Educational transduction
I paint, but I'm not a painter of ideas or projects. I consider myself an artist in progress, immersed in the process.Although I need specific stimuli to work (I need to want something, I need impulses, intuition), I often do not even have subject matter to deal with. When I start to paint, I have no idea what will come out, and usually, try to make it so; I strive to set aside everything that is too bright. But I'm not an expressionist. Like everyone else, I have my obsessions, and I also have an intense volition to go to the studio. I desire to do so, and I like it, but nothing else; I go to the studio, paint, mix, combine, move things from one place to another, change pace; I work and get results, always obtain something.
All this does not mean that I believe in an isolated purity outside of reality. Obviously, immersed as I have been for many years in the world of art and teaching, I am not naive, innocent, pure, or anything like that. I know quite well what surrounds me or, as a minimum, I interpret it from a particular point of view and maintain a personal position on all kinds of issues: artistic, cultural, social, political. In other words, what comes out in the studio emerges in relation to what I see, what I hear or what I experience. At the best of times, when things go well, it seems that what I do comes to represent something which extends beyond personal therapy, because people tell me they like it, or identify with what I do, or that they understand it and find it interesting. And sometimes I don´t care about that, depending on where I hear the opinion or how I am feeling at the time, but at times, it seems that I gather all the answers, and I identify with them. However, I feel that I cannot wield them as a justification for my work because it would not be honest, because when what one does in painting becomes a discourse, that happens through the interpretation of others. One thing is what you paint and another very different thing are the effects the painting brings about, or the ways it can be interpreted, the discourses it can generate, and so on. I neither have any project nor make projects.
Of course, there are ideals, images pulling me in one direction and images pulling me in another, and, in between, what I'm experiencing and what comes out. Sometimes things work more one way and sometimes the other, and occasionally a synthesis occurs. But it is hard, or rather impossible for me to know when that happens. So, from moment to moment, and depending on what is happening, and depending on the moment, almost painting by painting, I radically change my way of working, according to how one or the other tendency forces itself on my mind. I also do this because of the deep conviction that synthesis always comes when you least expect it, so I'm constantly fumbling.
In the process, transduction is specified in the tracking of the image in its genesis, which means tracking its development and understanding - not as separate processes, but as synchronous phases of a single process. The concept of transduction seems to come to name the essential method of processing-thinking in painting.
As I said before, in other words: because I believe in transduction as a method, the object in my practice is not previously defined. As I work, as I think, an emotional, thematic, procedural and conceptual domain is gradually shaped. I do not know what I'm doing or thinking until I have it in front of my eyes; until experience has taken place. I think first of Jauss, then of Dewey:
"... The idea of a work of art is not a previously given model, but the rule that becomes evident in its production. The knowledge that carries aesthetic production is not a platonic recognition, but the production rule discovered in construire or doing "(Jauss, 2002: 59-60).
Dewey:
“we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfilment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences" (Dewey, 2008: 35).
The whole experience enables the unity and the logic of its previous constituent phases, which, however, were not purposeful in any way. Otherwise, its conclusion would not have been an experience, but a barely significant mechanical act of repetition. Transduction, in turn, enables the discovery of the rule which means that experience is the experience of experience.
* * *
I teach painting, but do not know what to teach or how to do it. This is not due to a lack of knowledge or an absence of personal methods, but also because I know that artistic practice is rooted in the desire of the subject-maker. This is the reason why I do not in the academic premise which is tacitly transmitted, and which we also transmit: "First learn; then, express yourself." That way, the only thing you can achieve is to delay and never get to address the fundamental conflict between desire and language which drives practice.
Therefore, the process I experience as a teacher with specific students is necessarily a creative process in both its methods and its contents .I have to discover what each student needs to learn; I must establish the conditions for a negotiation between his or her desire and mine, and I must learn from him or her.
This teaching of nothing, is what I understand as educational transduction, a perfect analogy of painting of nothing that characterizes my practice. I try to dispute everything and discover the new in the process. What I call the new is a result of a unique relationship between sense and nonsense, which only becomes possible from a radical subjective implication. I suggest that the student who sees a teacher organizing the educational experience like this can also adopt the same behaviour in her or his artistic practice.
