Performing The Refrain of Art’s Prosthetic Pedagogy

Performing Out-of-Joint

On that particular day, Beverly entered the art room together with her classmates, Room 502 at the High School; she took her seat at one of the large worktables, as she would typically do; and waited until the bell rang for class to begin. She brought two books with her, their bindings threadbare and several of their pages seemingly dog-eared. She placed them deliberately on the drawing table in front of her, as did her classmates the items that they too had brought for class discussion in response to the simple task that I had assigned a few days earlier:

Perform a visual pun with found objects and materials.

The purpose of our art activity was exploratory and experimental: to study and discuss what would potentially happen in between and among the disparate and disjunctive characteristics of their puns, their paradoxical functioning, and what differential images, ideas, and actions would materialize. The performance of a pun constituted a double entendre, a mode of address that renders linear understandings and language out-of-joint to expose, examine, and transform their spectral hauntings of cultural assumptions and representations into ways of seeing, thinking, and doing differently: that is, a multiplicity. The experiment was part of a larger conversation that we were having about the emergence of conceptual art and performance art in the late 1960s and early 1970s to their most recent manifestations. Namely, how artists’ of these movements challenge of social and historical representations of art coincided with those of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement of that period.

One of Beverly’s classmates brought a chunk of broken asphalt with a bright yellow, slightly faded, double line across its black gritty surface that he found on the shoulder of a road near his home. In it, he jammed the tines of a stainless steel fork and proclaimed: “fork-in-the-road.” Another classmate re-enacted Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966-1967). After filling the cavity of his mouth with water from a glass jar, he pursed his lips, then tilted his head slightly upward to calibrate his aim, and discharged a jet of water that arced into that same glass jar that he had returned to the table in front of where he was sitting.

Yet another classmate brought a sheet of stickers to class, the kind from which children like to peel images and attach to their skin, lunch boxes, or any other surfaces of their liking. He proceeded to lift an image of a cow and chicken from their waxy backing and placed them to one side. With the thumb and index finger of one hand, he held up the negative silhouette of the cow and, with the other hand, at a distance of approximately 8″, he held up that of the chicken. In doing so, the alignment of both negative silhouettes served as viewfinders through which he invited us to gaze as he announced: “the-chicken-as-seen-through-a-cow” from one perspective and “the cow as seen through a chicken” from the other.

Then, when it was Beverly’s turn to present her experiment, she walked to a table at the front of the room and having garnered everyone’s attention, she placed one of her two books atop the other. Unlike the other students’ performances in which the materials and objects comprising their puns were obvious, Beverly’s were not. We were perplexed that even after closer examination, her classmates and I could not make out the books’ faded, illegible titles, until, of course, she informed us that at the bottom was Webster’s Dictionary, and on top Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was then, upon observing our collective puzzlement that she announced a “play-on-words.”

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I offer the above narrative about the pun experiment that occurred in my High School art class as a prelude to my introductory essay for this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) in which 10 art education scholars were invited to respond to The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice (Garoian, 2013). Each of the contributing scholars was asked to perform “out-of-joint” much like my students’ visual pun experiments:

Position your research and creative work adjacent to The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art to explore and experiment their betweenness; their multiple lines of flight; and, their accidental encounters for potential unforeseen and unknown alliances as they are read and understood through each other.

The coincidental encounters and alliances that my proposal invited the contributing author’s to consider in this special issue of QI are consistent with the premise of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art insofar as their contiguous adjacency and evocative engagement between and among our differing scholarly perspectives constitutes research and practice as a dynamic, performative assemblage. While the word prosthesis typically invokes artificial devices and augmentations, my use of the metaphor constitutes playing with and playing off such reductive cultural constructs to conceptualize prosthesis as an irreducible metaphor of embodied learning that resists intellectual closure and challenges representationalism. In doing so, I argue in the book that the exploratory, experimental, and improvisational processes of art research and practice constitute prosthetic ways of learning that unsettle and render socially and historically constructed assumptions and representations out-of-joint to enable differential ways of seeing and thinking to emerge. Hence, in The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art,

