Reading Diary
Bennett, J. (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press pp. 35-41
Notes on what affect is, what affect does, sensation, memory and Deleuze.
Affect is not ‘about’ nor is it experienced secondary.
Affect is a contagious process.
Affect is “the means by which a kind of understanding is produced”.
Deleuze - the encountered sign is different from the recognized object in that it can only be felt or sensed. It is not there as an object to appease the subject but to stimulate the subjects emotion, psychology, and senses; to link the affect caused by the image (sign) to thought processes without favoring experience or representation. “Deleuze’s focus, it should be noted, is always on creative production rather than reception. … the affective encounter becomes the means by which thought proceeds and ultimately moves toward deeper truth.” Deeper truth is part of the composition of an artwork.
Sensation “emerges in the present”. Deleuze - “Sensation is what is being painted,” Painting does to reference but express sensation, expression first is in the object and via the object’s production the emphasis of painting migrates from the object to process making sensation not subject to the paintings object but a part of the process.
Process links to the past (memory) in thru its present (becoming) experience; not “speaking of” but “speaking out of” the experience and bringing the spectator into contact with the image via affect.
“One should ask of a work of art, Deleuze says, not “What does it mean?” but “How does it work?” So the question becomes: How is “seeing feeling” achieved, and how does this process yield information to the body?”
Question to the work of my research and affect: How can the experience of applying the personas-as-tools speak out of the works via affect so that the spectator understands the experience of applying these tools to the creative process?
Boyd, C. (2017). Non-Representational Geographies of Therapeutic Art Making: Thinking Through Practice. London, England: Palgrave (chapter 3)
Non-representational theory particular to performance studies, origins in studies of human geography (Thrift, 2008) as a response to its obsession with representation - mental representations (Rorty), as knowledge/social facts (Foucault), social order (Rabinow) - and the contentiousness that developed when those who apply these representations no longer question them.
The “temporally unstable relations between a multitude” of human subjects, coming and going through space and time; non-representational in that the movement precludes what is there for what is happening.
Uncertainty, messy, process as opposed to finitude.
“Non-representational theory is interested in the way that life ‘takes place’ through movement, intensities, and encounters (Lorimer, 2005). It challenges the realm of language and its economy by asserting that there is always more going on than what we can apprehend (Dewsbury, 2010). Moreover, non-representational theory is a way of thinking about the world that places humans on equal footing with everything else. As Thrift suggests, the world is ‘jam-packed with entities’ that simultaneously enter into, and out of, relation with one another (2008, p 17) - humans are wrapped up in a wider ecology of ‘things’.” (32-33)
What appeals to me about non-representational theory expressed in the quote above is that it is non-hierarchical. It does not place one ‘thing’ (human or otherwise) above the other. It is about simultaneity, shifting, infinite space and time. For me this is more ‘representational’ of the world we live in than the world as described by representational theories. The diminishment of the position of the subject in favor of how the position of subject is obtained within a field of equal relations to other subjects appeals to my interests in the reversal between subject/object experienced regularly and to the processes by which continuous movement/engagement is not solitary but occurs in a larger body - joint action. We are part of an assemblage in continual dialogue, acting and being acted upon, in action so that cognition is reflexive (happening in the moment as opposed to planned out step by step in advanced or pre-determined). It is not about a fixed state but about a process of becoming in a infinite space and time, constantly changing and reinventing, finding new connections, a variable experience of non-uniform, non-binary, multiple, fragments.
Affect in non-representational theory.
A force, along with emotion, the edges of whose definition are blurred.
“Affect is relational - it consists of bodily capacities that ‘emerge and develop in concert’ (Anderson, 2014, p9). Affect is virtual in that it is about what the body can do, and not what it is doing or has done. Affects, in the plural, are becomings. … Affect is not a personal feeling or power but an effectuation of a capacity or force in and through a body as it is affected - as it acts (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).” (39)
By this quote it would appear to me that non-representational theory is a theory of affect.
“Emotion, in contrast, is the intense capture and closure of affect whereas affect is always in excess of the moment of its capture and cannot be grasped alongside the perception of its capture (Massumi, 2002). … Feelings as an assessment of affect in a moment of experience as it moves through bodies. In contrast emotion is an intimate and directly personal experience that fixes itself in words. Emotion is social insomuch as it can be articulated and folded back into more extensive networks of relations. As McCormack (2008) explains: ‘[a]ffect is a kind of vague yet intense atmosphere; feeling is that atmosphere felt in a body; and emotion is that felt intensity articulated as an emotion’ (p1827).”
