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Refrains for Moving Bodies
EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT IN AFFECTIVE SPACES
By Derek P. McCormack Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5505-2
CHAPTER 1
Transitions
For Experimenting (with) Experience
We move through and along corridors all the time. As spaces of transition, they allow us to pass between rooms, to travel to other places. As thresholds, they allow us to move between interior and exterior zones. As passages, they are defined both by their architectural structure and by movement through this structure. Yet while we may move through corridors, we don't often spend sustained time in them. Sometimes, of course, we linger a little, held temporarily in place by a chance encounter, a conversation, or when our attention is drawn to a notice or an announcement. Rarely, however, do we take time to inhabit these passages, to dwell within them. Rarely do we heed, let alone act upon, George Perec's injunction for us to learn to live in these "species of spaces." Rarely, unless they are spectacular or grand, do we pay much attention to the details, corners, nooks, and surfaces of these spaces. Because we take corridors to be overwhelmingly purposeful and directional, rarely do we consider the opportunities they afford for thinking.
In April 2001 I spent the guts of a week in a corridor at the Chisenhale Dance Space in London. I was there as a participant in an event of research-creation with Petra Kuppers, a pain-impaired performance artist and researcher, and Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, a hearing-impaired dancer and researcher. I had been invited by Petra on the basis that I was a geographer interested in the relation between questions of space, affect, and bodily movement. Under the heading of "Landscaping," our broad aim for the week was to explore the maps of movement that might emerge during the course of encounters between our ideas, interests, and bodies. Within the generous terms of this thematic constraint, we had no definite end point or terminus in mind: we were interested in the potential of cross-disciplinary practice and process, in the production of contexts within and from which new eventualities of thinking, moving, and relating might emerge. We were interested in the question of how something novel, however modest, might happen, when the relations between space, affectivity, and moving bodies are foregrounded as part of the process of thinking. And we hoped the Chisenhale would prove a facilitating context for the performance of open-ended, processual research-creation across and between disciplines and traditions of thinking.
That we end up spending much of the time in the corridor is not so much a choice: the building lacks an elevator, and access to the upper floor proves difficult, particularly for Petra. And so the corridor and lower part of the stairwell become our working space for a week. In itself this is hardly novel: Western performance practices have long since moved beyond the confines of the theater to explore and experiment with the site-specific possibilities of a multiplicity of everyday spaces. If the corridor and stairwell are open ended, they are not quite empty: the week that comes to pass therein is already populated by suggestions, anxieties, ideas. For Petra, these include the possibility of site-specific exploration through performance of "alternative access and space's imprint on bodies." For Kanta, these include the possibility of exploring the connections between hearing and deafness in distinctive kinds of performance space. And for my own part, they include the possibility that collaboration with practice- and performance-based researchers might allow a geographer to think through the relations between bodies, affect, and spaces.
Anticipatory interests only take things so far, however, when faced with the prospect of a week of working in a corridor. Inevitably — almost immediately — a simple and obvious question emerges: what should one do for that week as part of the effort to work and think across disciplines? Furthermore, how does one learn to become affected by what happens during such a week? And how does one know when something of any consequence is happening? In preparation, and without a real sense of how they might make their presence felt in the Chisenhale, I buy and bring some comfort blankets. Maps: random, charity store, fifty-pence-each maps — India, Norway, Wisconsin, Chicago, Buckinghamshire, France, and elsewhere. Maps: familiar technologies of lived abstraction. Maps: they become participants in the process of working in the Chisenhale. They provide blocks of color in the bleak white-gray of the corridor and stairwell. Some end up on the wall, some in fragments. Some are pasted to the risers on the stairwell, becoming the color of discipline in unfamiliar territory. Others become graphic thinking-spaces: for instance, we generate ideas on the back of Norway.
One evening during the week I go bookshopping. Luxury books. A copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems. The first poem in the book is called "The Map":
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves' own confrontation: and Norway's hare runs south in agitation.
I place the book as a series of lines of reference in an alcove in the corridor, adding to the geographies therein. Multiplying: the more available the better.
