ALEXIS ANJA KALLIO
Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (Australia)
July 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (4): 140–59 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.4.140
Abstract: Against a backdrop of intensifying geopolitical tensions, anti-intellectual rhetoric, documented instances of censorship, academic corporatisation and political interference, this article examines how the work of editors and reviewers might offer critical and creative entry points to disrupt the articulation of fascism in music education, academic publishing, and society more broadly. Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s understandings of (micro)fascism as intricately related to desire, I report the findings of a content analysis of music education journals and affiliate organisation descriptions and mission statements, through which articulated desires for the field and desires for society coalesce as centres of significance and subjectification. By insisting upon the synthesis and cohesion of these desires, editors and reviewers risk curtailing the experimental capacity of the field, reinforcing the very capitalist and neoliberal tides we so often aim to work against. Outlining a doubled editorial responsibility-for and responsibility-in music education, I argue that editors and reviewers need to interrogate their own ethico-political decision-making in relation to these disciplinary apparatuses and work productively within the tension that always-already exists between fascism and revolution.
Keywords: Academia, Deleuze and Guattari, editing, ethics, fascism, micro-fascism
The businesses (yes, businesses) of academic work are and always have been entangled with geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge production. These hierarchies have long established the United States and regions of Western Europe as central structures through economic influence, onto-epistemological domination, linguistic injustices,[1] and sociocultural stratifications that pervade understandings of music, education, research, and publishing (Aróstegui 2025; Kertz-Welzel 2021; Krawczyk and Kulczycki 2021). These central structures too entangle with the flows of capitalism and neoliberalism that shape the fields of music education and academia, delimiting not only what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts, but also orienting us towards ideals of progress. The work of editors and reviewers is at the heart of this academic knowledge/power nexus, with decisions shaping not only individual careers but the development of the field more broadly. In their calls to promote diversity without sacrificing scientific integrity (Aróstegui 2025), to counter the neoliberal frames of publishing that drive exploitation and exclusion (Schmidt 2025), to cultivate transparent, robust, and trusting practices in peer review (Mantie 2025), and to embrace an ethical response-ability that takes seriously our roles as stewards of ethical practice (Burnard and Mackinlay 2025), the authors of this special issue all acknowledge that editorial and publishing practices hold potential ways of reinforcing processes of stratification in significant and material ways. To varying degrees, authors also articulate the potential for individual editors, reviewers, authors, and educators to disrupt these hegemonies and take action to “truly transform music education, making it a force for positive change in the lives of our students and the broader community” (Burnard and Mackinlay 2025).
It is this potential that I would like to grapple with here. As academia and the arts face new—or at least more explicit in contexts of the Global North—challenges of anti-intellectualism, censorship, corporatisation, and political interference (see Kertz-Welzel 2025), I find myself asking rather desperate questions of my own work and the field more broadly:
- How can researchers critically examine pedagogical approaches in the classroom when the very existence of a department of education is under threat?
- How can teachers celebrate diversity in and through music when their students face deportation?
- How can any of us imagine a future for music education within the bleak if not apocalyptic frames of climate risk realism?
While such questions certainly lend themselves to pessimism and despair in the absence of an easy answer (or even a difficult one), this may miss the point of how they may be useful. In this article, I rather seek to put these questions to work in generating novel problems—in this instance, the “proliferation of fascist formations” (Goldstein and Trujillo 2021) that implicate the practices and potentials of music education (research) in both extraordinary and mundane ways. I aim to explore how our work as editors and reviewers might offer critical and creative entry points to disrupt the articulation of fascism, as an alluring but repressive power, in music education, academia, and society more broadly so that we may find new potentials and orientations in response to the urgent and often overwhelming questions with which we are faced. Similar to the recognition of complicity acknowledged elsewhere in this issue, this task demands an examination of the fascism evident in our own decision-making, with such problems inevitably demanding our own transformation. While I write this article from a position of relative privilege as a salaried faculty member of a public university in Australia, living far from the political turmoil of authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, I think it is worth noting that only fifteen years ago, university leaders from North America travelled to Australia “to learn how to fire people without successful intervention from governments or workers’ unions” (Heffernan 2024, 5). This climate of permanent precarity in Australian public universities has intensified in recent years, with government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in 27,000 job losses in 2020 alone. More recent policy decisions “trivialising the role of universities in society” (Heffernan 2024, 127) have generated an almost continuous process of organisational restructuring, institutional mergers, and program cuts across the sector (Whitsed et al. 2024). This uncertainty about one’s employment future and the future of the university more broadly fuels a politics of gratitude and obligation, curtails academic freedom, encourages theoretical, methodological, and political conservativism, and supports systemic injustices across the sector, including wage theft, exploitation, and control (Heffernan 2024). Thus, as we are confronted by both existential crises and more immediate challenges to academic freedom and integrity on our own doorsteps, I argue there is an editorial responsibility to identify the tensions evident in our own commitments and the critical points where music education research might truly transform the field and our connections within and across it.
