The Wooster Group: Analysis and the Body

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The Wooster

Group: Analysis

and the Body

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Introduction

a. Context

In the current period, people often think of the body and cognition as separate entities. This has been the case since at least the 20th_{century where labour of the mind is valued over and above any}

labour of the body, even including the ranks of command in sport or the military. It is visible in the information age, where the uploading and retrieval of facts is prioritised over the exploration of phenomena in reality. The senses are not 100% accurate, as any hallucinogenic drug would

demonstrate. It is still widely held that the brain itself holds thought (and the self) and that the body is a casing to be fashioned, not for labour, but for aesthetics.

The issue stems from two main ideas that somewhat refer to one another. The first is Descartes, who decried that the soul was not in the body, but in the mind, and worked to sever theories about mind and body from any kind of connectedness. The second is the modular theory of the brain, believing that, like a computer, the brain works with components that interchange and process information from different centres. These centres have a central processing unit (still carrying the idea from Descartes) where inputs are made into thoughts. Both of these, in the age of the internet, have constructed a world that attempts to do away with body, whether that is avatars on online gaming communities (otherwise known as sport) or financial market analysis that takes place not in the market itself, but at a computer. These two things inadvertently place an emphasis on language and information and deny the body any form of intelligible cognition.

Furthermore, Michel Serrés claims that these two things anesthetise the senses while he demonstrates that the senses are the point at which humans contact reality and therefore chaos. Where there is contingency in the senses, information and language attempt to overwrite that contingency by replacing the act of sensation with code: a series of steps or laws that govern the outcome of specific performative actions. They come to stand alone, in and of themselves, for what is understood by phenomena.

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After the Second World War, after an assault on bodies by words that governed reality in the form of propaganda, Samuel Beckett delivers a series of theatre pieces that represent language’s inability to stand in for sensation, trauma, emotion and reality. In Not I, a piece featuring only a disembodied mouth that speaks with no breaks at a manic pace, it is not the tasting, touching mouth we see symbolised, but a mouth that is reduced only to the function of speaking. It resembles an inner-thought, Descartes’ theory of mind embodied, that in lieu of images and smells, is cycling through language, spitting it so that it might continue to exist. What Beckett seems to highlight is just how central language has become to thinking and how that thinking is disembodied.

Language (mathematics and information) are at a distance from reality. They attempt to map to it, but they are only ever as good as the senses. What we know about the planets is only as good as our telescopes (our senses) which look at chaos to tease out sense across divergent forms of knowledge. We watch in a meditative boredom (perhaps in Heidegger’s profound boredom) waiting or exploring, without language, simply listening. Michel Serrés believes that music is the substratum of all meaningful language not because it is music, but because it, like the senses, listens to

repetitions, movements, rises and falls. For Serrés, this is cognition, and it occurs first in the skin, where the senses lie, and then knotted through scars and experiences all the way into the brain.

Language thus stands in for the flexibility of the senses, that could identify an individual by their look, movement, sound etc, and replaces that with a species or a race or a name. In the same way, a mouth that can taste, kiss, spit and scream is, in Beckett’s work, replaced by a device whose primary function is language. After the chaos of WWII, Beckett suggests that Europe cannot be rebuilt by words, by the word of God, by a speaking mouth, by language – but that is nonetheless what we are trying to do as modern people through coding, analysis and identity production that covers fluid phenomena with stable life-long identifiers such as the characters LGBTQ+.

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The premise of this thesis is to explore the gap between language and the body through the work of the Brooklyn-based performance collective, The Wooster Group. The Wooster Group stage productions that take pieces from the literary cannon and stage a collision between analysis and the body. They parody theory by bringing it into practice to demonstrate the dissonance between language and the body in theatre. The word itself offers no directive performativity, but through institutions and analysis comes to stand in for something concrete that is contingent in reality. So the Wooster Group re-introduces contingency into the literary cannon by trippin’ on the supposed dominant understanding of the modernist literary cannon.

While many scholars have investigated the work of the Wooster Group, few have done so outside of the deconstructionist lens. While this label offers many ways of analysing the Wooster Group’s work, I feel that there is more to explore in their work that is productive, which sits in this tension between language and the body. Therefore, my aim is to examine the Wooster Group’s work in light of recent object theories (Object Oriented Ontology) and in light of non-modern theories of

mind/cognition that do not displace the body in favour of the mind. This will allow us to make an argument for the tension in the Wooster Group’s work across their production history that is not so heavily dependent on deconstruction theory, and is more contingent on the meeting place they stage between language and the body.

The Wooster Group often take generalised ideas in literary studies, for instance, and performs that analysis onstage. In Vieux Carré, a play by Tennessee Williams, the repressed homosexuality that is typical of Williams’ work is translated to the body where the main character is dressed in a leather jock-strap. The character is thus defined visually by the way he has been analysed. This stands in for the tension the audience would normally discover in a play like this. It diffuses that tension, that thing that must be felt (musically) to be realised and instead uses the flatness of costuming to anesthetise and deliver the supposed important ‘information’ needed to successfully understand this play. In the process, however, they end up confusing the play with signs and symbols, information in

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the place of tension. They highlight the extent to which the senses are displaced from art in favour of information that seeks to explain that which is meant to be experienced.

Late Modernity displaces the body as mere ornamentation and in fact privileges the streamlined, uniform concept of a singular model, like a smartphone or a fashion model. They body is no longer a sensing organism but first and foremost a sign – a language. In this thesis, I would like to draw attention to this central tenet of Modernity and demonstrate the ways in which the body itself has been displaced by modernism, and replaced with words such as male/female, the letters LGBTQ+, concepts such as deconstruction, and an overwriting of the senses (both in the body and as a science). The Wooster Group provides a constructive avenue through which to explore how the body introduces necessary contingency to language by being closer to reality than language is. If Modernity is carried in the minds of modern man, the Wooster Group turns thought into action in order that theory might be tested in practice, in the flesh. They do so by parodying or simply opening up possibilities of interpretation of common literary criticisms to the body. Here, what we see are actors structured within the directive signs of criticism, failing to maintain the sort of perfection language seeks to stabilise throughout Modernity because of the incongruous way the body handles cognition compared to our current computer/code/language based theories.