In doing so I try to become a passeur in the process of building my technique as such. Passeur is a French term used by filmmaker Serge Daney to refer to the work of certain individuals who, in one way or another, allow the encounter with the cinematographic. Specifically,
"the "passeur" is someone who gives something from himself, who accompanies those he must take through on a boat or through a mountain; who runs the same risks as those who are temporarily in his care" (Bergala, 2007: 47- 48)
Educational transduction is thus grounded in a real experience, on showing or exemplifyng, on an accompaniment whose effects are accomplished without a consciousness of itself as a method. Accompanying-teaching gives rise to an analogical learning process, similar to the process one goes through with art itself (when what we see moves and changes us without us being aware of it). This is similar to the psychoanalitical relationship, in which the analysand learns by identification. He or she will not take the analyst's particular behaviour as a model, or copy it, but will learn precisely through the differences between the self and the analyst. The learning reaches its peak when the analysand discovers and acknowledges that the analyst knows nothing about him or her, and is thus able to come to terms with the fact of his or her ignorance.
In painting, neither may the performer be considered a maker nor what is painted recognised as an artwork until the viewer closes the event of the relational artistic circle. Only then does the viewer become the viewer through a potentiality which is brought into play by what is painted. From an original situation where there are different poles of intensity but no defined identities, the relational becoming between these poles allows the birth of the three agents necessary for the artistic event (maker, observer, artwork). In the educational relationship, this remains the same: the teacher, the learner and the educational content cannot be said to exist before their emergence relative to each other. Transduction, in this sense,
“is partly transmission and partly translation, partly a shifting in space and time, and partly a move from one register to another; but is a form of transport in which what is carried is also transformed.”( (Rodriguez, 2008: 13).
From one domain to another, from the painterly to the educational field, not the terms but a relational style is repeated, and this analogous repetition is what provides the possibility of learning.
The educational process does not represent the process of painting, but in its becoming, it revives all of its stages analogically. The teacher acts as the painter: finds the necessary impetus for action on his or her own desire and strives to modulate the pace of the chaotic tumult of his or her intentions, knowledge, skills and impossibilities. This means that the teacher experiences the educational relationship along the same premises as the practice of painting, and also understands that that you cannot so much teach how to paint, but teach in the same way as you paint. The teacher who paints teaches by example, though not in a moral, but in an analogical sense, by reliving and depicting the characteristics of practice in its full complexity. Painting is taught by playing out the artistic event (pre-creation, creation, re-creation) as in a laboratory, by gaining momentum in the artificial conditions of the educational institution, and by performing it, in this context, in all of its power. As in a game, a ritual, or a therapeutic situation; by creating optimal conditions to make the concrete, revealing experience possible.
Enhancement of potency
Potency, as I have already defined, means increasing the complexity of the relationship between what you, what you are not aware of doing, and what happens to you by chance [1]; it also means taking this relationship as a necessary and desirable link.
What does it mean to intensify potency?
Fundamentally, it means to take account of of the connection between action and tribulation as unavoidable and desirable, and to develop of a personal technique for the orderly resolution of tensions between what the subject does and what happens to him or her; between conscious and unconscious. It also involves learning a manner of making and causing things to happen by themselves, and integrating all of the above in a single conception of the creative act. As Françoise Julien said following a Chinese precept, it means learning to make so that you make nothing but nothing stops being made (wu wei bu er wu wei) (Julien, 2006: 17).
The nothingness that does not stop being made is the new, which allows us to close the cycle of experience and realize what the creation process has meant, always beyond the merely intentional but also the merely contingent.
In the sense of culminated experience, conscious of itself and for itself, enhancement of power is synonymous with the intensification of aesthetic experience. But in art, the consummation of author’s experience
is only possible through the confirmation of the person we call the viewer. It would have to do with a particular zeitgeist. I align myself, in this regard, with Jauss’s aesthetics of reception, according to which the artwork only exists within the framework set by its receiving. Perception, then, is the completeness of poiesis. In this sense, Simendon says that:
"Perception is not the capture of a shape, but the solution to a conflict, the discovery of compatibility, the invention of a form. This form, which perception is, changes not only the relationship between object and subject but also the structure of the object and the subject. It is susceptible to degradation, as are all natural and vital forms, and this degradation is also a degradation of the whole subject, as each form is part of the structure of the subject" (Simondon, 2009: 349).