Fascism(s) and the Political Work of Music Education Research
Increasingly, fascism appears to be a term bandied about in reference to everything and nothing at once, used to condemn the actions of individual political actors, to critique parochialism, and to vilify sociocultural groups while at the same time representing “some totalizing force ‘out there’—a distant concept against which we might do battle” (Kuntz 2022, 595). Similarly, anti-fascism has been all too easily coupled with anti-racism and anti-discrimination (e.g., Niknafs 2022) without clear conceptualisation or distinction, employed as a strong marker of morality in music education but an arguably empty one. Whereas conventional definitions of fascism pertain to the macropolitical historical regimes of Hitler and Mussolini as aberrations of modernity (Vogt 2021), I here turn towards Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitical project that orients us towards more everyday instantiations of “the fascism [that is] in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 1972/1977, xiii). Following Evans and Reid’s (2013) reading of Deleuze and Guattari in international relations, the notion of fascism is repositioned from a historical political and social failure or future threat that we may, and must, overcome to an ineradicable desire for power—“a ‘desiring machine’ as well as a ‘war machine’ which mobilizes every element of the desire of a people for its own repression and eventual destruction” (3). Fascism is thus not a problem to solve but “a necessary outcome, and effect, of being political” (3). If being political is not only work engaged with macro-level social governance but also the “everyday processes by which we all exercise agency, negotiate power and identity, and assign meaning to difference” (Kallio et al. 2021, 2), then micro-fascisms are evident in each and every encounter, deliberation, and action by which we desire power and influence. Evans and Reid (2013) describe these political relations as lines of flight where “power and resistance, creation and destruction, operate on the same line(s),” immanent to each other (168). Micro-fascist potentials are then played out as encounters navigate between desire and its own repression.
In response to Freudian conceptualisations of desire along the lines of repression and deficit, Deleuze and Guattari reposition desire from something buried beneath everyday existence to something that is mapped through it: desire as “an active and positive reality, an affirmative vital force” (Gao 2013, 406). Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977) write that “there is only desire and the social, and nothing else” (29), we can understand desire not as something that is separate from the social but as something that produces the social—an orientation that maps where power is located and how it operates. This is not only evident in explicit articulations of want or the wanted, as Patton (2000) describes, desire is present in any “given assemblage in the same way that, in a musical work, the principle of composition is present in the silences as much in the audible sounds” (70). Offering a more complex perspective on the contestations of meaning that legitimate certain knowledges over others that I have explored elsewhere (e.g., Kallio 2015), these mappings of desire are not fixed nor the purview of powerful actors and groups alone, but a cartographic and rhizomatic becoming through which the map “is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1987, 10).
The desiringmachine of micro-fascisms in music education research is thus composed in and through the everyday interactions and choices of researchers, reviewers, and editors. Henderson, Honan, and Loch (2016) describe the academicwritingmachine as one that shapes each of us as scholars “caught up in this mad process of never-beginning, never-ending? Writing, submitting, waiting, receiving feedback, receiving rejection, receiving success—yes, we will be counted for this one! But no, not good enough for this one. Deemed inadequate. We must write again, beginning again, re-enter into the process of never-beginning, never-ending” (6). Yet, we are not separate from this machine, as we generate research outputs to plug into it that in turn drive the machine ever faster, demanding more of us than humanly possible. Our plug-ins thus generate the very editorial practices that risk undermining academic integrity and freedom, demanding more; a consumptive form of control that renders our minds and bodies surplus. This is not to suggest that we desire for-profit (often staggering profit) publishers, predatory publishing practices, vanity presses, paper mills, the proliferation of pre-print and mega journals, ghost authors, courtesy authorship, the misuse of corporate artificial intelligence or other recognised ills. Rather, our desires produce these ills; desire produces the social. As Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977) explain, “It is not that we come to desire fascism rather than revolution because we mistakenly believe that fascism is good for us. Rather, it is because we become invested in fascism that we come to believe in it” (346).
