See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305787978 Being different in public Article in Continuum · August 2016 DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1210754 CITATIONS READS 0 101 1 author: Anna Hickey-Moody RMIT University 169 PUBLICATIONS 167 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Disability Matters: Pedagogy, Media & Affect View project Arts, Pedagogy & Cultural Resistance: New Materialisms View project All content following this page was uploaded by Anna Hickey-Moody on 19 August 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20 Being different in public Anna Hickey-Moody To cite this article: Anna Hickey-Moody (2016): Being different in public, Continuum, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1210754 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1210754 Published online: 01 Aug 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 41 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccon20 Download by: [University of Sydney Library] Date: 18 August 2016, At: 23:31 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1210754 Being diferent in public Anna Hickey-Moody Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT In this article, the phrase ‘being diferent in public’ is used to think about people with disabilities in public culture. I argue for the cultural value of disability in an era of austerity arguably marked by an ableism that pushes people to ‘pass’ as not disabled. Such a lack of cultural value is remedied through the work of Disability Arts organizations, and I take the work of a British and an Australian Dance Theatre company as two of many possible examples in which arts practices change public culture through staging the work of performers with disability. In building this argument, I develop a feminist, queer methodology for reading Deleuze and Guattari and Butler as theorists of public culture. Speciically, as theorists that illustrate the cultural signiicance of being diferent in public. Reading Butler and Deleuze together can teach us to appreciate lack as a mode of aesthetic refusal, as a way of being obviously diferent, or ‘positively negative’ in public culture. I take Deleuze and Guattari and Butler as part of the same intellectual public, a community concerned with creative cultural interventions into normative identity politics. I consider integrated dance practice through this framework as a valuable political and public intervention. Integrated dance is a term used to describe dance that brings together people with and without a disability. I argue that disability can be felt and conigured diferently through performance. The aesthetics of reimagining what a disabled body can do, or what a dancing body should be, not only constitute a practice of aesthetic activism but an aesthetic refusal of dominant body ideologies and capitalist codings of dance. Introduction In this paper I argue for the pedagogical capacity of dance theatre to create new public cultures of disability and associated systems of cultural value. I develop this argument through mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari as subcultural theorists of public culture and I spend some time establishing the grounds on which I read their work, articulating my feminist reading methodology. As such, this article reads in two parts. The irst half establishes my feminist methodology and this process entails signposting diferent afective readings of shared intellectual publics as a ground on which I base my critical approach to Deleuze and Guattari. I explicate diferently sexed intellectual cultures and argue the politics of sexing intellectual cultures is too often ignored. My methodology ‘refuses’ Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of the left-wing, white middle class male poststructural position. This refusal remakes their work as a queer theory of public culture and situates their conceptual resources as part of an intellectual project examining feminist and queer publics advanced by Fraser and Berlant. CONTACT Anna Hickey-Moody [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 A. HICKEY-MOODY Thinking about non-traditional publics, about swarms, packs and afective contagion, leads into thinking about how public art, such as dance theatre, can bring together non-traditional publics and can make new little publics (Hickey-Moody 2012, 2016) through afective contagion. Dance theatre devised and performed by artists with a disability is unique in the respect that it calls a public to attention to feel, observe and experience the perspectives of performers with disabilities. Very few cultural fora facilitate this experience. As such, I argue that dance theatre devised and performed by people with disabilities is a unique public culture of diference that provides resources for thinking and feeling diferently about disability and does so through a form of subcultural contagion or ‘pack logic’ invited by the process of sharing an aesthetic experience. Methodology: a feminist and queer approach to Deleuze and Guattari In her 1993 book Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies Elspeth Probyn suggests ‘the sexing of ourselves as women in discourse is of immediate concern to feminists’ (1993, 1), in part because ‘we can use our sexed selves in order to engender alternative feminist positions within discourse’ (1993, 1). This line of questioning opens up the self and faciliates