Just(ice) Do It! re-membering the past through co-affective aesthetic encounters with Art/ History

Abstract

The article explores the possibilities of reconfiguring an Extended Curriculum Programmes history of art and design curriculum in a South African university of technology and examines whether critical arts-based pedagogical encounters can affect students and my own becoming. To this end, the paper describes and analyzes an art history pedagogical encounter that explores ways in which educators and students might respond to calls to decolonise the academy and work affirmatively with difference(s) both within classroom encounters and society at large. The paper draws on the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Bracha Ettinger, three feminist theorists who move beyond binary othering and explore notions of both/and conceptions of difference(s) and share a common understanding of subjectivity as partial, co-affecting and coemerging. The entanglement between the afore mentioned theories brings together posthuman(ist) theories of diffraction and Ettingers human(ist) matrixial theory that emerges out of her psychoanalytic and aesthetic practices. Rather than position them as incompatible, it is my hope that by reading them through each other, new possibilities for shifting the binaries between, to quote Thiele (2014: 203), what supposedly counts as posthumanism and humanism respectively may emerge.