitalist design and in turn targets desire as lack to make
customers happy and fulfilled. Dark design attempts to project and present a world
where the techno-utopianism that capitalism offers shows us nightmarish scenarios that
truly make us think the unthought: the obscene supplement of technological surveil-
lance and security, such as the algorithms and CCTV camera systems that are able to
read emotions from facial recognition, gestures, and bodily gaits; the neurotechnologies
that claim to read minds; or profiling software that tracks our electronic bodies in what
we purchase and when.6 Such dark design has to be close to everyday life; otherwise
it becomes dismissed as “art” where anything goes. In this sense, it provides another
incompossible imaginary, an alternative world, the juxtaposition of the here-and-now
and the yet-to-exist. Pedagogically, such design opens up a space for questioning as it
disturbs what is taken to be the norm. Dark design needs to be physically crafted to
enable such a “parallax view” to emerge as a disjunctive interstice that then generates
cognition or self-refleXivity that emerges through the irrationality of the affect that has
been generated, occurring below conscious thought.7
An accelerated aesthetic is especially instructive when it comes to science, art, and
design as fictions or make-believe situations can be explored that are, nevertheless,
believable everyday situations that explore possible consequences before they happen.
In this way, desire is subverted from the molar trajectories at the “research” stage. The
entire development of biogenetics provides designers and artists to intervene in various
ways at the virtual potential level to generate “useful fictions” that generate debate.
Fictional products, services, and systems provide alternative futures that a public
can engage in. Pedagogically, such experimentation is invaluable as the nonhuman
and inhuman again come into play, especially in the various forms of bio-labs of
semi-living tissues arising from artistic experimentations of designers and artists alike
(e.g., Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Eduardo Kac, and Natalie Jeremijenko). For instance,
how similar to humans can robots become before the erasure of differences becomes
problematic, a theme explored in sci-fi? Or, more controversially, what use is made of
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 9

“transgenic animals” that are bred commercially for consumption and entertainment
(e.g., Revital Cohen’s Life Support, 2008). Such imaginary functional fictions are crucial
to the development of new lines of flight. Dunne and Raby’s United Micro Kingdoms
(2012–2013) presents four accelerated extreme “fictional futures” by four projected
populations: Digitarians, a Communo-nuclearist society, Anarcho-evolutionists, and
Bioliberals. Each reveals the cultural and ethical impacts of the way the respective
population does or does not embrace various technologies. These are alternative ways
of organizing everyday life in relation to how “humanity” might transform itself and its
technologies to fit the changing demands of the ecological and biological world known
as the Anthropocene.

Valuing Thought of the Unthought: The Case of Art

While speculative design makes much of the claim that it is “everyday life” (life as art)
that provides the impact necessary to change molar capitalist desire through experi-
mentation – and, thereby, speculative design distances itself from art, which is said to
be more removed from day-to-day living – art that addresses the Anthropocene (art
as life) is capable of disturbing the commonsense everydayness in much the same way
by concentrating and exploring virtual Ideas speculatively just like design. Both nonhu-
man and inhuman agents are also recognized. Such an art is “postconceptual,”8 and it
too shifts aesthetics out of the human realm. Pedagogically, again, the move away from
anthropocentric thought to face issues of the Anthropocene becomes the responsibility
of art education.
This presents a concern for the questions of aesthetics that specifically apply to the
art of the Anthropocene. As Peter Osborne (2013: 10) postulates, “there is no critically
relevant ‘pure’ aesthetics of contemporary art, because contemporary art is not an aes-
thetic art in any philosophically significant sense of the term.” Contemporary art is more
conceptual where aesthetics becomes separated from art. Aesthetics per se has already
been captured and wrapped up via designer capitalism, a world aestheticized for a cul-
ture of consumer goods, an aesthetics of surface and gloss appealing to the fetishization
of objects so that they in turn may become obsolete after a short duration. Ideas alone
can be works of postconceptual art, and Ideas or processes of concept formation can
be the serialized prehensions occurring at the virtual molecular levels of desire. Ideas
refer to the exploration of multiplicities at the virtual level of the unthought – or yet
to be thought. Concepts are not faits accomplis; they are emergent entities cotermi-
nous with an emergent changing subjectivity as they are created. It not that aesthetics
per se disappears, but that it is redefined as felt, spatiotemporal presentations – that
is, by an encounter wherein the usual perceptions are ruptured by percepts (not per-
ceptions), affects (not emotions or affections), and concepts (not cognition) as blocs of
sensation through postconceptual art. This is a tall order but with a completely differ-
ent agenda that separates itself from a humanized aesthetic. The Idea has to pry open
an event in representation in order to overcome the allure of commonsense notions of
aesthetics. This becomes what an art can “do,” rather than what it representationally
means or how it is subject to forms of interpretation and critique. This doing is not
some sort of action as might usually be thought; doing here refers to the affect of the
viewer in the way the habits of the sensorimotor circuit that is the basis of “normal”
10 Histories and Philosophies