Paul Valery describes this more simply: “My verses have whatever meaning is given them.” Enhancement of power is, therefore, letting your own desire carry you along, and learning to look at what has been done through the eyes of another.
As for the teacher's work, it should be noted that transductively, as with its effects, the intensification of aesthetic experience cannot happen only intentionally but also cannot simply be left to chance. To wish is not enough for it to happen; to provoke it is not enough; simply to wait for it is not appropriate. Do nothing, but nothing stops being done.
We should allow beginnings and ends, should create a beginning and should help to finish. Topics or materials are not so relevant as the experience of the process as a process, as a desiring, a drift we cannot accurately project. The closing of the process, of course, also matters, together with the subsequent awareness of what has happened. To call into question the beginning (What does it mean to begin? Where does the impulse come from?) and allow the end to occur, something which is hindered by Academic structure and its insistence on assessment as a false ending – showing no acknowledgement of the time each subject and process requires, or for the identity between process and duration.
This means that we always initially accept whatever the student brings. However, we should not take and exalt this as proof of a personal desire that will quite probably lie elsewhere, but may begin a process of questioning from that point, based on attacks on the primary desire to check its resilience and, in this sense, its truth. The residue remaining after all the attacks will necessarily be what the students want, although they may find this hard to admit, and it may no longer have anything to do with the starting point); and the operation thus closes in an ending unforeseen by both student and teacher. The time it takes is of no concern, because in the absence of closure, the process is diluted in the continuity of lived experience.
This experience, this creative exercise, must be directed towards itself. If we talk about experience, it might not, in its course, be conscious, because to a great extent, consciousness of itself nullifies the experience. Nevertheless, it must satisfy itself within itself: it must represent itself. That is, exercise is a second grade experience, an experience of experiences which teaches us to "behave experientially with our experiences" (Innerarity, 2002: 17).
As I said above following Innerarity’s ideas, it has its own temporality, and makes the present fuller, while anticipating future experiences and allowing for lost time to be recovered through the forgotten or repressed. Through the aesthetic experience lived and exercised all its forms (as aesthesis, poiesis, and catharsis), what do you learn? That you can correct your own experience, that you can play with it.
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[1] I remember now Duchamp and his "art coefficient": "In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work. In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed." (Duchamp, 2010: 66)
Transduction: Love and Pedagogy
- Come on, Apolodoro, write to your aunt.
- I do not know how to say that, Dad.
- As you wish, my son.
- It's not knowing how to want.
That does not know how to want, ...
Oh, pedagogy is not as easy as many believe!
Everything I have said so far could be condensed in the idea of transduction as a necessary link between love and pedagogy. In the following and last text, I try to explain and defend this conviction.
Love and Pedagogy is a title borrowed from a novel by Unamuno. The protagonist of the novel a very rational, very intellectual, very scientific man who has a wealth of ideas for changing the world. He decides to father a boy as an experimental project. When he finally manages to do so, he names the boy Apolodoro, which means gift of Apollo, or gift of sunlight, the father of truth and life. He also chooses the name because it begins with the letter A, like his own, Avito, Don Avito. Not only does he do this because of the convention of a child bearing his father's name, but also for practical reasons, so that the boy will not have to change the initials engraved on all the objects he inherits. That is, he thinks of everything, wants to control and predetermine the future of his son, for his sake and the benefit of the world, he says. He wants and believes that the child is going to be a genius thanks to sociological pedagogy, which is his invention and he is going to experiment with the child.
The story is hilarious but is also very tragical. The underlying problem is that Don Avito considers love and pedagogy to be incompatible, so that for him, the fundamental concern of education is to eliminate all traces of a loving initiation into life.
