Postmetaphysical Vision: Art Education’s Challenge in an Age of Globalized Aesthetics1 (A Mondofesto)2

The Studies in Art Education Invited Lecture is presented at the annual meeting of the National Art Education Association. Each year the presenter is elected from a highly competitive group of nominated scholars by the Studies in Art Education Editorial Board.In 2007, the lecture was presented by Professor jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta. Professor jagodzinski has published widely and is recognized for his provocative critique of culture and society. His writings address issues associated with Lacanian psychoanalysis, ethics, politics, the environment, and sexuality and gender among others.Doug BlandySenior Editor0.0 Designer Capitalism1.0 Choreographed Modulation1.1 Art and its education in whatever forms they are practiced within capitalist economies today are embedded within a society of control-what I call designer capitalism. This is my fundamental starting point in keeping with my loyalties to The Social Theory Caucus so that I may project the potential of art practices and their education that challenge this edifice. By a society of control I follow its general description as outlined by Deleuze (1995) and Guattari's (1984) understanding of capital as a "machinic phylum" where the freedom of movement and the ability of free choice have become illusionary democratic privileges. Leisure travel and materialist consumerism as production define such freedoms. They are illusionary in the sense that their exercise is subject to password controls, capital, privilege and the ability to promote oneself. What appears as an open society is composed of thresholds, boundaries, and gateways, all open and free for movement provided the holder has the right pass-be it a passport, a PIN number, credit card, degree, drivers license, and so on. This open-access designed environment is paradoxically structured by in/visible barriers that keeps ' 1 ' in or out.3 ' 1 ' is further encouraged or discouraged from entering spaces, buying and producing objects because of prohibitive costs, exclusivity, or high taxes. The trace of movement that '1' leaves in this supposedly open and free environment, what Deleuze and Guattari (1977, p. 39) called the "surplus-value of flow," is then used for market designer research as detection, registration, and then feedback to set up more alluring portholes to pass through and pay, thus redesigning the environment to increase profit margins, but more to the point-to consolidate power.1. 2 Under designer capitalism the liquid self is potentially no longer branded'by color, gender, sex-orientation, moral judgment, class and so on, but through market labels and customer loyalty. Traditional identity distinctions are no longer useful, but a hindrance, and are limiting factors for profit gain. Everyone is meant to be equal in a neO-liberal democracy provided they can pay as they pass the turn-gates of die allowable portholes in the free space of globalized capitalism. Everything becomes the same so that it can be exchanged so as to become different through exchange value. The machinic force of designer capitalism that relies on flows (codes) doesn't bother itself with identity politics any longer. It does so only to exploit and cater to difference as a niche market-like the Colors of Benetton. The skin of The Simpsons has become the right color-alien. The alien is the perfect trope for designer capitalism-one of non-identity, the global citizen, a hybrid hyped-stereotype ideally composed as an electronic digitalized body of accumulated information as to its movement, behavior, and ability to spend and move about in selected environments-like video game avatars whose designed environments (levels and plateaus) they dwell in are the phantasmagorical fantasy spaces, the mise-en-abyme effects that materially expose how designer capitalism attempts to manage and regulate the free spaces of the social order. The micro-power ubiquitous throughout control societies repeats itself within video game environments we all love to play where the same paradoxical 'freedom' of the self is being exercised through interactivity with the 'joystick' manipulating an avatar. …