I will argue that the Wooster Group stages analysis. Their productions take common literary criticism of canonical texts away from the pages of academic journals and institutions and place them in direct contact with bodies as a way of testing their mutual resonance. Often what we see in a Wooster Group performance is a dissonance between analysis and practice. Where texts are analysed, the Wooster Group over-analyses and speaks for the mechanism of that tension. This stands in for that tension, preventing the audience from experiencing it (a vital source of knowledge) and instead delivers it through analysis. This is typical of the informational age, where propaganda, media, and politics are entirely language-based, such as in recent elections where voters are

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country. Instead, they conform to a core consensus idea that they only hear about through the media and not through the body.

c. Plan

In order to make this argument more apparent the thesis has been divided into three

chapters. The first chapter will deal with The Wooster Group themselves, their work, and some of the criticisms they have received. I will argue that The Wooster Group seems to structure bodies within analysis in order to reveal the stark dissonance between analysis and performance, between language and reality. The body itself becomes a device where actors receive inputs from earpieces, screens and other cues which generate outputs. However, by mediating them through the body, the tension of the work is revealed in its failure to deploy analysis effectively that it might stand in for reality. Instead, the limitations of the body (the errors of performing) become visible and thus the failure of the body to effectively represent language forms a tension in their work.

In the second chapter I will deploy the work of philosopher Graham Harman to generate a discussion about the essence of objects as Speculative. I will argue that the Wooster Group is interested in the essences of things, but with Harman, denies the modernist belief that objects are graspable. Harman demonstrates how objects cannot actually come into contact with each other (atomically) and suggests that what we see as interaction between objects is because of mutual perceptions or resonances that occur in the space between objects (between words) called the

aesthetic dimension. This dimension helps us to think about relativity across forms of knowledge

production, rather than universal fixed truths. How matter is formed is contingent on mutual relations at different levels of perception, at certain times and in certain spaces. This means that objects and concepts become ordered in language, but are contingent in reality. In order to be in a position to discover the essence of objects (if possible) one cannot claim certainty or objectivity in language, because language is applied to the object that does not respond. Instead, we must find a

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place between objects as functional to the human, and objects as they appear to non-human entities in order to reveal more of their essence. This means that we cannot rely on science or sensation alone and must position ourselves to utilise and explore the knowledge produced by both in a sort of double-vision that includes the offline computational logic and reason of cognition with the

contingent but valuable knowledge of the body and the senses which exist in being (& time). The third chapter presents a further critique on language and a way back to the Wooster Group. Here, I focus mainly on the work of Michel Serrés who attempts to demonstrate that the pendulum (through Modernity) has swung too far in favour of information which displaces the body and its power to sense chaos through the senses. Serrés believes that the senses are located in the skin, the point at which a single nerve has tuned itself to parts of a phenomenon emanating from chaos. The senses do not work in isolation, as was the pervading view in psychology and

neuroscience at the turn of the century, but instead are a messy compound. It is the senses in combination that provides the best sense of world, not simply the huge focus on the visual. When we walk our ears are tuned to the sound of our steps, our inner-ear to balance, our eyes to direction and obstacles, our feet to the contours of the ground. Behaviour and cognition then cannot be thought of as software, implemented through language, but rather as a physical knot in the neurons, tied over many repetitions with temporal beats and cross-sense harmonies, different and contingent to every single body based on divergent experiences, spatial locations and temporalities.

This will allow us to look at the Wooster Group in more detail with respect to the staging of analysis. It will allow us to speculate that the Wooster Group performs the failure of language to adequately represent the world through the methodology of analysis that confirms its truth by erasing the body and objects and by transforming them into quantifiable and discreet

data/information/code. The Wooster Group re-introduces the body to forms of literary, cultural and political analysis to demonstrate a flaw in to their claim to totality. They stage timeless,

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through scholarly methodologies such as cultural studies and literary analysis. They demonstrate the way analysis claims proof through language that is, in performance, falsified by the body. It is a future (and present) where virtual and language-based powers (such as economics that uses capital as a representation for survival and evolutionary success) limit the body itself and the things themselves in order to confirm their own bias. It holds certainty, transcendence and cognition too close to the heart, protecting it from a chaotic world that time and time again makes it contingent through the body and the senses. Information is thus a coercion of the senses, blinding chaos, and virtually imposing (through powerful institutions) a non-contingent offline reality that is a representation of Nature standing in for Nature itself.

I will conclude by suggesting that tension between objects is subjective, mutual and relative and therefore contingent. I will argue that this tension occurs in the skin – in the body, and not in the brain (exclusively). I will argue that the body is an important site for knowledge, that sensing is in fact what the exact sciences are about – seeing what is there – rather than attempting to normalise behaviour or cognition to avoid contingency and proliferate consensus. I will argue that difference through contingency is what seems to underlie many relations, and offer that the contingency of the senses is a vital point of knowledge historically and presently (such as space exploration through the sensing of radiation – an extension of touch). The Wooster Group point to the objects themselves through the contingency of analysis, asking that we return to the body to confirm or ponder our reality. They do this by making us crave reality through the body. We crave reality because language diffuses tension by standing in for phenomena. This tension is the point at which confusion occurs, which brings about curiosity and observation which leads to an attempt at knowing something by feeling, touching and tasting, rather than by defining, standardising and signalling. The Wooster Group stages analysis in such a way that we can see (and feel) just how hollow and standardised language is becoming when it dictates the body and makes us crave tension and uncertainty again, especially in theatre.

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1. The Wooster Group: Form

and Analysis

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1.1 Introduction

Deconstruction is usually dealt with under the banner of post-modernism in contemporary literature. Deconstruction is also a term that has haunted the Wooster Group but not without adequate support.1_{Their earlier work was typically a dissemination of a variety of texts in fragments.}

Parts of novels, songs and videos were cut and pasted onto the pages of scripts as a way of testing their theatricality and their performative limit. Texts were broken down, studied perhaps, at the sentence level, the shot level, and the phrase level in order to discover their performative meaning. It challenged the idea of performing a single text under a holistic structure – under the authority of the author. But later, the Wooster Group makes a shift from the fragmentary to the whole and in the new millennium is almost exclusive performing single-text treatments. For instance, in 2007 they performed Hamlet.2_{When many directors approach the text of Hamlet, their intention is to}

culminate the story into a psychologically rational and expressive interpretation of reality. The Wooster Group, among others, rejected this singular notion of interpretation, which in most

instances was a product of institutional conceptions of affect (and therefore aesthetics) in modernist theatre. Affect, sensation or the aesthetic experience were and are often thought of as long, grand narratives – things irreducible to their parts. Many artists who were labelled deconstructionists were producing work that was seemingly ambivalent to what modernism saw as necessity.