Fascism is thus not the oppression of the masses by a relatively small number of individuals, be they politicians or publishing houses. Rather, these mechanisms of repression work by “manipulating what appeals to the general population. It mobilizes the masses by drawing attention to the political problems of the everyday” (Evans and Reid 2013, 44). In this sense, the undermining of academic practices and freedoms is also through our own gatekeeping of difference, reinforcing logics of stratification and extraction even while voicing solidarity with social groups that are harmed by these same onto-epistemologies. These everyday macro-fascisms born in the desire for others to align with our beliefs, values, and rules may be seen to have “become more potent due to the extended growth of neoliberalism” (Zembylas 2021, 2) and are accelerated by the seductive promises of liberal humanism that advocate for living musical and educational “lives of reform, bound within an enclosure of repeatable possibility” (Kuntz 2022, 596). In other words, it is our own commitments to transformation that keep us stuck in the status quo (see Kallio and Niknafs 2024).
The Desiringmachine of Music Education Research
To examine what music education research desires, or how it is framed by publication platforms as desirable research, I conducted an inductive content analysis in April 2025 examining the “about us” descriptions and mission statements of music education journals and their affiliate organisations or networks as shared on relevant websites (Vears and Gillam 2022). Inclusion criteria included being listed on either the SCOPUS or Web of Science databases and an exclusive focus on music education research. Journal metrics, language, rankings, and other variables were not considered as part of the selection criteria. Journals that were not listed on these databases or that published broader music or arts education research were not included in this analysis, regardless of the acceptance rates of papers related to music education or perceived reputation. Journals that were included in the analysis, their affiliations, geographical locations, and publishers are outlined in Table 1, which may be interpreted within the structuring of economic influence, onto-epistemological domination, linguistic injustice, and sociocultural stratification outlined in the introduction of this article.
I conducted an iterative coding process/mapping of journal/organisation mission statements and descriptions, assigning inductive codes and refining these conceptually and relationally through comparative and cyclic readings of the data. Coding moved from a manifest analysis, attending to “the visible or apparent content of something,” to a more latent and deductive analysis “looking at the underlying aspects of the phenomenon under consideration” (Boyatzis 1998, 16), refining codes and coding groups in relation to expressions of desire and, in particular, the desire to influence others. Ethically, it should be noted that I conducted this analysis after assuming the role of Co-Editor of Research Studies in Music Education in mid-2024. I am currently invested in developing a set of broad values to guide our editorial work (see Ballantyne and Kallio 2024), recruiting new Editorial Board members, and considering the place and purpose of the journal within the broader music education research landscape. As such, I do not write this paper from a stance of anti-fascism in music education research “because to believe in the integrity of such a moral claim is to be wilfully blind to the fascism that, necessarily, underwrites one’s own political subjectivity” (Evans and Reid 2013, 4). Rather, I am interested in how this political subjectivity, mine included, produces fascism: a fascism produced by the very desires that “become … complicit in [their] own repression” (Patton 2000, 74).
| Publication | Affiliation | Country | Publisher |
| Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education (ACT) | MayDay Group | USA | Independent, MayDay Group |
| British Journal of Music Education (BJME) | UK | Cambridge University Press | |
| Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (BCRME) | The College Music Society (CMS) | USA | University of Illinois Press |
| International Journal of Music Education (IJME) | International Society for Music Education (ISME) | UK | SAGE |
| Journal of General Music Education (JGME) | The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) | USA | SAGE |
| Journal of Historical Research in Music Education (JHRME) | USA | SAGE | |
| Journal of Music Teacher Education (JMTE) | NAfME | USA | SAGE |
| Journal of Music, Technology, and Education (JMTechE) | Association for Technology in Music Instruction | UK | Intellect |
| Journal of Popular Music Education (JPME) | UK | Intellect | |
| Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME) | NAfME | USA | SAGE |
| Korean Journal of Research in Music Education (KJRME) | South Korean Music Education Society | South Korea | Independent |
| Music Education Research (MER) | UK | Taylor and Francis | |
| Music Educators Journal (MEJ) | NAfME | USA | SAGE |
| Musical Art and Education (MAE) | Russia | Moscow Pedagogical State University | |
| Philosophy of Music Education Review (PMER) | USA | Indiana University Press | |
| Research Studies in Music Education (RSME) | Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) | UK | SAGE |
| Update: Applications of Research in Music Education (Update) | NAfME | USA | SAGE |
Table 1. Analysed music education journals.