I explore prosthesis as a metaphor of embodiment in art-based research to challenge the utopian myth of wholeness and normality in art and the human body . . . I propose prosthetic epistemology and prosthetic ontology as embodied knowing and being in the world to challenge the disabling, oppressive prosthetics of mass mediation, [and those of] academic, institutional, and corporate assumptions and sedimentations. (Garoian, 2013, p. 19, emphasis in original)

Before moving on to each of the scholars’ contributions, in what follows in this essay I characterize reading and writing “through each other” as an incipient occurrence of differential thinking and learning that suspects, complicates, and resists synthetic closure and bifurcations of dualistic understanding. In physics, such differentiation is constituted through oscillation: an undulating movement of interference through a medium that occurs by transferring energy from one particle or point to another without causing any permanent displacement of the medium (Free Dictionary, [Online]). In regard to the research and practice of art, the interference of oscillation has to do with coincidental, contiguous, and contingent encounters and alliances, what David Wills (1995) describes as

a function of prosthesis. It takes a fact of shared space, the contiguity of two or more differences, and narrates their relation as a coincidental event. But that shared space remains impossible to delimit; for as long as every relation is a relation to difference, what is a close or distant relation cannot be rigorously determined. (p. 42, emphasis added)

Consider a fork-in-the-road, the artist-as-fountain, a cow and chicken as seen through each other, and a play-on-words as oscillatory and prosthetic. Their conceptual displacements are coincidental, contiguous, and contingent as Wills describes. Their dissimilar images, ideas, and actions encounter in unpredictable ways and create a multiplicity of unexpected, unending alliances. Such spatial performativity constitutes what Victor Turner (in Carlson, 1996) refers to as anti-structural, liminal events (as opposed to normative structural operations) that enable students to “think about how they think in propositions that are not in cultural codes but about them” (p. 23). Such entangled thinking constitutes a “dialogical performance,” according to Dwight Conquergood (1985), which “struggles to bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have conversations with one another” (p. 9). Hence, inviting dialogical engagement between The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art and the contributing authors’ respective cultural works, as they are experienced through each other, constitutes “an open-ended performance, resisting conclusions and seeking to keep interrogation open” (Carlson, 1996, p. 31).

The concept of spatial contiguity as suggested by Arthur Koestler’s (1975) characterization of what a pun does, or how it performs, constitutes a “sudden bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices [that] results in an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one associative context to another” (p. 59). Hence, the performance of a pun as “strings of thought tied together by a purely acoustic knot,” which is cited in the first epigraph at the beginning of this essay, is bisociative inasmuch as it is constituted through a juxtaposition of two or more contiguous concepts within the same space of thought, not a dualism, not a dialectic, “not their fusion in an intellectual synthesis—to which, by their very nature, they do not lend themselves” (p. 352). Koestler’s use of “acoustic knot” to describe the transfer and alliances between and among incompatible ideas suggests the vibratory “soundings” of an agglomeration where each particle or component of the knot assemblage is in counterpoint with and affecting all of the others. Such an ideational acoustics that describes the incompossible sonority of a pun’s betweenness is analogous to a child beginning to hum, to sketch, and demarcate a tune, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (D&G) The Refrain. Humming, singing under her/his breath, the child constitutes oscillation insofar as it interferes, calms, and stabilizes the chaotic logic and fearsome circumstances of an unfamiliar, strange experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The rhythmic regularity of the refrain’s territorial acoustics is that from which order out of chaos is immanent.

In their characterization of the refrain, D&G begin by describing its “territorial, territorial assemblage” as consisting of “three aspects of a single thing . . . it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes, sometimes, sometimes” (p. 312). Sometimes the refrain proceeds from the indeterminacies and disorder of chaos toward the threshold of territorial assemblage where making the strange familiar is initiated as infra-assemblage. The prefix infra-, in this instance, means, “under, beneath” suggesting the stirring of an ordering process about to begin, which relates with Koestler’s characterization of bisociative thought as subversive, “underground games” (pp. 178-187). As mentioned above, D&G’s example of this aspect of the refrain consists of “a child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath” (p. 311, emphasis added), and in doing so, with tentative song, temporarily undermines and stabilizes the fear of what threatens. The singing has a calming affect albeit one that is yet fragile and prone to collapse.

