Category: Uncategorized

For the start of this semester, I am in Alberta. Covid-19 numbers in Ontario reached four thousand, but they’re coming down. Today they’re at three thousand. Before the holiday, Alberta was bad too. I got a flu shot before flying here, and had a little panic attack about maybe being sick, and had to get a covid test and reschedule my flight, then quarantined in my mom’s basement for 10 days. Now, the numbers are under one thousand here. I don’t know when I’m going home. These specific details don’t really matter, I guess I’m trying to outline that this is going to be a semester with disruptions. Last semester was difficult. The workload wasn’t unmanagable, but the stress of returning to school combined with global events that demanded daily exercises of personal responsibility ie: not riding transit, limiting how often I went outside, navigating school online and screen fatigue… it was a lot. In recognizing that, I plan to take one class this semester, on decolonization, fitting seeing as I am stuck in Alberta. I am excited as there are a number of inclusive design students in the course.

What am I going to do with my extra time? I am trying not to overload myself. It’s important I focus on my health and managing a sustainable routine, with daily exercise and eating well / regularly. I haven’t had a lot of pain in recent months, my cycle is disrupted from pandemic weight gain, but there is still some (IC and muscular recently). I have signed up for a critical theory course I don’t know if I can drop yet, that I would like to audit, and have submitted an application to audit a course on Senses in Artistic Practice, and have a stack of books I want to read and a new ereader … all of that is sounding overwhelming.

Setting some achievable work goals:

• Organization: Develop and use index card note taking system.
• Organization: Integrate Zotero into my organization system.
• Organization: Set up spreadsheet to assist visualizing.
• Reading: Work through my self-directed reading, set goal of 3 books to read and in what order. 1) Crip theory, 2) matters of care, 3) man with the compound eyes.
• Reading: Set time limits and word count limits to help avoid being precious about reading.
• Workflow: Use timer to help with work periods, bullet to-do list in binder.
• To mitigate difficulties with online courses: discuss with faculty accommodations for participation.
• To maintain connections with program: attend the IAMD meetings on a biweekly basis.
• Upon return to Ontario: increase regularity of studio practice, pick up MRI images to work with, etc.

Okay, cool beans. Time to do some reading.

Breaking Up with Deleuze

In this article, Eve Tuck grapples with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of desire, finding it simultaneously generative and unsatisfying. Recognizing that Deleuze will not ‘say’ what Tuck wants him to say about desire – that it is smart, and constitutes expertise – Tuck reasons that there is only one thing she can do: break up with Deleuze. The article is organized into several break-up rituals, and in each of the rituals, the author works to understand, interrogate, expand, and extend conceptualizations of desire. In these ways, an articulation of what it means to value the irreconcilable is presented.

Tuck, Eve. Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the Irreconcilable In International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23:5, 635-650, 2010.

Additional:

https://www.artandeducation.net/classroom/video/253794/eve-tuck-i-do-not-want-to-haunt-you-but-i-will-indigenous-feminist-theorizing-on-reluctant-theories-of-change

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh https://vimeo.com/423729554

Deleuze for the Desperate #3 Haecceity “Third in the series, this one discusses the haecceity. The term has been used to describe close working relationships, but it has wider applications. The discussion also helps to begin to grasp terms like ‘event’, ‘assemblage’, ‘singularity’ and ‘rhizome’. Transcript available on: www.arasite.org/deltranscript3haecc.html” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77CMNYJEb4I