its ‘movement into theory’ in ways that create ‘the possibility of other [sexed] positions’ (1993, 1). I take this theoretical strategy into the collective academic and, later, the material aesthetic (performance) as political. I begin by examining the sexing of intellectual publics. The uptake of theory is a sexualized and sexualizing process which has heterosexual or, conversely, queer determinations. Further, it is conducted in an implicitly masculinist or feminist fashion. My initial argument relies on the proposition that Deleuze and Guattari scholars, Deleuze scholars particularly, constitute an intellectual public largely invested in being clearly distinguished from scholars working on and with, the writings of Butler. Reading Deleuze’s Kantian heritage and emphasizing the fact Butler is not a philosopher are part of the fabric of this masculinist, white middle class heterosexual culture, which largely relies on the unpaid emotional, and domestic labour of women to resource the creation of philosophical distinction between Deleuze and Butler, or indeed feminism. This matters because the efects of this intellectual public culture only allows for certain kinds of readings of Deleuze to be legitimized. The politics of this divide articulate as a performance of the sexed nature of lived intellectual cultures rather than epistemic diferences themselves constituting an impassable divide. For example, Deleuze’s Kantian heritage versus Butler’s beginnings in Hegel lessen in signiicance when examining some meta-textual resonances between the arguments they advance. For example, Butler’s contention in Gender Trouble that practices of gender citation can be subversive and also normative (or conservative) and Deleuze’s argument in Diference and Repetition that diferentiation and diferenciation articulate creative and/or, conversely, repetitive ways of remaking. Such forms of repetition of course include making gender. These respective lines of argument make similar points in diferent ways. Both theorists argue there is an important political diference between creative or subversive citational practices and conservative citational practices, and this diference is political. This is a shared contention despite the fact the respective theorists develop the argument drawing on diferent theoretical resources. Butler and Deleuze/Guattari can be part of a shared intellectual public. Reading Butler and Deleuze together can teach us to appreciate lack as a mode of aesthetic refusal, as a way of being obviously diferent, or ‘positively negative’ (Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2009) in public culture. I take Deleuze and Guattari and Butler as part of the same intellectual public, a community concerned with creative cultural interventions into normative identity politics. Intellectual publics Warner (2002) shows us the social and political ends of intellectual publics, which, for example, shaped the prohibition in North America, and corresponding subcultures of speakeasies and consumption. Intellectual publics matter. The ways books are read matters. Books are made in the reading almost as much as in the ways they are written. Reading Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of public culture entails reading them alongside discussions of public culture. It also entails thinking about how publics CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 3 are conigured, and what publics do in their work. To begin with, then, a brief deinition of the public is needed. Habermas’ (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere brought a particular iteration of the public as a social sphere comprised of a critical audience into scholarly debate. For Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere’ is a democratic space that fosters debate amongst its members on topics concerned with the advancement of public ‘good’ (1962, 99). Drawing on Greek conigurations of public and private spaces and modes of social operation, Habermas characterizes the public sphere as a space in which ‘citizens … interacted as equals with equals’ (1962, 4). While this space of citizenship is signposted as a bourgeois arena, Habermas characterizes debate within the public sphere as socially inclusive, ‘as a realm of freedom’ (1962, 4). It is a space that, due to its access to economic and social resources, is separated from the power of the church and the government, as it is comprised of: [M]erchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers [who] … belonged to that group of the ‘bourgeois’ who, like the new category of scholars, were not really ‘burghers’ [comfortable members of the middle class] in the traditional sense. This stratum of ‘bourgeois’ was the real carrier of the public. (Parentheses added, 1962, 23) Habermas goes on to qualify that texts the public read and which carried the public are not necessarily ‘scholarly’. He introduces the concept of the public sphere through discussing an actor performing for his audience (1962, 14). This concept of performers as those who draw together new publics frames the second half of this paper. Habermas considers the ways diferent kinds of texts gather divergent publics by drawing ‘a distinction between the public that gathered as a crowd around a speaker or an actor in a public place, and the Lesewelt (world of readers). Both were instances of a “critical (richtend) public”’ (1962, 26). The attention of the audience and the constitution of audience are crucial to the deinition of a public, then. Sites of performance or display − be they distributed or localized, constitute publics as long as they draw audiences to attention. