Karen D. Van Minnen | 11130172
Supervisor: dr. T.F. Yaczo | second reader: dr. J.G.C. de Bloois rMA Cultural Analysis | Thesis and web project: hiddensolutions.nl 13 June 2018
Performative Gesture of Usage. Diffractive Tools and Non-I Disaffection.
Contents
Prequel: Cloud 3
Introduction 4
i. The Natural, The Abstract and The Tool 4
ii. Circle of Performativity 7
iii. Diffractive Reading: Mapping Interference 9
Chapter 1. Phenomenology of the Performative Gesture of Writing 12
i. Introduction 12
ii. Ciotógach, or How to Build a Power Construction 13
iii. Performativity and the Gesture of Writing 19
iii[a] Idiosyncratic, [b] In-forming, [c] Narrative: Lines and circles, [d] Tool and the Subjective
iv. The Performative Spectator 31
iv[a] Creation of a Spectator, [b] Writing Numbers into Matter, [c] Ambiguous Observer
Chapter 2. The Performative Gesture of Usage 36
i. Introduction 36
ii. Biophilia, Articulating Nature 37
ii[a] The Parasite, [b] The Introvert, [c] The Marginalized,
[d] The Precarious, [e] The Visual Field
iii. Why Knowing Matter Matters: Quilted Past 54
Chapter 3. The Performative Gesture of Translation 58
i. Performative, Translation, Gesture, Tool 58
i[a] The Human Rights of the River, i[b] Sentenced Landscape
ii. Diffracting and Re-Defining 73
ii[a] Bramble and Chestnut
iii. Conscious Observation: (agential) Cuttings from Nature 77
Conclusion - Epilogue 78
PREQUEL: CLOUD
Clouds in Each Paper
Thich Nhat Hanh, March 25, 2002
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.
If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So, we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Inter-being" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter" with the verb "to be", we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the
forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper.
The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
INTRODUCTION
i. The Natural, the Abstract and the Tool
We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, and how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.
(Deleuze and Guattari 284)
i[a]. The Natural
I listen patiently as she explained the peculiarities of the recipe, shoulders straight, carefully chewing, grinding the gritty substance away one mouthful at a time, a warm mug of Pasha cupped in my hands resting on my summer dress in the nave of my lap. I notice it is not clean, sticky… granulated honey melted on touch, sticking to my fingers… my dress, legs…
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i[b]. The Abstract
A corporate day-care centre moved into the music hall, which had become vacant as the music school could not uphold their unique space anymore due to a steady recline of admissions. Most music teachers, witnesses to their own tenures reformulation into flex-position, scavenge to make the schools ends meet. The first teacher to go was the magnificent walled garden.
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i[c]. The Tool
Maria Montessori’s statuette1 standing near the majestic oak on the square depicts a child letting
loose a small bird from the clutch of her hand. Her face upward, gazing into the sky. The unobtrusive bronze promises hands-on learning and freedom of movement throughout the day. The school head addressed the new parents in the gymnasium: “Refinement of nine articulated senses is achieved by isolating and focussing on nine senses by use of specific materials…”.
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The above fragments represent three different kinds of pedagogical landscapes I travelled through during the past eleven years. Each an independent ideological landscape articulated in a mission and vision report. The Natural, a parent-run crèche, promises to provide under fours a holistic experience in a living green, flowery bubble parallel to the smoky, grey, bent bicycle reservoir, dog toilet of big city realm. Articulated Nature here used to enlighten children into becoming inquisitive inclusive thinkers, a somewhat naïve gesture resulting in their exclusion within the realm of efficient modern society within general primary education. The Abstract, a corporate day-care centre, promises the same in their vision report however, theirs is based on hygiene, efficiency, and homogenising narratives. A polyethene bubble of security providing a perfect breeding pond for neoliberal guppies to explicate into bigger fish… sharks. After experiencing the reality of the first two mission’s visions, we continued onto (and remained) with the third.
The Tool … a Montessori primary, describes itself as a prepared environment, ordered such as to facilitate maximized independent learning and exploration: "The child takes in his whole environment,
not with his mind but with his life" (Montessori 291). This concept underpins each encounter between child and material.
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The Montessori bronze to me seems altered now. From the initial intrinsic absorber, she transcended to a lonely Pandora. Hope perched on the rim of her clutching hand.
After alienation from natural space, modern society articulated social space (Lefebvre, The
Production). The connective movement to human labour/urban environment formed an overall
estrangement from perceived organic space created in accordance with a quasi-natural temporal developing environment. Crucial here, Lefebvre states, is that space is not a container awaiting a filling by conceptions but an actor in processes of design concerning socio-political relations. From
social space Lefebvre takes our attention to abstract space, devised by those who determined
(articulated) and implemented the concept of quantification (Goonewardena).
How do we fare under the reductionism of abstract logic, a stance that evokes quasi-homogeneity and untangling of a concept of everyday life that is based on diversity? Living in
fabricated urban environments we are both actor in and subject to (being) architectured, articulated, (in)formed by a governance set on extirpating subjectivity. Ostracizing the idiosyncratic removes us from our ability to discern and articulate abject affect the performative gesture of the usage of the
tools we construe (can) evoke. Articulation is a tool to specify, a result of the way we learned to think
which formed in praxis. Hunting, thought to have created need to communicate through gesture and speech, led to structured thinking by introducing written symbols.
I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries.
(Darwin 56)
ii. Circle of Performativity
Accepted hypothesis regarding the origin of language states language evolved from hunting, unfolding into conception, creation, and usage of many kinds of material and abstract tools (Kimbrough Oller, Dale, Griebel). However. First, during a prelinguistic phase, primitive man tooled the body itself by copying and repeating favourable actions: hand became tool. By use of this
protolanguage - based on gestural communication – It became possible to transform available matter into articulations of need: i.e. a single stone (Toth)2 became sharp spearhead, incisor… dissector… The
concept of unity cut into divide, embodied. A technological index towards cultural replication
conceivable only from a diverse complex communication system (Levinson, Holler). The “gesture-first hypothesis”3 suggests gesture and speech evolved together. However, non-verbal cultures are
vulnerable to environmental change. An imitative and non-verbal culture will lose skill if the
environment from where the skill originated and used, disappears longer than an individual lifespan (Kimbrough, Oller et al.). Primate culture vulnerability research therefore argues that since early Homo species - Homo Habilis (qtd. in Schrenk, ch 9), retained their tool cultures despite millennia of temporal cyclic climate change. These species had sufficiently developed language abilities to verbally describe complete procedures. Grammar is needed to express series of action, a two-word "proto-language” would not suffice (163 -170)4. These actions require nouns or names of thing(s)5, which can
2 “…flakes and retouched flakes - were essential tools in Oldowan technology, particularly for activities involving cutting…” Toth, Nicholas, 1985.
