K T H C r i t i c a l S t u d i e s E l e c t i v e S e m i n a r w i t h D r . H e l e n e F r i c h o t : : S p r i n g 2 0 1 2A l l w r i t t e n t e x t a n d i l u s t r a t i o n s b y A n n a I n g e b r i g t s e n

A Colouring Book

An excersice in architecture + philosophy + affect

An exploration into gender and minoritarian identity in the context of the institution

The Strolling of Spaces

The Logic of Sensation Presents...

Introductions

Welcome to The Strolling of Spaces Colouring Book. This is a compilation of summaries, reflections, critiques, and interpretations responding to readings and seminars from the course: The Logic of Sensation. This Critical Studies Elective Seminar was held at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, school of architecture during the spring of 2012.

Throughout the course, we have examined the logic of sensation and affect as it relates to architecture and the institution. Weekly readings, reflections and illustrations have been shared, discussed, and critically analyzed during the seminars, informing the composition you now find in this colouring book. You are welcome to explore the collection of musings in any direction or order you prefer, there is no hierarchy or sequential system present other than the succession in which each page was produced. I would however, advise you to consider perusing the readings visible at the bottom of each associated page. This will offer deeper understandings of the relationships between the written reflections and drawn diagrams, as well as insight into the expansive spaces of critical architectural theory and philosophy.

The participants of this course were asked to choose an institution to employ as a lens through which to understand the readings, and as a position from which to respond to these readings. The term ‘institution’ can represent a variety of organized conventions ranging from the institution expressed as a nation-state to the institution of marriage, and has been interpreted in numerous forms. The following body of work centers mainly on institutions such as prisons, museums, and society while consistently returning to questions of sensation and affect. Instead of exhausting the institution, I decided to introduce a character as a means of exploring the cloudy constellations of architecture/philosophy/affect/institution. The character appears in the illustrations as a woman constantly morphing and transforming in her physicality through movement. This was partly inspired by Daniel W. Smith’s text, in which he describes sensation as the ‘master of deformations’, an ‘agent of bodily deformations,’ and speaks of the portrayal of these actions as a ‘frenetic dance.’ Thereby, in the manifestation of this booklet, I am simultaneously displaying the concept and performing the act.

The course themes also sought to emphasize gender and minoritarian identity in the context of the institution, and by embodying this character, I hoped to highlight her experiences and include her voice in the weekly discourse. As a mobile body, she is able to roam through varying institutional spaces which enables readers to navigate and access different orientations as she expresses an ‘anatomy of affect.’ Lefebvre argued that social theorists should examine not just institutions but moments within the realm of everyday life. These moments are difficult to define, and if we say that affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity, a moment of unstructured potential which cannot be fully realized in language, than we must depend on moments to inform a realized understanding of affect, and perhaps art is an appropriate media to represent it. This character, (which can also be known as an avatar, protagonist, heroine...) essentially represents a being in affect, a critical moment, or in the disruption/interruption of the moment. Her dancing legs, medusa hair, multiplying heads, flailing arms, twin figure, familiar spirits, and swiss army knife extensions, blur as well as clarify these moments. We can use her to analyze situations, isolate, extract, elude, capture, tickle, and stimulate spaces. In referencing Foucault we could even say that she is the apparatus to grasping the dispositif.

Affective Immediately

After reading several texts on the subject of Affect, I admit the concept remains to me elusive and somewhat intangible. I will use this first reflection as a means to unpack and clarify the various definitions I have found on Affect and to build a body of understanding surrounding it.

Seigworth and Greg illustrate Affect with juicy adjectives and colour its space with fantastical impressions of the imagination. Among the excruciating run-on sentences, I find some light in what Affect is not, such as over-romanticized pedantry, for example: “viewed as naïvely or romantically wandering too far out into the groundlessness of a world’s or a body’s myriad inter-implications, letting themselves get lost in an overabundance of swarming, sliding differences: chasing tiny firefly intensities that flicker faintly in the night...” (Seigworth and Greg 2010, 4) While I find these words poetic, I encounter a similar language used to describe Affect in their own text, sentences imbued with vibrant visual representations and characterized by contradictions. This makes cumbersome work for chiseling out a clear interpretation.

