Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 30
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multiple visions of politics and culture that promote community, sustainability,
and diverse ways of knowing, while challenging the dominance of Eurocentric
structures. I am struck by how the philosopher Guattari (1992/1995) wrote of
creative acts that demonstrate transversality by crossing boundaries between
systems, and by how the feminist scholar Donna Haraway (2016) encourages
interconnections between humans, animals, nature, and technology. She wrote,
“I admit I am drawn most by the collaborations that entangle people, critters, and
apparatuses” (p. 129). In addition, the post-humanist authors Eduardo Kohn, Cary
Wolf, and Jane Bennett help me see vibrancy in more-than-human ethnologies
and in every encounter as expressions of something new. These examples invite
narrative therapy to include transpersonal, relational, multistoried accounts that
are alchemical, transforming the world rather than just ourselves.
For Deleuze, the life force manifests in endless variety through all potential acts of
creation. Foucault (1970) emphasizes the importance of understanding
knowledge as interactive contingencies rather than as a study of static
representations. Our Western approaches, which rely on identity and form, can
be transmuted into art, liberated from the materialism of objecthood. Our clients
can engage in a creative process, freed from essentialist selves constrained by
reductive stories of causality and determinism. In a state of constant change, time
can be non-linear and simultaneous, surpassing the conventions of mechanical
utility, fixed outcomes, or client histories. The feminist philosopher Elizabeth
Grosz (2007) writes about Deleuze, “Life can be understood as the becomingartistic of the material world; and art can be understood as the mode of making
matter live…” (p. 300). I think of the artist Wassily Kandinsky (1911/2008), who
describes the spiritual vitality in art that goes beyond the material. He writes,
“Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the
existence of something alive” (p. 50). Art brings unseen stories to life as part of
the animate world.
With these goals in mind, I want to share a few artists’ works that help me
reimagine narrative therapy’s approach to space, time, vitality, and identity. I
begin with Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room.
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
www.journalnft.com
