The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking art beyond representation.
“Art is thus confused with a cultural object and may give rise to any of the discourses to which anthropological data in general lend themselves. One could do a history, sociology, or political economy of it, to mention just those few. One can easily show that its destination, anthropologically speaking, undergoes considerable modification depending on whether the artwork “belongs” to a culture that is tribal, imperial, republican, monarchical, theocratic, mercantile, autocratic, capitalist, and so on, and that it is a determining feature of the contemporary work that it is obviously destined for the museum (collection, conservation, exhibition) and for the museum audience. This approach is implied in any “theory” of art, for the theory is made only of objects, in order to determine them. But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Critical Reflections” 93
30/09/20 4:00 PM start time
Simon O’Sullivan. The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking art beyond representation, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 6:3, 125-135, 2001.
READING NOTES
- problem – there is no vocabulary of affect, cannot invent because would bring affect into representation, representation brings deconstruction. this problem has no solution other than to sidestep it.
- Lyotard – sign works in two+ economies, metonymic and metaphoric, perhaps affect.
- art historians – “how to attend to the material object behind the ideological veils (the cultural readings/meanings), whilst still attending to the object’s history” problem bc ideology + history are synonyms.
- Derrida + de Man – “present experience is inaccessible to conciousness”
- “affect is immanent[within] experience”
- faith – either deconstruction: event is always constituted, determined by scene of event, or faith: event as something genuinely unexpected
- virtual – art is a space/zone in which “one might encounter the affect”
- Bergson – attention – “suspension of normal motor activity which in itself allows other “planes” of reality to be perceivable”
- spatio-temporal register – art to switch register (new tech ie timelapse)
- body without organs – Deleuze and Guattari – to access affect, do not read about affect, experience it (to know body without organs, do not read about body without organs, make yourself a body without organs ????)
- matter in us responding and resonating with matter around us – affect as transhuman aesthetic
- art as […] an access point to another world,[…] a world of impermanence and interpenetration…
- “how to sidestep ourselves… we do it all the time…” we are involved in processes that go beyond our subjectivity, we “are” these processes.
- what are practices and strategies that… imaginatively and pragmatically switch the register
- “art’s function: to switch our intensive register” art’s MO is to transform selves and perspectives
- discarding “existent” and “possible” (negative) for Deleuze’s “actual” and “virtual,” (affirmative)
- possible undergoes process of realization
- virtual undergoes process of actualization
- Adorno – art provides critique of instrumental reason and world commoditity. Deleuze and Guttari – art and philosophy are pragamatic active concept creation to solve problems and getting something done. Different kinds of art have different functions.
- Kristeva – art seeks to “place us in a space at the limits of the sacred, and asked us not to contemplate images but to communicate with beings,” incarnation – to make us feel through abstractions the real experience.
- making visible the invisible, making perceptible the imperceptible, the harnessing of forces
- less making sense of the world, more exploring the possibilities of being and of becoming in the world
- less shielding us from death, more involved in actualizing the possibilities of life
- “aesthetic function” in this sense (above) makes term “visual culture” useful when detatched from “aesthetic form” (objects) and attached to “immanent aesthetic.” (so, visual culture in relation to general aesthetics rather than semiotics).
- reconfigure art history as creative writing, something parallel to the work art is already doing rather than interpertation
- art history as “the thinking[/writing] of specific art works[…] as exploration of art’s creative, aesthetic and ethical function.”
when looking through a lense of affect, what does art do?
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS (H3)
Badiou, A. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Bergson, H. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone, 1991.