READING NOTES

• inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s assertions of desire as ‘involution’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003), I have been theorizing desire and desire based inquiry as counter to damage-centered research (Tuck 2008a, 2009; Tuck et al. 2008).
  • forgoing Oedipal configurations of regression and repression (illustrated as the false choice between an authoritative father and devoted mother – her shape and his hand [Williams 1991; Gordon 1996]) for a configuration that constituted the multiple, the dimensional, and the kaleido directional.
  • Deleuze’s work is a fractal. He is insistent that philosophy operates and resonates while scaling up and scaling down.
  • open-handed hold that I use in my reading of poems (Tuck 2008a). my words were anemic, their words were ‘language at its most distilled and most powerful’,
  • there is no correspondence between the conceptual rhizome and the botanical rhizome (Colombat 1991, 15).
• ‘All we have to do is prove that you are damaged, and then we can get you what you need’.
  • The theory of change is flawed because it assumes that it is outsiders, not communities, who hold the power to make changes.
  • Are the long-term costs of these damage narratives worth the benefits (Tuck 2009)?
• Desire-based research frameworks appreciate that all of us possess a: ‘complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing [one another] as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents’ (Gordon 1996, 4; Tuck 2009).
  • desire […] ‘becomes applicable in any context or relation: it is a spontaneous emergence that generates relationship though a synthesis of multiplicities’ (Goodchild 1996, 4).
  • Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing of desire and the politics of desire is culturally specific, wholly situated within democratic capitalism, even at the same time that they are working to confront and expose the fallacies of this system (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 44; Goodchild 1996, 71).
  • It is desire’s nature of being unresolved and self-incompatible that makes desire productive.
  • Desiring-machines work by cannibalizing desire, past desire, desire-in-formation, so that the distinctions between them are blurred beyond recognition. There is no new, pristine desire; there is no old, preserved desire; there is only desire that is becoming.
  • Deleuze is adamant that desire is revolutionary. ‘This doesn’t mean that it wants revolution’, he writes. ‘It’s even better. Desire is revolutionary by nature because it builds desiring-machines which, when they are inserted into the social field, are capa ble of derailing something, displacing the social fabric’ (Deleuze 2004, 233).
• Foucault, Reich, Deleuze, Guattari, all of us, are concerned with how people can continue to participate in their own domination and exploitation.
  • In the notes, Deleuze addresses Foucault’s dissatisfaction with desire, along with MF’s petition for ‘pleasure’: “Evidently it is again something other than a question of words. Since as for myself I can hardly bear the word ‘pleasure’. But why? For me, desire does not comprise any lack; neither is it a natural given; it is but one with an assemblage of heterogenous elements which function; it is process, in contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as opposed to feeling; it is ‘haecceity’ (individuality of a day, a season, a life), as opposed to subjec tivity; it is event, as opposed to thing or person. (quoted in Ewald 1994)”
• desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire (Tuck 2009).
  • Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness (Tuck 2009).
  • participatory action research and Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies (Tuck 2008b). It is crafted to be particularly attuned to insynchronicity: to observe contradictions within institutions and the ways those contradictions play out in lived lives. A methodology of repatriation views insynchro nicity – the gaps between what institutions, people, and governments say they do and what they actually do – as revealing units of analysis
• Deleuze gives too much up when he says that desire is perfectly meaningless.
  • out of character that Deleuze, so relentlessly scale-ular, would maintain that society strategizes territorializations and deterritorializations because of the haecceity of public desire, but does not afford desire at the level of personhood the same providence.
• [Tuck] believe desire constitutes our expertise.
  • how do I attribute Deleuze’s notions of rhizomatic interconnected ness, a notion at the very center of his philosophies, when for hundreds and thousands of years, interconnectedness has been the mainstay in many Indigenous frameworks, both tribal and diasporic?
  • It’s an issue of false inventions and giving credit where credit is due, and again an issue of describing and engaging in contentious, complex ideas.
  • The notion of fluidity has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples. Federal agencies have invoked that language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for dismantling the structures of tribal life. Whitestream America has seized upon the message of relativism to declare open season on Indians. (Grande 2004, 112)
• valuing the irreconcilable […] Patricia Carini’s work on valuing the immeasurable.
  • To describe is to value, Carini tells us ‘Describing I pause, and pausing, attend. Describing requires that I stand back and consider … Describing makes room for something to be fully present. Describing is slow, particular work. I have to set aside familiar categories for classifying or generalizing. I have to stay with the subject of my attention. I have to give it time to speak, to show itself. I have to trust that what I am attending to makes sense; that it isn’t a merely accidental or chance event. To discover the subject’s coherence and how it persists in the words, I have deliberately to shift my own perspective in relation to it. (2001, 163)”
• ‘experience as always inseparable from language – from self-subject, from others, from discourse, from difference, from love’ (2009, 615). (Stacy Holman-Jones)

INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

Tuck, E., in conversation with M. Fine. 2007. Inner angles: A range of ethical responses to/ with Indigenous and decolonizing theories. In Ethical futures in qualitative research: Decolonizing the politics of knowledge, ed. N. Denzin and M. Giardina, 145–68. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Tuck, E. 2009. Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3: 409–27.

Gordon, A. 1996. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Holman-Jones, S. 2009. Crimes against experience. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 9, no. 5: 608–18.