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere maintains an ongoing discussion of the relationship between diferent viewing publics and textual forms. This line of inquiry later inspired a scholarly ield on media and their publics. Notably, this includes work on media audiences, such as Butsch’s inluential collection Media and Public Spheres (2007) and The Citizen Audience (2008), which ofer investigations of how diferent publics are created through diverse media forms. Butsch began mapping this ield in 2000 with The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990, and his inluence can clearly be seen in contemporary works such as Coleman and Ross (2010) The Media and The Public: ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ in Media Discourse. So choosing to watch something is one way of endorsing it, and belonging to an audience is a way of being part of a public. As a ‘public’ assembled to watch a performance, or any audience brought together to view a performance text, a localized given public might be quite small. Diferent textual forms (newspapers, journals, disability or inclusive performance and so on) thus operate as ‘public organs’ (Habermas 1962, 2) that conigure distinct critical publics. A constitutive feature of any given public is a concern with advancing a common good, a concern, transcending the conines of private domestic authority and becoming a subject of public interest, that zone of continuous administrative contact became ‘critical’ also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason. (Habermas 1962, 24) An investment in some iteration of social ideals and thinking about society is thus a constitutive feature of a ‘public.’ While such investments have been problematized in scholarship, I want to maintain them because they remain implicit in the diferent ways inclusive performance is conigured, and such concerns are drawn to the attention of the audiences to which inclusive performances speak. Through calling an audience to attention, inclusive performances create ‘afective and emergent publics’ (Bruns et al. 2011, 9) which are ‘structured by afect as much as by rational-critical debate. Such engagement can occur in and through popular culture … and everyday communication … By decentering more formalized spaces of rational debate’ (Bruns et al. 2011, 9). As Berlant shows in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), Dewey foreshadowed in The Public and Its Problems (1927), and as I have argued elsewhere (Hickey-Moody 2012), aesthetic 4 A. HICKEY-MOODY citizenship is a creative process that requires subcultures. Thinking through the process of making publics allows for the articulation of discrete forms of citizenship that are primarily articulated through feeling belonging to, and participating in, certain arts subcultures. The necessary problematization of the mainstream production of the possibility of ‘public good’ was largely engineered by Nancy Fraser, who, in her now famous response to Habermas, (1990) argues that marginalized social groups are excluded from any possibility of a ‘universal’ public sphere. Fraser contests the suggestion that such a space, as it currently exists, is actually inclusive. For Fraser, marginalized groups form their own publics: ‘subaltern counterpublics’ or just ‘counterpublics.’ These groups critique social investments which further the interests of the bourgeois, who Fraser characterizes as ‘masculinist’, stating: ‘[w]e can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal: it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule’ (1990, 62). For Fraser, the notion of independent ‘citizens’ is masculinist as, in order to function in the public sphere, one must rely on a certain level of domestic (private, often unpaid or unacknowledged and undertaken by women), labour. Fraser (1990, 62, 63) advances this critique through arguing there are problematic assumptions on which the notion of the public sphere is built: (1) The assumption that it is possible for interlocutors in a public sphere to bracket status diferentials and to deliberate ‘as if’ they were social equals; the assumption, therefore, that societal equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy; (2) The assumption that the proliferation of a multiplicity of competing publics is necessarily a step away from, rather than toward, greater democracy, and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics; (3) The assumption that discourse in public spheres should be restricted to deliberation about the common good, and that the appearance of ‘private interests’ and ‘private issues’ is always undesirable; (4) The assumption that a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation between civil society and the state. Warner (1992) also critiques Habermas’ notion of ‘the public’ for excluding marginalized bodies in ways that require a disavowal of the embodied nature of social diference. Butler and Deleuze/ Guattari ofer a means for reclaiming the production of social diference and indeed the value of social diference within public cultures. Both work the concept of becoming (1987, 1996) and demonstrate interest in the ways the self is always becoming itself and/or becoming diferent