situations or “natural” attitudes of perception and action is shaken or disturbed. Here

this is called “forcework by art refleXion,” with a capital X, which refers to how affect is
heightened and intensified so that a person is only then able to feel at the conscious level
the intolerable intensity of the actual. Art, science, and technology must come together
to offer a postrepresentational, a postconceptual, or nonrepresentational logic to open
up a gap within our habituated anthropocentric world to change human intensity so that
a belief in the world can still emerge. This again is the pedagogical responsibility given
our current “infection.”
What follows is one example to illustrate such an art. This is the oeuvre by Olafur
Eliasson. Here we will only dwell on his The Weather Project and mention briefly how his
other projects explore this nonrepresentational multiplicity regarding climate change.
The Weather Project was installed from October 16, 2003, to March 21, 2004, in the large
Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London as part of its Unilever series, which began
in 2000. Eliasson called it a “machine” or diagram in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, an
abstract machine that took up the entire space of the Turbine Hall (155 meters long,
23 meters wide, and 35 meters high). The mirror ceiling that was part of the installation
doubled this space. On entering the hall, the visitor faced a huge setting sun at the far end
that dominated the whole space. The installation’s atmosphere gave visitors a feeling of
tranquil wholeness and completeness. The calm of a setting sun created this cozy famil-
iarity of a hazy late summer afternoon. However, the audience soon became aware of
the construction of the experience, the space, the ambience, the warmth, the haze – they
became aware of the construction of the atmosphere. But, it was not London’s winter
outside that defeated this illusion.
The audience was able to see the indoor sun’s technological construction: a screen
and an array of orange mono-frequency sodium lamps that were positioned behind the
screen but not completely covered by it. The screen forming the 15-meter solar circle
was simply a translucent semicircle; its flat upper section was flush to the ceiling mir-
rors, the reflection creating the top half of the circle. This uneven juxtaposition created
a shimmer of a forever setting sun as if time were arrested in the present. The ceiling
mirrors reflected the whole floor of the hall and those visitors who stood on it. Pump-
ing water vapor into the hall controlled the atmospheric haze. This created a mist that
dissipated periodically. All 16 nozzles, the piping, and the pumps were visible with no
attempt made to conceal them. Indeed, all of the aspects of the construction of this
space were visible: steel, concrete, glass, electrical wiring, machinery to create artificial
temperature and humidity, and so on to create this atmospheric experience.
The installation was an astounding success with more than 2 million visitors. It became
famous as images of the audience reacting to and interacting with it became available.
They basked in the sun by lying on the floor as if on a beach, which gave them contact
with the ceiling mirrors and the ability to see themselves from a new angle. The Weather
Project formed a representational inversion of the naturalized order of things. The “nat-
ural world” went indoors. Bruno Latour (2003) at that time wrote that, like the reversal
that The Weather Project made evident, global warming had placed our species in
nature’s own indoors permanently. Everyday life had been brought indoors, so to speak.
The Weather Project questions our ideas of nature and its representation, and the
way they are assembled by our perceptual selves, our institutions, our museums, our
galleries, the media, and society in general. It vivifies our anthropocentric biases as a
world-for-us. The experience of the audience was not disconcerting; in fact it was just the
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 11