POST-READ

Interesting in thinking about own research and speculative presents, especially drawn to thinking about questioning damage-narratives, “desire-based research frameworks,” and valuing the immeasurable.

Reading Art as Confrontation

Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Reading Art as Confrontation In e-flux journal, May-August 2015.

Reading Notes

• What sort of compositions could retain the postcolonial concern with representation, aiming beyond the limits of postcolonial critique and its particular rendering of modern grammar? If it aims to go beyond denouncing, if it moves to dismantle and/or counteract the effects of epistemic violence, what would anticolonial artwork accomplish through the form of presentation?
• “[…] A process of rethinking visual representation unleashed, considering how to make these images “visible” without making them public, and questioning the iconography of the Palestinian refugee created through images mainly produced by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).” (description from “Together,” Eid-Sabbagh)
• The time and situation in which the performance takes place […] does something that is beyond and that cannot be comprehended by the conceptual tools and analytical moves associated with the “postcolonial” as a scholarly practice
• […] by violating the presupposition of universality that gives ethical support to representation (juridical, symbolic, economic). […] without some assumption of a universal (in terms of equality and/or transcendence), it is inconceivable that free (self-determined) persons or collectives would accept being represented by somebody or something other than themselves.
• […] the postcolonial academic does not have to worry about the “public” when she performs her critique. Nor does she, as noted above, worry about the “making public,” because what becomes “visible” in the text is mediated by pages and pages of conceptual and methodological declarations that make evident that what becomes visible is made so only under these conditions of emergence.
  • none of that distancing is available to the postcolonial performance artist.
• […] because of the in/difference between the stage and the museum as exhibition sites. Both offer precisely that which Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh’s performance refused (its corruptive move), which is the “ethical closure” effected by a reassurance of difference, namely, of a given distance between “I” (spectator/colonizer/Human Rights enforcer) and the “Other” (exhibit/colonized/victim). For that is precisely what has justified (as explanation, cause, or meaning) the violence done in the first place.

Module

Notes

• Sarah Ahmed
• in the critical undoing of hegenomy there are productive assembleges that matter and that in mattering there is forming
• disruption, confrontation and refusal are not simplistic methods that result in ruin, what emerges? transformations…
  Cont. w/ Eve Tuck
• “research that is not damage centred”
• delueze – do more than critique, but augment
• breakup as necessary and productive
• analyitic lense of experiece and self determination as method for self determination
• thinking with desire, counter to damage centered research
• haecceity: properties of a particular thing and not an individual, not about personhood (about fields that move the matter within space)
• freud – desire = lack,
• indigenous knowledge systems accumulate knowledges over generations
• stress selfdetermination, desire has expertise via desire and memory
• why desire should be smart? is smart a way of saying intentional, purposeful?
• what does it matter that deleuze does not say desire is not smart?
• immeasurable is about refusable to classify for purpose of unquestioned heirarchy
• irreconciable – difference is inevitable
• deleuze and guttari undersanding of desire is productive because they argue for necessary caution “art of dosages” opening body to connections that presuppose entire assemblage, circuts… passages and assemblages of intensity … gentle. lines of flight are not always predictable.

U.S. Third World Feminism- Differential Social Movement I

Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism- Differential Social Movement I” pp. 40- 63. In Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory out of Bounds Volume 18, 2000.