The length and specificity of mission statements and descriptions vary extensively across music education journals and organisations, with the MayDay Group’s Action Ideals and the KJRME having the most extensive and explicit value statements for authors to align with, “illuminate, extend, or challenge” (ACT). Many journal descriptions framed international impact as desirable (BJME, BCRME, IJME, JHRME, JMTechE, JPME, KJRME, MAE, MER, PMER, and RSME) through reference to an internationally representative Editorial Board (regardless of the actual geographic diversity represented), welcoming “international perspectives” (JPME), a desire to “expand and strengthen the international relations in the field” (MAE) and the sourcing of research that is relevant and “of interest to an international readership” (IJME). Interestingly, only six journals (ACT, JHRME, JMTE, JPME, KJRME, and RSME) explicitly desire scholarly excellence (while also not defining excellence), expressed in reference to low acceptance rates (ACT) and requests for “research that adheres to the highest standards for scholarship quality” (JMTE). Relatedly, only five journals (ACT, JMTE, MAE, MER, RSME) explicitly welcome diverse and innovative epistemological and research approaches, encouraging the “interrogation and development” (RSME) of new methodologies, “creative initiatives” (MAE) and embracing “pluralism in knowledge construction” (ACT). More prominently coded in journal descriptions was the desire to affect and shape teaching practice, and affiliated organisation mission statements articulated the desire to influence and change society more broadly, each of which is outlined below.
Desires for the Field
The desire for research publications to affect music education teaching practices for students of “all age levels” in “the classroom or studio, in school and out, [in] private and group instruction” (IJME) is articulated across almost all journals and affiliated organisations. Journals are presented as a “forum for the scholarly presentation of pedagogical and technical information for music teachers in higher education” (JMTechE), where “successful practices” (JGME) can be described and shared and connections between research and practice strengthened to enhance “professional development and improv[e] practice within the field of music education” (BJME) and music teacher education (JMTE). PMER similarly encourages submissions that examine “reflections on current practice … [and] reform initiatives” in music education, ostensibly seeking an evidence base to instigate or evaluate shifts in contemporary teaching practice. The accessibility of academic texts is emphasised by MER, encouraging submitting authors to avoid “impenetrable jargon” in encouraging clear communication with an international readership. The readability of submitted articles is also highlighted by BCRME and Update, both of which aim to make contemporary research “accessible to all” (BCRME) and bring “research in music teaching and learning close to everyday practice [by] … present[ing] reviews of the literature and findings of individual studies without research terminology or jargon” (Update). Although there is general consensus that research published in these journals should “improv[e] teaching practice within the field of music education” (BJME), the orientation of these transformative visions is often less clear. Indeed, none of the journal descriptions clearly outline such value commitments, which are instead housed in the mission statements of affiliated organisations. For example, NAfME (to which JGME, JMTE, JRME, MEJ, and Update are affiliated) outlines a series of collective values, including “equitable access to music education,” social and cultural belonging “throughout … lifelong experiences in music,” cultural diversity, and wellbeing (NAfME). Similarly, ISME (to which IJME is affiliated) lists ten core values pertaining to inclusion, professionalism, intercultural understanding, equitable access, respect, and peace. Focusing more on perceived inequities in music education, SEMPRE (to which RSME is affiliated) specifically seeks to support “areas where music, education and research are under-resourced” (SEMPRE), and the MayDay Group’s (to which ACT is affiliated) Action Ideals describe a need to examine “taken-for-granted practices” and exercise “an acute criticality towards cultural bias and hegemonic educational practices embedded in the development and implementation of curricula” (ACT).
Desires for Society
Desires for broader affect beyond the teaching profession are not articulated in journal descriptions but rather in affiliated organisation mission statements that outline commitments to “a global standard of research ethics” (KJRME), values associated with the “humanizing functions” of music (MayDay), and “the power of art in our communities” (BCRME). These include the MayDay Group (to which ACT is affiliated), CMS (to which BCRME is affiliated), ISME (to which IJME is affiliated), NAfME (to which JGME, JMTE, JRME, MEJ, and Update are affiliated), the Korean Music Education Society (to which KJRME is affiliated), and SEMPRE (to which RSME is affiliated). The only affiliated organisation that does not outline a desire to influence society was the Association for Technology in Music Instruction (to which JMTechE is affiliated), which instead solely focuses on influencing the music teaching profession and developing a scholarly community in music technology education.