Sometimes, however, the refrain is constituted as an intra-assemblage. Here the prefix intra- constitutes interiority, a pulling away, selecting, eliminating, and extracting: a mining of differential components from chaos, “rhythmic markers” to create a potent structure, a home-space that keeps the forces of chaos at bay (Coonfield, 2009, p. 10). In other words, having experienced and gained confidence and composure through the performative power of giving voice to the unknown, “A child [knowingly] hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 311). And, sometimes the refrain is constituted as an inter-assemblage. In this occurrence, the prefix inter- has to do with betweenness, an opening of passages to potentialities that enable reaching out to create yet unforeseen, unknown encounters and alliances. D&G contend that it is through the threefold process of refrain—infra-assemblage, intra-assemblage, and inter-assemblage—“that Milieus and Rhythms are born” (p. 313), and from which creative agency is possible within the incompossible circumstances of chaos.

A child’s singing for comfort from the chaos of indeterminacy and incompatibility constitutes infra-assemblage that complements the acoustic soundings, indeterminacies, and incompatibilities of Koestler’s bisociative thought. While skeptical, my art students relished in the speculative play of the pun experiment: its perpetual repetition of difference, its uncanny strangeness, its risk-taking dare, its unpredictability, its disequilibrium, and its making of sense a never ending, interminable process; all of which constituted a learning event that was unexpected within the overly determined, familiar context of their education and schooling. ¹ In other words, they delighted in the impertinence of the experiment insofar as it resisted representational relevance. Indeed, given that schooling tends to be coercive, more often than not, students engage in “not-learning . . . the will to refuse knowledge,” which is confused as their failing to learn, according to Herbert Kohl (1995, p. 6). As many of my art students were considered misfits both for their academic performance and social status in the school, the pun experiment constituted “not-not” learning, a double negative (Schechner, 1985, p. 113) that allowed for skepticism while attending to academic forms of knowledge and understanding.

Perhaps, on an intuitive level, my art students understood that schooling constructed them as actors to role-play academic knowledge similar to dummies that merely mimic the machinations of a ventriloquist. Jean Sartre (1956) refers to such acting for an audience as standing on ceremony. Whether playing at being a student, or any other social role, the subject exits “only in representation,” a condition of “nothingness” that comes from acting in “bad faith” insofar as it reduces the desires and complexities of the self to measured and predictable outcomes (pp. 59-60). In comparison, Turner (1996) characterizes persons, like my students, who are engaged in playful exploration, experimentation, and improvisation as irreducible “threshold people . . . liminal entities [who] are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (p. 95).

The students’ gaining awareness of and confidence with the indeterminate, elusive forces of chaos as a resource ² for creative agency constituted intra-assemblage inasmuch as it emerged from what they extracted from and attempted making sense of their experiments. “Yet another pun,” one student bellowed suddenly realizing the disjuncture between our pun experiments and the academic expectations of school. Through his and the other students’ thought-experiments emerged a multiplicity of thought-experiments, inter-assemblage from which emerged multiple others as we discussed the incompatibilities of fork-in-the-road, the artist-as-fountain, a cow and chicken as seen through each other, and a play-on-words as potentialities with which to transform academic expectations into creative agential forces.