A well-educated person, according to Don Avito's ideal, will be someone who has risen above love. Here the matter may be caricatured or exaggerated, but I think it accurately expresses the conflict between individual and society, the eternal struggle between desire and language, which in the Academy always tends to be postponed indefinitely and never faced. Implicitly, it states that first you learn, because there is something to learn, there is a law which we guard and transmit; but then you express yourself, that is, you skip this law. First you follow the law; then love will come.
I think that the way of transduction might allow us to link love and pedagogy. According to this thought, I defend two ideas about art education:
1. You can teach and learn art, but not in a symmetrical relationship. There is no way to know if what is taught matches what is learned. So it is more realistic to think otherwise. There is nothing to teach and nothing to learn; rather, it is nothingness, precisely, that you have to work and build a communication system around. I know, of course, that there are basic and fundamental issues which remain over time and that any beginner should assimilate (which relate to matters like material sensibility, organization, and representation in general). But paradoxically, these issues only become primary and fundamental if you run into them and handle them as if they were your own invention, to later encounter the entire History of Art in them. Consequently, it is better to consider there is no content in art teaching. That is, in short, the first idea, but I will leave it for later.
2. Only selfishness is pedagogical. If you are in a position to teach, I think it is essential to recognize that the sole justification for your effort is that you do it for yourself. Perhaps as a demand for love, to be more loved, or to enlighten your thinking, because explaining things helps you to understand them better, or to achieve greater professional prestige, or for any other reason; but always, I think, a selfish reason will be there. Taking that step is basic for me: we do not put ourselves in the position of teaching out of altruism, or for art's sake; we do it driven by selfishness.This second idea has to do with psychoanalytical technique. The relationship established in psychoanalysis between analyst and analysand can serve as a reference. Although they renounce the body, which in art and its teaching is essential, a relatively straightforward technique has been developed which uses only a few specifications (free association, scansion, latent alertness, variable length of sessions), and allows the subject's desire to be broached. That is also our need.
Despite what one might at first believe, the relationship does not involve the desire of the person who goes to the office wanting to alleviate his or her sufferings, making the relationship possible over time and eventually bringing about the cure. It is the desire of the analyst that comes into play, because, as they say, the analysand's passion is ignorance. The analysand refuses to know, and wants to continue enjoying the symptoms as he or she already does (although the symptoms cause suffering, they also bring the analysand much satisfaction) and is terrified to move from his or her stand. I am not talking about individuals but about generality; this is a structural, unvarying human condition.
I would say it is also the professor who keeps alive the teaching and learning relationship out of his or her selfishness, because the unconscious passion of the student is ignorance or, in other words, inertia in forms of private enjoyment that he or she does not want to lose. If learning is difficult, is this because inertia condemns us to repeat procedures that, albeit unconsciously, give us a lot of pleasure? And after all, what does it mean to learn something? I would say it is to shift subjective limits and the limits of inertia, to get out of oneself, to lay down repetitive forms of enjoyment and seize others less dependent on the symbolic law and common sense.
Because, no matter how radical you are, even if you act against common sense and try to undermine its foundations (many forms of artistic practice do this), you are subjected to a kind of feeling of infinite debt towards it, something that can never fully be paid off. Whether for or against, it governs and directs your actions; however, I think that the fate of art is to act on a different plane, oblivious both to submission and the pride of being above the symbolic law. I think art exists on a plane of indifference to such master-slave relationships. Art is thus always essentially political, as it reveals the fissures in any social situation to demonstrate the possibility of another world, another way of being in the world, another plane of existence.
If we are talking about shifting unconscious limits, and therefore a lack of boundaries that can directly be addressed, I think progress must also come from the unconscious. And what would be unconscious in anyone´s practice? Precisely his or her quirks and weaknesses, what is beyond his or her control and perception and cannot be seen. The teacher must identify and exploit this, even if he or she does not have the key to its meaning, or rather, for that very reason. In the development of oddities, the passion for ignorance that prevents progress turns into knowledge.
The starting point (and this is chiefly true in first teaching relationships) should thus always be anything that the apprentice brings, even if it is absolute shit, and precisely for that reason.