from itself. This process of becoming is often also a style. Becoming is process of becoming invested in aesthetic practices. Those who are different in public are invested in practices of aesthetic refusal, and develop new forms of aesthetic refusal. Hebdige’s 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style became famous for ofering tools for thinking about the vernacular practice of aesthetic refusal through style. Hebdige explains this process of refusal through characterizing it as a deviation [that] may seem slight indeed – the cultivation of a quif, the acquisition of a scooter, or a record or a certain type of suit. But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of deiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a Refusal [sic]. He continues, to say, ‘this Refusal [sic] is worth making … these gestures have a meaning, … the smiles and sneers have some subversive value’ (1979, 2). Over 30 years later echoes of Hebdige’s refusal resound in Lauren Berlant’s concept of oppositional citizenship, constructed in her 2008 book The Female Complaint: The Uninished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Berlant says: ‘… Juxtapositional citizenship … reveals individuals en masse hoarding a sense of belonging against what politics as usual seems to ofer – a space of aversive intensities, increased risk, shame, vulnerability, exploitation, and, paradoxically, irrelevance’ (2008, 150). I disagree that political desire that is failed by politics must lead to irrelevance, and would take the concept of oppositional citizenship further to examine the political signiicances of diverse ways of being diferent in public. Style can be read as lifestyle, styles of (art/political) practice, media publics and mediated publics, ways of belonging to public and private CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 5 countercultures or oppositional publics, or aesthetic practices that are articulations of little public spheres (Hickey-Moody 2012). Through asking ‘what makes such a public “counter” or “oppositional”?’ (2002, 85), Warner shows us that the nature of political ‘opposition’ is diicult to deine. For example, art practices can be both oppositional and can acquiesce to dominant political and ethico-aesthetic norms. For example, arts practices often try to create dominant cultural positions. Often arts programmes can attempt to do this by involving marginalized peoples and utilizing arts practices that are of interest to marginalized people or exploring themes that are topical in the lives of marginalized people. However, arts practices are also often politically conservative. There are major distinctions between the natures of the publics formed and addressed through diferent kinds of arts practices. This is but one example of the politics of style in making a public culture. In Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner explains the concept of an intellectual public as ‘the social space created by the relexive circulation of discourse’ (90). Warner further explains the importance of intellectual publics, stating: This dimension [the intellectual public] is easy to forget if we think only about a speech event involving a speaker and an addressee. In that localized exchange, circulation may seem irrelevant, extraneous. That is one reason why sender/receiver or author/reader models of public culture are so misleading. No single text can create a public. Nor can a single voice, a single genre, even a single medium. All are insuicient to create the kind of relexivity we call a public, since a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter between discourse. (2002, 90) As ‘an ongoing space of encounter between discourse’ (2002, 90) the intellectual publics that mobilize Deleuzo-Guattarian and Butlerian theory typically encounter each other as antithetical to their own position. However, this is just one of a number of possible constructions of the space between these theories. As I have shown elsewhere (Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2009), and introduce above, DeleuzoGuattarian and Butlerian publics share some points of identiication, namely, an understanding of ways of being diferent in public. These respective scholarly communities are formed around interests in the politics of citationality, in matter and the politics of how things come to matter, in Israel and Palestine, in the politics of thought. These topics all provide possible spaces of encounter. Yet these intellectual publics are divided by the ways they are sexed. This is expressed in the politics of reading, the sexual orientations of the readers, and problem of thinking gender. Save for a few signiicant exceptions1 Deleuze scholars do not recognize the sex/gender distinction. That is, the argument that sex is a biological or material marking and gender is performative, or a set of learnt behaviours. For example, the collection published by Edinburgh University Press on Deleuze and Sex fails to distinguish between sex as an act, as a reproductive possibility, as a biological marking and gender as a vernacular and political performativity. This distinction between sex and gender is completely ignored and such a bold statement shows the role that editorial choice and, indeed, publishing house style have on shaping intellectual publics and giving value to theoretical debates. The book could be read as suggesting it might be unDeleuzian to bring