Imaginative Interdependence: Imagination, Speculation and Aesthesis

Abstract

This paper addresses the importance of creativity, speculative imagination and the production of novelty in pedagogic practices in art education and art practice. These terms refer to always incomplete assemblages or agencements of experiencing. Whitehead's ideas on imagination, speculation and propositions are linked with Stengers's work on speculation and the cosmic adventure. The paper proceeds to consider the notion of imaginative interdependence as a key leitmotif, illustrated by Haraway's (2016, p. 14) discussion of the children's game ‘cats cradle.’ Imaginative interdependence is then aligned with the notion of ‘agencement’ to move away from viewing practice or imagination as processes initiated by a prior or transcendent subjectivity, what we might call the phenomenological subject. In contrast, practice and imagination are conceived as emerging within agencements, interdependent relations, considered as cosmic adventures often involving human and non-human participants. Such adventures are explored and problematised in the context of art education. Questions arise involving the contrast between the dispositifs of institutionalised art education and local agencements of art practice that may not conform. The notion of aesthesis is introduced to explore these contrasts as well as that pertaining to the contrast between established conventions of art education and the rupturing force of art's education that may open new modes of sensing and becoming. To conclude the paper builds upon the notion of agencements of imaginative interdependence in the context of art education by emphasising the importance of aesthesis and Deleuze and Guattari's call for a new earth and a people to come.