READING NOTES

• “hegemonic feminist theory ” denying, permitting, and producing difference.
• U.S. third world feminism as a model for oppo sitional political activity and consciousness in the postmodern world. In mapping this model, a design is revealed by which social actors can chart the points through which differing oppositional ideologies can meet, in spite of their varying trajectories.
• Louis Althusser’s theory of “ideology and the ideological state apparatuses.”
• humans are called into being as citizen-subjects who act—even when in resistance—in order to sustain and reinforce the current dominant social order.
• “means and occasions”7 do become generated 7 whereby individuals and groups in opposition are able to effectively challenge and transform oppressive aspects of identity and social order,
• “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential” forms of oppositional consciousness.
• Differential conscious ness is the expression of the new subject position called for by Althusser—it permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology
• contention is that the feminist forms of resistance outlined in what follows are homologous to five fundamental forms of oppositional consciousness that were ex pressed within all U.S. liberation movements active during the latter half of the twentieth century.
• The application of differential consciousness generates grounds for making coal tions with decolonizing movements for emancipation in global affinities and associations. It retroatively provides a structure, a theory, and a method for reading and constructing identity, aesthetics, and coalition politics that are vital to a decolonizing postmodern politics and aesthetics, and to hailing a “third-wave,” twenty-first century feminism.
• U.S. third world feminists is composed of “different kinds of humans,” new “mestizas,” “Woman Warriors” who live and are gendered, sexed, raced, and classed “between and among” the lines
  • “the Borderlands,” “la nueva Frontera.”
• How did this systematic repression occur within an academic system that is aimed at recognizing new forms of knowledge?
• 1980s hegemonic feminist scholars produced the histories of feminist consciousness that they believed typified the modes of exchange operating within the oppositional spaces of the women’s movement. These efforts resulted in systematic studies that sought to classify all forms of feminist political and aesthetic praxis.
• from the perspective of U.S. third world femi nism: from this critical perspective they are revealed as sets of imaginary spaces, so cially constructed to severely delimit what is possible within the boundaries of each narrative.
• manifestly different types of hegemonic femi nist theory and practice are, in fact, unified at a deeper level into a great structure that sets up and organizes the logic of an exclusionary U.S. hegemonic feminism.
• first-phase “liberal feminism” is fundamentally concerned with “demonstrating that women are as fully human as men.
• Jaggar too argues for the recognition of second-phase feminism, describing it as the moment when femi nists turn to Marxism as the way to undermine the feminism of the liberal first phase.
• this third phase that women seek to uncover the unique expression of the essence of woman that lies beneath the multiplicity of all her experiences.
• third-phase feminism was actualized under the names of either “cultural” or “radical” feminisms
• the “liberal,” the “Marxist,” and the “cultural” forms, construct different modes of oppositional aesthetics, identity, and politics.
• Jaggar’s book has much to say. She typifies first-phase “liberal feminism” as “tending to ignore or minimize” racial and other “difficult” differ ences, second-phase “Marxist feminism” as tending to recognize only differences of class, and third-phase “radical feminism” as tending to “recognize only differences of age and sex, to understand these in universal terms, and often to view them as bi ologically determined.” But fourth-phase “socialist feminism,” she hopes, will be capable of recognizing differences among women “as constituent parts of contem porary human nature.”
• “liberal,” “Marxist,” “radical/cultural,” and “socialist” feminisms. We can schematize these phases as “women are the same as men,” “women are different from men,” “women are superior,” and the fourth catchall category, “women are a racially divided class.”
• each position in this typology is an imaginary space
• history of oppositional consciousness.
• not as a typology, but as a topography of consciousness in opposition
• These orienta tions can be thought of as repositories within which subjugated citizens can either occupy or throw off subjectivities in a process that at once enacts and decolonizes their various relations to their real conditions of existence.
• feminist versions of four forms of con sciousness that appear to have been most effective in opposition to modernist modes of capitalist production insofar as these same four responses appear again and again across social movement theory and action of every type
• Unlike its previous and modernist hegemonic version, however, this alternative topography of consciousness and action is not historically or teleologically orga nized; no enactment is privileged over any other; and the recognition that each site is as potentially effective in opposition as any other makes visible the differential mode of consciousness-in-resistance
• addition of the fifth and differential mode of oppositional consciousness to these has a mobile, retroac tive, and transformative effect on the previous four, setting them all into diverse processual relationships.
• I describe its locations categorically here as the “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential” forms of consciousness-in-opposition.
• The Equal-Rights Form the differences for which they have been assigned inferior status lay in appearance only, not in “reality.” Aesthetically, the equal-rights mode of consciousness seeks duplication; po litically, it seeks integration; psychically, it seeks assimilation. “liberal feminism.”
• The Revolutionary Form second ideology identifies, legitimizes, claims, and intensifies its differences—in both form and content—from the category of the most human. the only way that society can affirm, value, and le gitimate these differences will be if the categories by which the dominant is ordered are fundamentally restructured.
• The Supremacist Form Under “supremacism” the oppressed not only claim their differ ences, but they also assert that their differences have provided them access to a higher evolutionary level than that attained by those who hold social power.
• The Separatist Form organized, rather, to protect and nurture the differ ences that define its practitioners through their complete separation from the dom inant social order.
• The Differential Form of Consciousness and Social Movement “differential,” insofar as it enables move ment “between and among” ideological positionings it functions as the medium through which the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of opposi tional consciousness became effectively converted, lifted out of their earlier, mod ernist, and hegemonic activity
• without making this kind of metamove, any “liberation” or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppres sive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself
• positing a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter
• Cherríe Moraga defined U.S. third world feminist “guerrilla warfare” as a “way of life,” a means and method for survival.
• She interpellates a constituency of “U.S. third world feminists and their allies” when she writes that it is between such lines that “the truth of our connection lies. ”49
• The differential mode of social movement and consciousness de pends on the practitioner’s ability to read the current situation of power and self consciously choosing and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push against its configurations, a survival skill well known to oppressed peoples
• Within the realm of differential social movement, ideological differences and their oppositional forms of conscious ness, unlike their incarnations under hegemonic feminist comprehension, are under stood as tactics—not as strategies.
• “la conciencia de la mes tiza.” This is the consciousness of the “mixed blood,” she writes, born of life lived in the “crossroads” between races, nations, languages, genders, sexualities, and cul tures, an acquired subjectivity formed out of transformation and relocation, move ment guided by la facultad, the learned capacity to read, renovate, and make signs on behalf of the dispossessed.
• “outsider/within” identity that guides movement of being according to an ethical commitment to equalize power between social constituencies
• Audre Lorde, a “whole other structure of opposition that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time that we are resisting.”
• does not “support re pression, hatred, exploitation and isolation,” but which is a “human and beautiful framework,” “created in a community, bonded not by color, sex or class, but by love and the common goal for the liberation of mind, heart, and spirit.
• (1) the equal rights (“liberal,” and/or “integrationist”) mode; (2) the revolutionary (“socialist” and/or “insurgent”) mode; (3) the supremacist (or “cultural-nationalist”) mode; (4) the separatist mode; and (5) the differential (or “womanist,” “mestiza,” “Sister Out sider,” “third force,” U.S. third world feminist . . . it has generated many names)
• previous four, not as overriding strategies, but as tactics for intervening in and transforming social relations.
• deploys each mode of resistant ideology as if it represents only another potential technology of power.
• set of principled conversions that requires (guided) movement, a directed but also a diasporic migration in both consciousness and politics, performed to ensure that ethical commitment to egalitarian social rela tions be enacted in the everyday, political sphere of culture
• recognizing the structures around which consciousness disperses and gathers in its attempts to challenge social powers
• subjugated citizens either occupy or throw off subjectivity
• dialectical modulation between forms of consciousness permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology: the practitioner breaks with ideology while also speaking in and from within ideology.
• oppositional expressions of power as consensual illusions.
• the differential mode of resistance represents a new form of historical consciousness

