CONTEXTUALISATION - LECTURE 2
Lecture 2 + Seminar - 16.10
AFFECT BEYOND THE HUMAN
Pre-reading based on Todd Cranan’s review of ‘Affect theory reader’: the Aesthetic Politics of Affect. https://nonsite.org/radically-private-and-pretty-uncoded/
-’Affect constitutes a level of experience (that) cannont be translated into words without doing violence’ Anna Gibbs as mentioned in Todd Cranan’s text.
- Affect organises itself:
_ challenge of affect theory (according to Patricia Clough) is to show how bodily matter bears information which overruns the information contained in any linguistic system.
_ affect organises itself: eveyr other form of organisation (?) includes perception, cognition, meaning, language, etc... are not entirely separable from affects but secondary to them (p196)
_ you can’t get from one to the other: language, no matter how intensely one deconstructs it, will never open onto affect.
- can Affects transcend time (inherited traumas or Ingrid’s premature example)? yes (links to decolonizing the experiences of a mixed person?)
DELEUZE
-Massumi: every form or image (information) is received by an agent ‘spontaneously + simultaneously’ in two orders of reality (one local/learned and the other non-local and self-organising:
_ learned vs innate/animal-like/fight or flight/survival
_intention + affect
_meaning + sense
_perception + experience
THESE CO-EXIST BUT DON’T CO-MINGLE, BUT YET STILL FUNCTION TOGETHER
-Roland Barthes: Affective states outplay the paradigm of dialetics by referring to something that slips through the net of dialectical analysis (therefore the unknown, the ‘automatic’, the self-organised)
-are there things in the world we cannot sense (depends on how you define sense)
-are there any form of affective relations taking place in your work?
-affect has a lot to do with relations.
-aesthetics isn’t about the beautiful, it’s about experience (perception, aesthetic experience, sensation): see Caroline Jones ‘the senses’ aesthetic experience.
- the 60s/70s insisted on widening sensory spectrum shift from object to experience (smell, touch, factory art, land art, noise, was introduced to modernist white cube)
- happenings/feminist performances/living theatre/fluxus: extension of the body, widening sensory spectrum (Marshall McLuhan: the extension of man)
- where is institutional critique today in art?
- are there other forms of sensing environment, ecology? who has agency + power in terms of my practice , in relation to how I meet the world, my surroundings, questioning norms and structure.
- Affect= having an effect on (links to the emotionally affected felt by humans but this is still very human, how else?)
- affect arises in between when something/one has an effect on capacity to act and acted upon, who is acted upon and vice versa, agency, power, who says they have capacity to act
- affect is also not just about human emotions then
- a body is never defined by a body alone (reminds me of David Abram ‘we are human only in contact, in conviviality, with what is not human’)
_questions materiality + ecology
_how do we define things based on where they are, who decides this
_could there be other forms of being in certain environments, ecologies, societies
_ affective TURN = more AWARENESS about this
-affect is a different way of thinking autonomy + subjetivity, goes against binary way of looking at things (object/subject, nature/culture) closer to assemblages, the becoming, everything is connected to something, you in relation to... bodies + its environment simultaneously. it is a folded cosmos (THE FOLD, Laura U. Marks): the bodies have changed when connected to each other, when unfolding they are changed again. what happens in that change? adds another awareness. UNFOLD=DECONSTRUCTING (see also Jane Bennett)
- can think of form of relations as a rhythm (folding + unfolding and the changes is a rythm), self is relational, related to environment:borders, geographies)
- active participation forces of non-human in events (see in THE FOLD).
- how can bodies, or cannot, assert themselves in those relations.
-materials are also ‘bodies’ (Jane Bennett)= vital materiality.
-see TAI SHANI for experimental writing as a method
Seminar - 17.10
AFFECT BEYOND THE HUMAN - click for link to assignement
- ‘we are human only in contact, in conviviality, with what is not human’ (ix)
- ‘the eyes, the skin, the tongues, ears, and nostrils - all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness’ (ix)
- ‘phenomenological research began to suggest that the human mind was thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our forgotten relation with the encompassing earth’ (xi)
- the environment is also becoming while humans are becoming.
- what is sensing? who can sense and partake?
Are there any affective forces in your work? where is the relational in your work? is it affect if it’s between your thoughts having an effect on you?
-in terms of participation (physical) between people, people doing things together (eg painting blindfolded)
-in terms of working with more-than-humans: planting trees, mushroom dyes, nettles (but that still feels like it’s from a very human perspective). the interaction / sitting with a tree that Mari Jerstad does.
-ritual (transformation) also has an in-between / liminal state.
- making a difference as artists: a difference means a change.
-does something have to be folded before being unfolded?