such lines of inquiry together. The distinction between sex and gender has been a mainstay of feminist thought for so long, that to write on theoretical sexualization without employing the feminist distinction between sex and gender seems an anti-feminist act. Swarms, packs and Deleuze and Guattari in public Twenty years after their death, Deleuze and Guattari in public present as straight white men having debates about the ideas of other, usually dead, straight white men. Deleuze and Guattari in public present as middle class homosocial intimacy mediated through a masculinist philosophical intellectual public. There are occasional interventions made by women into this intellectual public – for example, those noted earlier and the inluential work of Grosz (1994), Keeling (2007), Braidotti (1996, 2000). Deleuze and Guattari’s work circulates in diferent social science and humanities disciplines in very different ways. Across these disparate methods for engaging Deleuze and Guattari’s intellectual resources, philosophers maintain an investment in the divides between what we might call the ‘sexed’ intellectual publics, respectively, surrounding Deleuze/Guattari and Butler. ‘Philosophy’, then, or doing philosophy 6 A. HICKEY-MOODY with Deleuze and Guattari, requires maintaining a divide been those with a sensitivity to the politics of gender performance and philosophers who read Deleuze sans gender, which really means they read Deleuze in relation to the thought of other dead, white, exclusively male philosophers. The intellectual publics that gather to respond to the works of these diferent theorists are more diferent than the arguments advanced in the work of the intellectuals themselves. The methodologies through which these arguments are developed are very diferent, are, respectively, Kantian and Hegelian, but I don’t agree that this is a reason to see the broader arguments as unequivocally incompatible. Examples that might be given of the incompatibility between Butler and Deleuze and Guattari include the fact that Butler looks at the production of sexed bodies and gender identities and, a crude reading of Deleuze and Guattari would suggest that they are not interested in gender or ‘molar’ identity categories. Further, Butler looks to examine the conditions for possibility that inform contemporary religious and sexual citizenship, whereas Deleuze and Guattari can be said to re-imagine how we think the prospect of relationality, not explain grounds on which it occurs. This being said, and indeed, the list could go on, Butler and Deleuze and Guattari both ofer accounts for the cultural value of diference and, speciically, the cultural value of being diferent in public. Deleuze and Guattari also ofer us a particular theory of public culture. Deleuze and Guattari are theorists of the swarm, the pack, the multiple and the multiplier. These collective nouns express diferent kinds of publics – they ofer means of thinking through animal publics, human publics, human-non-human aggregated publics. Deleuze and Guattari always think in terms of the (public) aggregate, or the private collective. They think and model relationality in publics. They explain the multiplicity of the unconscious as A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts, babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuareg. A multiplicity of wolves or jackals … All of these things are irreducible but bring us to a certain status of the formations of the unconscious. (1987, 8) Here, publics as multiplicities are the model for collective unconscious, and, as swarms, teams, nomadic tribes, material publics constitute a basic unit of activity in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. They go on to suggest that: Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people. A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is distributed according to crowd phenomena, …. in the form of molecular multiplicities. (1987, 8) The crowd as a libidinal drive, which features in the quote above, igures in the work of Deleuze and Guattari in many diferent ways. Here, the lived, potentially private singular of making love is already a public. The public at large directly produces the unconscious of the dividual. So, like Warner, and Berlant, Deleuze and Guattari consider the politics and afects of publics. The (largely masculinist philosophical) publics they draw to attention have just not yet made this connection. One of the essential characteristics of the dream of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man’s nose, the elements, determined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tissue, ceaselessly dance, grow and diminish. These variable distances are not extensive qualities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible, or ‘relatively indivisible’, in other words, they are not divisible below or above a certain threshold, they cannot diminish without their elements changing in nature. A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or: the wolf clan doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of Deulhs, under the direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge. (1987, 34) This descriptive passage illustrates the kinds of group subjectivity, the collective singular in Deleuze and Guattari’s work that operates thorough swarm logic, pack logic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Thinking and acting is always collective