POST-READ

i feel like sandoval is saying mode a differential conciousness as a mode of social action is already being enacted and she’s giving a name to it so it can be used and recognized more broadly. i am thinking about code switching and being sensitive to using different language in different situations, applying that kind of idea to feminist movements.

Chapter 1 Feminism is Sensational

Ahmed, Sara. Chapter 1 Feminism is Sensational pp.21-42 in Living a Feminist Life, 2017.

READING NOTES

POST-READ

Ahmed is very easy to read and I look forward to reading more of her other works (she appears often on my reading list!)

Module

NOTES

• differential consciousness – us third world feminisms
• mestiza consciousness (anzaldua) – oppositional living at the borderlands, those that exist outside socially constructed centre
  critique of feminist movements, reflect white hegenomy in united states.
• Jagger “phases of feminist thinking” doesn’t reflect how it intersects with race and class, attempt w/ socialist feminist “women are a racially devided class.” Jagger believes “us third world feminism” is descriptive/anecdotal and not worth of theorerizing
• Oppositional praxis (euro-american white feminists)
  • liberal feminism – ex. voting rights
  • marxist – equality to men is not enough, wanting to restructure system
  • cultural – claims of female superiority (essentialist: maternal instinct,
  • what a woman “is,” centre potential for social change in hands of women)4
  • socialist feminism – class differences as a key characteristic of inequality, and by extension race
• Sandoval – not negation of Jagger’s phases but rejection of theory that doesn’t include lived experiences. difference of sandoval vs jagger = jagger limits, sandoval emergents, moving, method
  • equal rights form – intergration and assimilation4
  • revolutionary form – women stop trying to equal achievements of men, pushback for radical change
  • supremacist form – women centered leadership, different experiences valid/superior to others w/o same struggle (representation)
  • separatist form – “separation from the dominant social order” (p 56)
  • differential conciousness – “history of oppositional conciousness,” aim to not have boundary driven categories, mobility in political and material ways, moving between and among ideological positionings, flexible mobile diasporic nomadic, tactical instead of strategic (tact vs strategy, micro vs macro)
• Sarah Ahmed
  • sensation as a form of mobilization (more feeling than affect)
  • tactics of sandoval in use, use to think about differential conciousness.
  • how do come to you align yourself with certain lines of thinking?
  • coming to terms with being in opposition to dominant positons