3 “…the “gesture-first” idea was put forward by several prominent thinkers—for example, by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, in Paris in 1746 (Condillac, 2001), or by Giambattista Vico, in Naples in 1744 (Bergin & Fisch, 1984). It was further
sympathetically discussed in the nineteenth century by Edward Tylor (1865), Garrick Mallery (1881/1972), George Romanes (1898), and Wilhelm Wundt (1901/1973), among others.
4 New Frontiers in Language Evolution and Development: Introduction to the topics Volume, D. Kimbrough Oller, Rick Dale, Ulrike Griebel. Taken from: Kendon, Adam. Reflections on the “gesture-first” hypothesis of language origins. Psychon Bull Rev. 2017; 24(1): 163–170.
5 Nouns: living creatures, physical objects, places, actions, qualities, mental or physical states of existence, and ideas or abstract entities.
occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. And verbs, which inflect in specific ways, encoding tense, aspect, mood, and voice influencing the relational position of object and subject. I regard syntax a micro landscape built up of time-space location, temporality, modality, values, movement, voice, and negation. And within these linguistic landscapes tools are (not only) deployed (-) they also take position.
I believe, an intrinsic relation exists within the triptych: space - language/gesture - tool. As a mother, graphic designer, and teacher I observe, live, and analyse affect from this construe. I contemplate how it influences me… seeing what it can do with others. And wonder. Could it be that language creates landscapes within syntax, empowering us to intervene through the gestured use of tools? How does this turn influence us? How does it define us and what are the consequences for the world we live in. I will discuss this so-called “wording” of the exterior world with interior needs, through what I have coined “the circle of performativity”6. A perpetual cycle in which language
(syntax) and gestures define space articulating landscapes where actor positions (problematised through gesture) are translated into need and materialized in the conceptualization of tools… which in turn effect language through use. This model helps me understand how profound historic earthy matters (such as oil, wood, and stone) create verbal (metaphoric), organizational, material tools… and a paradox. Using these tools domesticated our wildness while at the same time forces us to return to a Wild we have become too unhanded to survive in without technological guidance. I feel today’s unbridled domestication paralyses the idiosyncratic leading to an involuntary return to the wild for the inadequate, unprofitable, and dispelled social groups. The scope of disorders termed disability, seems to be widening. Causal by nature, linear thought enhances this mechanism. It is therefore
6 Performativity. John Austin (1962), credited with initiating the study into performatives, states that a ‘performative
utterance’ is a speech act that creates events or relations in the world for example the statement: the naturalisation of a new citizen to a state.Every utterance is a locution. Performative Speech acts are Illocutionary and Perlocutionary.
Illocutionary, when they are intended speech acts that bring about certain realities -determined by social conventions in
particular situations (i.e. judicial pronouncements). Perlocutionary performatives is the effect that follows by saying something upon listeners within society. Per-formatives are utterances that cause formative force per (by means of) the utterance. Performativity in its causative sense, reverses the concept of identity as the source of secondary actions (speech, gestures).
imperative to unveil and counter exclusion contrivances created by causal thought. Non-linear narratology is an interdisciplinary method which could help us to re-form abject performative nouns such as alterity.
iii. Diffractive Reading, Mapping Interference
…we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. Does such a premise imply that we must renounce all our complex technologies? It does not. But it does imply that we must renew our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques and technologies are all rooted. Without the oxygenating breath of the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them. We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention. (Abram, Becoming)
Within New Materialist tradition, prominent theorists, such as Donna Haraway (feminist science studies), Trinh Minh-ha (literary science) and Karen Barad (feminist theorist) articulated a method (tool) referred to as diffractive reading taken from the metaphor of diffraction. A method of reading removing difference from its role as divisive noun bringing it to the realm of creative constructive (idiom) making a difference (Barad, Meeting). Thus, creating space to step away from Self - Other (Hegel) contentions. Diffraction moves towards critical consciousness as a self-accountable, critical, and responsible engagement with the world (Barad, Meeting 72)7.
I wish to determine the effects of difference (Haraway) that come from conjunctional points within the weave of (cultural) texts. I do so by paralleling associative analytical readings (as set out in this thesis) with an online presentation (website), placing this disquisition in an uncanny mosaic structure. A mash-up of utterances, sounds (and simulated scents), image fragments from my past and conversations with people who are all, in their own idiosyncratic way, percipient in their entanglement (NPR Invisibilia)8 with their (particular) tool of choice. A sub-acting comparable to a
7 “Affect from usage of premediated tools, particularly hi-technical varieties, is multiplex and daunting. I discuss, what I notice to be growing influence from socio-political construes on individuals to collaborate in their own divide from the social-net through tool dependency” (Barad, Meeting 72).
8In Entanglement, you'll meet a woman with Mirror Touch Synesthesia who can physically feel what she sees others feeling. And an exploration of the ways in which all of us are connected - more literally than you might realize. The hour will start
right angle-connection between genetic chimerism: the occurrence of multiple genotypes arising in an individual body, and mosaicism: the property of being composed of cells (often through mutation) of two genetically different types.
Perhaps these quantum entanglements are what we feel when we fall in love with a tree, a pair of scissors and anything made up of the same components as we are. Fragments of ourselves within the other…you feel it when you become friends or enemies too. Even when we see something in an abstraction…a film, read it in a book as a spectator. (Fragment from: Invisibilia podcast, Entanglement, 30 January 2015, (33:08))
Associations and links can narrow and help focus upon a concepts radius or its
territorialization9 (Deleuze, Postscripts) aiming at an essence contained in definition un-obscuring and reducing meaning by filtering: a vertical conceptualization. Expansions within the mosaic, move through horizontal, rhizomatic networks of alternate routings, opening possible new appropriative innovation of the concept (deterritorialization) 10 which allows associative patterns of thought to mushroom (Deleuze & Guatarri).