The purpose of this chapter is to allow the artistic practices of the Wooster Group to stand alone and oblivious to deconstruction theory in order to provide a fresh approach to the theorisation of The Wooster Group’s treatment of their objects and their theatrical practice. For this reason, we require a malleable object theory which places fewer restrictions on defining the hard edges of objects and the nature of their interaction. We require a theory that allows for contingency by organising a diverse set of objects in combined interaction such as: literature (at the narrative, thematic, style and grammatical level), film (at the narrative, thematic, style and grammatical

1 Mike Vanden Heuvel (2004), L.S.D. (Let’s Say Deconstruction!): Narrating Emergence in American Alternative

Avant-Garde Theatre Histroy. In The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. Callens, J. (ed), P.I.E., Brussels. 70-82

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[compositional] level), architecture (at the civilisation, city, village, set level), sound (at the

movement, piece, tone and noise level), and the human (at the genetic, environmental, emotional, mechanical and sensation level) etc.

However, we must first address the issue of the post-modern label and come to terms with the Wooster Group’s shift from the early multiple-object work of the 70s and 80s, to the more conventional single-object focus of the 90s to the present. To do this I will use two plays as primary examples: LSD (…just the high points…)3_{and Hamlet.}4_{LSD centres on hysteria and hallucination,}

collecting source material from the literature, film, music, pharmacology and theatre of the 60s in the USA. When these objects are thrown into the air, the Wooster Group attempts to play with their relations, searching and finding a theory of connectedness/contingency between the various divergent objects and concepts of the 60s (the high points – the dominant theories) and making a sort of collage that manifests itself around the themes of hallucination and hysteria. In contrast,

Hamlet uses only one source text, but a text torn between mediums. The Hamlet performance takes

the video recording of a stage play and meditates on it. It questions the nature of mediation and translation from one medium to another and attempts to re-stage that reversal (returning the filmed staged play back into the temporal domain of live performance from the evidence archived in film). It is between these two plays that I will try to find a common approach to the performativity of texts and their analysis, offering that imagination, speculation and observation (hallmarks of OOO) could be a useful lens through which the Wooster Group examines the nature of live performance and to argue that that approach is dealing with a deconstructed world, rather than producing it.

1.2 An Alternative to Deconstruction

3 The Wooster Group (1984) The Performing Garage, Brooklyn, New York

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The early work of the Wooster Group is typically discussed within a deconstructionist discourse.5_{For Aronson, The Wooster Group was arguably the only example of deconstruction in}

American Theatre.6_{Their early work is thus used as a lens through which to view their later work by}

many scholars. However, this is sometimes problematic and contradictory. Mike Vanden Heuvel argues that this is likely because the Wooster Group’s aesthetic is ‘modulating’ rather than static.7

They approach each work, or each series of works, differently and contingently. Where the early work of the Wooster Group was an assortment of texts, a montage of fragments, their later work tends more towards an interpretation of a singular text and its dominant literary critique. The question, then, is whether a deconstructionist lens is adequate for examining their work, or whether such a lens, in light of their more recent productions, is no longer viable.

In theatre, deconstruction is synonymous with a post-war rejection of modernity through the oppositional way objects construct reality.8_{After Freud and psychoanalysis the idea that human}

behaviour could be objectively ‘studied’ and accurately ‘performed’ in the theatre was a manifesto. Understanding the subconscious triggers, such as repressed homosexuality in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, allows one to utilise that subconscious tension to deliver an authentic performance. Supressing those triggers thus supresses their performance. So, by activating and deactivating the subconscious triggers, the actor performs naturally. Characters are far more psychological where by their underlying tensions and traumas are symbolically revealed in behaviours (actions). Characters must eliminate their traumas in order to be liberated from unwanted or undesirable behaviours. Vengence, acceptance and understanding are perhaps the most common counter-behaviours in narrative for psychological characters which aim to eliminate trauma and normalise behaviour.

5 Aronson (1985) The Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…), THE DRAMA REVIEW, 2, 9(2) MIT 6 Aronson (1985) pp. 65

7 Vanden Heuvel (2004)

8 I take this from the more classical interpretation of deconstructionism in Derrida, namely the opposition between essence and appearance. However, as we will see, I will contest the deep notion of the opposition between good and evil in oppositional objects through ambivalence, allowing for subjective possibility and imagination which will be discussed at length with regard to the Wooster Group.

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But the supposed psychological dramas, with their moral study of the human condition, failed to predict or even come to terms with the events of WWII as it became apparent that the so-called fascist trigger was in fact far more complicated and subjective than could be explained by a unified subconscious. After Auschwitz, it seemed impossible for many artists to make any kind of art -let alone a bourgeois art about and for the upper-classes - when the promise of industrialised modern life resulted in the mechanistic extermination of millions of people because of an arbitrary linguistic referent to an undesirable trauma that stood in for behaviour (and genes). Cleary

something was going awry in modernity, suggesting that the grand morality plays of naturalism re-enforced social positions whose endgame was ultimately identity politics resulting in implicit forms of eugenics to deal with the growing contingency of large civilisation.

In the late 60s and early 70s, when much of the experimental theatre coming out of Europe reached the USA, and when the Vietnam and Cold War provided the lens through which US

theatregoers could relate to these experiments, there was a sort of thriving avant-garde in New York.9_{Largely influenced by the French post-structuralist philosopher, Jacques Derrida, these}

avant-gardes investigated the rudimentary in theatre by way of breaking down modernist texts and conventions to reveal or challenge them. In a way, the post-war era became about a working-class theatre where modernist notions of class, gender and transcendence were constantly contested, where the pageantry of the modernist play - it’s supposed psychological realism - failed in the eyes of the avant-gardes. If Auschwitz was a modern problem (that it was about eugenics: race, sexuality, gender), that it was made possible by modernity, then modernist art could be used to examine this potential.

At the time, deconstruction through Derrida became a pervading scheme through which to methodologically interrogate modernism and was deployed by many avant-gardes in many western arts to come to terms with the atrocities modernity supposedly made possible.10_{For theatre, this}

9 Robert Cardullo (2015). Experimental theatre in the twentieth century: avant-gardism, the absurd, and the

postmodern. Neohelicon 42:341–358.

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meant an assault on the human subject, its God-given agency, and the extent to which its life (and thus its performance) is ultimately structured within the framework of a modernist conception of the human. Re-structuring the theatrical space and fracturing its psychological realism offered a

landscape through which human performativity could be augmented, challenged, abused and cut.11

Modernist characters came to be seen not as psychologically stable, but as a ritualised subconscious rehearsal of ‘modern man’ that was privy to manipulation and demanded that people self-discipline social deviation through education, service – and on the other side: through drugs, such as

alcoholism in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.12

While the avant-gardes smashed texts apart to work with their pieces, the more commercial theatre was preoccupied with an objective gaze. Designers and directors utilised the vacuous space left after WWII in their minimal designs, which placed extra scrutiny on the text itself.13_{As we will}

discuss later, the 1964 filmed production of Hamlet demonstrates a stagnant, minimalist approach where the ‘naturalism’ of the psychology of the characters is unabated by glorious set pieces. Rather, the stage design and direction began to examine the power within the play on an abstract level, a sort of structural interrogation of narrative made visible (but abstractly) by space. There was a mechanism in the text, and it needed to be isolated. The actors still performed a psychological realism without any of modernism’s luxuries such as lavish costumes, set designs and make-up. Modernism was stripped of its ornamentation and artists examined only the core, essential functions of these underlying rules or mechanisms.