And so, in the process of thinking with maps, some familiar themes and concepts begin to populate the corridor and stairwell. A legend of sorts emerges:
Time
Space
Perception
Fantasy
Line
Cartographic legends can be understood, referentially, as the elaboration of the information contained on the map. And narrative legends can be understood as mythical fantasies with complex imaginative geographies. In the context of the Chisenhale, however, a legend becomes the shorthand for a form of creative collaboration providing inventive trajectories along which to begin to move in a white-walled week of thinking-space. Rather than a matter of fantasy, legends become lines of orientation for what Henri Bergson calls creative fabulation, a kind of inventive thinking into the potentiality of the event to come.
As it turns out, many things happen during that week. Minor details: the difficulty of beginning to know what to do in a corridor; encroaching frustration, tedium, claustrophobia; needing some orientation; wanting a manner of beginning to move. An uncertain rhythm beginning to emerge. Work, break, work. End to end, wall to wall. Turbulence: the felt sense of minor eddies in the rhythms of an ordinary access space.
THIS CHAPTER DWELLS within the details and afterlife of this week as a way of considering the following question: how, even in the most mundane of architectural spaces for moving bodies, might opportunities for experimenting with experience be generated? On one level then, the chapter provides a rationale of sorts for the minor collaborative experiments that might be facilitated by one such space: a corridor. On another level, and more broadly, however, the week becomes an occasion to dwell upon the problem of how experience might be understood as experimental. William James and John Dewey offer answers to this question through their shared affirmation of a conception of experience as an ongoing relational process of transition rather than an after-the-event process of representational reflection. Critically, they also affirm experience as something experimental and provide some valuable points of orientation for thinking about how and where such experimentation might take place. In the process, however, they encourage us to avoid thinking of such spaces as corridors in narrow, three-dimensional terms. Following James and Dewey means thinking of how corridors offer relation-specific affective spacetimes for experimenting with experience through moving bodies.
Questioning Experience
To commit to spending a week in a corridor is to take seriously the proposition that something might happen when bodies move in that corridor. Moreover, it is to place a degree of faith in the possibility that whatever might happen during this week has the potential to produce modifications in experience that, in turn, might shape the sensibility through which thinking takes place. It is also therefore to become entangled — intentionally or not — with one of the most problematic of philosophical concepts. Experience is always already shadowed by all kinds of conceptual and empirical difficulties. It has been dismissed as a mere veil over the underlying truth of nature, and as the refuge for a brute philosophical materialism. Its unproblematic affirmation has been criticized on the basis that it assumes a shared set of values anchored in a universal and distinctively human subject. The championing of experience as a useful philosophical category is also often taken to assume the possibility of an authentic relation between self and world. Indeed, it is precisely the impossibility of this coincidence that a range of post-structural theories have sought to place at the center of philosophical and, indeed, ethico-political thinking. These theories have, of course, subjected experience to a particularly withering critique, the terms of which are by now relatively familiar. This critique works to expose and demystify efforts to intervene in experience on the basis that they inevitably posit some existential truth, or grounds, upon which this experience is based. It seeks to reveal how any appeal to experience as a category is also always beholden to a dream of presence. It explores how the meaning of experience is multiple, and how this multiplicity is enacted through a range of practices and technologies. It also, therefore, seeks to expose the political and ethical implications of privileging experience, and more specifically how such privileging works to sustain certain systems of value, and in ways that foreclose the futures of other values.
In the wake of this critique, any claim that experience serves as a straightforward touchstone for a thinking subject is difficult to justify. Consequently, as Giorgio Agamben observes, "the question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us." Yet while it can be approached only asymptotically, experience remains one of the central problematic object targets of contemporary Western capitalist societies and the biopolitical technologies that shape the affective life of these societies. It continues to be modified through technologies and practices designed to produce distinctive and sometimes novel ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving in a myriad of contexts. This is nothing new, of course: the work of Michel Foucault and others has demonstrated how the possibility of working upon experience through techniques has long been central to the fashioning of the self. It is fair to say, however, that one of the distinguishing features of that structure of feeling named modernity has been the generalized rendering explicit of experience as a field of biopolitical intervention. Experience has become both more available and more problematic. But as Agamben also observes, such has been the proliferation of techniques and technologies for working upon experience that it is no longer possible to think of it as something singular, homogeneous, or easily translatable from one context to another.
