Personal Research - Notes

This essay aims to summarize my recent readings and further notations for my self-directed research.

As to better support my recent projects and deepen my knowledge on my interest towards choreography and performance; I found relevant to research on sense experience and how knowledge is achieved by the interrelation between brain - body - world. One of my references being Alva Noë, one of the theorists that inspired the EEC programme - Embodied Embedded Cognition.

Noë investigates the structures of experience and consciousness (what philosophers call phenomenology); Presenting experience as the "basis of accessibility", allowing humans into "achieving access to the environment".

In an interview with Marlon Barrios Solano, part of the Embodied Techne Series (2012), Noë discusses "Dance As A Way Of Knowing".

He explores the idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process. Motion as "sensory motor understanding is what brings the world into focus for consciousness."

Noë highlights the fact that motion relies on a "temporally extended involvement", which enhances sensorial perception and consequently produces sensorial change: "transformations that happens in you while you go across the process; what is that transformation? Is understanding, is seeing connections, is knowing your way around."

Dance as a way to enact experience, thinking in motion - "dance in a sense of performance is an enactment or modeling of this fundamental fact about the world around us, which we dynamically interact with.".

In dance, along with similar kinesthetic experiences, the human body reaches an intense sensorial perceptual experience, composed of information from many places in the body, finding the need to have an understanding of/ control over of sensory consequences of their own movement. It can be seen either as personal, depending on the case- collective, confrontation - creating great awareness.

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Other comments on my readings:

On the book Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, and particularly a text by Jeroen Fabius - Con forts fleuve, politics of perception in the work of Boris Charmatz, a point on the relation between communication and perceiver, although in the theatre context, seems to relate the same way in overall modes of performance, including dance:

"In dealing with politics, theatre cannot compete with the directness or speed with the means of communication of mass society. But, at the same time what characterizes communication in contemporary society is the loss of the communicative. A spectator can no longer assess the value of what is presented; everything is reduced to information; the gap between experience of an event and perception of the event is so big, that there is no way to assess what really is determining one's experience. " "Theatre can respond to this only with a politics of perception, which would at the same time be called an aesthetic of responsibility (r response-ability). Intead f the deceptively comforting reality of here and there, inside and outside, it can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception - Hans-Thies Lehmann"

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Massumi also seems to have been a useful theoretical reference for the undergoing works and research :

"stop thinking in binarisms, but rather in terms of emerging , passing into, i.e. dynamic unities and unmediated heterogeneities, and to think of perception and thought as two poles of the same process ", by Brian Massumi - Parables of the Virtual, Movement, Affect, Sensation

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http://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/thinking-with-the-body/?video=4

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Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects

"from the point of view of objects and subjects: how does an object perform its objectness and how does it perform us. In other words: how does the object perform our subject-ness. And how does the subject perform the object. Or: how can we replace our subjectness by objectness and what does that entail?"

http://apass.be/performanceperformativity/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology

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Form, Substance and Difference* by Gregory Bateson

"It is the attempt to separate intellect from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous—and dangerous—to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to separate mind from body."

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Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”, MC Journal, Vol. 8, No. 6 (December 2005), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php

As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.

A feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. It is personal and biographical.

An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned.

An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of the three central terms in this essay – feeling, emotion, and affect – affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30). Affect always precedes will and consciousness (Massumi, Parables 29).

Without affect feelings do not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without feelings rational decision-making becomes problematic (Damasio 204-22). In short, affect plays an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect dissolves into experience.

What does all of this mean for individuals who are interested in media and cultural studies? It means that describing “media effects” in terms of the communication of ideology sometimes results in the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy. This has to do with the second term in Massumi’s definitions of affect/affection. L’affection is the process whereby affect is transmitted between bodies. “The transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (Brennan 6). Because affect is unformed and unstructured (unlike feelings and emotions) it can be transmitted between bodies. The importance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message.

The transmission of affect is about the way that bodies affect one another. When your body infolds a context and another body (real or virtual) is expressing intensity in that context, one intensity is infolded into another. By resonating with the intensity of the contexts it infolds, the body attempts to ensure that it is prepared to respond appropriately to a given circumstance. Given the ubiquity of affect, it is important to take note that the power of many forms of media lies not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning.

The power of affect lies in the fact that it is unformed and unstructured (abstract). It is affect’s “abstractivity” that makes it transmittable in ways that feelings and emotions are not, and it is because affect is transmittable that it is potentially such a powerful social force.

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Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 2003

For Brennan, the transmission of affect is social or psychological in origin, but it is responsible for bodily changes, it alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the individual. The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only arise within an individual person, but also come from without – via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact.

Affect - Feeling

Brennan, however, emphasizes the moment of judgment and evaluation in all affect: by an affect I mean the physiological shift accompanying a judgment. She makes a distinction between affect and feeling. Feeling not only refers to the sensations that register stimuli, but they also include something more than sensory information: they suppose a unified interpretation of that information, they are sensations that have found the right match in words. (5) Affects are material, physiological. They have an energetic dimension. They can enhance or deplete; energy can be projected outward or introjected. Simply put, anothers feelings can enhance, energize (as in warmth, love), or drain. The transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in the transmission of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’.

But the content one person gives to an affect, may be different from the content – the linguistic and visual content, the thoughts I attach to that affect – given to that same affect by another. (6) The content remains my own: they remain the product of the particular historical conjunction of words and experiences I represent.