The following is a series of lensed paralleled readings [use the camera app on your smartphone to scan the QR-codes in the text to direct you to Soundcloud audio and YouTube videos for cultural readings and transcripts] an invitation to meander and embark with concepts such as performativity, gesture, precarity, disability, sensation, tactile, abject, and convention. A fluid landscape of linguistic weavings which map several effects, evoked by differences I observed within socio-political space related to human and non-human intervention. In chapter one, I focus on the relation between
with physics and end with a conversation with comedian Maria Bamford and her mother. They discuss what it's like to be entangled through impersonation. “Perhaps these quantum entanglements are what we feel when we fall in love with a tree, a pair of scissors and anything made up of the same components as we are. Fragments of ourselves within the
other…you feel it when you become friends or enemies too. Even when we see something in an abstraction…a film, read it in a book as a spectator.” (NPR Invisibilia 2015, 33:08).
9 Territorialization is a process of assemblage theory, and is viewed as the ordering of the bodies that create the "assemblage". Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, 1972.
10 Deterritorialization (French: déterritorialisation) is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972). The term "deterritorialization" first occurs in French psychoanalytic theory to refer, broadly, to the fluid, dissipated and schizophrenic nature of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist cultures, Deleuze and Guatarri, 1972.
language, writing tools and gestures. Chapter two, explores an array of different relations that emerge from gestural acts through tool use. In chapter three, I discuss possible methods towards creating new perspectives of thought (consciousness) regarding our position in relation to Other. I believe mapping interference (Haraway) as method, could be a useful tool when used to articulate both the origin of these observed effects and their affect, making their relation visible. As a first step to remove us from the gripping dept claim neoliberal ideology (in praxis) placed on our future(s). A claim pushing us towards the endless pollution of our habitat through a continuous stream of “hard” and “soft” pollution (Serres, Malfeasance)11. A claim based on the dogma of progressive (modernist)
thought… and inherently linear.
Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. (Donna Haraway).
QR-code to YouTube (00:50) Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus…12
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11 In Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? Serres explains "hard pollution" as material waste and "soft pollution" as sound and images affect.
CHAPTER 1. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE PERFORMATIVE GESTURE OF WRITING i. Introduction
"Wood" is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.
(Martin Heidegger)13
We start with Western oral and written language. Nominating, an auto-epistemic14 act paramount in the creation -and continuous creation- of the concept Nature. The nature(s) emerging from
performative gestures grant us - as creators and guardians - the right to subtract and mould the
compounds of our terra. Planet Earth is therefore a habitat inherent to human, a composite inner
towards outer spaces connected by entrances and exits to other sentient beings and matter. The ancient Greek named the outer structure cosmos. The inner is oikos, a term with several meanings; a house, household, family, but also family property, all living creatures - including slaves. To nominate is to denote a race or subspecies (categorise), giving it the same epithet as the species to which it belongs. Categorisation and cognition form a symbiotic pair. Perception dictates convention articulation. A concept of something cannot exist without it being named (De Saussure). Thus, to structure our perception we use differences between meanings. A real chair does not exist beyond
13
What unfolds in language then is the illuminative appearance of Being as lichtung. The lichtung as clearing or glade is akin to the woodsman's trail (Holzwege) in the forest. It is the lit-darkness. Based on all we have explored hitherto, we are in a better position to tentatively glimpse what it is that language does. Rather than merely stand for what is already manifest, language first brings Being as this or that being into the open of the clearing as unconcealment. Heidegger writes: Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness of that which is not and of the empty. Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as. Projecting is the release of a throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such. This projective announcement forthwith becomes a renunciation of all the dim confusion in which what is veils and withdraws itself. Williams, Duane. Language and Being: Heidegger's Linguistics, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, Heidegger, M. A Dialogue on Language, in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (Harper San Francisco, 1971, p. 33.
14 The autoepistemic logic is a formal logic for the representation and reasoning of knowledge about knowledge. While propositional logic can only express facts, autoepistemic logic can express knowledge and lack of knowledge about facts. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoepistemic_logic
the play of orchestrated symbolic systems. To recognize a chair as particular within the whole it needs defining. Chair is a specific collection of properties which en ensemble define its specifics (dependant of context) within the symbolic system of language. Much of reality is a linguistic convention of naming and characterising. And as Michel Serres (The five) notes, the turn side of using determinative communication is that it deafens the senses. “Life takes time to emerge out of concept, word or name, it takes time for a child to break free of code “ (133).
What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?
(Serres, The Five)
ii. Ciotógach15, or How to Build a Power Construction
Life is beautiful, really it is, full of beauty and illusions. Life is great, without it you would be dead. (Korine)
Age five. First day of primary school. Surrey. A handsome Georgian property. An all girls’ boarding
adjustment. The hall dim with floods of coloured sparkles coming in from the classrooms stained glass
fanlights. The floor: dark wooden boards, they shine and are sweet-scented. My emerald uniforms coat drowns in the dark forest of cloaks and hangers. My father’s hand releases mine as I enter Mrs. Mercers’ bright classroom, dissipating into the haze of the passage as she closes the door…
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I started to handwrite at home with my left around age three and was proud to show off this ability at my new school - unaware of my faux. On first entering the building, it seemed bright and
happy - coinciding my mood. However. Confronted with an unexpected disability - and immediate profound action complying to convention, my perception of school shifted from welcoming to dismissive. The taming of my hand meant taking me away from my idiosyncratic manner of
expression, as a form of domestication. This imposition led me to precipitate both the act of writing and expression of thought through speech, relying on a combination of drawing tool usage,
knowledge of tactile through use of material, music, singing and rhythm to communicate. A transcending of linear convention into conceptual holistic awareness. Leaving me sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s idea that non-humans would not speak our language even if they were capable of speech as they are reticent - as is his lion.16
A little while back, a confrontation with a depiction of an act of violence - similar to the one inflicted on me - reminded me of the tentative disturbing implications of my non-normative disposition … a scene within a film by Yorgos Lanthimos called The Lobster (2015).