So... what is Affect? [ I collect below, highlights of my affected reading-journeys as an assemblage of initial knowledge for review]:

It can be born, and in opposition can drop dead. It has variegated histories and entangled orientations. It can extend, suspend, accrete and accumulate. It can be both in-between and beside. It is intimate and impersonal. There is an urgency about it, and amplification that occurs. Its cluster of promises/threats embody a yet-ness, not-yet, and never-to-be-resolved. Force relations and forces of encounter inhabit it. It gives way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs in the landscape. It gathers and unbinds while stretching and unfolding. It is a body and also a peeling or wearing away. Its gradient of bodily capacity acts as potential /participation in passage. If process was preferred to position it would feel less like a free fall. It is muddy and sticky.It may be an inventory of shimmers, nuances, states and changes. It travels as twinkling/fading, vibrant/dull continuities. As Bloom-Space it opens as a vibrant incoherence that circulates about zones of cliche and convention. It is an experience of intensity, non/un/prior to/outside-consciousness, pain, communication, transmission, unformed/unstructured/abstraction, as virtual, shareable, collective contingent conversion points.

So basically if Affect was a human being, it would be an impossibly slippery, socially-inept, multi-tasking robot.

So is that a promise or a threat? Isn’t its claiming to be Biological problematic? Can this be the stuff of Magic? How exactly is it a Powerful Social Force? And is it really Neutral? Am I listening to Punk Rock or am I Daydreaming? ... And yet - it doesn’t so much reflect or think - Affect acts... as moments, and the continual smashing of them.

Readings: ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg eds. The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Gregg, Melissa. ‘Affect.’ M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 25 Nov. 2011

Sensation and The Diagram OR…The Land of In-Between

You feel that you have lived too long in this dry and tasteless life. Mostly, you are tired of the dreadful art which surrounds you. Overcome with the desire to be free of consciousness, constraints, conventional square frames, representation, and narrative, you seek a new path. You must procure movement of free, random, involuntary character, employing manual traits of confused sensations. A new rhythm. You throw your easel in the trash and take a walk. Ambling fitfully along the ‘daily round’ you find yourself caught ‘frozen in the middle of a strange stroll.’

A philosophers search for The Moment, as in Sensation and Affect, resembles the surfer travelling endlessly for The Perfect Wave. The taste in that Moment is so sweet, yet fleeting, you search on, in a state of wander-lust. You wonder briefly if you are really forging a ‘new path’ or if this is indeed a place of ‘escape’? An obsession grows for ‘loss of control,’ ‘confused sensations,’ ‘a movement “in-place,” a spasm,’ ‘the actions of invisible forces on the body.’ One’s appetite grows stronger and may begin to crave more ‘violent methods,’the ‘frenetic dance,’ ‘hysteria,’ ‘chaos,’ and ‘flight.’ But this journey need not occur in some exotic locale. For the artist, ‘the entire battle takes place on the canvas.’ But it can be assumed, that on the other side of that moment, of catastrophe, is without question, ‘the emergence of another world.’

In-Between-Ness rests in a location neither here nor there. The seduction of dreaming within interstitial places is irresistible and bewitching, you will easily embrace the unknown. There is a restless peace in the non-committal nature of such a position. Though you can move on, you prefer to remain on the fence, swinging on the gate between subject and object, between many points of departure in the optical landscape...

What are the maps to these lands? How does one construct a sensory diagram which claims to both ‘the abandonment of any visual sovereignty and control’ while maintaining that it ‘must remain operative and controlled… must not be given free reign…’ These are the dangers you meet when exploring new frontiers. When eager enthusiasm for the ‘pure’ and ‘new’ encounters sobering threats which challenge your very existence. The shady shift to diagrams which ‘unlock areas of sensation’ and ‘collapse visual coordinates’ such that you flail madly into a ‘vanishing grey point,’ an abyss. It is a leap, to be sure, ‘continually changing direction’ and undoubtedly folding back upon itself at all angles in a most unpredictable manner. In being here, you are transformed. You are deformed. You experience ‘orders of sensation,’ ‘levels of feeling,’ and ‘shifting sequences.’ You will want to realize these sensations, ‘to paint between things’ to capture and express the vital movement, this transgression. Different tools must be found, alternative canvases and new agents of form and figuration.

Because in the Land of In-Between, in that elusive land of elusive names, a land where the tactile ground is a gateway to new horizons, and even the lines are nomadic creatures, diagonally evading contours and appearance - you will inevitably overcome the chaos. You “must emerge from the catastrophe,” even if it means emerging dizzy and with a whiplash.

Readings: Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Diagram’, in The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Painting and Sensation’, in The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003. Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze on Bacon’, in The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003.

