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.
Cognitive semiotician and aesthetics scholar Per Aage Brandt’s theory of the neuro-semantic economy of meaning con- struction departs in some important ways from Lehmann’s un- derstanding of simultaneity in aesthetic perception. In Brandt’s model, meaning is organized on five nonhierarchical strata, to which we can attend selectively or simultaneously: sensation (qualia),∗ perception (objects), apperception (situations), reflec- tion (notions), and affect (emotions). Thus, the processes of or- ganizing meaning do not constitute linear, integrative “assembly lines” that culminate over and over again at the level of abstract or reflective thinking. Instead, Brandt claims, mental construc- tion is “sloppy,” involving overlays of attention that occur in orders that are not strict. from "Auditory Turn: William Forsythe’s Vocal Choreography"
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
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"
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
http://aaaaarg.org/ref/8d0e4c5d242dfd06055818a73b7121e8
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
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."
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.
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.
David Reinfurt: eveRything is in eveRything
"A.J. Ayer helpfully places hume in the framework of British empiricism, a fundamental philosophical position that claims all knowledge arrives directly from sense experience. empiricism relies on a step-by-step sensory construction of the world and sits directly opposite of Rationalism, which imagines the world as complete and total, waiting to be described. Ayer begins his empiricist line with John Locke. in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke first concretely described our understanding of the world as coming only from sense perceptions.
he then divided this sense data into two categories: ideas of primary and ideas of secondary qualities. Primary qualities resemble the object that they describe, such as the solidity of a table, or the extension of a broom handle. secondary qualities are then reduced to surface treatments
and therefore subject to change. these include color or taste, and as Ayer describes Locke describing these, they are: Nothing more than effects.
next in line according to Ayer is george Berkeley, the Anglo-irish philo- sopher and Bishop who, at the beginning of the 18th century, “demolished [Locke’s] theory of perception.” Following Locke, Berkeley agreed that we only know the world through direct sensory experience but then traced this to its logical end. if we only know something through direct experience then we cannot say anything about external objects separate from our sensible perception of them. Bishop Berkeley continues by suggesting that a mind is required to order these sensations and to construct these objects through a series of sensations. therefore Locke’s distinctions of primary and secondary qualities as located in an object was patently false. Berkeley’s account instead relied on god to originate the sensations and to make them known in a mind. According to the Bishop, Locke “had no warrant, on his premises, for believing in the existence of physical objects at all, that is, so long as physical objects are conceived ... as existing independently of our perception of them.” Ayer places David hume directly in this arc. hume reduces the empirical argument to its almost-absurd essence. Ayer, again: Berkeley had eliminated matter, but left minds intact. Hume, an avowed sceptic, showed that this favouritism was unjustified. We had as little reason for believing in the existence of minds, as beings maintaining their identity through time, as we had for believing in the existence of material substances ... All that remains, then, is a series of fleeting “perceptions” with no external object, no enduring subject to whom they could belong, and not themselves even bound to one another. this parade of perceptions, hume argues, actually produces the mind, and knowledge is constructed only through the sequence of sensory experiences. hume’s words now: “i say compose the mind, not belong to it. the mind is not a substance, in which the perceptions inhere.” he follows this argument to its end, wrestling with the fundamental philo- sophical problem of cause and effect. hume arrives at the radical conclusion that no such relationship can be shown to exist only through direct sense experience. Or, as Ayer says, “there could be no necessary connection between distinct events."
According to hume, since all perception comes only through sensible experience in the base unit of the impression, then he is unable to sense any quality directly of either the first moving billiard ball or the second billiard ball that would “admit” of the former’s motion as producing the motion of the latter. there is nothing that can be directly sensed either from the motion of the first or the motion of the second that can account for a cause and effect relationship between the two. he continues then to suggest, if we cannot sense anything directly to account for this relationship, then our expectation of the second ball moving on consequence of the first striking it is founded on absolutely nothing beyond previous experience. According to hume, there is no fundamental connection between cause and effect. And further, “We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past.”
Focillon then returns us to David hume for now, by making the case that thinking makes itself felt in the world OnLy through forms. hume suggests that these forms are actually *constructed* by our direct sensory impressions, and articulated by the connections that they make from one to another and through time. According to hume, objects are little more than bundles of perceptions, temporary and contingent—living made concrete as form.