Among the mission statements of music education organisations, there is a prevalent assumption that music and research collaborations could, and indeed should, be harnessed to “further understanding of one another’s worldviews and related ways of being and doing” (MayDay), contributing towards a “global movement of diversity, equity, and inclusion” (KMES). Music is described as a “lens to the experiences and interpretations of the world” (NAfME) and as something able to promote “international understanding, co-operation and peace” (ISME). In this way, music is positioned as “a shared human universal” with the potential “to cultivate a deep impact in uniting, healing, and nurturing social belonging” in culturally diverse societies (CMS). Cultural diversity is frequently equated with musical diversity, with many organisations emphasising a need for “respect for all kinds of music” (ISME) and encouraging “genre fluidity” (CMS) as a means to foster belonging. The value of diversity extends also to knowledge systems, with representation from “multiple worldviews” “(e.g., Indigenous, queer, feminist)” (MayDay) seen to promote social equity. Perhaps most explicit in terms of a desire for music education to have a social influence, the Action Ideals of the MayDay Group state that they “engage in anti-oppressive actions that challenge and oppose injustices and hate crimes, including white supremacy and cultural elitism” (MayDay), suggesting that it is not only understanding that is sought but ethical action and material change on a broader societal level.
Music education, as a largely performance-oriented discipline that “teaches and affirms our unique voices” (CMS), was also seen to affect (and largely effect) individual and social wellbeing. With music conceptualised as central “to human wholeness through our emotions, intellect, and physical and spiritual well-being” (NAfME, with spirituality also referred to in the journal description of MAE) and “crucial for a healthy society” (SEMPRE), organisations suggested that music education should serve a “humanizing function” (MayDay). Access to music education is thus argued to be “essential for the wellbeing of the individual and society” (ISME). Similar to statements relating to cultural diversity, the MayDay Group’s Action Ideals also articulate perceived threats to wellbeing for music education to overcome as “the current climate of privatization, competition, and profit” and “cultural bias and hegemonic educational practices,” including “the language of outcomes, standards, and assessment involved in the a priori construction of curricular policies,” “colonization,” “corporate power and overreach,” and narrative frameworks “that may oppress or misrepresent” the “social, cultural, spiritual, geographical, historical, and political contexts” that people live and make music within and across (MayDay).
Editorial Fascisms-in-the-Making
Even from this relatively superficial analysis, the field, taken as these “leading” journals and their affiliate organisations, appears relatively unified in its desires for equity, inclusion, social and cultural understanding and belonging, and the improvement of teaching practice in line with these value commitments. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Kertz-Welzel (2025) too has noted, “there are some discourses which are ‘allowed’ or highly appreciated, and others, which are not so well tolerated” (99). One would be hard-pressed to find a published article in any journal arguing in favour of any of the positions which the MayDay Group, for example, orients its work against, including white supremacy, cultural elitism, oppression, ecological destruction, neoliberalism, and managerialism, to name a few. Similarly, few would advocate for research divorced from practice, or impenetrably jargon-laden texts. These consistencies of desire hold the territorial assemblage of music education together as “orthodox belief[s] which one is not really allowed to question” (Kertz-Welzel 2025, 100), forming a desiringmachine that authors, reviewers, and editors plug into in forging connections, careers, and orienting our work.