Pertaining to reading and understanding complex and contradictory images, ideas, and actions “through each other,” D&G describe the process of the refrain in terms of “a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction”:

Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu [ideational situation] serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieu pass into one another; they are essentially communicating [rhythmically]. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 313, emphasis added)

To clarify, “milieu” is a technical term that D&G use to characterize the vibratory, provisional middle between disjunctive ideational fragments, and rhythm is the incommensurable acoustic sonority and counterpoint communicated between and among the milieus through transcoding and transduction. For example, Beverly’s play-on-words, a playing with words, and being played by words from which the students’ multiple other conceptualizations of the pun emerged, may be considered milieus, ideational situations while the interminable occurrences of sonority in-between them constitutes what Massumi (2002) refers to as the “processual rhythm of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 217). To further differentiate milieus from rhythms, D&G write,

Action occurs in a milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or Zwielicht. Haecceity. To change milieus, taking them as you find them: Such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown, takeoff. (pp. 313-314)

Hence, while milieus are constituted by the coming-together of contiguous disjunctive images and ideas, rhythm is what resists their territorial enclosure. In doing so, the refrain’s rhythmic repetition is a vibrant, irreducible process of perpetual differentiation performed through transcoding and transduction of milieus’ dissimilar “components as melodies in counterpoint, each of which serves as a motif for another” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 314).

For Derrida (1994) and Deleuze (1994), the motif of counterpoint that my students experienced with their pun experiments would constitute chronological time-out-of-joint; that is, time in the present as counterpoint between the social and historical specters of representation and what has yet to come in the future. This reference to disjointed time that both philosophers borrow from Shakespeare, occurs when Hamlet laments, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” (Shakespeare, 1599-1601, I.V. 935-945). The expression refers to Hamlet’s succession to the throne being usurped by his uncle Claudius who murdered his father the King. The ghost of his father haunts Hamlet to avenge his murder and to claim his rightful place on the throne. Obsessed yet confused whether to carry out the insistence of the ghost, Hamlet finds himself dithering in a state of contradiction: time is out of joint.

For Deleuze (1994), time-out-of-joint constitutes “a ‘caesura,’ [an interruption] at which beginning and end [of chronological time] no longer coincide” (p. 89). Instead of the sequential and circular unfolding of time’s historical content, it is time per se that oscillates, unfolds, comes undone, and in doing so, attains “a pure and empty form . . . the ground [of historical time] has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come [difference] to return” rather than the sameness of what happened in the past (p. 91). Time was indeed rendered out-of-joint by Beverly’s constative naming “a play on words,” which described the situation, the grounding of her two books while, concurrently, her description flipped into performative action Austin (1962) when she revealed the actual identity of the books. In doing so, her pun experiment constituted a refrain that incited a groundless multiplicity of accidental encounters and alliances, milieus, and rhythms of association and conceptualization to emerge. More to the point, by way of Beverly’s compelling experiment, we were all “played by,” implicated, and enfolded in Hamlet’s haunting conundrum; its abrupt transfer of our thinking between “the play” and “the dictionary,” while repetitive, turned time upon itself thus initiating a return of difference, the yet-to-come, and not the return of the same.

Later in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s lamenting soliloquy echoes the existential paradox “To be, or not to be, that is the question . . . ”, which is a refrain that has haunted the human mind since the playwright authored the verse. Riffing on Hamlet’s question, Derrida (1994) performs yet another iteration of the refrain to explore the betweenness of “being” (ontology) and “not being” (hauntology): the latter, a neologism, in contiguity with the former. Being, the revenant of persistent historical representations, and not being, the apparitional yet-to-come (consider Deleuze’s time as an empty form) when considered through each other open an incipient, prosthetic space of possibility from which a multiplicity of encounters and alliances materialize seeing and thinking differently. Such proximity and liminality constitutes paradox: a “maintain[ing] together that which does not hold together” (p. 17).

Maintaining hauntological repetition together with ontological repetition is not to undermine, marginalize, or suggest the end of history, but to initiate a processual rhythm of being and not being from which the becoming-other of history is possible. In other words, Derrida’s positioning ontology out-of-joint with hauntology does “not [suggest] a time whose joinings are negated, broken, mistreated, dysfunctional, dis-adjusted, according to a dys- of negative opposition and dialectical disjunction, but a time without certain joining or determinable conjunction” (p. 18). Such vibrant proximity that repels determinable conjunction occurs when ontology and hauntology are not opposed dualistically, but experienced through each other spectrally. As Beverly and her classmates performed their disjunctive experiments; their milieus shifting rhythmically through one another enabled a spectral conjuring of manifold ways of thinking differently. Consider their fork-in-the-road, the artist-as-fountain, a cow and chicken as seen through each other, and a play-on-words. The playing out-of-joint in these ways constituted being-played-by and playing-with that Derrida (1994) refers to as “paradoxical incorporation” (p. 126) and Deleuze and Guattari. (1983) “disjunctive synthesis” (p. 227).