The story takes place in a hotel where single people must find a mate or be transformed into a wild animal of their choice and released into the surrounding countryside. Antagonist David brings his brother along: a previous guest turned border collie. We see pigs, peacocks, a camel and many, many dogs passing as mentioned in the film by the Hotel Manager. She states that there are so many dogs in the world because people do not possess the ability to be more creative about what they might long to be… given a second chance. The first few days David must find his way around, his right hand attached to his back by a thin leather belt - to emphasize how difficult it is to live without a partner (a man’s right hand) - it makes use of our knowledge of a general bias of both handiness and
16 If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Ludwig Wittgenstein. This concise as well as a very famous statement made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1958 towards the end of his Philosophical Investigations, has given rise to a multiplicity of debates and provoked detailed studies on animals, language and subjectivity. Supplemented elsewhere with another Wittgenstein's contention: “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (223), it fails to become completely clear. However, both quotations make us aware of the role played by our perception of the world and its importance in the process of communication. One has a great opportunity to learn about it when going abroad to a country with completely different traditions from his own–even if he speaks given countries. language fluently–he is unable to understand people. Needless to say, that the situation with animals would seem to be the same. Tim Rayner. Meaning is use: Wittgenstein on the limits of language, Philosophy for Change: Ideas that make a difference, March 11, 2014.
gender to illuminate the clumsiness associated with working the “wrong side”. Using the sinister left hand depicts a clumsy David displaying great lack of cutlery skills at the breakfast table in the communal hall. Lisping Man (Robert), caught masturbating, receives severe punishment. This is a forbidden act as it distracts the subject’s lust projection inverting it and so reducing his chance of amorous connection. Robert humiliated… panics. Punished in public for his act. Forced to place his “masturbation hand” in a hot toaster during breakfast in the communal parlour. Both mental and physical pain are excruciating. Now the object “hand” can no longer act-out the unwanted
performative deed. And any future thought of this act is forever associated with severe inconvenience
and shame. Public corporal punishment here, as in my case, exemplifies the urgency of power needed to govern. It also demonstrates how strong the human will to physically project and transform its needs into material and accompanying gestures is. Aside this socio-political problematic, another thought invaded my mind. Being confronted with the image of a man’s limb being tortured for doing “wrong” affected me… my “wrong” left hand shook and quivered. I felt his pain in my own limb. The searing smell of blazing steel on flesh. I felt his shame… my left-hand twitching. Being a spectator to a depicted interaction (representation) influences the receiver and is performative - a concept I will elaborate on in part iii of this chapter. Seeing acts of violence, exposure to verbal descriptions of acts of violence past, reliving historic linguistic acts of violence transcended through use of metaphor and other tropes are all performative… a confirmation ritual to establish centrality through affect.
We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists.” This phrasing is unfortunately familiar now. Its actual meaning is frequently as follows: “We can’t say racist, misogynist, supremacist, imperialist, or fascist things without having them recognized as such.” It is about longing for the time when you were the centre of the world,
and all these outsiders did not complain so much about you taking up all the space. (Teju Cole)
In his theoretical essay Gesture and Affect: The Practice of a Phenomenology of Gestures Vilém Flusser asserts: “Affect releases states of mind from their original contexts and allows them to become formal (aesthetic) - to take the form of gestures becoming ‘artificial’ ” (6). He uses two distinctive
expressions of pain as an example to underpin this statement: “Crucial is the articulation of pain, its symbolic expression to another. Precisely this symbolic aspect, and not the “real” presence or absence of the represented pain, makes the gesture stand for the state of mind” (7). Subsequently, by formalizing them into symbolic gesture, affect “intellectualizes” states of mind, which in their turn could be thought to have become constructs. He notes that understanding that the scale of values must therefore move between truth (authenticity) and kitsch, is crucial. Information theory claims that the more information a gesture contains, the less it is like kitsch. It is therefore more difficult for the receiver to read concluding that this results in less communication. Furthermore, it claims the quantity of information conveyed by the gesture is related to the gesture’s code... the emptier it is, the more effortlessly it can be read” (8), and so we are prone to being moved by emotionally laden gestures in television and attracted to concise tabloid news articles crowned by bold statements. Bold gestures, such as being witness to acts of torture as Lisping Man (Robert) was subject to by the proprietor of the hotel in The Lobster, have therefore more affect and play a crucial part in building power-construes as they range in width and diversity. Learning to read between cultural lines requires training oneself to be receptive. I will continue with two vignettes to amplify the extent of scope involved in this line of preclusive, normative thinking.
First, returning to the concept of handiness, Chris McManus, in his book Right Hand, Left
Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures notices that, from the
Industrial Revolution, workers were obliged to operate machines designed for right-handers:
representing the biological norm of proper “rightness” (justness) of dedication and skill. This bias took left-handers out of obscurity affirming their sinister tendencies as these workers would appear less capable through clumsy handling. Selection based on handedness meant that not adapting to the “right” norm, could lead to loss of security. A left-handed worker frowned on, his disability a menace. Machine labour therefore traditionally appointed a “right” workers privilege. Nominating a body disabled, finds its origin in deformation imposed on bodies to create a visible, visceral boundary. I therefore move onto Shaun Grech who discusses the role colonialism played in giving corpus to the
articulation of Other17. Grech explains how corporeal violence and its visible manifestations not only
managed but also perpetuated the same racial and other categories of difference thus turning bodies into the medium upon which these differences were permanently inscribed and displayed (9). Grech shows us this is the moment of becoming. It is the moment that the scarred, un-free body of the colonized slave became a disabled body, and where disability and colonialism (force of power) fused together to become. A moment described by the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth (32) calling it: “the deforming element,
disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality… the depository of maleficent powers”. Once identified in the mass slaves were known as “degenerates” or moreover “internal enemies” (Foucault,
Discipline) and came to incorporate many others defined as “not of us” such as women, the working
class, racial others, and disabled people. Punishments visualized by body parts hung in trees (Grech 9) embodied from within the social arena the outcome of transgressive behaviour and the colonisers power to intervene and manage and to curb resistance turning these bodies into a warning that dissent would not be tolerated thus creating the politics of “staring” that would find its way into disability features (ibid.).
… it was in fact a body saturated with resistance, an unruly body which ultimately had to be regulated because it defied and threatened the functioning and dealings of empire through its very existence… (Shaun Grech)
The knife tool, a separator of whole to parts, translates need to divide into physical and symbolic action. Now the disabled body also became a potent panoptic tool of discipline and regimentation to satisfy the colonisers inspecting gaze (Foucault) and an aid to ensure docile bodies and minds through the threat of its very existence and/or imposition (10). A process that operated at the physical, psychological, and ontological levels and at the conscious, sustained by colonial
obsession and fears of the dark deformed monster (Quayson).
