Sublime Acts: Desire in the Studio IDEA Symposium Interior: A State of Becoming September 2012 Sublime Acts: Desire in the Studio Marissa Lindquist 1 and Jill Franz 1 1 School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, m.lindquist@qut.edu.au, j.franz@qut.edu.au Introduction When we design, we desire. An accumulation of literature focusing upon desire and creativity in recent years underscores an inherent need to question normalised processes of design production and reconsider the body and its affects as agents of change. McWilliam (1996), Pignatelli (1999), O’Loughlin et al. (1998), support Michalino Zembylas’ (2007) call to develop “the sort of curriculum which would foster [a] pedagogy of desire...enhancing opportunities for emotional and bodily expression, helping students to develop sensory intimacy with their world, and counteracting the tendency to de-sensualise and commodify the human relation to reality.” (O'Loughlin, in Zembylas 2007:342). Whilst Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘immanent force’ and ‘continuous becoming’ often form the centre of their call, it is the disruptive forces of irregularity, obscurity and uncertainty that they point to as a means of transgressing territories and finding new ways to corporeally engage with otherness. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in positing their ideas of bodies as ‘productive machines’ of desire ask: What sort of desires do modes of production require? What kind of resistances does this production come up against? Finally, what are the conditions for new ways of living and desiring? (Burke, 2003). Similarly, Zembylas queries how desire can be pedagogically useful as that which produces and seduces imaginations instead of being associated simply with repression and coercion? (Zembylas 2007:331). In sum, what mobilises desire? It can be argued that what lies beneath Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘immanent force’, is the ‘irresistible force’ fundamental to Edmund Burkes (1757) Romantic notions of the ‘sublime’. While it appears that the former views desire as the immanent force that produces creativity, novelty and change, it is an initial ‘blockage’ or disruption in experiencing the romantic sublime that mobilises forces of desire. How can we thus posit the short-circuit, power-surge or even perhaps ‘virus’ within the ‘productive machine’ to interrupt, challenge and precipitate production? A postmodern interpretation of the sublime, such as Patricia Yaeger’s (1989) ‘feminine sublime’ engages with the disruptive and irresistible forces [desire] found within the traditional romantic sublime. Rather than transcending corporeal humanity through existential acts, the feminine sublime monopolises this disruption to foster a horizontal sublime, which reaches towards humanity, spreading itself out into multiplicity, transposing and appropriating (Yaeger, 1989; Wawrzinek, 2008) through inter-corporeal experiences and explorations. Acknowledging the role of ‘disruption/blockage’ as a key agent in the mobilisation of distinct modes of desire, this paper takes Burke and Yaegers ‘sublime’ as a critical lens to review a first year interior program posited around the body. The paper highlights how the students’ desires, including the desire to learn in and/or about interior design, together with the teachers’ desires, and finally the embodiment of ‘desirous processes’ within the program represent an overarching pedagogical ‘hinge’ (Ellsworth 2005). Rather than a point of beginning, the start of first year is thus seen and experienced as a threshold informing a new rhythm to an already underway process of becoming.