By this I picture a group of circles - Matryoshka dolls. The outermost circle/doll is non-representational theory, the next is affect, contained in affect is feeling, and contained in feeling is emotion. But this image is to solid, contained, bound. Maybe it is more like a cloud of gases of various weights, mixing as they encounter each other; the space that is the cloud is indeterminate, the gas is found in a place -the cloud- with no set boundary or defined edge, the place that is the cloud changes as the gases move through the space that is the cloud.
“..., non-representational theory thinks of space in topological rather than topographical terms, foregrounding the conditions of space’s emergence (Murdoch, 2006). Space is a ‘socially produced set of manifolds’ actuated by ‘the ensemble of movements deployed in it’ (Crang and Thrift, 2000, p19 and de Certeau, 1984, p117 respectively). Space is highly contingent and unsettled, being formed and re-formed in a ‘wide unlimited range of temporal and affective conditions, or situations’ (Crouch, 2010, p14). Space is full of creative potential. It is constituted out of materiality, objects and movements that displace human subjectivity. Space is always becoming. It begets itself.”
Trialectics - I think of the past, present, future as such.
Non-representational theory is unsettling.
Deleuze, G. [1964] (2008) Proust and Signs (trans. Richard Howard), London and New York: Continuum pp. 11-17
Notes.
Truth and time. Searching for time lost is a search for truth. Lost time is a concrete situation that drives us to search for the truth behind the time lost (how did this happen?)
Betrayal by involuntary signs leads to finding truth.
Betrayal is violent.
Proust - We are forced by something to think and seek truth. It is the encounter with the sign that leads to our questions: ‘Why? What does this sign mean?
“... the Search is always temporal, and the truth always a truth of time.” (12)
4 structures of time, each with their own truth ...wait, there is more than one truth?!
-passing time
-wasted time
-regained/recovery time
-absolute/original time
“We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content. … We never learn by doing like someone, but by doing with someone, who bears no resemblance to what we are learning.” (15)
This brings me back to Richard Wollheim’s what makes ‘painting as art’ and the painter placing him/herself in the position of the spectator. The painter does not learn to look at the painting like the spectator but rather leans by looking with the spectator. When I am painting with the personas-as-tools I am not painting like Franzi or Petra but rather painting with Franzi and Petra. At times this is passing or wasted time but it eventually morphs into recovered time and then, hopefully, to becoming original time.
Dewsbury, J. D. (2009). Performative, Non-Representational, and Affect-Based Research: Seven Injunctions. In D. DeLyser., S. Herbert., S. Aitken., M. Crang & L. McDowell (Eds. ), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography New York, NY & London, England: Sage pp. 321-334
Starting with one of my favorite quotes from Beckett. Reminds me of how a former colleague approached me the day after a recent presentation to say “I’m sorry your presentation yesterday was such a failure.” The former colleague was taken aback when I asked her not only why she thought it was a failure, why she felt the need to say ‘sorry’, and even more, why she thought presentations need be successful -wasn’t presenting one’s research and work in the context we were presenting about learning from the experience more than succeeding or failing? If you give yourself over to the experience and open yourself to learning from it how can that be a failure that needs an apology. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Performative methodology is about trying, failing, ‘no matter’. My understanding is in order to open oneself to this, to engage in/with a performative methodology one must relinquish control, fixed notions of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, embrace what ‘is’ rather than fixate on what ‘should be’. It is about emphasizing exploration of the problem rather than bulldozing ones way to a solution.
Thinking, sensing, presenting thought/unthought.
Conviction to stretch and strive to the full - Injunction (2) - so true!
Performative Methodology: “..., the object of study for performative research literally comes into being through being enacted in the practice of the research itself.”
Relative my research, the object of study - personas-as-tools in my painting practice - can only come into being through the enactment in the practice of the research. Therefore performative methodology has a place (but is not the only methodology) in the overall methodology of my research.
“... making meaning … this takes place through a whole number of interconnected empirical encounters … which develop … in ways that destabilize or do away with territorial disciplinary anchorage ….”
Thinking towards a form of expression … opening space to think about what kinds of knowledge might come from the research.