There is darkness and there is darkness. Though darkness was “present” before the world and all things were created, it is equated with matter, the maternal, the germinal, the potential. The dualism of light/darkness did not arise as a symbolic formula for morality until primordial darkness had been split into light and dark. Now Darkness, my night, is identified with the negative, base and evil forces – the masculine order casting its dual shadow – and all these are identified with dark skinned people... (Gloria Anzaldua)
My “wrong” hand seems almost innocent when placed beside the above acts of violence but is a remaining particle of a tenacious concept. To me, using my left is a form of resistance as I am always aware of the perceptive turn it makes me take. I feel the frantic actions (my) left-handedness triggered display how far western civilisation will go to ensure the “purity” of our social machine of well-abled bodies. Placing an aberrant body on a pillory is deeply rooted in binary way of “being” - with online pillorying or “trolling” as its most recent articulation. The digital “swipe left” could deem you unsuitable, undesirable within an online social community. These childhood memories expose how a trivial (then considered) everyday gesture is related to an also not yet so distant mentality predicating violent acts of colonial dictatorship.
Performative acts of violence are the founding ground of written language, education, the punitive system, and creator of social binaries. The western educational system required
generalization of information transmission, which was related to a uniformity of movement in handwriting. Writing in unison connected to homogenization of thought. About 300 years ago The British Empire “…created a global computer made up of people” (Sugata Mitra). Within his effort, children learned to write with a dip pen. While a right-hander could smoothly drag the pen across paper from left to right, a dip pen not easily pushed across by the left hand without digging into the paper and making blots and stains. All must learn to write in the “right” manner. This doctrine of “right” and “wrong” way of learning (or of believing in -a particular- truth) paired to a preference of movement (execution of normative truth) to either the proper right or the sinister left… the gesture of
writing as (in)formative force in the building of power constructions obscured by its reassuring
ubiquity. The craft of writing in itself performative.
iii. Performativity and the Gesture of Writing iii[a] Idiosyncratic.
Prior to the introduction of the mass producing in-formation tool: the moveable type printing press, by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, every depicted (written) thought, was hand-crafted and therefore idiosyncratic. The history of English grammar begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet
for Grammar by William Bullokar in 1586. In the early works, the structure and rules of English
grammar were contrasted with those of Latin. Forgoing to this, all who could master a pen -as a producer of symbols - used their own grammar and spelling - without punctuation: a scriptura
continua or continuous text.18 A handwritten document a tell-tale map into the secrets of one’s inner
self, expressing not only nuance in structure and style, but also through movement and flow of letters. These lacings of intertwining concepts revealed emotion: a thickening of the arch or evasive lightening in the swirls, droplets of ink or finger smudges, all revelatory markers creating atmospheric interlinear information, scrawled handwriting, crossed-out wording and inky additions…noise,
interference. Each technological step is a further abstraction of the writing hand, a re-moving gesture from the magical, mystical world of the imaginary into a cleaner generalization of thought. A
deafening of the full harmonic of the orchestra of communication… turning interaction into a dissonance of similarities. Homogenization of meaning through signage, moving from handwriting through generalization of print to standardization. First via the typewriter, then word-processing via
18 The first western text, the medieval scriptura continua or continuous text, was dictated by the author to a scribe, without word spacing or punctuation and was a method of text writing, with no set word order, resembling the tedious deciphering of a puzzle. Word order gradually standardized and with this word spacing and punctuation marks introduced (Eisenstein 1993). These changes lightened the cognitive load drastically creating circumstances for reading to become practically automatic: decreasing the brain’s energy consuming need for decoding visual information on the page (scriptura continua) consequently this led to using more of its capacity to understanding the meaning of a text: “Readers didn’t just become more efficient, they also became more attentive.” Remarkably, immersion in a narrative requires the ability to focus on one object but humans depend for their survival on the ability to shift their attention at the least hint of change in their
surroundings. Change could (negatively) mean danger or (positively) opportunities. Reading a book is therefore not a natural choice. Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 63 2010. Print.
applications such as Microsoft Word from which we gradually slide into DNA-editing. Technology guides away from the permeable qualities embodied in writing, translated from sensations felt when skin moves over skin in an amorous intuitive, precarious encounter transmittal of (in)formation. Michel Serres (Genesis) in an interesting paradox, notes that risk of failure (through the concept of the parasite) is necessary to reach successful communication19. Today an application such as Microsoft Word, will automatically “correct” not only typos but also quirks and accidental slips that
might lead to poetic neologies. The text seems to correct itself, instigating the writer to obeying the implicit arranging rules of syntax (gender, time, place, subject, object, active, passive). Computational temporal edit-promptings paralleling human narrative insertions challenge the idiosyncratic … preferring use of the active over passive form, syntax defines space and inter-relations in time... space created by syntax is ego oriented. But does not always need to be - as asserted by cognitive linguist Lera Boroditsky (“Remembrances”). She is interested in the way an (oral) Aboriginal community in Australia (Kuuk Thaayorre people) perceive space and time. This people do not use words like "left" and "right," but cardinal directions. The Kuuk Thaayorre utter "Hello" as: "Which way are you going?" answering with, i.e. "North-northeast in the far distance”. This community organizes time from east to west. Their notion of time is not “locked on the body.” It does not travel from left to right as in English speakers’ perception20 - following the bodies writing habit movement. The Kuuk
Thaayorre’s time notion is “locked on the landscape”, evoking an exceptional sense of orientation. Due to their orality, Syntax space here is eco-oriented.21
19 The stability- seeking drive to eliminate or exclude the parasite is never fully realized, both because its presence catalyses s anew level of complexity within the communication system, and because the excluded parasite is always replaced by more powerful parasite s. Given that this doomed attempt at elimination is the condition of the dialogue 's "success," it follow s that the third is necessary to communication, because of the complexity introduced by the interlocutors' desires to exclude it. Martha J. Koehler, Modles of Reading, 2005, p. 64.
20 Hebrew speaker/writers have been shown to represent time as flowing from right-to-left (e.g., Fuhrman and Boroditsky, 2010), while Mandarin speaker/writers employ top-to-bottom representations (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Boroditsky et al., 2011) and English speaker/writers employ left-to-right representations (e.g., Tversky et al., 1991; Boroditsky, 2001). Crucially, a number of studies demonstrate participants’ representations of time to mirror writing direction even when this conflicts with the dominant metaphorical schema in language (e.g., Bergen and Chan Lau, 2012; de Sousa, 2012).