opposite, not a dissensus as is usually thought. Bathing in the sun, visitors experienced
the exposed entrails of the artificiality of the natural. Eliasson constructed an abstract
machine that, in the first moment, was phenomenologically pleasant and soothing. But,
in the second moment, it revealed what sustained that experience – the visibility of the
technical set-up of the installation made the shift to the second moment inevitable, but
reversible only to a limited extent. Conceptually, once this shift had occurred, the second
moment immediately interfered with the return to the first; a self-refleXion occurred. It
was not the same phenomenological space. Returning to the first now had to be a con-
scious decision. In this way the multiplicity of layers of just what the installation was
“doing” were replicated in the viewer’s mind.
Eliasson’s installation positioned the viewer in this vibrating gap to stir up an event.
The viewer was prompted to notice that this event “happened” – that it was incorpo-
real, impassive, and impersonal. The installation enabled the phenomenon of “seeing
yourself seeing” as perceptual representation was disturbed and the unthought opened
up through a machinic aesthetic that was able to de-anthropomorphize experience by
wedging itself between subject and object, a third-person neutral position. Through this
subjectification, a new subject was produced. Eliasson invited the visitor to reflect on
the perception of nature and on the nature of perception. But it was technology that
inserted itself between object (unknown nature) and subject (the visitor) in the staging
of this encounter or event.
Eliasson has developed many other machinic installations as examples of postrepre-
sentational postconceptual assemblages (in this case, human and inhuman assemblages)
that explore this gap: the gap of seeing yourself seeing in different ways and the gap of
playing with different nonhuman times – both immanent in their exploration and ques-
tioning of the world-for-us. Eliasson reiterates a Baroque complexity of vision by explor-
ing the human perceptual system of subjective seeing via a machinic vision. The Weather
Project was an exploration of upward reflexive vision, but this is only one of many types
of vision, including downward vision, frozen vision, afterimage vision, frozen vision, per-
spectival shattered vision, hyperreal perspectival images, relative position images, and
so on, all investigated through a host of abstract machines of his invention. Thus science,
art, and technology come together in achieving this postconceptual aesthetic. Art edu-
cation’s responsibility is to shift aesthetic toward a postconceptual positionality, which,
like speculative design, places the participant/spectator/consumer into an encounter of
self-refleXibilty in order to release unthought thought.

A Line of Flight?
The exploration of virtual Ideas is where we as educators should be taking our design
and art students to face the infection of the Anthropocene: into that speculative realm
that occupies a space between the actual (reality) and the impossible that appears as
nonsense – a space of dreams, hopes, and fears. This is not to offer utopian worlds
but rather to place students and public alike into that space where there is a question-
ing as new incompossible worlds are presented by artists and designers generating new
forms of desire that turn their back on designer capitalism and the marketplace of con-
temporary art. The visitors to The Weather Project were positioned in such a place to
explore their own self-refleXive thoughts. Eliasson presented no moral high ground, but
12 Histories and Philosophies

an ethico-political orientation was certainly raised that might cause visitors to change
their views. Speculative design does the same thing. In this way, the future remains open
and debated before it happens given that in today’s media-saturated world, as Richard
Grusin (2004) has shown, events are already remediated and premediated to “protect”
the public.