A: Both.
if (1) the only way to know the world is through direct sensory experience, and (2) objects are collections of sense impressions, and (3) the mind is COnstRUCteD from this series of fleeting perceptions, then it follows that thinking and form are ALL One."
Partial, Material and Situated Knowledges
- 20 - The work’s transmaterial flows and affects, transformation of agencies, and the constitution of transversal relations happen where different agents, human and non-human, meet; where data and bodies dynamically couple and affect each other. In the following we will take a closer look at how these transmaterial minglings and congealing agencies produce multiple perspectives and alternate situated knowledges. The works’ specific material enunciations, the ways in which they dynamically couple with bodies, and the transversal relations they produce, cut across and challenge some old and long-engrained boundaries, separating mind from body, human from nonhuman, and culture from nature. These demarcation lines and their underlying Cartesian ontology also brought upon us the distinction between matter and information (see Hayles 1999), which has deprived the digital of its materiality and in many ways defined the medium’s potential. The way, in which the artworks and their experimental playgrounds outplay these boundaries, is by deliberately producing unstable conditions and embroiling matter, processes, and human actors in this maelstrom of constant becoming. Davis has depicted the productive effect of Philip K. Dick’s radical and often destructive interferences: ‘In a world of manufactured illusions, the gremlins of entropy—malfunctions, interference, decay—can paradoxically liberate us by gouging holes in the smooth surface of simulation; these corrosive gaps create the space for breakthroughs and insights, imaginative or real’ (2005). The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials: Uzume’s chaotic habitat and Maya’s noisy and bubbling data passage, On Track’s messy mix, and Zwischenräume’s forceful inscriptions of the machines’ gaze. All four release, what may appear as wilfulness, an agency unintended or an ‘other’ that unsettles our expectations and assumptions. At the same time, they open up a space for a different set of questions and relations that seek, in Donna Haraway’s words, ‘perspective[s] from those points of view, which can never be known in advance, which promise something quite extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination’ (1991:192).
Thinking with the body: Mind and movement in the work of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: http://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/thinking-with-the-body/?video=4
"Mediated cognition. Thionking process that you are unware of (mediated things: internal derived from external things.)
"
"“We are at the beginning of a new language.” This was the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica writing in 1969 about the possibilities of a behavioral art. For him, the shift from visual aesthetics to synthetic, polysensorial experimentation was part of a larger rearticulation of the work of art: from one that proposed a merely metaphoric structure, or “model of life,” to one that treated “conflicts” within existing behavior as the generative material of the work. If the first remained confined to what Oiticica called “distant Utopias,” the second conceived of the work as a practice of transformative change seated within the present, in the “building up of everyday life.” The “new language” to which he refers was, thus, a language for the construction of behavior itself." at http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn/
Gerhard Schulze in The Experience Society: It corresponds to a general revaluation of experience in Western societies, in which “experience” has become a focus of social, economic, and cultural activity. This tendency has been discussed by various observers; its most comprehensive analysis so far, however, comes from the German sociologist Gerhard Schulze.
Even though the ecological and economic consequences of this transformation have by now reached public consciousness, the cultural impact—at least as an impact of this process—is much less present. The transformation from a society of lack to a society of affluence, according to Schulze, produces a change in the way individuals relate to themselves. With the increase in both income and leisure time, more and more people can (and need to) shape their lives according to their own needs and preferences. People have to learn how to relate to their living context in a mode of selection—and their selection criteria are no longer primarily purpose-oriented—that is, driven by necessity—but are also, and increasingly, aesthetic. When I choose, I can choose according to necessity or taste. And in Western societies since the 1950s and 1960s, the realm of the nonnecessary, the aesthetic, has gained an extreme importance. The emerging affluent society might still celebrate its new wealth—as they say, more is more—but for the individual in the advanced affluent society, aesthetic criteria, such as quality and intensity of experience, have become a main point of orientation. It is important, however, to understand this as a gradual project in a historical perspective. Schulze does not claim that today we want (or are able) to orient our lives according to our experiences. What he says is that a historical and intercultural comparison reveals that there is now a relatively large focus on experience for the construction of the social world.