Where Arthur Miller criticised modernism in The Crucible, highlighting the extent to which fascism, in the form of a strongly anti-communist America, risked falling into the same identity laden nationalist trap Europe did, the avant-gardes were less cautionary and more experimental. For the most part, it seems, they saw language not as a saviour, as the triumph of humanity, but rather as a

11 Abramovic

12 Perhaps the most pertinent example here is Samuel Beckett’s work, where characters seem stuck in an endless loop of repeated questions with no answers but nonetheless continue to rehearse them. Waiting for

Godot is a good example.

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volatile and unpredictable human tool with no inherent moral salience. Language, by definition, did not protect modernity’s moral good. In fact, in the form of propaganda it effectively did the opposite. It was capable of diminishing the humanism of the prisoner of war, allowing normal people to act in immoral ways by disciplining their behaviours through language. Language was not something to be taken lightly by the avant-gardes, and texts (such as Nietzsche to the Nazis) could be bent to the will of anyone under interpretation so long as one had authority over interpretation (i.e. through an institution). The more mainstream, middle to upper-class theatre still propagated language for transformative effect, as is the case with Miller, suggesting perhaps that modernism could be fixed if people were made aware of and thus subsumed its ‘faults,’ for example, the ability for language to incite hysteria, hallucinations and potentially violent actions was demonstrated in The Crucible.

Most of the avant-gardes were thus grouped under a heading of post-modernism, typified by a critique of modernism’s conventions. However, it is wrong to suggest that all avant-gardes fit squarely into this concept. Even in terms of deconstruction, many theatre-based avant-gardes were awkwardly situated within a movement whose hallmark was attacking modernism. The early allure of situating these groups within a historicised movement often used avant-garde performance (and performance art) as a source of examples of post-modernism rather than the groups labelling themselves as such. It became more of a political label than an aesthetic one, and stood in front of collectives that were, in all honesty, doing very different things. In fact, there were and are many diverse interventions, from a renaissance of romanticism (Shakespeare on Broadway in the 60s with famous American actors), to a dreamlike subconscious realism based on Jung’s critique of Freud’s psychological trifactor: the adding of the collective unconscious to id, ego and super-ego to the theory of human cognition and behaviour.14_{The mysterious, unreachable collective unconscious}

could be divulged in the space between texts and the public, and many theatre makers (mostly notably Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata) attempted to stage this collective unconscious – the reality of dreams. However, these diverge from the work of the Wooster Group, which warrants a more

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detailed picture than a defined generalised political term, such as deconstructionist (or post-modern).

1.3 Trippin’

The Wooster Group, however, seemed more interested in the juxta positioning of genres and conventions between various texts in order to reveal them in performance. But typical of the

Wooster Group is translation and mediation through analysis. What I will argue is that the Wooster Group stages their work between the forces of objects (both physical and analytical) that create the opportunity for a thematic resonance and a recognition of self that is contingent. Analysis is given body in performance by the Wooster Group. In LSD, the thematic resonance is imbedded in the title (just the high points) as if to reduce the texts in question to their most dominant form of critical analysis: the court-scene in The Crucible, the cool wit of Timothy Leary, the pornography of Naked

Lunch, and the hipster youth-culture of Allen Ginsberg. By arranging, translating and mediating these

texts in collaboration, the Wooster Group becomes a curator of sorts, searching for their aesthetic resonance, perhaps even their collective unconscious as a way of historicising the 60s via the institution of a panel (the first act of the play). Rather than simply performing the literature, the Wooster Group is concerned with objects, such as the recreational drug LSD. Hysteria and

hallucination, symbolic of the drug’s psychological effects, become thematic fairy-tales, arguing that the aesthetic of the 60s, - its experimentation and uncertainty - is essentially a kind of trip, a loss of grip with modern reality: a mythology.

This trip became not only the trauma of the loss of the stable reality promised by modernism in the post-war period, but also a site of possibility for reconstituting reality – a reality not dependent on the bourgeois class. The deconstruction of modernism is also, in part, its rebirth but under different circumstances. Rather than a dependency on psychologically rational behaviour, modernism (through Derrida and later Butler) could be understood through its languages and their forces. For

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Derrida (and Butler) there is a linguistic focus, that modernism is a series of ritualised performative acts and that humans and their behaviour could be understood via the ways in which behaviours are implicitly rehearsed and ritualised.15_{I will argue, instead, that they dealt with a larger plethora of}

forces which constitute human behaviour, including subversion, sensation and spectacle. These aesthetic tools were also always situated between objects, and not in them inherently, for instance: between analysis and the body. This is contrary to the idea that speech acts act in isolation, that they are the essence of human behaviour, and that there are many other influences outside of language that coerce human behaviour including the very physical, non-linguistic act of behavioural

intervention through psychoactive materials (to treat depression, for instance). This is, in part, what Timothy Leary suggested: that there was possibility in realising that human thought and human behaviour (and identity) is not entirely ritualised and rehearsed as Derrida and Butler suggest, but is also chemical and that trippin’ with brain chemistry went hand in hand with discovering new behaviours and thoughts that were linguistically unthinkable (or repressed). And these new or underlying behaviours or thoughts were brought about by tasting the world. One could, according to Leary, fracture, mediate and transcend ritualised performative acts by reconstituting reality as it is

physiologically perceived by the senses. There was not one reality to be found, but an infinite number

of possible realities, and that reality could be constructed and regulated through language and social behaviour (propaganda from the institution) by manipulating the world to avoid the contingency of the natural body.

Sensation is the site at which human behaviour is realised and therefore is the focal point of affective responses. People tripped over their own performative acts and this led to alternative acts – a mutation of those acts – that pointed to the essence of objects outside of the theatre. It is thus the objects themselves, through their interaction with us, that structure our behaviour, and not entirely the ritualised rehearsal of speech acts. Trippin’ is therefore a way of taking the noise of perception, or the noise of competing body-mind functions, to totality by acknowledging their contingency. In

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doing so, it demonstrates the relationship between mind and body, swinging the pendulum back toward the body as a site of contact with chaos and thus reality. The former (the non-trip) becomes a mechanism through which to produce a stabilised reality, largely through language and its

institutions: nations, arts, sciences, politics and law. It rejects or suppresses the noise of the senses, diminishes their value, and further displaces the construction of the human in line with automation – that being cognition, where the body itself is a kind of smooth, streamlined, hygienic protective casing: a minimal ornamentation to the black-box Central Processing Unit of refined and error-free inputs and outputs. The senses are displaced in favour of this prevailing model for cognition, abstraction and institutionalised analysis.16_{This places spectacle, direct contact with the senses,}

below analysis in artistic practice without justification outside of a non-contingent world.

