Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t
Facilitation: Share observations, critiques, considerations. Prepare 2 thoughtful and complex questions inspired by selected reading.
Report: 500-600 words, present understanding of text. Include questions posed to class, and how the question came to be. Report should show text was read carefully. Elaborate on point of view. Can focus on particular aspect of text. Must think critically.
What resonated most for you?
18/09/20 5:00 PM start time
Massumi, Brian. “Introduction: Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t” pp. 1-21 In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.
QUESTIONS
Why is this one of first text we read in this course, and how does this text orient us in critical theory?
- learning to think abstractly
- learning to think with movement
- critical theory method
- affirmative critique
- inventive writing
What do I think is important in the Bergson 15 points?
- “Extensive” is the retrospective from endpoint, “intensive” is the movement that enables the retrospective.
- Process(movement) before signification(sign/code).
- How to explain the wonder that there can be stasis(sign/code) given primacy of process(movement)?
- Statis and motion is not binary, modes by which realities pass into one another(continuum).
- Process concepts must be ontogenic(nature of being /organism/), equal to emergence.
- In field of emergence indeterminacy (change) has ontological(nature of being /human/) priority over determinism (static), therefore comes “before” but not necessarily “first” in time sequence.
- Dimension of emergence is prior to distinction between individual and collective and any model of their interaction.
- Possibility is a variation implicit in (coding) what a thing can be, potential is the immanence(process) of a thing to its still indeterminant variation.
- Distinction between becoming and the normative operations that set the parameters of history (the possible interactions of determinate individuals and groups).
- Natural and cultural feed forward and feedback into one another, nature-culture continuum.
- Habit is an acquired automatic self-regulation, is acquired therefore cultural, is automatic therefore natural. Consider difference between law and habit and distributing in nature-culture continuum.
- Bracketing of nature of process misses becoming of culture, misses continuum of feedback/feedforward by which movements capture and convert each other.
- Own writing adds to reality… consider how you want to distribute time and effort into affirming or debunking. Which is more inventive?
- Use vagueness.
- Paradox as logical operator is a method of vagueness… consider “incorporeality of body”.
Why were Deleuze and Massumi assigned as facilitation pieces and then expanded on in an audio post?
What did I not understand?
- What is the distinction between movement and sensation?
Draft Writing
In “Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t” by Brian Massumi, what resonated for me the most about it was the experience of reading it. I found it very difficult to read, it took me a lot of time, I felt it physically from reading it all in one sitting. However, it was fun to feel sparks of discovery and understanding, lose them and then find them again. Going into it I had a rough expectation of how to read an academic text, I read the introduction and the conclusion and some of the topic sentences, assumed it would adhere to my expectations, and trudged through it. I took way too many notes. When it got to the 15 points of Fluidifying with Bergson (Movement) it starts to loosen up, and I feel like I don’t have to struggle as hard. Points from earlier are being repeated in different ways, using different levels of language, and I’m being given multiple ways of looking at and understanding things. It’s still challenging, I still have a lot of tension in my body, but around point 12 and definitely by point 14 where he says “hey it’s cool, this is difficult but we’re here to have a good time” I feel really rewarded and like I’ve been invited into a secret club. Not only does this text introduce ideas about movement and sensation, but in the writing it demonstrates the importance of the experiential aspects of them.
I was hesitant to do this as my facilitation because it was really difficult and I don’t understand a lot about it. I tried to explain to my partner what it means to think about concepts not as positions on a grid but as movements between positions on a grid, but it’s not easy to think of and it’s not easy to explain. The text has taken up a lot of space in my brain since I’ve read it. ***I don’t want to make any more assumptions but this is probably one of the more difficult texts we will read in this course, but it does a good job of being a kind of deep end for critical theory, affect studies and creativity. I find I am also thinking a lot about dance, movement, embodied empathy, abstraction in art, the order in which sensation, emotion and conception happens in our brains, what that means for these topics and our reality, and what goes on between them.
I keep finding myself of affects as a miasma that we pass through, pick up, and experience as emotion, and art objects as things that contain affects and put them on blast, or emit the miasma. Something about this feels not-quite-right and too rooted in materiality.
Parable: illustrated examples of ideas used to indirectly convey meaning (fables)
Virtual: essentially / effectively but not directly
Affect: (Deleuze Video) becomings that overflow and spill past those that experience them / twists being, becomings
Movement:
Sensation:
Draft #2
“Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognizable to you as your own. This means you have to be prepared for failure. For with inattention comes risk: of silliness or even outbreaks of stupidity. But perhaps in order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to ‘affirm’ even your own stupidity. Embracing one’s own stupidity is not the prevailing academic posture (at least not in the way I mean it here).”
Page 18
In “Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t” by Brian Massumi, what resonated for me the most about it was the experience of reading, and is reflected in the recommendations Massumi gives for writing, quoted above, from page 18. I found it very difficult to read, it took me a lot of time, and I felt it physically from reading it in one sitting. Coming into graduate level studies, reading complex material can be intimidating, I am aware that I probably won’t grasp most things on a first read-through, I have skills and strategies to read quickly and I’m learning not get bogged down. But that doesn’t necessarily serve for all readings. With Massumi, I did a read through of introduction, conclusion, and topic sentences, and my expectation was to read an argument about the disciplines of humanities and sciences, but when I read closer what I found was different. As I read through the 15 Bergsonian points, the reading got clearer, and sillier, and more joyous.
On page 17, he explains that he is making an effort to demonstrate that “writing in the humanities can be affirmative or inventive,” and gives a series of suggestions on how this can be done. It made me feel like I’ve been invited into a secret club, given tools to participate. I felt reinvigorated and like I now had a key to returning to the reading with, to better understand the why and how ideas of being restated, put into different contexts, using different conceptual webs. The text is written this way so the ideas of movement, sensation and affect can be suggested towards rather than explicitly stated, because it is difficult to fit them into the static frameworks that I already grasp.