How do we want to live? What does it mean to lead a good life today? What could be “beautiful” relations?
This new focus on the subject and the intersubjective goes hand in hand with a changed relation to the material world. In a society that is focused on the production of goods—a society of lack, in other words—relating to things basically means adjusting to their characteristics. In an affluent postindustrial consumer society, the focus shifts from producing things to selecting them. Choosing things, however, means that their criteria are adjusted to me. This change of perspective leads to encounters with the self. Aside from things, the subject finds the theme of itself. This is where Schulze joins a discourse on the “technologies of the Self” (Michel Foucault) and the “aesthetics of existence,” which has gained increasing attention in recent years. This new focus on the subject and on the techniques and practices of subjectivization has been largely criticized, or even dismissed either as a new kind of fashion trend or—as Ulrich Bröckling claims, for example—as a particularly refined mode of economic self-exploitation. Schulze, in contrast, sees the turn toward the subject as an urgent and necessary project demanding public and rational debate, precisely because we don’t know how a “culture of being” might look today. Modern Western societies were primarily characterized by their attachment to what Schulze calls the logic of expansion or the “cumulative game” (Steigerungsspiel)—to perpetual technological, economic, and scientific progress and innovation. The more saturated the status quo of scientific and technological development, the more apparent becomes the necessity for a different mode, one that is less determined by breaking boundaries and expanding possibilities, and more oriented toward ideas of how to shape and give form to the status quo. Schulze speaks in this regard about the increasing significance of a “culture of arrival” that needs to be acquired in a collective learning process. This, according to Schulze, is the main challenge of contemporary Western societies: the transition from a tradition of appropriating nature to the creation of an appropriation of culture.
If we agree with Schulze’s analysis that a major characteristic of our time is the fact that what historically was an upper-class phenomenon—namely the cultivation of an aesthetics of existence—is today a kind of mass phenomenon, then the “experience society” ultimately has to be seen as a part of a huge movement of democratization. With the increase of both income and leisure, more people can and must engage with techniques and practices of the self—the freedom to choose is also the obligation to choose. When material needs are satisfied to a certain extent, inner experiences become a focus of individual behavior, and a need for refinement, for the shaping of character, arises. And the realm that answers to this need is, in a secular society, no longer religion but the realm of culture. This, to a certain extent, might explain why in Western societies the aesthetic is gaining more and more significance for the practice of life. A notion of the aesthetic, however, that slowly seems to be loosening its obligatory tie to the object or artifact and increasingly orienting itself to the subjective and intersubjective.
The rise of material production as the dominant source of wealth was accompanied by a new ambition to democratize culture, which brought the fields of culture and production closer together. So if bourgeois culture was essentially based on a connection between the individual and the material object, then visual art became a kind of practicing ground in which this specific connection between materiality and subjectivity was both practiced and reflected on a purpose-free level. Not only because the artwork itself has, as a material object, a relation to the realm of material production—and yet can also designate this object as a source of cultural significance and aesthetic refinement—but also because the exhibition constituted a kind of ritualistic cultivation of the idea of an individual who relates to the material object.
And just as the attachment of visual art to the material object cultivated and refined bourgeois-industrial society’s groundedness in material production, so did art’s “experiential turn”—and the new focus on the perceiving, experiencing subject that came with it—resonate with the fundamental economic and cultural transformations of bourgeois-industrial societies in the late twentieth century. If present-day Western societies are on their way to a postindustrial social order, this development is mirrored in art’s shift from the object toward the dimensions of subjective and intersubjective experience. It is precisely these correspondences between art’s experiential turn and the rise of “experiences” to a prime paradigm of Western societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that raise the central question of a qualitative judgment of this new “experiential turn” in visual art. And by this I mean not only the ability to decide between aesthetic and nonaesthetic experiences, which is becoming more and more virulent given that “experience” is now a focus of social, economic, and cultural activity. I also mean questions about aesthetic judgment, about quality and depth. Questions that until now have been asked primarily in critical discourse: What, after all, is experienced? The experience of having had an experience? Does the strong focus on the subject play into the hands of a narcissistic consumer culture? How does the strong focus on presence that comes with art’s turn to the experiential relate to the idea of a historical memory that is constituted by and through art?