This is perhaps why today spectacle in art can be viewed as a kind of drug-like escapism from modernist reality, something heavily critiqued by modernist (mostly activist) institutions for its inability to enact long-term social change. I, however, tend to disagree with this harsh critique of the spectacle, as the spectacle is synonymous with the real-life way creatures interact with their

environment. As John Dewey suggests in Art as Experience, the biological way through which a creature experiences the world is unjustly separated from aesthetics in art theory.17_{For Dewey, this}

generates an arbitrary distinction between low and high art that is more representative of

institutional politics than it is of aesthetic experience. The natural spectacle of an Icelandic volcano eruption creates a kind of activism within the present context, a demonstration of the human’s helpless limit to conquer nature, and today, a specific global anxiety about the environment (and the weather) in general. Despite its natural world origin, it contacts the human aesthetically through all the contingent forces it resonates with, and through its being influences politics, science and business directly – not linguistically but sensuously.

16 Institutionalised analysis refers to the methodology of disciplines – the dominant methodological approach to knowledge within an institution/discipline.

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Post-modern and deconstructionist theatre distils art through (over)analysis. In chapter 3 we will return to the issue of analysis through Michel Serrés’ critique of language in The Five Senses.18_It

often strives to uncover underlying mechanisms (such as speech acts) in order to objectify art objects. A literary analysis of Alan Ginsberg attempts to prove the legality of his work by uncovering core manipulative conventions that are debated in the court room as being either positive or negative for the social institution. It reduces a text to a binary of inclusion or exclusion by the dominant class and takes it as totality through analysis defined and proven through language. It demonstrates a modernist cornerstone: that language is totality and that through language everything is explainable and provable. Art is abstracted from the body, the site of the senses, and coloured in by language. It conforms to the modernist idea that art is such because it is spoken for, because it, as a real-world object, represents language, and not that art represents the real-world. The totality of language within modernism gives precedence to law, to theatre, where words stand in for actions in order to produce words which become an origin of actions in and of themselves. It writes over the world in order to objectify and stabilise reality, an aestheticising of the messy, carnal, sensual senses in favour of a scripted input-output work ethic.

1.4 Analysis as Performance

The Wooster Group hones in on many of these dominant forms of analysis and embodies them in performance. For example, in The Crucible there is a “negro slave”, Tituba.19_{The character}

description is as such in the original script. A negro female slave is a direct historical colonial linguistic referent in western modernity. It becomes a black woman, as in, a woman who is black in skin-colour and from a low social standing in society (historically in the context of The Crucible). She is

sensational because her identity is pervasively linked to her colour (and genes) and not her cognition. But contrary to tradition the Wooster Group ignores, for the most part, this static (objective)

18 Serrés, Michel. (2008) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. New York: Continuum

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interpretation and instead, as they do with many of their characters, designate such elements to superficial facades, reminiscent of modernism’s claim to their essence.

The way the Wooster Group performs Tituba is through analysis. Arthur Miller, a white man, writes the realist experience of Tituba in order for a person to perform that realism. He performs a seemingly non-embodied and thus objective black-face that is not deemed as such because analysis, deprived of the senses, doesn’t need to be embodied to be proven. The Wooster Group embodies this analysis: a white woman is covered in black paint. It uses the body as the site of this tension, between analysis and the practice of such analysis. It calls into question the distance between analysis and the senses, where the embodiment of analysis results in the Wooster Group being demonised for blackface through rigid symbolic or iconic rules of culture, a culture reduced to language referents that box-in and over-simplify experience and deny tensions. Instead, as I argue, the Wooster Group, through the embodiment of analysis, demonstrates rather viscerally the failure, contradiction and rigidness of institutions such as literary analysis, that throughout modernism often produce canonical texts (things the Wooster Group focuses on) in order to structure literature within a sort of grading scheme, encouraging a cognitive rather than visceral aesthetic experience that aims at producing a stable literary world, linear in its progression, and powerful enough to supress the contestation of works that pander to the senses, disrupting the ordered reality it seeks to produce. Similarly, in Vieux Carre,20_{a play by Tennessee Williams where literary critics crudely label the}

tension of his work as ‘repressed homosexuality’ the main character in the Wooster Group production is given erotic costuming (a leather jock-strap), parodying the façade of the linguistic referent in the modernist reality to turn tension (which must be sensed in order to discover ‘meaning’) into information and language.

These are the kinds of trips we encounter in the Wooster Group’s performance, where a black character is queered by the body of a ‘white’ woman, who is still black, but a different kind of black. Where Arthur Miller wrote the language of a black woman, the Wooster Group playfully

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continues the narrative of her body, where black-face becomes this irreverent costume guarding the contingent inner-human (actor-writer). It is the modernist façade of an identity, of a series of behaviours, of an institution, of the homogenisation of a heterogenous group of people. The

Wooster Group trips us on the ritualised linguistic meaning of ‘negro slave.’ It is the realisation that a simple stage direction is not intended to be taken literally linguistically. But that’s exactly what the Wooster Group did, because the act of naming a ‘black woman,’ is not stable unless the linguistic reality of all actors is stable, unless it is only interpretable as a singular linguistic referent to a singular object in reality – if it is consensus. And when the Wooster Group destabilises that reality, “negro slave” can mean a lot more things than it does within modernity, suggesting that language can be tripped and that analysis struggles to embody and thus to come into contact with reality. “Negro slave” in fact is only a surface, a façade, an undetailed black & white binary silhouette of something abstracted from the act of experiencing – and the Wooster Group performs that, where tension lies between text and body.

Artistic Director of the Wooster Group, Elizabeth Le Compte once said, in response to the backlash the company received for doing “blackface,” that what they did is no different to what Arthur Miller did in writing “a negro slave.” In fact, the blacked white-woman is an extension of this convention in modernist writing made visible in the body. It is a relative, not a static position which affords the Wooster Group its interpretation of analysis – that it isn’t objective. The Wooster Group constructs a black woman with language, icons, images and discreet actions and finally with black paint on skin, imitating the way any person subjects any other person to an identity based on the perceivable objects in conjunction with a modernist humanist linguistic scheme.