SEE ALSO: Art Education in Post-political Times; Art and the Educational Threshold:
The Aporia of Access; Paradox and Art Education: The Disobedience of the Force of Art
and the Adventure of Pedagogy; The Performative Virtuality of Art and Its Education

Notes
1 “Designer capitalism” is a term used to characterize capitalism since the second
industrial revolution, when the commodification and aestheticization of the object began
to supplant its use value and functionality. Designer capitalism plays on the
aestheticization of the “world picture” in order to increase desire associated with an
object. The stress is on “sign” in de(sign), which has become an established
advertisement label among capitalist internationals. Two variants of this are the Nike
“swoosh” and the FCUK label, which plays on a glance aesthetic. The hesitation is all that
is sought for. From this emerges the oxymoron of mass customization, an attempt to
target specific profiled interests to increase sales.
2 The Anthropocene refers to the proposed, and as yet unofficial, name for the epoch in
which the anthropogenic activity of our species has begun to terraform the Earth, thereby
making significant changes to its geology and its ecosystems. Coined and popularized by
the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen (2006), the term has been challenged for its
anthropocentrism, as there is now a strong recognition of the more-than-human agents
that must be recognized, both ethically and politically, in the way they contribute to the
ecology of the entire Earth. The Anthropocene has now been euphemistically referred to
as “climate change,” with the full recognition that as a species we need to change our
productivity and our relationship with the more-than-human if we are to survive.
3 Speculative design in many respects can be likened to the speculative realism of so many
materialist philosophies that have emerged. These philosophies “speculate” on the
noumenal realm – the realm, especially in Kantian thought, that is inaccessible to human
experience. Speculative design works with prototypes, projections, and scenarios for
what might be achieved in the future. Extrapolations are made based on emerging
technologies, and techniques of application are played with in various areas (film,
ecology, literature, robotics, avatars) that present a “near” or plausible future. “Design
fictions” is a synonym that has emerged directly as a result of digitalized simulations
made possible via computerization.
4 One simple example developed by Dunne and Raby (2013) in their work with the
designer Michael Anastassiades was called Do You Want to Replace the Existing Normal?
(2007–2008). This is a clock that presents statistics at odds with what is expected of the
product. The clock searches newsfeeds for fatalities, organizing them in a database by
form of transport. Car, train, and plane are the possible settings, and the clock then
“speaks” out the numbers of fatalities. Here a different desire is tapped that certainly is
available but is repressed since it is not marketable.
 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 13

5 On accelerationist aesthetics see the collection of essays in e-flux, number 46, 2013.
6 The best television series example of this accelerated aesthetic is Black Mirror (Channel
4, Netflix). Bernd Hofengaertner’s explorations in Belief Systems (2009) are a design
example mentioned by Dunne and Raby (2013: 38) in which six scenarios are developed
that accelerate such surveillance technologies. One example is a “shopping machine” that
sells teapots. The customer walks up to the machine and pays a certain sum of money.
From a database, thousands of images flash on a screen, and they stop on a teapot based
on the micro-expressions that have been read on the shopper’s face. This is an example of
“interpassivity” and not “interactivity,” where the machine does it “all for you.”
7 To unpack this difficult sentence: Given the “affective turn” that shapes much of
sociological, psychological, and neurological thought, my term “self-refleXivity” presents
a grapheme to suggest that design and art can “force” the experience of an encounter
whereby an affective shock is created, no matter how brief, which then allows for a
conscious reflection, breaking the sensorimotor habits that have been established within
the consumer/spectator/participant.
8 “Postconceptual art” is an emergent term that attempts to pinpoint art that both is
nonrepresentational and has an ability to convey the precarity and the possibility of
recent technological, sociological, political, and ethical developments when it comes to
the epoch that is called the Anthropocene. Although postconceptual roots are not
entirely easily traced, “idea art” and the Fluxus movement have strong affinities.
Postconceptual art is able to use big data and demonstrate the effects of algorithms; it
also harnesses the elemental, fundamental, or primary materials, such as light, water, air,
and earth, in all of their morphological stages to make specific points concerning climate
change and our species’ participation in the Earth chain of becoming.

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 Desiring Lines: The Pedagogical Responsibility of Art & Design at the End of the World 15

jan jagodzinski is a professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of

Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is a founding member of the National Artist
Education Association’s Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education, past president of its
Media, Culture and Curriculum Special Interest Group, and past editor of the Journal
of Social Theory in Art Education. He is also book series editor for Educational Futures
(Palgrave). He currently holds board roles for numerous journals and has authored and
edited a wide range of books.

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