Schulze’s Experience Society was published in 1992. The empirical data on which the book is based stem from the late 1980s. Critical voices could argue that the diagnosis is too dated to be adequate for the reality of the early twenty-first century, that economic crises and the “new poverty” question the affluence of Western societies and the search for “experience” as one of their main characteristics. There are, however, two misconceptions inherent in this critique. The affluent society is defined by the fact that its aggregate production is greater than what its population can consume. This signifies a transition from supply-driven to demand-driven markets. It does not mean that what is produced is equally distributed or accessible. The fact that there is an inequality of distribution that can and should be criticized does not mean that Western societies are not structurally affluent societies. And it is also empirically easy to prove that the experience-orientedness that Schulze observes has even increased since his book came out—up to the rise of the market and culture of experience that exist today.
Although Schulze’s fundamental diagnosis is still valid, the author himself refined and updated his analysis in a recent lecture on the subject. From today’s perspective, he differentiates between what he calls the “early” and “late” experience societies and what can also be defined as first-experience and second-experience societies. What characterizes the first-experience society is the shift from outer to inner goals described earlier, a shift that gives the central role to the subject, which seeks happiness in experiential stimulation. Reviewing this phenomenon today, Schulze adopts a more critical tone that incorporates some of the cultural critique of the supposedly narcissistic and individualistic focus on experiences:
In early experience society, instrumental thinking conquered the new pattern. Rationality of experience was born: a collection of common strategies to maximize and perfect experiences. A rapidly expanded market of experience trained and stabilized this rationality of experience. In a collective learning process, consumers and suppliers established four simple techniques of psychophysical stimulation: accumulation, variation, escalation, and coding opportunities of experience. … In late experience society, however, these techniques have largely lost their potency, like addictive drugs. People are still dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. They still define the sense of life in psychophysical terms. The good life is still conceived as one of intense, fascinating experiences. But there are increasing tones of criticism, boredom, disgust, and hostility.
Like Zygmunt Bauman and others, Schulze points to a kind of dead end of the subject’s turning to the self in the attempt to invert the self-centered perspective and open it to a new direction: to understand the work on the self as something that requires an involvement with something outside it, with projects and content. The shift toward inner goals that Schulze had defined as the main characteristic of contemporary Western societies is now recognized as a path that does not turn away from the outside but, conversely, presupposes an engagement with it.
Interestingly, there is a connection between Schulze’s critique of the experience society and a critique of the experiential turn of art that was raised by the art historian Rosalind Krauss. As Krauss writes in her essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” published in 1990, the phenomenological orientation toward experience, something that she elaborates primarily in reference to Robert Morris’s sculptures, brought with it not only a new approach to the physicality of the body but even a kind of compensatory, if not utopian, gesture as well. A viewer-subject, alienated in everyday life from his or her own experiences, was to be realigned with them through the experience of art. “This,” Krauss says, “is because the Minimalist subject is in this very displacement returned to its body, re-grounded in a kind of richer, denser subsoil of experience than the paper-thin layer of an autonomous visuality that had been the goal of optical painting.”
(...) Krauss quotes Thomas Krens, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a key protagonist in this change, who specifically referred to Minimal Art in explaining these developments: “It is Minimalism that has reshaped the way we … look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.” Krens understood that conventional museum architecture was unable to provide the kind of experience that these Minimal objects required. The sculptures prompted him to opt for new design paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatial concepts that took their cue from warehouses and factories and presentation formats that were geared toward comprehensive monographic shows.
Precisely because these objects engender an experience that remains contingent and does not refer to an essentially stable subject, this experience cannot give rise to a cultural context as traditionally represented by the museum. Instead of “reconciling” the individual with his or her own experiences, Minimal Art, according to Krauss, ultimately serves to underscore what she calls the “utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture,” which no longer finds the terrain for experience within a historical trajectory. In other words, it nurtures an individual subjugated to spectacle.