and always public. The following three fragments demand individual noting for this reason: A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. (1987, 264) The anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has nothing to do with the preferred, domestic and psychoanalytic individual. (1987, 270) CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 7 In any event, the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous position, whenever in a given space and animal is on the line or in the act of drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. (1987, 271) This passage goes on to illustrate pack logic which can also be anthropomorphized into public logic: bands are also undetermined by extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centres of the conjugal, familial, or State type, that make them pass into an entirely diferent form of sociability, replacing pack afects with family feelings or State intelligibilities. (1987, 271) I want to suggest that the intellectual publics surrounding Deleuze/Guattari and Butler are an example of what Deleuze and Guattari themselves call ‘pack fascism’ (1987, 271). An afective reading of both parties can show the development of a shared intellectual public, as both communities are concerned with understanding the politics of diference and the social and cultural signiicance of minoritarian diference. Such approaches are of particular value when thinking about the social and cultural significance of performers with disabilities and the kinds of public making their performance work achieves. Being diferent in public Neither Deleuze/Guattari nor Butler can be characterized as those who Foucault igures as ‘poor technicians of desire – psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom –who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack’ (1983, xii, xiii). Both Deleuze/Guattari and Butler make concepts that do things rather than simply advance critique. Schizoanalysis, the project of considering libidinal social lows and intercepting them, and the lesbian phallus, the idea that women can possess the primary psychoanalytic signiier of masculinity are core concepts advanced by these theorists that provide tools for both understanding how we might ‘do’ society and identity diferently, but also ofer purchase on the cultural value of those who are diferent. As concepts, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s lesbian phallus articulate the conviction that psychoanalytic models of power dominate the ways subjectivity is imagined and performed by individuals. Both concepts critique the role of psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural imaginaries, suggesting that this prominence is not a good thing and should be challenged. Part of this psychoanalytic model of subjectivity is the fantasy of psychic interiority, an assemblage of connections which reproduces an unconscious ‘closed of from’ contact with the real, closed in on itself. In opposition to this psychoanalytic production of the unconscious, schizoanalysis involves the production, release and airmation of lows of desire. This desiring-production occurs in the individual body, yet it also occurs in large social assemblages and machines. Here, it is not what desire represents that is of importance, but rather the ways in which lows of desire are organized, in relation to capitalism, within the socius. For those researching or working with disability, such lines of questioning provide fruitful lines of inquiry (see Rasmussen 2006; Hickey-Moody, Rasmussen, and Harwood 2008; Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2009). Such lines of questioning open up possibilities for understanding how the materiality of bodies are performative texts that restructure social lows. Disabled bodies re-machine ideas of ‘normalcy’, of desirability, of value. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari characterize capitalism as the social, material, psychic machine that ‘eats’ and recodes its own outsides. There is very little that cannot be ascribed capitalist value and, for the most part, art is a vector of a capitalist economy and system of production. Later, in What is Philosophy? art is characterized as that which makes an outside to capitalism. Art makes us think otherwise, and (like thought) is only able to be accessed by those who have the strength for it. Art here has a political function. Namely, the iniltration of the commodity form into our desires, our dreams, our libido, our materiality. If art does constitute an outside to market value, such other worlds are manifested by bodies whose materiality (or ‘natural’ state) refuses capitalist overcoding. Through examining the work of Candoco Dance and Restless Dance Theatre, I want to suggest that performance art can create probeheads for what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and O’Sullivan (2012) call proto-subjectivities; ‘untimely ictionings’ (O’Sullivan 2012) of a world yet to come. Butler’s lesbian phallus is a form of aesthetic refusal, a means through which a woman can refuse the position of being the penetrated 8 A. HICKEY-MOODY sexual body through penetrating a woman, or a tomboy girl or, for that matter, a man. In a similar manner to the way Butler shows we can refuse how certain sexual performances have become naturalized, Candoco Dance and Restless Dance Theatre problematize the ‘naturalization’ of dancing bodies as very particular