Ok to add own reading for this process if they feel the bibliography does not fulfill their interests/needs…Opportunity to clarify questions on the readings, demonstrate their understanding of the methodologies covered in class, and add personal insights or extra research information to the issues discussed… Find a case study example of art/design/media/curatorial practice to illustrate discussion of, and questions about, the theory in the specific article.

• What questions do I have about research-creation?
  • how does research (knowledge making) as a (speculative) event emerge in the practice of / how is it demonstrated in the practice of a disability artist? (Springgay)
  • What is it about a practice that makes it research-creation? Can you apply research-creation as a framework to a practice that does not consider itself that way?
  • how do disability artists take daily-practice, incremental/partial/diffuse experimentations and translate the EVENTS into other forms of publication to get at different aspects of research?
  • how do disability artists honour emergent polydisclinary drives and how does that emerge in their work?
  • what makes someone a disability artist? (presenting as such)
  • what does function does research-creation serve for disability artists? assertation that this kind of knowledge production is valuable.
• what does this have to do with iris haeussler?
  • Florence Hasard, “The psychologist on our team suggests that she was haunted by her past experience as a nurse during WWI, which lead her to focus on the fragility and ephemerality of the human body.”
  • artist statement – artists echoed in work of Florence Hasard, often women artists who become institutionalized – Séraphine Louis, housecleaner institutionalized for “chronic psychosis,” – Agnes Richter, seamstress institutionalized for acute delusional episodes (https://florencehasard.org/artist-statement)
  • fictionalizing as a means of creating distance between private and public, how to create distance between the self and work, how to get out from under yourself…

Artists

Adelaide Damoah – endometriosis, performance, decolonization
Deborah Padfield – Inside the Metaphor, photography research-practice, presentation of work via writing and presentation, co-collaboration with service users

Deirdre Logue

Vanessa Dion Fletcher https://www.dionfletcher.com/

Katherine Araniello – Sick, Bitch, Crip Dance – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJVgQysT_f8

Additional Readings

Scarry, E. (1985) The body in pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Lynne Beckenstein (2017) Listening to color: a set of propositions on pain as feminist aesthetic, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 27:3, 283-300, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2017.1365439

Bissell, David. “Obdurate Pains, Transient Intensities: Affect and the Chronically Pained Body.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2009, pp. 911–928, doi:10.1068/a40309.

Rice, C., LaMarre, A, & Mykitiuk, R. (2018). Cripping the ethics of disability arts research. Catriona Macleod, J. Marx, P. Mnyaka, & G. Treharne (Eds.), Handbook of ethics in critical research: Stories from the field (pp. 257-272). London: Palgrave.

Rice, C. Multimedia Storytelling Methodology: Notes on Access and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, University of Waterloo. 2020.

Research Ethics Board

Research Ethics workshop with Christine Crisol and  David Griffin

https://www.ocadu.ca/research/research-ethics-board.htm

http://www.ger.ethique.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique_tcps2-eptc2_2018.html

https://www.ocadu.ca/Assets/content/research/ROMEO/ROMEO_Tutorial_Students_NewApplications.pdf

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?

1. “Extensive” is the retrospective from endpoint, “intensive” is the movement that enables the retrospective.
2. Process(movement) before signification(sign/code).
3. How to explain the wonder that there can be stasis(sign/code) given primacy of process(movement)?
4. Statis and motion is not binary, modes by which realities pass into one another(continuum).
5. Process concepts must be ontogenic(nature of being /organism/), equal to emergence.
6. 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.
7. Dimension of emergence is prior to distinction between individual and collective and any model of their interaction.
8. 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.
9. Distinction between becoming and the normative operations that set the parameters of history (the possible interactions of determinate individuals and groups).
10. Natural and cultural feed forward and feedback into one another, nature-culture continuum.
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.
12. Bracketing of nature of process misses becoming of culture, misses continuum of feedback/feedforward by which movements capture and convert each other.
13. Own writing adds to reality… consider how you want to distribute time and effort into affirming or debunking. Which is more inventive?
14. Use vagueness.
15. 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)

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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.