But just as Minimal artworks are abstract—with their geometric shapes and qualities as pure objects—and seem to maintain a position outside the representational conventions outlined in art history, so too does the experience of viewing these artworks remain abstract. This becomes clear, for example, in Tony Smith’s oft-cited anecdote of his nighttime experience on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Smith drove down the empty road and reported how this experience, for him, was quasi-aesthetic in nature yet also shattered all customary aesthetic order. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” is how he put it, and it was clear to him that a reformulation of the aesthetic would also provoke a fundamental change in the conception of art, transgressing the aesthetic experience in a way that was universal. It was precisely this universality that ultimately rendered the experience of these works indeterminate and general.
In different ways, and from very different perspectives, both Schulze and Krauss point to an important premise of the experiential turn, which does not imply a turn away from meaning, discourse, and content but rather points to a connection of meaning production to experience—to the viewer’s situated and embodied experience. It leads to a concept of situated knowledge, an understanding of meaning as something that is always and inseparably linked to a situated and embodied subject. Correspondingly, the turn toward the subject and his or her experiences does not imply a narcissistic turn to the self. The work with and on the self presupposes an engagement with outer projects or content in the same way that such an engagement with projects or content also implies or leads to work on oneself.
The museum has always been a place that changes and transforms itself according to profound changes in the socioeconomic order upon which it is based. As long as this order was determined by premises of production and progress, the exhibition was able to be the privileged site for ritually performing a subjective encounter with objects. Historically it was an institution of liberal government in which essential values of modern subjectivity could be practiced and enacted vis-à-vis the material object. In this sense, Tony Bennett calls the exhibited objects “props for a performance in which a progressive, civilizing relationship to the self might be formed and worked upon.” From the 1960s onward, there seems to have been a strong tendency in visual art to connect to and at the same time challenge this formative effect of the museum. The exhibition, once conceived as a space dedicated to cultivating our most sophisticated relationships to objects, now proposes an aesthetic experience that is no longer work-related but self-related. The object, traditionally the protagonist of meaning production, becomes a device for engaging in an experimental relation with oneself and others. If we understand this turn toward the production and shaping of experiences today as an adjustment to the present state of Western societies, this, at best, could restore a discourse that enables art to become productive beyond its own boundaries in a project of a “culture of being.” Yet the subject of this experience is not of worldless and timeless universality; it is rather conceived as situated and contextualized, establishing a notion of aesthetic experience that is able to connect to the social and cultural contexts of art.
Performance Art: Life of the Archive and Topicality - Edited by Raphael Cuir and Éric Mangion
"According to John Langshaw Austn, the concept of performance originates in the productive role of language in relation to reality - perforative utterances are those that "do" at the same time they "say". Performance objects will then be seen as ocurrences capable of creating the circunstances in which action is carried out." (p.79)
" David Zerbib on performance ontological frame:
presence = temporality singualrity = identity materiality = body efectiveness = transgression (p172)
Performance is reached in effect, as an effect, and this type of effectiveness leads to a anner of acting in consequence. Thus, the more it shows the work as an effective action, the more it acts on beings and things. (...) Intnesifying this view, we might say that performance art establishes its ontology as an active principle, since its mode of being purpposes effectiveness and implies efficacy.
Performance art a - a form that shatters artistic categories and definitions and trangresses limits - paradoxically constructs, in this very movement, its own ontological frame and means of its artistic recognition. (p.186)"
Moving as Thing: Choreographic Critiques of the Object - ANDRÉ LEPECKI
To be moved by some thing, rather than by oneself. —Yvonne Rainer
"saturation of contemporary life by what Jean Baudrillard once called “the system of objects.”
...a “thing” would be that a-personal, subjectless matter, that noninstrumen- tal entity that would liberate a dancer’s moves into a field of nonhierarchical, hor- izontal interactions. The task (ontological but also political, aesthetic but also eth- ical) was to create a choreographic logic where any links between “manipulation” and “subject,” “utility” and “object,” would be bypassed—so that other possibilities for things could come into being.