Massumi’s Micros

I will begin with Massumi’s statement:” I think there is no such thing as starting from scratch.” So even as I write this now, it is simply a re-beginning, a remembering forward. My thoughts expressed in writing are an act resulting from the very crowded, overpopulated constellation of my mind. My body is pre-populated “by instincts, by inclinations, by teeming feelings and masses of memories, conscious and non conscious, with all manner of shadings in between.” This bodily commotion forms an emotion salad of agitations that fuel me and move me onwards. Though as moments pass and accumulate, the salad takes on a soupy consistency, as individual ingredients break down and begin to melt into one another. I suppose no recipes really start from scratch, they have all begun before, elsewhere, and will evolve endlessly in warping blending collections.

Massumi describes the key term as ‘relation’ because “it’s all about event,” (or at least a dimension of every event) within a region of repetitions. Our pasts are extracted and produce points of future potentiations. Microshocks precede these events, punctuated by feelings of microperceptions, which occur while you are busy doing something else. At the instant of the affective hit, affect takes over your life. It “fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock.” In this intensity, “in a kind of existential agitation, a poising or posturing for the coming event, a kind of recoil, not to withdraw from the world, but rather to brace for it again...” we are overwhelmed and temporarily simultaneously engendered both absent and existent.

There is no tangible beginning or end to Affect. There is no rest or escape from Affect, “escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture” for its very existence resides in the happening of in-between. “The microshocks don’t stop, “they come in droves, all in intervals smaller than the smallest perceivable. It is only because an affective tonality envelops groupings of them, continues through or around them, that we feel the moment as having extension, rather than feeling it implode into an infinitely proliferating fractal cut.” Within every affected moment we are being split and reformed, severed and united. I feel as if my mind is blurred into separate units, in time and space, like a motion blur in an over-exposed photograph capturing me dancing to my favorite song.

The experience of being at a live music concert comes to mind. Multiple bodies form a larger body. The body(ies) are saturated in affect, in different ways on a spectrum of time, but to the same tune. “Affective attunement” is a term used to describe the variability that can eventuate from what might be considered the “same” affect. Though there is no ‘sameness’ in affect, there is “affective difference in the same event.” We can find difference in unison. Each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, but at a collective event, bodies containing unknown actions may also be primed to act in unison as the cue originates from the same commotion. Affected in this blurry dance, I move between intangible moments, moments which make time, which compose the present, “it’s a creative factor in the emergence of time as we effectively experience it; it’s constitutive of lived time.”

Readings: ‘Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Brian Massumi, ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics, in Inflexions online journal, no. 3, October 2009.

Feeling: The Architectural Kiss

Melting; an architectural alchemy, a union of magnetic forces bound for inevitable separation, yet yearning for eternal closeness. But how to kiss your way into a more expansive understanding of architectural space? How to soften two similar but different surfaces such that new definitions of threshold emerge and operate through suction and slippage rather than delimitation and boundary?

Lavin claims “Kissing as a theory of architecture... and a potent way to describe a contemporary architectural performance.” She describes architecture as having grown intolerably bored, confining and austere. That it’s current forms are “merely what you bump up against when you back up to see some art.” Architecture now really deserves a kiss, needs to kiss, needs a theory of kissing. And if ever there was a champion to free architecture from it’s conventional binds, if ever the power of affect could outweigh the threats of cultural paralysis, it is the Kiss. Not in death, but in sleep, to wake from it’s enduring slumber. A Kiss to wake.

Kissing offers a release from permanence, socially constrained architecture. Kissing extends alternative visions of ephemerality, desire, romance, healing, love. “It is the devastatingly generous slip on and over the archaic architectural figures of authority and autonomous intellection.” It is not violent or over excessive, yet still steadfast, “it is the gesture of a sweetly gentle and yet thoroughly overpowering kiss.”

And what else to caress, to embrace, to kiss - than the ubiquitous architectural surface? The outer skin is accessible, the envelope is attractive, and the facade communicates potential for affect. “Architecture’s most kissable aspect is its surface.” There are infinite types of surfaces, infinite possibilities, there’s a surface for everyone. Lavin states “the kiss is today’s highest form of sensation.” And indeed, the sensation is undeniable, the chemical vibrations, starting in a low hum, and rising, quickening with increasing material closeness. By melting architectural surfaces into/upon one another, are we kissing architecture or is it kissing itself or others? Can we define this touching in known terms (a polite greeting, a tragic farewell, an act of passion, intimacy or deceit) or do we need new names?