kinds of bodies (Benjamin 1994). Through modelling the aesthetic of their performance practice on the bodies and lives of dancers with disabilities, these dance companies develop an aesthetic appreciation of being diferent in public. Candoco Dance and Restless Dance Theatre capture and press into being expressions of worlds in which bodies and embodiment can incite curiosity. Through making percepts, or perceptions of other worlds, that speak through afections of the spectator for an other, Candoco and Restless challenge and redeine how bodies (including the thinking and the dancing body) foster convivial communities of diversity and complexity. Both companies expressly create performance art through collaborative processes between disabled and non-disabled dancers. Restless frames itself as ‘a centre of excellence for disability ethos and practice’ (2010, online). Candoco views its work as ‘pushing the boundaries of contemporary dance’ in ways that ‘broaden people’s perception of what dance is and who can dance.’ Material proto-subjectivities, new assemblages of bodies, generate perceptions of other worlds and craft new economies of social value. As Candoco’s website states, ‘We want to excite by being daring, inspire by being excellent and question by being diverse’. Here we see, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, that there is no existence without co-existence, the necessity of being becomes a necessity of ‘being-with’ (Nancy 2002), a being-with that is a mutual exposure to one another and to diference. The art of being diferent in public, then, is part of the philosophy-art-science-machine through which dividuals are made subject to a world escaping the capitalist bleed, a world mediated by untimely art as a politics of resistance. Untimely art makes new publics (Habermas 1962) and calls forth the people yet to come, the socius not yet established. Art escaping the capitalist bleed is future oriented. It values diference. It makes its people, its subjects, through scrambling capitalist codes in a manifestation of untimeliness that is temporally and spatially modulated. The materiality of the body becomes part of an aesthetic compound that articulates new diferences and speaks to emerging images of thought: ways of thinking and being diferent in public. Creating a being of sensation in dance theatre is a material way of invoking the untimely, of conceptualizing bodies diferently. A public is called to attention to witness the power of diference to resonate with the liveness of the project of being diferent together. Disability, and the bodies of people with disabilities and impairments give rich meaning to the work of CandoCo and Restless Dance. The body, and compounds of bodies dancing, constitute texts that call audiences to attention and in so doing, extends bodies as complex intra-actions of the social, biological and afective. New materialist writers remind us that embodiment is a process of encounters, intra-actions with other bodies (Barad 2007). Manning, for example, explains: A body … does not exist – a body is not, it does. To sense is not simply to receive input – it is to invent … Sense perceptions are not simply ‘out there’ to be analyzed by a static body. They are body-events.’ Where ‘Bodies, senses, and worlds recombine to create (invent) new events. (2009, 212) Similarly, Braidotti (2000, 159) asserts that the ‘enleshed Deleuzian subject … is a folding-in of external inluences and, simultaneously, a unfolding outwards of afects. A mobile, enleshed memory that repeats. The Deleuzian body is ultimately an embodied memory’. This embodied memory takes on a new signiicance in relation to disability, as the cultural histories and modes of experience of many people with disabilities are primarily embodied. These knowledges are critical and ofer a politically signiicant advancement of the critique of ‘the medical model’ of disability undertaken during the early and mid-1990s, and the ‘social model’, particularly for the caring professions and those trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and schooling, inclusive performance ofers a means of cementing inclusive practices and achieveing the ‘integration’ and inclusion of disability into ‘mainstream’. Integrated dance theatre contributes what is lacking in the debates around the social model, namely, productive ways of moving beyond the challenges to abledness being grappled with in the routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers and caseworkers. Disability is a pragmatic exercise, but it is more than this. It is a way of making new afective scripts, social CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 9 meanings, ideas of bodies and value. Radical new models of abledness lourish in the arts and constitute the lived experience of many disability activists. CanDoCo and Restless redeine the boundaries of dance as physically based performance sourced in bodily capacity (in preference to disciplining the body into extant genres of ‘the dancing body’). Both companies integrate abled and disabled dancers and develop a performance aesthetic that is speciic to the bodies of dancers with disabilities. Here, the particularity of the body and the experiences it retains, collective embodied memories, and bodily intra-actions between dancers, form the matter of art. The materiality of this art also critiques capitalist productions and commodiication’s of the dancing body. I