What then to make of experience in a context where its philosophical currency has been devalued through the terms of critique while also becoming the focus of an ever-expanding range of interventions that mobilize it in order to generate different kinds of value? Certainly, it would be possible to continue to develop and refine a critique of the category of experience. And to some extent this remains an urgent and necessary task. However, the question of experience — and all the problems and possibilities in which this question is implicated — is not exhausted by critique, or at least not if critique is understood as a project of demystification. Instead, as a number of prominent thinkers, including William Connolly, Isabelle Stengers, and Nigel Thrift, have argued, one of the key questions facing us today is how to develop an affirmative critique of experience: a critique that seeks to reclaim the category of experience as an occasion for thinking, without, at the same time, reinstalling it as an essential phenomenological category, or an existential ground for thinking. This critique affirms experience by opening it up to all those elements that are in excess of a phenomenology of presence: that is, it seeks to make explicit the non-, or more-than-human, participants in the processuality of experience as it comes to matter.
Affirming Experience
An important way of developing this critique is to foreground the traditional association between experience and experiment. As Raymond Williams notes, up to the sixteenth century, both terms were often interchangeable. Subsequently, experience came to mean more than a process of empirical testing, and incorporated a sense of conscious awareness of a past state or event and the ability to use this awareness in the present. This divergence of experience and experiment parallels the split between subject and object. Experience became something possessed by the subject, a reservoir of worldly wisdom upon which to draw when making sense of the world. At the same time, experiment became defined and delimited to a greater and greater extent by well-rehearsed methodological protocols that worked to exclude, albeit under certain conditions, the influence of subjective experience.
An emphasis on experience as experiment persisted, however, in various minor strands of philosophy and social science. North American pragmatism is one of the most affirmative of these philosophical traditions, particularly the varieties developed by William James and John Dewey. Their respective work is affirmative in a number of shared respects: in the faith placed in the promise of a world of change and becoming; through a vision of an ethics of immersive involvement within this world as the basis of a renewed philosophical vision; and through the tone or style in which it is written. Yet what James and Dewey affirm, perhaps more than anything else, is the value of experience as a philosophical category: a concerted attempt at the renewal of this category for philosophy is one of the defining features of their respective writings. Pragmatism, in deed — in its doing — is nothing without experience.
A series of themes cuts across the respective visions of experience outlined in the writings of James and Dewey. For both figures, experience is of this world: it is not a secondary reflection of the world apprehended from a distance. Experience, in other words, is part of the sensible materiality of nature. Dewey is especially emphatic in this regard: "It is not experience which is experienced, but nature — stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object — the human organism — they are how things are experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth." Similarly, for James experience is part of the ontogenetic materiality of nature: it is the "stuff of which everything is composed." At the same time this primal stuff is by no means homogeneous but is infinitely differentiated: "There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced." If experience is in some sense coextensive with the sensible yet differentiated materiality of the world, then it becomes difficult to think of the process of experiencing as involving the activity of a mind representing (internally) to itself the details of an external environment.
To affirm a pragmatist conception of experience is, in other words, to take seriously the claim that experience can never be reduced to processes of representation. What is not present in experience for these theories is a representational picture of the world: indeed, these theories are relentlessly critical of any sense of experience as something that takes place through an act of cognitive representationalism. Experience is not our way of producing a synthetic facsimile of raw sense data. Nor is experience an after-the-event event: it is not (only) something we make sense of retrospectively through reflective contemplation. So pragmatism moves against a model of experience that would install a division between a perceiving subject and perceived object, precisely because in the process experience is reduced to the status of something upon which a thinking subject reflects through an act of separation and transcendence. As James puts it, "as 'subjective' we say that experience represents; as 'objective' that it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se." This means, in turn, that the subject and object of experience do not precede the event: they are created in and through it. Similarly, Dewey argues that the work of experience is not to produce a copy of an environment external to itself. If this were the case, the experience of an organism would actually be of a different environment than the one in which an organism lives and moves — a situation that would make its life infinitely more difficult. Dewey does not however deny the existence of cognitive experience: his claim is instead that "cognitive experience must arise from that of a non-cognitive sort." Cognitive knowing, as one mode of experiencing, emerges from a background of nonrepresentational sense making.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Refrains for Moving Bodies by Derek P. McCormack. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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