Performing Art and Its Pedagogy of the False

An extremist, political will to truth has been driven by pernicious falsifications in recent election campaigns in the United States and worldwide. The fake, post-truth logic of this nationalistic zeal slanders and defrauds the empirical research of art, and its pedagogical potential for thinking otherwise, by its retrograde purpose of making traditional understandings and foundational methodologies great again. In this article, the nostalgic resolve for epistemological predeterminations is positioned alongside Nietzsche’s concept of the will-to-truth, and Deleuze’s cinematic regime, powers of the false, to argue that artists and teachers create empirical truths by encountering the contingent events and circumstances of living in the world—not to be confused with baseless, petty lies or merely reproducing past representations. Within this adjacent positioning, art’s pedagogy of the false, and its destabilization of real world ascetic actualizations, will be conceptualized according to the experimentalism of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Deleuze’s regimes of cinematic narration.