The desiringmachine of music education research can here be understood as a “hierarchical system … with centres of significance and subjectification” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 16), in that it constitutes (and is constituted by) a multiplicity characterised by a unifying, organising structure. As identified in the analysis of journal and organisational descriptions and mission statements, these centres of significance coalesce around ideals of best and evidence-based practice, equity, cultural diversity, and inclusion. Beyond reinforcing dominant philosophies of music education that reduce complexity and conceptual openness (Kertz-Welzel 2025), these “orthodox beliefs” (100) produce the subjects of music education (as researchers, teachers, students) in particular ways, mapped according to social entities of sex, sexuality, culture, race, class, dis/ability, and so on. The gravitational pull of these centres of significance and subjectification is referred to by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as an arborescent system—“multiplicities that are extensive, divisible and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious” (33). This molar system of relations is contrasted with and proceeds rhizomatic systems in music education: “libidinal, unconscious, molecular intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications” (33). As such, music education is always-already both arborescent and rhizomatic, and the editorial work conducted within journal and organisational systems serves to draw together these ever-changing multiplicities that characterise local contexts and encounters. This is not fascist in and of itself. However, reminded by Foucault’s (1983) often quoted dictum, though, that “not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous” (231) and Evans and Reid’s (2013) point that fascism is “a necessary outcome, and effect, of being political” (3, emphasis added), this engineered system and our connections to and through it can certainly be seen to hold potentials for fascisms-in-the-making (Kuntz 2022, 603).
If we understand this arborescent system to play “a piloting role” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 142), these flows of desire towards relatively fixed and narrow centres of significance may be seen to “process … molecular energies” (215) into a cohesive whole by producing the fixed subject who must be “plugged in in order [for the musiceducationmachine] to work” (4). This fixing of subjects takes place via the overcoding of bodies, flows, and intensities (according to sex, culture, race, ability, etc.) in defining the molarities by which these bodies, flows, and intensities matter to music education as charted by fixed points on a measurable plane of progress. For example, genre fluidity or pluralistic approaches to repertoire, in all of their messy instantiations and becomings, are measured by already-fixed understandings of cultural representation according to geographical location, race, ethnicity, language, aesthetic qualities and musical idiom and, in turn, are seen to promote diversity and challenge cultural elitism. Musical diversity is then reduced to identifiable (visual, sonic, and other) categorisations of difference and equated with cultural diversity (similarly categorised), synthesising an array of rhizomatic and creative individual, social, and musical becomings into fixed topographical points of difference. Such synthesised subject positions are thus managed by the desiringmachine of music education (as also plugged into the academicwritingmachine) by attending to the division and reconstitution of subjecthood along the lines of measurable attributes. This ongoing process of re/deterritorialisation potentially results in a sort of cultural exhaustion by which we lose “our capacity to imagine any resistive practices beyond a return to synthesis” (Kuntz 2019, 33), a synthesis to which we can apply existing measurement tools to evaluate. In this way, what (or who) matters in music education continues to be defined by familiar ideals and values that negate the rhizomatic becomings of students, teachers, researchers, and communities, and continue to consume difference and disjunction in the name of liberal humanist notions of progress. Editorial decision-making, in emphasising alignment with the desiringmachine of music education, thus risks curtailing our own experimental capacity by insisting on a “reductive grounding of the stable/stabilizing subject” (Kuntz 2019, 39) and preventing the formation of new subjectivities and “forms of connection between deterritorialised elements of the social field” (Patton 2000, 9). In other words, as reviewers and editors seeking transformative potentials, we may instead reinforce “the limitations of determined possibility” (Kuntz 2019, 33) and in turn produce the divisible subject as one “amenable to governance” (32). Upholding molar centres of significance and subjectification, even those that are framed as transformative, thus binds music education to the contemporary flows of capitalism and neoliberalism that continue to animate and asphyxiate contemporary learning, teaching, art, research and life.
Editorial Responsibility for/in Music Education
The overcoding of rhizomatic flows along familiar and measurable semiological axes as articulated through the mission statements and descriptions of journals and affiliate organisations provides editors, researchers, and teachers with a feeling of power. More than simply control, this sense of power can be read as “a sign of our own power to act” (Patton 2000, 75) and an ability to effect material change in our field and the world more broadly. However, as Patton (2000) argues, this “is not a reliable sign” (75) of our potential to live a more-than-fascist life in and through music education and informs my differentiation between an editorial responsibility for and an editorial responsibility in the field of music education. Like arborescence–rhizomatic, molar–molecular, and other doubled terms applied in this paper, it is tempting to place fixed valuations of editorial responsibility for and in, with one term representing the good or better option than the other. This misses the point, as both terms are drawn along the same political line of flight and both are needed to keep the musiceducationmachine working. Indeed, desire does not only produce synthesis but also embodies “the power of differential reproduction or becoming-other which is the condition of creativity in culture as well as in nature” (Patton 2000, 70). Rather than opposing ethical poles of right and wrong, good and bad, it is then the ways in which these forces (for, in) are assembled in and through our work as editors that hold ethical charge.