Although the kiss is innovative in the context of architecture and affect, it is also a modest proposal. It is a tease of what it may become, just the beginning, an introduction. How might architecture madly grope each other? Hold each other? How might it intertwine, caress, and dance? Is it limited to only two bodies?

How to enable architecture to kiss to the greatest affect? Lavin suggests “an entanglement of architecture with another,” that it may expand its affective range by “hooking up with more cultural players.” Set-ups, blind-dates, speed-dating, cute-meets, moving beyond its comfortable form, risking a flutter to its fixity. It is transformative, it is transgressive. The act stimulates a beautiful distortion; the embrace interrupts communication, replacing affect and force for representation and meaning. The Kiss is contact, a performance of temporary singularities, a union of bedazzling convergence.

Readings: ‘Nigel Thrift, ‘Spatialities of Feeling’ in Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge, 2008. Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Our Fear of The Other

What I find most interesting in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison chapters is “The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected...” [199] The ‘othering’ and exclusions of “incompatible” persons, ranging between lepers and plague victims to beggars, vagabonds, madmen, and the disorderly. Through extreme measures of surveillance, power, control and order, models of purity were sought towards a “disciplined society.” Constant observation and registration, restrictions of space, social isolation and exclusion were employed to correct abnormal individuals. This systematic ordering and controlling of human populations was best visualized in the Panopticon, where ”a permanent gaze may control prisoners and staff.” [250] ...The all-seeing eye, scanning for signs of delinquent activity.

This may be likened to, (in a rather less serious scene), a gardener standing in the middle of her neatly manicured landscape, examining its inhabitants for the tiniest of flaws, the most miniscule of inadequacies, clutching her sharpened pruners and shiny steel shovel. She also aims to reform unruly occupants, to “make them conform to the “norm.” Part of this colonization includes the adoption of a normative taxonomic classification system of organisms. Foucault reminds us of Marquet-Wasselot’s ‘Ethnography of the Prisons, 1841,’ cataloguing a “zoology of social sub-species and an ethnology of the civilizations of malefactors, with their own rites and language...”where the criminal belongs to a typology that is both natural and deviant...” [253] Here we see how quickly and easily we designate and diminish all forms of life.

In Richard Mabey’s book “Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants” he problematizes our suspicions, superficial branding, treatments and exterminations of plants. Our culture views weeds as displaced, toxic, as parasites to society, evasive and threatening to order, ugly, wild, and that “we morally disapprove of their behaviour.” [9] These botanical thugs unsettle our perceived state of equilibrium, and like the Prison Institution, we aim to enforce regularity.

In discussing structures of space, Foucault’s heterotopias offer “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.” He describes the first principle as ‘heterotopias of crisis’ or the “heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.” He speaks of retirement homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons. Later, in the third principle he exemplifies the garden as a contradictory site, “juxtaposing in a single real place...several sites that are in themselves incompatible” [25] I argue that gardens can belong to both principles. “Weeds are not only plants in the wrong place, but plants which have slipped into the wrong culture.” [11] Slipped, as if through the mirror, “both isolated and accessible, public and hidden” another set of relations.

The four-legged woman of my illustrations is meant to represent minoritarian identities in contrast to the institution. Whether her legs, heads or hair marks her as an ‘other,’ she stands on her own. Through the provided and supplementary literature, she may be compared to prison convicts as her differences criminalise/demonize her, or viewed as a weed, with her misfit activities and refusal to play by the rules. Her acts are subversive, and like a thorn or thistle, this maverick refuses to be constrained by our cultural concepts.

Readings: ‘Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991. Michel Foucault, ‘Complete and Austere Institutions’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ in Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 22-27. Richard Mabey, “Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants” Profile Books, 2012.

Museums and Other Beasts

Douglas Crimp’s “On the Museums Ruins” is a criticism of modern art and literary and artistic institutions. He centers on the museum as focus for his critique, and by way of Theodor W. Adorno, introduces this structure of ‘confinement’ as having etymological grounding in the word museal, referencing the mausoleum. Metaphors of the process of dying, burial and decay illustrate a vivid view of the museum as a place preserving relics of the past rather than respecting the needs of the present: “Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art.”