21 It is widely accepted that language helps shape mental representations by encouraging its speakers to develop habits of thought (cf., Slobin, 1996). But it is worth emphasizing that it is the use a linguistic system is put to – and not the linguistic system per se – that feeds these habits. Habits are born out of repetition, it is not enough for a language to possess a term or set of terms if its speakers do not often use them. To wit, English possesses terms for the cardinal directions, but its
Coding and DNA-editing introduced a step even further away from embodied writing, by moving us from writing onto matter to the concept of writing matter itself. We seem so enticed by this socio-political system urging constant language evolution towards generalization, and do not seem too disturbed about the implications of removing idiosyncratic linguistic diversity. Math
education moved to domination over literature and language accumulation in primary and secondary curricula uncanny - resulting in Humanities’ coincide with “soft” research deemed subaltern to “hard”, evidence-based science. Language is organic and instable. It is meant to be in a state of perpetual flux and flow with the changing tides. The neo-liberal contra-movement most effects those insecure of their language abilities - reflected best in reactionary school segregation as resistance to mass migrative Babylonic cultural mingling… But also articulated in an educational system that does not require cultured reading and writing as its focus lies on efficiency and market values (birth of a self-imposed precariat).
Handwriting is specific, a gesture unique to its executor: a reflection of temperament, the revealing fragments of personality flavourings made visible, the inter-symbol motion set into inky articulations - much as the photographic actions of Eadweard Muybridge (Eadweard Muybridge) depict the inter-movements of (particular) gestures or distinctive movements. Between each
articulated movement (posed photo) a clumsy seeking for grip resides. Overlooked time frozen. But it is these movements that reveal the essence of a person. Language articulates the body. Language is authoritative rule, writing attitude. language is a tool of philosophy and a means to create
understanding within the chaos. As I touched on in the previous sub-chapter, by creating typing machines we chose speed and efficiency (Vincent 337) over visible character interference, the peculiar quality of the magical swirl lost, replaced for efficiency and generalization of mood. Removing
speakers do not use them frequently or across a wide range of contexts (e.g., for small-scale arrangements). Egocentric terms in the relative frame of reference dominate English discourse, and accordingly English speakers have been shown to build egocentric mental models of space (e.g., Levinson, 2003; Majid et al., 2004). Non-linguistic representations should not be influenced by language, then, but by the linguistic culture of a community: how a language is put to use, including how often a particular term or structure is uttered as well as the full range of associations it receives in context (cf.,
Slobin, 1996).Taken from: Gaby, Alice. The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space. Front Psychol. 2012; 3: 300. Published online 2012 Aug. 28.
character - in favour of efficiency - in the execution of writing, understanding the subsidiary
possibilities of the writing machine over the writing hand (Sennett) is an interesting prompt towards social admission into the rational of a neo-liberal market economy suppressing difference. But, allowing the different and learning to accept and appreciate the value of difference is essential for social cohesion.
In For Opacity, Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant proclaims that the topicality of the question of the right of difference does not seem to be relevant anymore although the theory, as he explains, is invaluable it offered us the opportunity to fight against, for example, the presumption of racial excellence or superiority such as found in the field of genetics. By looking at the process of comprehending people and thought from a Western perspective, it becomes obvious that this transparency is where the presumption of racial excellence is originated. Glissant calls for
understanding that the quality of lacking transparency or translucence is something to embrace. For through our differences we could be brought together and this will concurrently make us
permanently distinctive. He reflects on the notion that there are limits to absolute truth and that it is imperative to understand that it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he would not have generated on his own: “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.” He ends by saying: “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone.”
Take for example a personal letter. The mere effort needed to write a handwritten letter over a typed version, gives it added value. This gesture offers the receiver a guarantee that its sender is
sincere. Through the advance of accessibility of publishing (social media) printed in-formation, effort
has receded. The idiosyncratic hand is opaque, a riddle to a hasty reader. Devaluation of writing culture is apparent and concerning. The borders of sincerity of intention obscured by the enormity the pool of digital linguistic projections tsunamis in ever-increasing tempo. However, resistance always finds ways to counter pressure. Emoticons ( sealed lips) and SMS-language (2F4U: Too Fast For You), are ways of priming emotion back into syntax -adding icons and numbers to the equation.
iii[b] In-forming
In November 2017, I attended the second Worlding the Brain 22 conference in Amsterdam. Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the keynote speakers sharing his notions on “Art and Entanglement” with the assembled crowd. In his book Strange Tools he argues that human, is a group of beings which are “cultural by nature”. Noë regards cultural
technology in broad manner: including tool usage and actions such as writing and drawing. These
movements in-form us into what we are. In organizational sense. He claims that art’s aim is
reorganization. Disruption. In his talk at the Amsterdam conference, he focused on entanglement of
nature and culture itself. He feels we have radically underestimated the significance of this entanglement. A Pyrrhic victory. The origin of writing, Noë conveys, lays with accounting, with “tel-ling” or the taking down of numbers and keeping trail. This “score taking” technology articulates
mark making other than speech. Actions, not only preserved for humans as animals also make this
movement when creating tracks and routes. The creation of tracks is part of a knowledge cycle. A “keeping track” of what we do creates readings of our doings offering insight towards possible intention. Writing is the scratch on the body made by another, painful to the skin … its sounds show up in the way we have learned to play with them. I can relate to that statement. A trained graphic designer/artist, I cut, scrape, pin, bruise, stain, burn, solder, weave and sew symbols and tracks into materials such as paper, wood, stone, clay, cloth, skin, iron, paraffin… an effort to articulate that what cannot speak within the linear, to articulate what is buoyant in interlinear space. As a designer, I am accommodating, translating the will of the client (sender) to that of the receiver. As an artist, I question and disrupt conventions. Either are ways to speak from within matter itself. Entering its domain by force… appropriation of intrinsic inner values from another body - human and non-human alike. Used towards creating an understanding with ones’ own. An emotive gesture that is
performative through its action. Matter gives way to force inflicted. The non-human body allows the will of human mind to use the familiarity of its compound as an intercessor.
And so, for those who are able to write, spoken language becomes more than a medium through which they express themselves (as it is for illiterates and children); language is rather the material against which they press the alphabet, against which they literally
ex-press. In short, they work on the language. Only at the point when language ceases to be a means (a medium) and begins to be a purpose does the essence of alphabetic writing come into view.