"think about the individual and its relation to the environment in new ways, emphasizing their ongoing exchange on a physical level, "

(entertainment is also effected by sight, by seeing another person’s physiognomy and body language. On the face of it, in sight our boundaries may stay intact. We become like someone else by imitating that person, not by literally becoming or in some way merging with her. But visual images, like auditory traces, also have a direct physical impact; their reception, Brennan says, involves the activation of neurological networks, which also constitute transmissions breaching the bounds between individual and environment.)

book review by Dorian Stuber

Affect (thoughtless) - Feeling (thoughtful)

Transmission (spreading, passing on) is thus the central element of Brennan's theory of affects. Although she is indebted to psychoanalysis as the modern methodology most attentive to the corporeal materiality of affects, her own theory diverges from Freud's metapsychology "in that it postulates an origin for affects that is independent of the individual experiencing them" (13). Hell, for Brennan, isn't other people. Rather, it's the self, considered as a self-contained subject defined against those others. For to think that, affectively speaking, we are individuals, such that our affects seem "our own," is to suffer from a fantasy. Indeed, for Brennan, this foundational fantasy governs Western modernity. It is experienced, in miniature, in the infant's projection of its passivity and helplessness on to the mother. The foundational fantasy is "the belief that 'we,' the passive infant, are the true fountain of energy, and the mother is a hapless, witless receptacle" (13).

For Brennan, the primary effect of this fantasy, in allowing for a subject-centered, self-interested point of view, is to denigrate the idea that the flesh is itself intelligent. In denying the corporeal "other I" that lies behind the ego, the Western subject denies the transmission of affect that nonetheless remains (destructively) operative. Projection/introjection is delusional inasmuch as it is not experienced as a transmission. The deluded subject thinks, for instance, that the other is bad and it itself is good; it fails to see that the rage and envy it attributes to the other is really its own.

In the book's final two chapters, Brennan suggests how that transformation might occur, through what she calls the education of the senses. That education turns on the possibility of relating experience to language in ever more refined ways -- a possibility that requires that we expand our definition of language to include the systems of the body. At stake is the body's very interpretability in language.

Brennan is not suggesting that we should replace corporeal expression with language, but rather that we should (re)align those modes of expression. That alignment requires discernment. As we have seen, discernment is the meditative process whereby the body's experiences can be named: "insofar as people attend actively, listen to what they are feeling, they can identify sensations, sounds, and images, that they can name or, after struggle, can find words for. We do this all the time. It is called thinking" (140). As always Brennan is here bracing in her directness -- and her refusal to separate intelligence and body. Brennan never opposes these qualities, just as she never opposes meditation and reason. (Her use of "meditation" thus recalls its use by Descartes in his Meditations.)

But Brennan is vague when it comes to explaining this alignment of corporeal with linguistic expression. What does "alignment" mean? How does it happen? Brennan follows Lacan in suggesting that language is an entity greater than any individual who uses it. It preexists her, and continues after her death. The structure of language and the structure of the individual are thus at cross purposes: language is eternal and infinite, whereas human life is temporal and finite. Brennan then equates this structure to the ego's relation to the greater processes of life of which it is only an insignificant part. Life itself -- which is expressed directly through those "languages" or forms of expression that Brennan variously calls "fleshly intelligence" or "fleshly codes" or "languages of the flesh"-- is infinite in the same way as grammatical language, and it is only the deluded, affect-laden perspective of the ego that fails to see this, by overstating its own importance. For Brennan, the only difference between corporeal and linguistic languages is that the latter is "slower" than the former, because it incorporates self-consciousness of its own expressive capacities into its operation. The languages of the flesh, by contrast, are quick, almost instantaneous.

Brennan understands both linguistic and corporeal languages to exceed the individual, she also attributes tremendous power to the individual, who can transform language through learning, attention, and reasoning. (Her book concludes, in a version of Wittgenstein's aphorism, "Of that we cannot speak, thereof we must learn" [164].) This confusion over individual power or agency is not cleared up by referring, as Brennan repeatedly does, to an "other I" that must replace the position of the ego. The "other I" is by definition attuned to the "living logic" of the flesh -- but what is the status of this "attunement"? How do we find the words to express this dispersal of agency? Is this an active process or a passive one? Brennan occasionally hints that the body itself, as a sensing being, may operate on our linguistic choices: "Language may echo the facts of transmission; sentir may mean smell [in French] either because we once knew that we felt the other's feelings by smell or because the body knows it still and seeks the word that will best describe its operations" (149). The verbs here, "echoing" and "knowing," seem to describe opposite sorts of activities. The passivity of echoing is at odds with the activity of knowing. In Brennan's account, language -- no matter whether it be of the word or of the flesh -- is straightforwardly communicative. There seems to be no place for the waywardness of figural or rhetorical language -- even as she herself is beholden to it.

Brennan's book is most vital as a contribution to -- properly speaking, a meditation on -- the theoretical or philosophical question of the relation between living being and representation. We should be grateful to Brennan for making us attentive to the languages of the body, but we still need further consideration of the way that language as we have traditionally understood it relates to those other, still potentially metaphorical languages. In particular, we have not yet said all there is to say about the function of metaphor, metonymy and all the other rhetorical resources of figurative language as privileged elements in the task of aligning body and word.