Foucault is quoted discussing the logic of libraries and museums using painter Édouard Manet and novelist Gustave Flaubert as vehicles to exemplify the departure in the mid-late 19th century of these institutions contents from artistic achievements to manifestations of ‘the existence of museums’ with new relationships to themselves. Foucault’s consideration of The Temptation as a work which comprehends “the greenish institutions where books are accumulated and where the slow and incontrovertible vegetation of learning quietly proliferates” [47] is oriented towards a more positive future than Adorno’s morbid comparisons, but it still holds an underlying narrative of decomposition. Foucault likens Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet as “the grotesque shadow” of the earlier Temptations of Saint Anthony. “If The Temptation points to the library as the generator of modem literature, then Bouvard and Pecuchet fingers it as the dumping grounds of an irredeemable classical culture.” [47]

Gustave Flaubert’s satire from 1881, Bouvard and Pecuchet is a novel that systematically parodies the inconsistencies, irrelevancies, the massive foolishness of received ideas in the mid-19th century. It follows two “loony Parisian bachelors” who upon a chance meeting, find that they share an utter distaste for their desk-ridden city lives and promptly relocate to the countryside to commence a life of intellectual stimulation. After failed attempts at almost every branch of knowledge, they realize their endeavors are futile and resume their initial task as copy-clerks. Having accumulated a large and heterogeneous collection of items, they design a taxonomy, and they effectively constitute for themselves a private museum.

Eugenio Donato remarks that the series of heterogeneous activities of Bouvard and Pecuchet is not the library-encyclopedia, but in fact the museum. “The museum contains everything the library contains and it contains the library as well.” [48] Then we could say that the novel is indeed another scale of museum. “It is thus through the Museum that questions of origin, causality, representation, and symbolization are most clearly stated.”

But beyond the evident presence of the museum in these texts, I want to reflect on the characters of Flaubert’s novel. The narrative of exploration and collection as well as the relationship dynamics are ripe with opportunity for a revisionist ficto-critisism, especially as the novel is unfinished. In the adjacent diagram I have imagined the two bachelors as woman: Frankie & Justine, as part of my own study of gender and minoritarian identity in the context of the institution. An original title for the novel was Les Deux Cloportes, or, The Two Woodlice. The woodlouse is known to have a shell-like exoskeleton, which must be progressively shed as it grows. Was this a comment on our societies and individuals violent creations towards progress? The need for self erasure and transgression in order to modernize?

Readings: ‘Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995, excerpt, pp. 59-79 Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’ in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 43-56.

“The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.“ [Excerpt from Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), Diacritics, v 16, n 1, Spring, 1986.]

A Brief Surf of Disciplinary and Control Societies

Throughout his essay, Deleuze moves through sections of History, Logic, and Program, to examine a selection of confining institutions including the factory, prison, school, hospital, business, and family. He explains that places of confinement, or - environments of enclosure - include disciplinary societies, and control societies. Foucault associates disciplinary societies with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and leaving them behind, they are today being replaced by control societies. While it may seem that we are “in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement” we can also expect that in this ‘breaking down’ we are “at the beginning of something new” and will see a “widespread progressive introduction of a new system of domination.” [182] Control is the term Burroughs proposes for this new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future.

A suggested key to understanding the differences between the two societies is through the metaphor of money, which also indicates Deleuze’s relating our monetarily driven capitalist culture to points of control. While disciplinary societies are “related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard,” control societies can be “based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies.” Here, we see controls inherent elusiveness, its intangibility is a result of our digital age; coding, samples, data, markets, information technology... its oscillating mutations are characterized and confused by both restrictions and perceived freedoms. Today, art lies on a circuit of banking, businesses have souls, and the new ’confinement’ is ‘debt.’ Deleuze states “Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.” [181]

This fluctuating quality lends itself to the very nature of our protagonist avatar, who also experiences transformations, ‘mutations’ and is in a continuous state of variation. Deleuze offers other creatures to inhabit her environment “If money’s old moles are the animals you get in places of confinement, then control societies have their snakes.” We have passed from one animal to the next, from mole to serpent, in the systems in which we live, but also in our manner of living and our relations with others. These “coded” figures ride the same waves as the avatar, in an ever-changing flow, with unpredictable turns, tricks of power, glides of liberation, and “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control.” [178] Deleuze meets Kafka on the beach, ‘at the point of transition between the two kinds of society’, and declares, “Disciplinary man produced energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits. Surfing has taken over from all the old sports.” [180] But we are warned… “A snake’s coils are even more intricate than a mole’s burrow.” [182]

In this illustration, our avatar is accompanied by her ‘familiars.’ These ‘familiar spirits’ in folklore are known to assist their witch, but can have both malevolent and benevolent intentions. Moles and snakes are ripe with symbolism, beyond these texts alone. Snakes for instance, are feared in most cultures as unpredictable and unseen, until suddenly striking and transferring their poisonous venom. This can be related to biopolitics and invisible power structures which desperately attempt to stop the inevitable, and attack to assert and achieve control. Moles are blind worker drones found in dark subterranean tunnels. We can connect these characteristics to older technologies, monetary systems, and institutions such as banks and currency. The creatures attachment to our surfing avatar connects their embodied meanings to current societies surfing of information and the transparent waves on which it rides, glimmering, yet possessing lethal power. How else might we navigate these waters?