Refrain: a fork-in-the-road, the artist-as-fountain, a cow and chicken as seen through each other, and a play-on-words.

The sonorous, oscillating entanglements suggested by Koestler’s acoustic knot, D&G’s milieus and rhythms of the refrain, and Derrida’s hauntological predicaments resonate with Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of diffraction, a performative process through which she calls “into question the basic premises of representationalism” (p. 28). For Barad, representationalism is constituted by reflection, a mirror image that repeats sameness, that which is already assumed, through external observation and consideration. Diffraction is what she describes as “marking differences from within and as part of an entangled state” (p. 89), which is also characteristic of the entangled, indeterminant movements of thought in Koestler’s bisociative space, the multiple lines of flight in D&G’s refrain and rhizomatic assemblage, and Derrida’s hauntological conjurings.

Basing her research on Neils Bohr’s question of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics, Michel Foucault’s critique of representationalism, and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Barad points to wave behavior as the constituent performativity of diffraction, that is, in terms of its involutionary process of enfolding differentiation: “the way waves combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading out of waves when they encounter an obstruction” (p. 28). Considering that performance in the general use of the term does not preclude perpetual enactments of ideological dominance, diffraction constitutes thinking in terms of its performativity: as an “entangled ontology” of perpetual differentiation.

Diffraction, performances of linguistic entanglement, occurred through my students’ pun experiments where it became evident that, as Barad writes, “mere spoken or written words [or academic knowledge] forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said” (p. 146, emphasis added). As in my students’ experiments, diffracting images and ideas are not positioned externally or hierarchically to interact with one another, but engaged with one another through intra-action in materializing “discursive phenomena” (p. 89). Consider the intra-actions of “fork” with “road,” “artist” with “fountain,” “cow” with “chicken,” “Hamlet” with “dictionary,” and all of what such out-of-joint thinking enables. The phenomena that materializes from between and among, according to Barad, is not constituted as independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties, but as inseparable ontological units of entangled intra-acting “agencies” (p. 139).

The neologism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies [images, ideas, objects] that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. It is important to note that the “distinct” agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements. (p. 33)

In other words, given that diffraction is an intra-active, relational process, what materializes from between and among its distinct agencies (milieus in D&G) constitutes Barad’s “agential realism”: a pragmatic, non-representational realism of thought and action that “mattered” to my students as it materialized different ways of thinking about art, schooling, and their lives through the relational encounters and alliances of their distinct agencies—their intra-activity with each other, with the objects and materials of their experiments, with the larger context of school, and of living in the world where discourse can either constrain or enable what is being said and done.

Pertaining to prosthetic performativity and its various permutations that I have discussed above, in the following essays of this special issue of QI, each contributing author has positioned her/his research and practice adjacent with The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art to explore their coincidental, contiguous, and contingent encounters and alliances. In “The Métier of Living: Art, Genocide and Education,” John Baldacchino re-reads my characterization of “prosthetic synthesis” and, in doing so, raises concern that its “instrumentalization” of the Hegelian dialectic “risks pedagogical and aesthetic ossification.” To resist such ideological closure, Baldacchino inverts my use of the metaphor to argue instead for “synthetic prostheses,” which constitutes art education as a process of “unlearning” that enables exiting the assumptive predicaments of art, education, and history.