Once objects and subjects symmetrically co-determine each other, it follows that “if the status of the object is profoundly changed, so also is that of the sub- ject.”8 In this light, the change of the object’s status in recent choreography raises a pressing question for subjectivity: once an object surrenders (or is evacuated from) utility, once it is removed from the realm of instrumentality, from relations of subordination in regards to a subject that manipulates it—in other words, once an object becomes no longer an object but a thing—then what does a subject become? Specifically, what does the subject who dances become? In the co-constitutive sym- metry obtained between objects and subjects, the subject follows the path of the object: the subject involutes, becomes-thing.9 But, if this is indeed the case, what does this involution actually perform, in the realm of the choreo-aesthetic as well as that of the choreo-political?
Moving as Thing
Holding oneself back, holding back the very mode of subjectivation called “self,” is nothing more than to initiate a becom- ing thing by giving space (within objects and within subjects) to things.
—particularly in “the extreme phase of capital- ist development in which we live,” characterized by “a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.”
As we produce objects, we find ourselves being produced by objects: “Today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.”26 Agamben’s definition of appa- ratus, then, is useful for understanding the predominance of objects in recent experimental dance: first, because his notion uncovers a performativity in objects, and second, because it identifies a choreographic force defining and inhabiting objects in contemporaneity—a force securing the relation between subjectivity and objectivity as it mediates the question of obedience, of governing gestures, of determining who determines whose movements.
...as the necessary action to break free subjects and objects, and reveal a shared mode of being thing, and moving as thing.
This activation is nothing else than the political effect that a choreographic critique of the object has the capacity to create: the formation of an “impersonal movement that at the same time displaces the other from himself and allows him in his turn to give himself as thing and to take me as thing.”
"
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/general-performance/
"...In a curious way, the recent interest in time-banking tends to restore time as the measure of value. Early-twentieth-century examples of time-banking, which are invoked as models for contemporary forms, are in turn indebted to the Equitable Labor Exchange developed in the 1830s by Robert Owen, and to Marx and Engels’s insistence on the abolition of money under communism, when socialized production would enable the direct expression of value in its “natural, adequate, and absolute measure, time.”
"The new labor is marked by the inability to distinguish between labor and leisure, between work and occupation, between working hours and free time—between performance and life."
"At a moment when the Western and indeed global performative economy is showing serious signs of disintegration, such interventions are part of a mix of practices that turn general performance into a reflexive and interventionist praxis, that turn new labor into a different kind of (non) work. Economic general performance spawns new forms of aesthetic general performance—its mutation, its fulfillment and tipping point."
http://frontdeskapparatus.com/files/015.pdf
Metahaven
White Night
Before A Manifesto
May 2008
"the new reality of design. Its unit of measurement is virtual.
Surface is folded out in order to produce value, while it is folded into secure it. The production of surface is design’s equivalent to the production of space; surface in the generic sense means flat space to display. Surface is anorexic, hyper-thin architecture.
Communicative (active) surface, or screen, is classified by its capacity to reveal and open up doorways to virtual worlds. In the absence of message, it maintains a system of placeholders and default images.
Active surfaces are inhabited by worlds in worlds.
Surfaces extend everywhere, recuperating the potentiality for conflicts by offering more space for the uncontested expansion of self-referential opinion. The actual confrontation between adversaries is prevented from taking place, thus suspending the political. The potentiality for a conflict to occur directly produces production – that is, it perpetuates the immanent breeding ground for new spheres and strata, new identities, new aesthetic needs and thus new spaces for production, combined with a permanent process of tagging. Precisely the tags, or names (which have passed through preceding stages of evaluation) enable
the transformation of cultural clashes into capital accumulation. This
is the true power of surface, as the multiplication of virtual surfaces
is a frictionless event. This mechanism maintains itself only because endless coexistence equals the permanent potential for conflicts. This is the opposite model to the real and the physical, where the natural rule perpetually refuses the territorial coexistence of incompatible alternatives.
Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens – inventors of the Third Way – have done so with a focus on the changing role of the individual and the self. Scott Lash and John Urry summarize: ‘The thesis of the postmodern political economy is one of the evermore rapid circulation of subjects and objects. But it is also one of the “emptying out” of objects. For Giddens modernization is a process of “time-space distanciation” in which time and space “empty out”, become more abstract; things and people become “disembedded” from space and time.’