Bogue, R. “Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Bogue, R. “Art and Territory.” A Deleuzian Century. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
Derrida, J. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McCleod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Lyotard, J.-F. “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.” Trans. Maria Minich Brewer and Daniel Brewer. The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Melville, S. “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Art Criticism.” October 19 (1981): 55–92.
affect: “moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter” “the effect another body, [ex art object] has upon my own body and my body’s duration (Spinoza),” “matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us (Bataille),”
intensity: extreme degree of strength, force, energy, or feeling (Merriam-Webster)
immanent: existing or remaining within (Merriam-Webster). “experience as immanence means that it emerges from the realm of the virtual in and immanent plane from within, always from within.” (From M-B Module)
individuation: mechanism that multiplies and breaks from the national body politic, breaks from the grid system where resistance is primarily concerned with a deconstruction of instrumental reason, via evaluations of discourse significantation and language. (from M-B Module)
duration: the time during which something exists or lasts (Merriam-Webster)
aesthetic: a particular theory or conception of beauty or art : a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight
virtual: the realm of affects
resingularisation: process of reordering ourselves and our relation tot he world (Guattari, Chaosmosis 7)
marxism (The Social History of Art):
deconstruction (derrida, The New Art History): “a kind of expanded ideological critique”
post-medium:
deterritorialism (making visible the invisible, “harnessing of forces” deleuze+guattari):
transformation: exploring the possibility of being/becoming in the world, actualizing the possibilities of life
hermeneutic: Interpretive; explanatory.
heuristic: involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental
aporia: an expression of real or pretended doubt or uncertainty especially for rhetorical effect
Kurt Foster “Critical History of Art or a Transfiguration of Values,” Derrida “The Parergon,” O’Sullivan “Art as Text: Rethinking Representation,” Craig Owens “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of the Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, and the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Art Criticism,” Andrew Benjamin “The Plural Event,” Alain Badiou, “Deleuze: The Clamour of Being,”
Notes from Module
- what do ideas do? what does art do in the first place?
- manning – national body politic, matter is reduced to identity, ideology, gender, purely human.
- affimation of life.
- function – not as utilitarianism or function as capitalism/world market. what art serves is a function that can’t be seen (affect)
- individuation – a mechanism that multiplies and breaks from the national body politic, breaks from the grid system where resistance is primarily concerned with a deconstruction of instrumental reason, via evaluations of discourse significantation and language.
- what is the function of theory when what is observed is the impact of forces of affect?
- transcendence vs immanence – becoming moves in excess of language and critique but not outside it
- “all we have of the present is its trace” outcome of movment, and art and event.
- immanence – god is within the physical world
- transcendance – god is above or beyond the physical world
- “experience as immanence means that it emerges from the realm of the virtual in and immanent plane from within, always from within.”
- prothestic limbs, timelapse photography, slow motion film, spatial registers like microscopes and telescopes,
- body without organs – a body that rejects organisation (organisation is national body politic), possible to connect intensely via body’s potential to become
- art has potential to take us out of centrality of being human
- becoming and not arriving, actualizing the virtual, that which we cannot see
- Ecosophy, 3 ecologies, environment, social relations, human subjectivity
- consider resingularizing activities in the every day, move into virtual, realm, aesthetic, work within 3 registers of 3 ecologies (environment, social relations, human subjectivity)
POST-READ
I wonder if it means something that I am always rushing off to eat something when I am done reading.
This text aims to put in action a vocabulary of affect, and in it navigates questions of how to side-step marxism, deconstruction, representation, and reconfiguring art-history to detatch it from ideology and semiotics. This text describes the virtual as “a space in which one may encounter affect.” An affect is a force that exceeds experience, it is immanent (a part of) experience. An affect is a transhuman experience because it is the matter in our bodies resonating with the matter of the world around us, it is “interpenetrative.” Art allows us to switch our spacio-temporal register and focus on the resonating with the world around us. It is an event, a fleeting, “an impermenance.” This theory, unlike deconstruction, focuses on affirmation rather than critique. In deconstruction, there is the “possible” that goes through a process of “realization,” and resembles reality. In affect, there is the “virtual” that goes through a process of “actualization.” In Marxism (Adorno,) art functions as a critique to society, in affect (Deleuze,) art functions as a problem solving creative force. Through abstraction, we feel the real experience, and we become aware of the possible that is made invisible by our “subjectivities.” For art historians and those concerned with “visual culture,” their work becomes a co-creative endeavor, working alongside art by performing additional exploration of the art’s creative, aesthetic and ethical function.