The essential task of those who are in a position of authority is to form a museum of the weird, through the assessment and marking out of these strange results, so they become the most visible thing in the class, what establishes the style of the group of people. Thereby the link of the group, what "makes a group" from a simple gathering of people, is what each of its members does not see that he or she does not see. The teacher then teacher gains his or her authority in the renunciation of institutional power, which is the default grounding. He or she obtains his or her authority at the time in which his or her own "unknowing" is acknowledged and placed in the foreground. This idea has to do with Rancière´s "ignorant master." (2003)
I remember now a professor I had at the Art College in Bilbao. Suddenly, sometimes, one day, he would call a pupil to discuss his or her work. In doing so, he showed an interest and excessive passion that left the recipient unseated. I think this was something purely technical, and induced the receiver of the call to a new commitment by putting the "thing" in the foreground; he showed that work was significant, and even if the student found this hard to appreciate, perplexity could intensify the relationship with his or her personal practice.
I speak of selfishness because, perhaps, the teacher might have had a specific interest in the job or student behind his action. However, he was able to turn something that only concerned him into an educational technique. He placed the "thing" above himself, showing that it was so important and so difficult to handle that it had him obsessed; therefore also unveiling that he had no magic solution. I consider this pure technique, possibly almost unconsciously developed to deal with the desire of students and move it so that their desire could gradually disassociate from all kinds of forms of dependency and servitude. Surely this not be valid for everyone, and certainly not serve as a formula, but certainly in the 80s-90s, with some people, this technique worked.
It is important to note that this professor's attitude was abnormal. No-one else did the same, and it probably would have seemed wrong. He risked and destroyed implicit conventions and, in so doing, taught. And he did it transductively: regardless of whether what he said was more or less successful, his act, the phone call was itself "teaching by analogy." It actualised certain basics of art technique, which, from my point of view, lies in types of exceptional gestures that lead you to see reality in a new way.
I think, then, that teaching must always be experimental, and that no method is useful, because the central feature of learning, like that of art, is to be an event, and this can only happen in the fissures of what is being institutionalized. And it must also be experimental; because then, regardless of its contents, it teaches by its own form and by analogy, transductively.
I will return now to my first idea.
As I said before, you have to work around nothingness because the object of teaching is technique, and artistic technique is a unique mixture of desire and language, expression and structure. To achieve this, it is no use learning the common language and then characterizing it personally; from the very beginning of its assimilation, you have to find the way to twist the language as needed.
Our usual understanding of the art learning process works as follows: you must first assimilate fundamentals, then express yourself; first, jump through hoops, then break them. But I think, from an Artaud's quotation, hoops should always be on fire, like those of the circus:
"And if there is one truly infernal and damned thing left today, it is this our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like those tortured at the stake, signalling through the flames." (Artaud, 2010: 7)
I do not think we have to understand the sentence as an argument against form; in fact, he talks of signs drawn from blazes which, after all, are also forms, but compared to some others, are necessary and urgent. So, good shape, according to Artaud, is an urgent, needed, and heartfelt one; it is possibly also a rare sign, because the ones caused by fire are probably very rare, undefined as conventional symbols. And making a signal as an unrecognisable sign is a tough job.
So I think there are fundamental questions to assimilate, but these have to be discovered for oneself; no one can know what another needs to learn, not for his or her sake, nor in the name of art, to ensure its permanence. Hence we must establish a pedagogical relationship that does not include content - or where the content is the practice or the making itself, which will teach the practitioner what she or he needs to learn. But we must also know that this practice cannot be formalized or respond to any specific method.
So, the greatest difficulty comes from the understanding of art according to the condition of its practice; from understanding it as something that is done to get closer to the new, which, as I have already defined, is business as usual but updated, made visible, perceptible. It is the “something” that we say is beyond reason and discourse when we say "it has something” that moves them.
But if I talk about updating “somethings”, it is because as they take shape - and I again remember Artaud - they cease to be that to become specific things with specific names; from there to the cliché there is only a step. “Something” must appear as a residue to meaning that cannot be assimilated, so that it can never be a result of a formula or a predefined code of representation.