In “Embodied Homelessness: The Pros/thesis of Art Research,” Susan Finley explores the adjacencies and contiguous relationships between and among The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art—her research and practice as an artist and scholar—and the personal, lived expressions of the poor, street youth, tent communities, and sheltered and unsheltered children. In doing so, she argues that the pedagogical potentialities of such contiguity, constituted within the prosthetic, liminal spaces of artmaking, can transform the “fractured lives” of “homeless-otherness.”

jan jagodzinski, in “The Prosthetic Space of Art: Taking the ‘Visual’ out of Visual Art,” engages The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art through several thought-experiments. Basing his inquiry on Derridean and Deleuzian poststructural theories, jagodzinski challenges and disrupts the preoccupation with visual representation in art and its education. Contrary to representationalism, he argues that the prosthetic space and time of art is constituted paradoxically and out-of-joint, a complex and contradictory performative occurrence from which a multiplicity of non-representational “images of thought” emerge differentially.

In his essay “On the Education of Art-based Researchers: What We Might Learn from Charles Garoian,” Donal O’Donoghue performs a “prosthetic reading” of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art to explore the intellectual and creative potentialities that prosthetic liminality and contingency suggest for welcoming “newcomers” to the field of art-based research. O’Donoghue raises important questions about the conviviality of prosthetic pedagogy toward art-based research, namely, how its spaces of possibility can accommodate a diversity of researchers’ ideas and intellectual traditions.

In her writing performance, “Breathing Photography: Prosthetic Encounters in Research-Creation,” Kimberly Powell creates a prosthetic space of embodiment where the intimacies that she experienced from her son’s birth, and her mother’s dying are brought together in contiguous relation with the material proximities of carbon photographic printing. The multiple encounters and alliances that occur from their betweenness constitute for Powell an experimental “field of relations’ from which “research-creation” emerges.

In “Swarm Intelligence as a Prosthetic Capacity for Self-Adaptation and Social Intervention,” James Haywood Rolling, Jr. characterizes the pedagogical capacity of prosthetic space in terms of an incommensurable relational configuration that is a swarm. Given its affinity with differential alliances, Rolling argues that knowledge that materializes from a swarm constitutes identity as an interminable “de/re/constructive process.”

Christopher Schulte’s “Researching Anna’s Drawing: The Pedagogical Composition of Concern,” tells of his research encounter with a 3-year-old student and her drawing, and the relational learning process that occurred between them. For Schulte, Anna’s drawing, and children’s art in general, constitutes a prosthetic, compositional space that “concerns” thinking “with and through” the entangled “curiosities and experiences” between students and teachers.

For Christine Marmé Thompson, “Prosthetic Imaginings and Pedagogies of Early Childhood Art,” occur as “fluid performative events” from which remarkable images and ideas materialize when children engage in the playful research of artmaking. Contrary to romanticized notions of children’s art as emanating from purity and wholesomeness, Thompson conceptualizes children’s evocative images and stories as prosthetically constituted by the “personal, social, and material circumstances” of their lives.

In her essay, “Reactivating ARTIUM’s Collection: The Time-image and Its Mode of Address as Prosthetic Pedagogy in Museums,” Laura Trafí-Prats writes about the Laboratory of logics of vision, a gallery installation that she created in which she and her students positioned the entangled, “difficult knowledge” of their memories and cultural histories in contiguous relation with contemporary works of art from ARTIUM Museum’s collections to perform paradoxical modes of pedagogical address.

With their essay, “The Rhizome of the Deaf Child,” Joseph Michael Valente and Gail M. Boldt examine the pathologizing assumptions that essentialize pediatric cochlear implantations in deaf children while downplaying the diverse performativities that constitute communications within deaf culture. In challenging reductive, binary representations of normality/abnormality and deaf/hearing, Valente and Boldt argue that the liminalities and contingencies of prosthetic space constitute communicative competence and learning as anomalous, relational, and differential ways of being in the world.

Hence, in that shared, in-between space with no beginning and no end, the distinct agencies of the authors’ essays and my book, while out-of-joint, perform intra-actively with and through each another. In doing so, the authors’ insightful and evocative narratives, having materialized through their willingness to engage in such speculative play and scholarship, are constituted as the prosthetic potentialities of art research and practice: its sonorous refrain where every relation is a relation to difference.

And again: a fork-in-the-road, the artist-as-fountain, a cow and chicken as seen through each other, and a play-on-words.

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