The Wooster Group thus challenges the linguistic referent. It admits that language is liable to interpretation, even at such a highly-abstracted level. In fact, it parodies the interpretation of

language by remaining ambivalent to the rehearsed modernist referent of a black woman. It makes no suggestion of the woman’s origin or race in lieu of a modernist conception of race. Black, then, is

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a contentious word when used to describe human behaviour and performativity. The Wooster Group is capable of seeing this dissonance, of realising the adjective’s modern application, and making it contingent through a trip. Though it is still a sensitive issue in identity politics, the Wooster Group stages the continued racializing analysis of modernism on the body of the actor. It demonstrates absurdity in the word and attempts to direct the audience to consider analysis and practice. By embodying analysis, a totalitarian world of analysis is represented, whereby the actors are

themselves caught in language, inscribed all over their bodies, in the movements too, that deny their inner-contingency in favour of a virtual stability given by langauge.

The Wooster Group actors are structured. They are mediated through screens and mediate their own performance by attempting to embody isolated performative methodologies. We trip on the word (the character) through embodiment. The Wooster Group attempts to construct a stable reality to such an extent that it is unstable, and like a dream (or hallucination), one is constantly dealing with the question of reality. If analysis cannot produce, top-down, stability, as is the pseudo-chaos of a Wooster Group performance, then its contact with reality, and its power to govern that reality through a system of knowledge based on language alone, is questionable so long as the body exists.

Although race is often difficult to talk about in such ambivalent terms,21_{the important point}

here is that race, like all other aspects of labelled identities in modernity, is contingent through trippin’, remixable and – in the end – uncertain without a collective modernist reality to constitute it as such. In making this rather absurdly literal performance, the Wooster Group challenges what Miller means by what he writes, and in a supposed post-modern, post-race reality, a black woman is not a fixed objective identity. It is merely an adjective and an object, liable to be interpreted under the potential each word embodies. The death of the author is not necessarily the end of authorship, but rather the end of the author’s ownership of his/her text – an end of the idea that language itself holds the key to an accurate depiction of an objective reality that through the author’s skill is

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uninterpretable to the reader because it is the objectively fixed reality they both share.22_The

Wooster Group, in spite of the correct modernist understanding, performs that deep tension, the deep uncertainty through which objects are described and defined as such within modernism.

1.5 The Third Hamlet

In 2007, the Wooster Group staged a production of Hamlet based off of a 1964 filmed production, one of the first attempts at live-filmed theatre and a commercially successful large-scale production of Shakespeare in New York. This video was perplexing to the Wooster Group for its remixing of mediums. The original play that was filmed was done so through a variety of cameras positioned around the auditorium. The goal of this filming was to effectively capture the experience of theatre on film in order to distribute it to a larger geographical audience. But what struck the Wooster Group was the complexity of the task at hand, that of translating theatre to film. That of subjecting the free gaze of an audience to the fixed gaze of the camera. That of analysing theatre through the language of film.

The original staged Hamlet was cut, edited and shot from a variety of points of view. In a way, the Wooster Group suggests that this is a form of deconstructing the Hamlet of theatre to be constructed as film by filmic analysis.23_{It cuts, frames out and focuses in on the elements the}

director choses, a form of his or her analysis. The Wooster Group set themselves the task of reconstructing the original stage play from the evidence left in the film in order to test the

22 Arthur Miller eventually refused the use of his play in LSD, effectively using the power of his modernist authority to claim ownership over the interpretation of his work. They replaced the scene with a parody of The

Crucible.

23 LeCompte actually attended the original production that was later made into the source film. In an interview, she remarked on the difference between the two mediums and their impact on her. Re-imagining it in the way that the Wooster Group did is also a demonstration of what is lost in translation (and what is added). But importantly for this paper, it is more the fact that film and theatre produces different vantage points through which parts of Hamlet can be explored. Staging them side-by-side (and intertwined) explores the nature of their interaction.

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authenticity of this analysis. Film and theatre are thus variables which have the potential to bring forth the object, titled as such: Hamlet.

Kate Valk and Scott Shepherd in Hamlet (2007) The Wooster Group. Photo by Mihaela Marin

In this production, there is a screen at the back which has the film projected onto it. Throughout the play actors take control over the video, fast-forwarding, rewinding and pausing the film as they chose, selecting (as the director did) their points of focus. But there are two Hamlets now. There is the Hamlet of the film, and the recreated Hamlet of the stage. These two Hamlets interact with one another, a kind of imitation of the original text of Hamlet. But that text,

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is unreachable. Hamlet is thus not film, nor theatre though it is perceivable in both. The piece largely reflects the process of translation, or of mediation of a text. Where one piece sees Shakespeare’s now reconstructed text as a performative play, the Wooster Group sees the film itself as sacred – as the original text - in an effort to uncover Hamlet through its analysis. We have a paradox between imitation and interpretation, between sensing and analysis.

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For the Wooster Group the purpose of finding Hamlet is a tongue-in-cheek endeavour of literary analysis. Rather, what interests them more is the process of revealing this interaction through the body. It is the process of staging such a clinical, objectively constructed Hamlet, messy but ordered and timed exactly to the film, with all the human error you can expect from live performance of which language attempts to erase. It is a rather impossible task. However, the impossibility of the task is its most important aesthetic quality for it demonstrates that Hamlet is itself withheld and that the true Hamlet exists between its text(s) and cannot be drawn out of language alone. Analysing this film through a language has been done, probably without much question or criticism, but the moment the Wooster Group introduces the body, everything becomes contingent again.

We have a scientific Hamlet of sorts. In this case, the film. It is an objective study of the 60s play with an impersonal, perhaps indifferent gaze, that erases Shakespeare to focus on his text as an essence: how he is essentialised in modernist language. We also have the functional Hamlet, the one that is present in the room, with an audience who is situated in time, in a city with social and cultural structures that one might relate, or use as tools through which to enjoy the play. So we could say, in the case of Hamlet, that there is also a third Hamlet in the Wooster Group production. And that is

HAMLET. We never see this HAMLET in full. We can only glimpse this HAMLET, ponder what it might

be, when we blur the lines between the two Hamlets on stage by making them contingent through the body. This calls us to look outside of the theatre, to experience.

The Wooster Group are, in their theory and practice, attempting to connect the dots left separated by the 20th_{century. They are, rightly so, re-validating the world, demonstrating that this is}

no contradiction, no dead-end, that contingency is not the problem. Hamlet exists. But we cannot get to it, that word that explains it in a word: Hamlet. Instead, we have the text itself, and it’s

possible performability through which life can be given by contingency. Each production of Hamlet is this interaction, a way of connecting the stark frozen world of ink on paper with the vibrant

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sensuality of temporal reality. HAMLET is more than the ink on paper, more than the performance, but is perceivable, bled out or coloured if you will, by each connecting interaction, in each aesthetic intervention into the text.