An editorial responsibility for the field of music education aligns with the piloting role mentioned earlier, serving as both guide and gatekeeper of what is and what ought to be possible in research and teaching practice. This piloting is oriented by centres of significance and subjectification—resources of power that offer a sense of purpose and possibility and fuel the imagination for how music education may serve a positive and transformative role in the lives of individuals and communities. Yet, in delineating the imaginable (Foucault 1971), this editorial responsibility also tethers the field to “normalizing logics and practices” (Kuntz 2022, 602) that promote conventional approaches to inquiry. Such work cannot resist the gravitational pull of molarity and instead curtails experimentation towards becoming-otherwise by its insistence on synthesis and coherence. With fascism operating “through the masses (and the collective forces of desire)” (Kuntz 2022, 620), this tethering and continual reterritorialisation of difference holds fascist potentials in its entanglement with the flows of capitalism and neoliberalism, reinforcing representational logics and producing the governable researcher subject. This governance, which is also self-governance, becomes an individualised and measurable ethical obligation that in turn reinforces the very processes of confinement and capture our research so often aims to work against. This is not to say we are doing nothing, but that our work articulates desires for transformation within the existing structures of social life—not against them.
An editorial responsibility in music education does not seek a refusal of or undoing of molarisation but rather the “redistribution of the molar assignment of differential power and affect” (Patton 2000, 83). This is a responsibility of becoming-revolutionary. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write of revolution as always “immanent and consist[ing] in the new bonds it installs between people” (177), even if fleeting. Patton (2000) distinguishes between a liberal freedom, such as that articulated by journal descriptions and organisational mission statements, and a critical freedom, as can be seen in the transgressions of “the limits of what one is presently capable of being or doing” (85) in becoming-revolutionary. He explains, “whereas the normative status and the value of liberal freedom is straightforwardly positive, critical freedom is a much more ambivalent and risky affair: more ambivalent since it involves leaving behind existing grounds of value, with the result that it is not always clear whether it is a good, or indeed by what standards it could be evaluated as good or bad; risky because there is no telling in advance where such processes of mutation and change might lead” (Patton 2000, 87).
In this sense, an editorial responsibility in music education is a process of cartographic and critical inquiry in and of itself, something that resists “the territorialisation of particular styles, genres or modes of capture” (Patton 2000, 73) in favour of creativity and experimentation. Such potential for immanent transgressions in music education demands an interrogation of the ethico-political decision-making of editors and reviewers in relation to the disciplinary structures of research and music education, and an ongoing questioning of when desires for conformity and cohesion impinge upon political potentials to become-otherwise. Simply put, an editorial responsibility in music education is a responsibility to become-revolutionary, to challenge not only the established bonds between people (and indeed the more-than-human) in schools, universities, communities, and music studios but also in research practice itself, to identify the critical points where lines of flight may alter the shape and valence of the musiceducationmachine in more-than-fascist ways.
Becoming-editor in music education can thus be construed as an assemblage of responsibilities-for and responsibilities-in, a dance between the arborescent and the rhizomatic, a productive tension between the work of discernment and cartography. This responsibility is an ethico-political one—to recognise and work against the fascism in our heads and continually seek to deterritorialise the same majority machines we ourselves are plugged into; and to accept that, yes, we are all becoming-fascist now, and not to be afraid of becoming-revolutionary as well.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to my colleague Associate Professor Chris Stover for his generosity of thought and clever questions in helping me to articulate my ideas and refine my arguments for this paper. I would also like to thank Dr. Mathew Klotz for their assistance in proofreading and copyediting.
About the Author
Associate Professor Alexis Anja Kallio is Deputy Director of the Creative Arts Research Institute and Deputy Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. Her work examines music education and research as political arenas wherein individuals and social groups negotiate meaning, value, ideals and power. She is Co-Editor in Chief of Research Studies in Music Education (with Julie Ballantyne), Editor of Difference and Division in Music Education (2021, Routledge), and Co-Editor of The Politics of Diversity in Music Education (with Heidi Westerlund, Sidsel Karsen, Kathryn Marsh and Eva Sæther 2021, Springer), and Music, Education, and Religion (with Philip Alperson and Heidi Westerlund 2018, Indiana University Press).
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[1] I write this article in Australian English except in direct quotations.