I was insisting that the biggest difficulty in teaching and learning comes from the condition of art practice, which is linked to the passion for the new. What we have in our hands is between nothing and something.
And, if that is our content, then how to refer to it, how to enable it, how to transmit it? It seems clear to me that trying to explain “somethings,” doesn't work; indeed, to me it is not useful either as a speaker or as a listener. And I would say that is where a particular, widely imposed style of teaching goes wrong.
There is a tremendous inflation of discourse that tries to explain a posteriori the “somethings” which have already formed in the work of many artists and intends to serve as a productive method, which is absurd and impossible because it has very little to do with the ways we make.
I think we should develop a particular technique. According to this technique, the real teacher would be the actual act of making; but not just any making: a making which searches and causes the event, which is simply the overcoming of inertia, the movement of personal boundaries through the assumption of the unconscious, of the weird. A making which, as Klee would say, is the exception rather than the rule, an experimental and self-willed making, because it acknowledges the will to new forms.
And how can we engage in it? I think the only and most efficient way is through the other, through the viewer who, in habitual teaching situations, is embodied by the group. Through what the group takes us back to by remarking that we do not see what we do not see, through the precarious position this puts us in, we may come to understand that solutions are always in the making itself, nobody has them, and the only way to approach them is to keep making.
We engage in doing thanks to the team gathered around the aforementioned "museum of the weird." Here, it makes sense to me to remember once again Duchamp's idea of an artistic coefficient (remember: "an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed"). The group is what allows us to internalize this reality and abandon fantasies of total control. You could say "the unintentionally expressed" often has to do with the contributions of meaning made by the material basis of the work itself. We often desire materiality to be transparent because of the strength of our imaginary projections: we want to see the picture, and the brushstroke is an obstacle. Matter always slows the condition of the speed of the image and the subject-maker, due to the expressive urgency, overlooks it; The group, however, is not so excited by the imaginary, or is excited by a different imaginary; it is more prone to its perception.
I wish to end by contributing towards some ideas about the discourse of the teacher, because in all teaching technique, language and the way we use it is a fundamental pillar. For all the above, as an art teacher, I have to learn to speak by saying “nothing.” But at the same time, I have to make sure that my speech is performative, to launch people in such a way that they can no longer turn back. I also have to point in a particular direction, the direction of artistic tradition itself. So that tradition as a wide frame of possibilities becomes desirable; I have to invest, somehow, the idea that “My wish is your command,” and even exchange this for “Your command is my wish.”
The empty word is a type of word or discourse which does not point to an ultimate meaning, but rather to some unconscious truth. Transductively, it functions as an analogy of the artwork in which the viewer, in this case the listener, also imbues what he or she has received with a subsequent meaning. It has to do with the discourse of the analyst in the sense that this is theorized by Lacan; as a kind of discourse which, particularly in comparison with University discourse, makes a difference. The empty word does not attempt to speak from the place of truth and does not try to hide the Real. I will explain this, to finish off, through a personal anecdote: a (different) painting professor once told me: "you have a paralytic brushstroke."
This was not something that came out of the blue; he said it at a specific moment, in a tone which was not at all insulting, and after we had already established a particular rapport. It made me laugh, but also puzzled me because I did not know why he had said it. Besides that, it was not something I could ask him because it would have been like asking him to explain a joke, which would have broken our tacit understanding. The fact is that humorous perplexity made me start a type of experimental work (what about the brushstroke?) that no other training I have ever experienced has been able to match. That sentence was an empty word which allowed me to learn by myself what I needed to discover. Although I do not mean that from that moment the teacher no longer had anything to do with my learning, because it was he who replied to many questions I asked in order to understand my own brushwork and all of its implications. That is, from that sentence, I asked him for basics, foundations, laws. And at that moment, what he gave me was very useful. In that sense, I would say that the function of the empty word is to open space to couple the law onto.
All this defines transduction as a "pedagogy of love or loving pedagogy" that aims to directly confront the mismatch between what is taught and what is learned; and also to address the conflict between desire and language, and not to base art learning in its continual postponement.