am inspired by the ways encounters with diferent forms of knowledge (art, philosophy, curriculum) can shift the techne of disability from its historically and continuingly oppressive ideation and practice into a techne of possibility. Aesthetics of diference The practice of sourcing aesthetics of disability within choreographic material requires more than pragmatic choreographic, structural principles. The performance of an acquired taste or artistic sensibility, sourcing aesthetics of disability as dance text is distinguishable from including a diverse skill base in a work. For example, by virtue of who a dancer is, they might perform a movement with a particular style. A twitch, an angularity of posture, a lean, an idiosyncratic movement of sorts may be included in a phrase to be performed by a number of dancers. Multiplied, somewhat de-personalized, idiosyncratic expressions cease to be articulations of disability and become part of the aesthetic force produced by a dance theatre work. In stark contrast to medical and sociological discourses of disability, within Restless and CanDoCo, the beings of sensation which inhabit integrated dance theatre texts are speciic to the bodies of the dancers and thus are a performance of the dancers’ personal and cultural histories. Furthermore, it is through the production of beings of sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 165, 177) that performers with disability deterritorialize medical and sociological discourses of disability and create space for the construction of imaginings of an open body. A glacial zone, in which dominant cultural assumptions surrounding bodies with disabilities are frozen and re-constructed, this sensory being that inhabits integrated dance theatre texts can be translated into thought as the idea of ‘an open body’ (Hickey-Moody 2009). This interstitial place of collective imagining is what Deleuze (1988, 49) has read as the space ‘between the body’s afection and idea, which involves the nature of the external body, and the afect, which involves an increase or decrease of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike’ (49). Between emotional, embodied afect and images in thought there is cognitive labour. The idea of an open body, a collective assemblage of corporeality that can be connected to in a range of diferent ways, is born of sensation produced through integrated dance theatre. The open body is the political and scholarly work of the aesthetic personae that populate integrated dance works. To revisit Deleuze and Guattari’s (1996, 177) what is philosophy, ‘Sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression’. Sensory becoming in integrated dance theatre most often entails identity negotiations and is a performance of certain ensemble dynamics. Corporeal and artistic becoming, respective practices of critical enmeshment, are irreducibly entwined in dance theatre, a forum in which corporeal change directly informs artistic product. When a performer leaves physical and conceptual territory which has become indigenous to their identity, or sense of self, when a performer inhabits a space and motion of ‘otherness’, this crafted movement beyond the self constitutes a becoming, a transformation in art, a speciic textual afect. The production of these afects is a critical enmeshment of a performer’s re-negotiation of their personal and corporeal limits and the zone of newness. Conclusion Engulfed by waves of afect, an audience becomes a swarm, a pack, it is moved and it moves public cultures. Disability can be felt and conigured diferently through performance. The aesthetics of 10 A. HICKEY-MOODY reimagining what a disabled body can do, or what a dancing body should be, not only constitute a practice of aesthetic activism but an aesthetic refusal of dominant body ideologies and capitalist codings of dance. Like Butler’s lesbian phallus that shows the ‘natural’ nature of sexed bodies can be reorganized, inclusive dance theatre shows us the ‘normal’ dancing body is a construction. This construction is one we have been taught to expect by capitalist codings of dance texts and bodies which construct very particular hierarchies of aesthetic value surrounding bodies. Schizoanalysis shows us there is always a possible outside to capitalist hierarchies and the work of CanDoCo and Restless Dance allows us to reshape the capitalist lows of desire attached to bodies. The work of being diferent in public undertaken by these companies makes publics and disrupts public cultures surrounding bodies, aesthetics and abilities. Through the work of Deleuze/Guattari and Butler, we can see how CanDoCo and Restless Dance exceed existing capitalist codings of bodies and ofer alternatives codings, modes of aesthetic refusal which create cultural economies open to the practice of being diferent in public. Note 1. Namely, those published in the Deleuze and Feminism collection edited by Claire Colebrook and featuring Alice Jardine, and thinkers such as Hannah Stark, Rosi Braidotti, Felicity Colman, Helen Palmer, Patricia McCormack and Beckie Coleman. Acknowledgement For M.B, with all my love. In the hope that one day you will be brave enough to let yourself be diferent in public. Disclosure statement No potential conlict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Anna Hickey-Moody is a lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney. 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