What the Wooster Group demonstrates to us is the underlying process of mediation and translation through language. They open out the editing process to their audience to demonstrate the process of dissecting a text, of actively interpreting that text in performance. This production is a rehearsal of sorts (like many other productions) where the audience is asked to study with the group. They are asked to recognise the subjective viewpoints of HAMLET in order to make aware its many sides, in order to demonstrate the impossibility of the task at hand, of actually being able to pin down a text in non-contingent circumstances. The tension in Hamlet cannot be explained. Taking a Shakespeare course at university the professor thought it wise to read, rather than perform Hamlet, to look at it rather than feel it, embody it or hear it. The Wooster Group demonstrate the massive void in literary analysis, where the mind (cognition in a text) is unjustly privileged over the act of

sensing through contingency (what Hamlet as a character goes through). Tension (an elusive

combination of senses that mimics how we confront totality) is replaced with cognition and code via the literary analysis of words whose presence is virtual, rather than physically present in a

performing body.

By imitating the film, the Wooster Group place themselves entirely (squarely) within a reality of analysis. The act of copying exactly reveals contingency in the process. The audience is drawn to the moments that reveal this contingency, where there is tension between language and the body. They are bound by analysis of the text. They can only watch the film, act it out, position the stage in line with the point of view of the various cameras. It’s a mechanical production of constantly moving parts, a representation of a fixed point of view on a moving object. It’s loud, technical, fast and sometimes messy. The actors even mimic the jarring elements of film, its jumps, cuts and flickers. They go boldly towards an impossible task to point to something that can only occur in the senses:

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tension. It is an analytical approach to the text that positions the actors within the totalitarian world of inputs and outputs that utilises and satirises the way analysis and language – not the senses – governs performativity by removing contingency and thus tension.

1.6 The Gap between Embodiment and Analysis

Hamlet is thus a presence, a word given to a non-linguistic phenomenon – a phenomenon felt but never graspable. And to some extent, the Wooster Group parodies this grasp-ability as it ritualises the canonical performance of film where Hamlet is symbolised in the receiving of

communion, words that are consumed via the institution of theatre for their transformative effect. It is a performance that points not to analysis, but the gap between analysis and reality that must be bridged by experience. We are called to return to (if we ever left) the mythical/magical/spiritual dimension of reality – to return objects to the senses, revealed through observation in reality, and not represented in language. The immaterial essence of things conjured up through performance is an effort to make present that which is hidden, mirroring the way the girls conjure the devil in the woods of Salem in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. They represent language, curse, governing action, something heading towards a 1984 style thought-crime, where language transcends into a totality that governs performance, completely eliminating the body and the ‘error-prone’ senses to strive towards a spiritual god-like omnipotence reminiscent of the Christian god, who speaks to create worlds, who was immaculately conceived by the word alone.

If modernism gave us Auschwitz, 9/11 etc., it demonstrates that in striving for virtual stability inevitably demonstrates its own contingency. These phenomena, overly analysed, are never

understood except when reduced to language. The Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet, I argue, is a myth about Hamlet’s essence. It is a myth constructed through the presence of film, imaged through the being of performance, and indifferent to the historicising of time leading not to a good – an objective meaning – but to a mythical one, something that is pointed at by language because

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language cannot stand in for it. It must be sensed and experienced. The Wooster Group

demonstrates the gap between analysis and practice, tripping over the void to remind us that theatre cannot deliver the given, it can only point to it by attempting to summon or conjure it in the mind, that it might be sought in reality.

1.7 Conclusion

The main argument in this chapter is to move an examination of the Wooster Group’s artistic practice away from a purely deconstructionist lens, to a more object-oriented one. Where many scholars have remarked on the problem of a supposed shift in the Wooster Group’s work, I have argued that this shift is relatively superficial if we ignore that a fragmentary object (black slave in The

Crucible) is of no greater or lesser importance to a whole modernist object (such as Hamlet). In both,

we see the Wooster Group staging dissonance which transforms reality away from homogenised modernist conceptions and is instead, post-deconstruction, in the business of creating, imagining and mythologising objects again metaphysically by taking analysis as totality. They do this through, what I call, trippin’ (to take a metaphor from L.S.D.) or remixing whereby the linguistic reality that is created solely by language forms a dissonance in the failure of practice, contesting the authority of language, its universal perceivability, and the homogenous reality the modernist use of language seeks to promote by governing performance and, from Descartes, attempts to do away with body as a form of knowledge, identity and being.

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2. Resonance: affect,

objects and the aesthetic

dimension

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2.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter I described how the Wooster Group takes on analysis as a kind of metaphysics in-and-of-itself but confronts contingency with the body. This allows them to take modernism’s emphasis on language and analysis to totality in performance, creating a dissonance between language and performativity. This makes for quite a grim outlook with respect to knowledge and understanding. But we are reminded that the Wooster Group doesn’t call us to abandon the essence of the objects themselves. Rather, through theatre, they point outside of language to the essence of the object, emphasising the lack of experience required to understand and interact with an object/phenomena/concept/thing. The actors themselves do this, and perform this for the benefit of the audience, structuring themselves within language that replaces their bodies with words and symbols designed to anesthetise the body and the senses so that it might conform to the noiseless objectivity given order by language. The bodies quiver and often fail in the task at hand,

demonstrating to the audience the impossibility of governing action (of governing interaction with the world) through language. They demonstrate that language cannot be the given, but can only point to it – that when it becomes the given it works to erase the senses by replacing them with simplified referents that cannot capture the complexity and contingency of all the senses sensing in combination.

In this chapter, we will focus a little more on Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO) through which the withheld essence of the objects themselves is not a fundamental problem that must be

overcome through language, but through a combination of things, just as the senses combine to recognise (and memorise contingently) an experience. I will be focussing mainly on philosopher Graham Harman’s Speculative Realism to bring about an idea of resonance – a less causal and more interactional form of harmony between objects that opens up complex possibilities rather than

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simplified referents to interaction. It will allow us to use levels and scopes in combination, just as we define objects by their materiality and their functions – how we interact with those things to bring about further interactions which produce new materials and functions. It does not deny metaphysics, but multiplies it in the absence of certain knowledge arguing that being driven towards the essence of the object metaphysically facilitates interaction with the object that can reveal other sides, aspects, functions and materials – new objects themselves, smaller or bigger. I will argue that this interaction can only take place through the senses and thus argue that language, through

modernism, attempts to desensitise the senses in order to produce the reality that it itself is: ordered, cognitive, educated, knowing and omnipresent and thus bodiless.