Readings: Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in Negotiations: 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Latency: A Feminist Space of Resistance?

Verwoert’s text “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform” considers our capitalist economy of corporate productivity and posits a fine selection of questions which prompt self-examination and inspire often jarring personal critiques of our intimate belief systems. In todays Information Age, we are frequently driven beyond our physical/emotional/psychological means to points of exhaustion and possible break-down, in efforts to match others and our own expectations. But are we performing these acts of our own free will? Are we really in charge? Are we (even/still) happy? In searching for these answers, we meet two challenges: a) to understand the conditions of our agency in order to redefine them according to our own terms, and b) to imagine other logics of agency enabling us to defy social pressures to perform. The term “we” refers to an ‘ever-expanding’ group of ‘creative types,’ who perform as “instigators or facilitators of social exchange” (Verwoert, 2010. p14). It can be assumed that this ‘artistic practice’ within which we engage is a good place to be, that we are well-equiped for devising workable alternatives and forms of resistance. Yet with the ‘high performance culture’ always at our heels, “are the forms of agency that we commonly associate with resistance not modes of high performance themselves?” [Verwoert, 2010. p19] Are there more subtle ways of performing dissent? “What silent but effective forms of non-alignment, non-compliance, uncooperativeness, reluctance, reticence, weariness or unwillingness do we find in everyday life?” [Verwoert, 2010. p21]

This discourse evokes themes of current feminist architectural theory, also offering socio-cultural critiques and non-normative strategies. In Altering Practices: feminist politics and poetic of space, we find problematizations of current professional practice, active imaginings of alternative and utopian1 futures as ways to form resistance and alter these practices, and effective presentations of the incredible agency we can generate in what Jane Rendell calls “feminist spatial practices”2 which can be related back to Verwoert’s suggested “alternative modes of production.” [Verwoert, 2010. p35] The feminist patriarchal critique replies to some of Verwoert’s questions such as: “Who sets the urgent pace according to which all others are measuring their progress?” [Verwoert, 2010. p35]

By re-claiming and appropriating the magical words ‘I can’t,’ by unlocking and embracing it as a form of agency (without depriving ourselves of our potential to act), we can both respond to Verwoert’s invitation to interrogate our notions of ‘free-will,’ and present a critical feminist strategy. One might also claim the ‘Logic of Latency’ as a feminist space. The Beauty of Latency reacts against the ‘logic of high performance,’ it creates in-between places and periods of time, “performance is all about timing.” [Verwoert, 2010. p34] Latency is defined as: present, actualizing, refering to powers or possibilities existing but hidden or not yet actualized; the potential to manifest. In physiology, the ‘latent period’ is the interval between stimulus and reaction.3 This can be linked to what Rosi Braidotti has theorized as “Becomings.”4

The movement within this latent space and time is exemplified with Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings, which illustrate “a utopian state of exuberance” [Verwoert, 2010. p45] through careful studies of modern ballet. The artist reflects on how dance relates the individual to the collective through formalized body language without being organized towards an ulterior end. The translations of patterns of social life into dance and then abstracted through painting communicates ‘the idea of bodies communicating’ in both terms of ‘I Can’ and ‘I Can’t.’ In this “state of suspension between exhaustion and activity, between the ‘I Can’t’ and the ‘I Can’, the state of convalescence is the epitome of an empty moment of full awareness.” [Verwoert, 2010. p70] It is here that our protagonist/avatar/heroine takes the stage for her final dance.

Readings: Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion an dExuberance’ in “Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want.” Sternberg Press, 2010. Jan Verwoert, How do we share? The secret? How will we experience? The mysteries? in Cristina Ricupero, Alexis Vaillant, Max Hollein, eds. Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, CAPC Museé d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Snoek Verlagsgesellschaft, 2011.

1 “Utopian thought portrays a different world as presently not yet existing but realistically within reach.” [Voewert, 2011. 26]2 Dr. Rendell, Jane. 2007. “How to Take Place (but only for so long)” In Altering Practices, edited by Doina Petrescu. 69-88. Oxon: Routledge.3 http://dictionary.reference.com4 See: Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p111.