“Knowledge is not science.” !!!
“Remember, ‘something in the world forces us to think’ (Deleuze, 1994: 154) ...remember we are producing an understanding of the world because the world is not already out there as such …” otherwise everything would be obvious and none of this would be necessary!
Sensing - bookending - diagramming. How is the sensing aided? Think eyeglasses, hearing aids, salt …
“Human beings, let us argue, do so much in the doing, far more than in the sense making they have of what they think they were doing or thought they did: ‘There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming … the deed is everything’ (Nietzsche, 1967: 45).”
What do I do to enhance the sensing in my research?
Consider Lepecki and Banes, “four ways of focusing research into the sensing post the sensation itself”:
-where corporeal meets the social
-where somatic meets the historical
-where the cultural meets the biological
-where the imagination meets the flesh
Question: is performative methodology a rhizomatic methodology?
Presentation of the research post-performance.
The paintings generated by my research will always be presented ‘post-performance’ but they are also the product of the performance and yet not artifacts of the performance.
I do not want to present the personas as personas or as tools anymore than I would want to present one of my paintbrushes or the many, old, yoghurt containers I use to mix paint in. So, how do I stretch to present the product without presenting artifacts (the tools used in the performance itself)?
“..., the audience can be used far more effectively, productively, and explicitly, to help us script the meaning and findings of the research (which will probably be a series of further questions for research based upon the problematics raised and staged). But crucially this is not just participation for it is far more disruptive for what is stage is the fact that modes of expression are also modes of registration: therefore it is the mode of registration that makes something visible and shared.”
Consider ‘modes of registration’ to use with the audience … activate to interpret rather than passively receive … sensation or representation, and which comes first?
What are the performative questions I can ask myself and the audience?
“Why so?”
“The point is that the presentation of research for performative methods is also research in itself, if not even a continuation of the research.” (332) See my opening note on recent experience/converso with former colleague…
“... the way research is framed matters more than any other aspect, and perhaps nowhere is this framing more sharply felt and orientated than in the endgame point of the research’s application.” (333)
What is my end game?
Priest, E (2013) ‘Felt as Thought or, Musical Abstraction and the Semblance of Affect’ in M Thompson and I Biddle (Eds) Sound, Music, Affect: Theorising Sonic Experience. London and New York: Bloomsbury pp. 45-63
Susanne Langer - the human capacity to live in and through sensory abstractions which double sensation with semblance.
“...livable abstractions “felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function’ (1953: 32)” opening ourselves via our ability to perceive the nonsensuous in sensuous ways as a means of moving from the finite (actual) to the infinite (potential).
“What the arts speculate on, however, is not the status of a truth or fact, but what it feels like to feel oneself affecting and being affect by and as an occasion of experience.”
Music and painting … the experience of sound being felt as thought, the experience of seeing the colors, textures, of (abstract) painting being felt as thought. Both composed (according to Langer) of processes not substances, describing the development of feeling.
“... thinking is a doing in its nascency.”
“...feelings are emergent phenomenon.”
Exogenous and autogenous feelings: the former occurs on the periphery, a quickly managed, improvised response; the later not becoming physically felt in a specific origin or stimulus but felt as a ‘mental state’.
According to Langer, many processes remain unfelt but remain relevant due to their interaction with others, making feelings inspired by the unfelt (mood, tone) and thus transform experience into concepts. Mood functions as a medium to carry concepts, the medium of abstraction.
Abstraction
Semblance, Schiller’s Schein.
Massumi: ‘what is felt abstractly is thought’ (2011: 109) ‘When we pause to think … this is what we’re doing: continuing life abstractly’ (2011: 118) ‘Thinking is life being felt abstractly ….’(Langer 1942: 71)
Cage’s 4’33” “..., the idea of listening becomes content. … 4’33” is intensely expressive, but expressive of its own idea. … an occasion to experience, … imagining. … that leads it to the heights of abstraction: conceptualism.”
Daydream.
Proust, M. (2002) [1927]. Finding Time Again - Volume 6: In Search of Lost Time (trans. Ian Patterson). London, England: Penguin Books pp.174-5
This passage simply brought to my mind how in the many anxiety filled moments I have had recently there have been “madeleine moments” when I have stumbled out of where I was back to another place that caused me to stumble back to where I actually was in the moment.