For me, presentations are more difficult than reading, I’m not good at them and I’m probably going to feel like an idiot. But making a fool of yourself can be like a gift to others, and if I didn’t get it out of the way I would spend the whole semester dreading having to do this facilitation while navigating the weird loneliness of graduate studies online. There’s different levels of bravery, some that are about enduring and some that are about ripping off a bandaid, and if I had to endure it would be a great boulder for me to carry. The joy in this reading excited me, and I’m bringing it into my discussion. I wish Maria had posted the audio clip earlier because it probably would have been easier for grasp the details of this text with that support but I didn’t get to listen to it until Sunday and I had already prepared. So the question I bring to the class is this: Why do you think this one of the first texts we read in this course, and how do you think it orients us in critical theory?
This text makes me excited for the research ideas that I bring with me into graduate studies, losely based on a foundation of texts that include things like disability identity, embodied empathy, liminality, flow, process, a betweeness of things. I recently began arranging a visualization of process from the past year, including reading, writing and visual residnu, and in reading Massumi i think a lot about one of the notes i had written in the night months ago but thought wasn’t worthy of being added to my milanote board: in crip time (periods of brain fog or fatigue that make work difficult or impossible), how can stasis be thought of as productive? I am also thinking a lot about, in prioritizing process, visual output is where I pivot, but it doesn’t feel like a resolution. The 15 Bergson points are excellent starting points for reframing my thinking around these questions, point number 4, Statis and motion is not binary, modes by which realities pass into one another(continuum). Point number 11, Habit is an acquired automatic self-regulation, is acquired therefore cultural, is automatic therefore natural. Consider difference between law and habit and distributing in nature-culture continuum. Point number 13, Own writing adds to reality… consider how you want to distribute time and effort into affirming or debunking. Which is more inventive?
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Bio:
Retired faculty in Communications Department in Montreal, translated Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and wrote A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t is the introduction for his book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), this book played an important role in the creation of the field of Affect studies. Deleuze describes what an affect is and how it relates to other ideas in I is for Idea video.
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3 (2011), pp. 434-472.
Technologies of Lived Abstraction, edited by Massumi and Erin Manning
Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. (2009)
Presentation Final
In “Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t” by Brian Massumi, what resonated for me the most about it was the experience of reading it, and I think this is reflected in the recommendations Massumi gives for writing.
I found this text very difficult to read, it took me a lot of time, and I felt it physically in my body.
Coming into graduate level studies, reading complex material feels intimidating, I am afraid I won’t understand, that I’ll lose focus or that I will be too focused, that my notes will be stupid, or that I will be so afraid of feeling stupid I will just avoid it. I have skills and strategies to read quickly and I’m learning not get bogged down. But that doesn’t necessarily serve for all readings.
With Massumi, I did a read through of introduction, conclusion, and topic sentences, and my expectation was to read an argument about the disciplines of humanities and sciences, but when I read closer what I found was different. I did feel stupid, and I was taking too many notes, but as I read through the 15 Bergsonian points, the reading got clearer, and sillier, and more joyous.
On page 17, Massumi explains that in the essays in this book he is making an effort to demonstrate that “writing in the humanities can be affirmative or inventive,” and gives a series of suggestions on how this can be done. It made me feel like I was being invited into a secret club and given tools to participate. I felt reinvigorated and like I now had a key to returning to the reading with.
Whereas before I felt the language was dense because of jargon and references I was supposed understand, now I had a better understanding that in a way ideas were being restated using different language, put into different contexts, using different conceptual webs. Portions of the text are written in a way so the ideas of movement, sensation and affect can be suggested towards rather than explicitly stated, as a way to side step the frameworks that I, and a lot of people, already carry. Most importantly, I came to understand not supposed to grasp it all, and the unknowing is part of the experience.
Presentations are more difficult than reading, for me, I’m not good at them and I’m probably going to feel like an idiot.
But I wanted to get in on this nugget of joy, making a fool of yourself can be like a gift to others.
If I didn’t get it out of the way I would spend too much time dreading having to do this facilitation while navigating the weird loneliness of graduate studies online in a pandemic. One of the things I bring with me into graduate studies is a kind of gross vulnerability, which we all do, and the degrees to which we admit that, or the time in which we allow ourselves to feel it, are always shitfiting. When I think about affect being “becomings that overflow and spill past those that experience them,” I think about how when I see somebody dancing I feel in myself, it in my physicality, what it is to dance.
I also find myself asking, I know this is not supposed to be a summary, but how do I demonstrate that there are aspects of the text that I grasp? How do I find the language to talk about the concepts discussed when I don’t think I’ve ever had to discuss critical theory before? Do I talk about my research? This text makes me excited for the ideas that I have because they’re loosely based on a foundation of texts that include topics like embodied empathy, liminality, flow, process, and an inbetweenness of things.
It makes me reconsider ideas I had written down in the night and discarded, like “how can i think of stasis as being part of a productive process in context of crip time.” What happens when I look to Bergson point number 4, Static and motion is not binary, but modes by which realities pass into one another(continuum)
Or … why should anybody care about what I’m thinking about in my research, I can’t even tell if we’ve started doing research yet.
Point number 13, Own writing adds to reality… consider how you want to distribute time and effort into affirming or debunking.
Instinctively, I would rather crawl under a rock than do a presentation, but when I consider how I want to distribute my time and effort in this seminar, my priority is not in trying to conserve my energy in case of an attack.I would rather try on the costumes of using language add to the reality of this course by stepping up and feeling like an idiot. Despite the gymastics and the density, choosing what you want to put into reality was one of the things Massumi was explicit about, and that got me excited.