2.1 Mutual Interactions – Mutual Agency.

Published in Documenta, Graham Harman wrote an article titled The Third Table in which he described in shorter detail the crux of his Speculative Realism philosophy.24_{The title highlights the}

inherent paradox of objects. The first table is the phenomenological table. It is the table as defined by its function, the fact that we can put things on it, eat off of it, sit around, symbolise it (as in painting: The Last Supper, for instance) etc. It has a function outside of its atoms, that banquets were had around it, focusing the senses, or the governing social structure in a business meeting – an altar. The second table is the scientific table. It is the table of atoms, of wood or metal, of magnetic bonds that form the entire table. Both of these approaches to the table, the functional and the scientific, are correct ways of thinking about tables (and matter). Both of them have advantages for different realisms. For instance, the atoms of the table don’t immediately come to mind when I write this paper on it. It is more its use to me right now than its atoms. But the second table is nonetheless important, for instance, if there is a fire. The combusting wood of the table is an interaction with its

24 Harman, Graham (2012). The Third Table. In Katrin Sauerländer (ed.), _Documenta: 100 Notes-100 Thoughts_. Documenta.

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molecules, not necessarily with the fact that it is a table. But the ultimate question in this paper is, what if there is a third table?

The point of this question is to alert us to the fact that the essence of objects, their

thingness,25_{is the third table. It is the table that is between the function and the atomic. This is the}

essence of the table, the thing that ultimately is what a table is, both functionally/culturally and scientifically, spatially, and temporally. However, Harman reminds us that this third table is withheld. This is because objects, such as us, cannot come into contact with other objects directly. Instead, they interact in a third space, the space of the third table: the aesthetic dimension. This dimension is a non-object space: a sort of anti-space or a vacuum where no objects lie. Each object is surrounded by this vacuum, unable to make contact with any other objects. However, the end result of this is perhaps a completely static world wherein nothing is able to interact. But this is not the world we see. We see, through our bodies, that objects are able to interact with one another despite not being able to come into direct contact with each other.

To resolve this, we cannot think of objects as either the first or the second table entirely. Instead, we need to acknowledge that the table as such has something to do with both of them. The relationship between them cannot be explained entirely by the atoms, nor entirely by the function. Instead, the table as such is an interaction between the two, and the third table might in fact be the real table - that through one lens (science) manifests itself in atoms and molecules, while through another lens (phenomenology) appears to the human as something with certain functions. In order to resolve this dissonance, we need to accept that the object is simultaneously both of these things (and perhaps neither) because neither can explain how these atoms, in this arrangement, foster these functions (and vice-versa). Rather, in order to deal with objects, we need a sort of double vision. We need to accept that the third table manifests itself to us in at least these two ways: as sensation to the human’s perceptibility of the table, and as a relatively strong magnetic bond between molecules of a certain make-up.

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Let me give an example: In order for a creature, a monkey, to comprehend the relation between itself and anything that is not itself, a nut, it must interact with it. The monkey might offer certain aesthetic interactions, hitting it against a tree, learning about the hardness of the nut, the music of the percussive tone of the inner flesh produced between the tree and nut with the force and grip of the hand of the monkey. Eventually, cracks in the outer shell of the nut appear. The monkey trips on new aesthetics (reality). A rock. Between two rocks. A rock with a grove that is a reflection of the nut carved out by the indifferent interaction with rain – air. This stops the nut from slipping, but in a rather contained, sophisticated and specific manner, cracks the outer shell and reveals a substance that forms a strong resonance with the cellular composition of the monkey. Neither object by itself constitutes the relationship between the monkey and the nut. To know the monkey (or the nut) we cannot reach its objective essence because the object exists (and is as such) under the conditions of all objects in relative times and spaces. Potentially, within each object is the reflection of its point of view on everything it interacts with. But we cannot access that. We begin to paint it, carve it out, its forms, contours, colours, sounds, their size and proportions. We don’t tend to conduct research on the monkey by studying how the weather eroded the rock. But we could, and it would paint at least some part of that thing.

Thus, an object might be the reflection/refraction/mediation of the entire universe in varied degrees, strengths and measures. As we search further outward spatially, farther from now in time, to the largest aesthetic collection of emissions of radiation we are currently sensitive to view, we too look inward, to the smallest of things we can discernibly detect, not the old objects of time but the flashes of the few frequent bursts in an ever present static – the underlying sound of the record player you only hear when the track ends – a tension of the senses between discretion and noise. We go infinitely in both directions.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that this relationship cannot be governed through binary of cause and effect and will instead point to the possibility for interaction through the vibrating

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activation of matter: resonance.26_{Therefore, the aesthetic dimension}27_{might be viewed as the}

non-object space through between matter across which resonance with other matter occurs. Resonance is constituted by time, by space, by energy and by objects. It is the degree, the frequency, the level, the scope and the partial way objects mutually interact with the perceivable (resonant) parts of each other. Resonance is vibrations or magnetic fluctuations that occur between objects in time and space but is not an object itself. It highlights subjectivity and relativity. There is no formal formula for what constitutes a resonance as all things resonate. However, through the senses, we are susceptible to objects that constitute us, those which we resonate with us and vice-versa. This occurs in time and in space, not universally. Oil resonates with the industrial revolution as well as with climate change, but they did not occur simultaneously. Instead, they occur because of other resonances with other concepts and objects. Resonance doesn’t define the objects as such, it only highlights bonds as they are perceived by the senses, or the extension of the senses through prosthetic scientific senses (such as an electron microscope). What the monkey is, is reconstituted in every instance by waves, electrons, passing over – through, re-arranging, reflecting and refracting in a way that our senses can distinguish it by degrees of radiation, cells attuned to particular frequencies, sound, colour,

movement (time) in order to perceive it as something we might decide to call matter, living matter, animal, mammal, monkey.

This knowledge is not produced through language but through interaction with the perceivable parts of the objects and is contingent on them. We cannot see UV light rays, but their interaction with our skin makes them apparent to us. We are still able to sense it first, before we can tease out to give it a name. That knowledge first comes to the body because the body is the site at which one opens onto chaos. But UV light resonates with the human body in order to produce a

26 I prefer the term resonance myself as affect tends to describe a process (or a physiology) and the aesthetic dimension calls to mind a space. Resonance encompasses space/non-space, objects/non-objects. It avoids having to deal with affect as a process (a linear force from one thing to the next) or as a meeting-point for interaction. Rather, it highlights contingency by being reluctant to graspability while still foreshadowing the presence of interaction.

27 The aesthetic dimension is Graham Harman’s term. It assumes that if an object’s essence is ‘withheld’ then objects can’t actually (physically) touch one another. But objects interact, and seemingly so in a space between objects, whilst maintaining their essence. This is the aesthetic dimension. This will be expanded below.