(Flusser, Does Writing 62)
Therefore, from my performative actor role, I feel akin with the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser’s (Does Writing) etymological account of one of the foundational myths of the West: the precedence of the act of writing over the act of creating images. The narrative Flusser sets out follows an act of creation executed by God - the Great Father, whom sculpted his own image from clay (Hebrew: Adamah), which can be interpreted as the material of “the Great Mother”, by imbuing it with his “breath” -the spirit this intercourse erected human being (Hebrew: Adam). From this myth one could further the narrative to the birth of the act of writing. Baked Mesopotamian clay tablets induced with information. Gods intra-action of breath and clay matter, meant grasping an object, reshaping it through tactile intercourse towards an act of information: he physically scraped form into it. In-formed it (41)… Then he continued to burn the informed tablets, hardening them. The gesture of writing comes from this informing and burning. To inform means a subject performs a defiant scratch, insinuating “spirit” into complacent objects, relieving oneself of phlegmatic resistance from objects towards subjects by tunnelling itself out of the conditional into objective realm. Writing presses its meaning into the object as an act of inspiration. However, temporality will erase all that is “pressed in” and as objects tend towards entropy all engraved information in time will pulverize. The subjects will to inform is weaker than the objective world. Future efflux of influence of scraped out written information relies on the resilience of the object into which it is engraved. The strength of a message can be measured by the effort it takes to scrape it away. The hardening of clay by heating is the hardening of memory. However, even the most adamantine matter resists deliberate reworking: iron rusts, sand riding wind scours, water gullies and simple usage of inscribed, in-formed material wipe our renderings away over time.
Let us pause here and take a brief look at a particular example of in-formed material:
St. Peter's Statue. A work in bronze attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio demonstrates temporality as an
intrinsic property of objects. Centuries of pilgrims visiting the Basilica touch and kiss the
representation of St. Peter’s (the key bearer) foot which proceeds to wear thin, the right toe caressed amorphous by faithful pleads that he be merciful and open the gates of heaven should they die before ending their journey. A representative tool that carries a message of faith through time, the gesture of its usage as a divine tool performative, its material adagio a return to its primary form in the temporal progression of myths. The reproduction of the representation, its only true chance to travel with posterity.
If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. “If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution…An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. (Chesterton)
Flusser points out that the history of the West revolves around this theme of the passing on of information production and safeguarding it through reproduction and storage. The imaginative subject that seeks to be free and immortal, forms a binary with the static object that tends towards heat and death. He sees this act of scratching in or inscription as the ultimate expression of free will. By generalizing this act of writing, a pathway to a feeling of detachment is created… a tearing up of the imaginative.
iii[c] Narratives: Lines and Circles
In English to write is to “scratch” and is derived from the Latin “scribere”. Scratching and tearing share a common stem. One could say that writing or scratching is the tearing up of images (Flusser, Does
relation between the representations made up of light and dark (pigments) and written or scrapings via an incisor of symbols into matter. This incisive tool revolts against the images we take and create out of the objective world, antagonistic towards the imaginary-magical-ritual. This tearing rips the world of representations and sews them together in denotative linear patterns transforming them into what is countable and accountable. Into concepts that can be criticized. This process illuminates why writing is in fact the death of magic (Flusser, Does Writing). The death of circular, cyclic replaced by the causal tracks of the linear realm of historical thinking 23.
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Continue here… Alphabetic writing was both an important factor in the emergence of abstract, homogeneous "space," and of abstract, linear "time." Oral cultures, perceive temporality of time as cyclical, senses attuned to the surrounding land, conversant with an intrinsic understanding of winds voices and the articulations of birds, joined particles in cosmos. A perception of such a time, changes the way we perceive World 24, conjoined with the circular real of the sun and the moon and cycling of the seasons, death and birth (re-composition) and the eternal (re)turn of the green. In Prairie and Plains
Indians - Iconography of Religions Section 10 - North America (1997) anthropologist Ake Hultkrantz
tells us, that Western time concepts include a beginning and an end as opposed to the American Indians, who’s oral temporal perception of time is as an eternally recurring cycle of events and years … their languages often do not articulate terms for past and future as the whole rests in the present. In a conversation related to this thesis, entrepreneur Floris van Luin explains his experiences
23 "We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. " (Barad,
Diffracting Diffraction)
regarding the way people of Ghana - most outside major cities - rely on orality in defining social questions within the realm of cultural protocols - witnesses are required for most understandings allowing space for fluidity and grace in individual situations as opposed to the rigidity of the linear of our legal system (in line with the law) imported during colonisation, which stills parallels the
traditional pyramid hierarchy of the Ashanti monarchy25 of vassal kings and subjects. Lying and
displays of disrespect in public of those in higher ranks considered morally wrong. The oral tradition of orchestrating four rhetorical modes of discourse: exposition, argumentation, description, and narration evoke a sense of pride. Being eloquent and honest means being present as part of the circle of understanding.
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Continue here… The circular does not seem much respected in Western civilization as common metaphors reveal. Told you are “caught in a circle” implies you are off track (the journey a metaphorical road). A strong preference for lines and angles is encouraged. The Bible dictates we must travel in a straight line for our life is a journey and we are required to think straight in order to grow - in spiritual sense. Stories going in circles are going nowhere and lack any kind of path. They are experienced as
frustrating as they conflict with our expectations for SOURCE-PATH-GOAL structure in narrative development, and in action in general. Circle could be defined as geometries praia.
In Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics Mark Johnson explores the hypothesis that a person's identity as a moral agent “…is inextricably tied up with her quest for synthetic unity in her life, the most comprehensive form of which is narrative” (163). He argues first
25 Ghana is a unitary presidential democratic republic. As such, the government is headed by a president, and not a king. There are however several vassal kings, or chiefs as they are typically called in Ghana... The most famous and most powerful of these kings is the king of the Ashanti Kingdom, the Asantehene. www.quora.com/Does-Ghana-have-a-king
that narrative characterizes the synthetic character of daily experiences, prefigured in all common activities from which refigured stories emerge out of the narrative structure. Consequently, understanding, expressing, and communicating experiences is wholly dependent on that prior structure of life and this trait can also be used to configure our lives in innovative ways. Secondly, he states that - particular - descriptions we give of actions often do not involve narrative explicitly using various imaginative resources such as (e.g.) image schemas, conceptual metaphor, and metonymy in order to develop coherence and synthetic unity “…through a temporal sequence of events ” (163). Nevertheless, understanding action sequences and situations presupposes a mostly tacit narrative background as there is a proto-narrative structure to experience, to our identity and to action that serves as a base for our interest with verbal narratives constituting the most pervasive mode of rational explanation we have. “Only within a narrative context can we fully understand moral personality (the self) and its actions. The unity of the self and its acts is, in the broadest context, a narrative unity ” (164).
Narrativity. Cause and effect is inherent to linear thinking. Forged into Western thought and sense of temporality through the transformation of babble into structured scripting. According to Flusser (Does Writing), history is simply not possible without writing: when writing started, history was born. This is not for reason that writing dictates, articulates processes, but because it
“…transforms scenes into processes” by generating “historical consciousness” (44). Practices of writing and reading induce a linear sense of time and give prominence to diachronicity in general as compared with synchronicity (15). For Flusser, modern society's break with the general human sense of time as cyclical (an obvious extrapolation from nature's rhythms), owes a deep debt to the increasing salience of writing over the past several centuries.26 Time as a linear progression did not
emerge with the simple discovery of writing but in correspondence with cultural changes in modern
26 Flusser’s analysed relation between writing and history takes media practice as the central player in culture: as the awareness of time as linear movement (Does Writing). The function of changing scenes into processes is inherent to the performative act of writing. This is where Flusser invites us to gaze at a contrast between culture based on writing and culture based on images thus placing himself in opposition to Derrida as Flusser relates the institution of writing itself with resistance to images: “Greek philosophy and Jewish prophecy are battle cries against images on behalf of texts." and so, removing himself from the notion that writing is a change in the form of memory (as Différance).
society such as the printing press (wide-spread of writings), compulsory education, upcoming of urban commercial cultures, the emergence of the modern state with its bureaucratic form.
iii[d] Tool and the Subjective
The thread created moves forward crisscrossed and interlaced by other threads until it breaks with its own linearity; and hence, a story is told mainly to say that there is no story – only a complex, tightly knit tissue of activities and events that have no single explanation, as in life. (Trinh T. Minh-ha)
The performative act of writing has changed the way we perceive ourselves in our surroundings because it forces us to think in lines. Writing is an act of slicing memories (within unconscious space) toward a world not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts, bare of imaginary… What we call “history”. It is a progressive understanding. Consciousness changes by changing technologies, which come to life through changing
consciousness. Looking at writing as tool of control from the perspective of the colonial matrix of power reveals how the Western colonial power used it as tool to control subjectivities.
We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage upon which the human drama is enacted. History conceives the past mainly in terms of biography and nations. It seeks causality in the conscious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing. (Paul Shepard, interviewed by Derrik Jensen)
In an interview published in E-International relations the Argentinian semiotician and professor Walter Mignolo, explains the role of aesthetics in the colonial matrix of power. Within this property, Modern Western aesthetics managed sensing of meaningful allurement by controlling taste and subsequently the artist’s genius to create a work of art. Both poetics and aesthetics are regional philosophical discourses and limited to Europe’s history and identity based on a narrative building of
itself tracing its origin in Greece and Rome, that describes and regulates poiesis (making or expanding) and art (expression or application of human creative skill and imagination). The expansion of the West paralleled the expansion of “uct pictura poiesis” before the enlightenment and since the
enlightenment also the expansion of artistic technique, art models and of philosophical aesthetics. Consequently, people outside of Europe were not considered capable of comprehending and sensing
meaningful allurement and deemed alien in the “civilizing mission”. And this is how, according to
Mignolo, the Eurocentric philosophical aesthetic, this type of knowledge and understanding was first formed than managed to control subjectivities. Non-Europeans were purposely educated to become literate in European performativity, teaching them our alphabet and coinciding fundamental thoughts of our culture thus creating the conditions needed for language to become a fundamental part in both the formation and transformation of the colonial matrix of power. A tool that proved to be immensely powerful in silencing non-Western conceptions of creativity and the corresponding place that such creativity has in the overall cosmo-sense of the civilization in question.27
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iv. The performative spectator
All politics rests on the fact that the entire world is only, too happy to have someone who says: “quick march!” -towards no matter what. (Jacques Lacan Geneva Lecture)
27 Mignolo considers “getting at” the core of Eurocentric knowledge production a fundamental de-colonial task (Weier). 28 QR: German-born Peruvian mathematician, archaeologist, and technical translator. She is known for her research into the Nazca Lines, which she discovered together with American historian Paul Kosok in 1940. Known as the "Lady of the Lines", Reiche made the documentation, preservation, and public dissemination of the Nazca Lines her life's work. The lines, first thought to have been irrigation ditches historian Paul Kosok and assistant mathematician and astronomer Maria Reiche, were later rearticulated after they discovered a marker for both the winter and summer solstice on one of the straight lines via the setting sun. A finding that led to redefining the geoglyphs “the largest astronomy book in the world”. Taken from:
www. wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Reiche
In The Practise of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau recollects a collection of objects he saw at the
Shelburne Museum in Vermont…
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…the existence of subjects, the agents, and authors of conjunctural operations…
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iv[a] The Spectator: Creation of a spectator
Amsterdam 2017. On my way to a lecture by professor Erik de Jong30 in Natura Artis Magistra - the
Amsterdam Royal Zoo, I stopped to buy myself a snack at the kiosk overlooking the recently opened “elephant experience enclosure”. While waiting my turn in line, I noticed a woman in her thirties standing nearby. She was holding her ten-something-month old son tight against her light-blue fur sports jacket. He peered over her shoulder and while pointing at the apples, muffins, the colourful fizzy drink bottles on display, the sparrows on the sill, he … uttered the holophrastic Dutch pronoun “die” (that).31
30 Professor Erik de Jong, University of Amsterdam: ARTIS-Chair Culture, Landscape and Nature. During these lectures, professor de Jong discuss the added value of Edward O. Wilsons Biophilia hypothesis (in short: The innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life.) for Anthropogenic discourse in a fifteen-week course for the UvA’s Cultural Studies program. The term "biophilia" means "love of life or living systems." It was first used by Erich Fromm to describe a psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital. Wilson uses the term in the same sense when he suggests that biophilia describes "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life." He proposed the possibility that the deep affiliations humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole are rooted in our biology. Unlike phobias, which are the aversions and fears that people have of things in their environment, philias are the attractions and positive feelings that people have toward organisms, species, habitats, processes, and objects in their natural
surroundings. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis
31 Studies of very young children have suggested that pointing, followed by symbolic gestures, preceded the acquisition of speech. This has been considered compatible with a gesture-first position (e.g., Meguerditchian, Cochet, & Vauclair, 2011) Kendon, Adam. Reflections on the “gesture-first” hypothesis of language origins. Psychon Bull Rev. 2017; 24(1): 163–170.
