Emma Marks
SENSUAL-ENCOUNTERS WITH ORDINARY THINGS: A speculation by Emma Marks C&G 2020
Word count 7077
Emma Marks
Sensual-encounters with Ordinary Things: A Speculation
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Contents 3
Illustrations page
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Introduction
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Exploring words
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Sensual-encounter Ordinary Things
Sensual-encounters with ordinary things in extraordinary situations
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind Storytellers Fairies Objectum Sexuals Shamans
Sensual-encounters with ordinary things in art practice
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Artists in Lockdown Potters Verbs
Speculations
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Illustrations Figure. 1
Emma Marks, Film stills from Encounter experiments, 2020
Figure. 2
Emma Marks, Fake Maths, 2020
Figure. 3
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Official Trailer online video, YouTube, 25 July 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpQ3G08k48 > [screenshot by Emma Marks 29 March 2019]
Figure. 4
Roy Neary and Mashed Potato Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. By Stephen Spielberg (Columbia Pictures 1977), online video recording, YouTube, 7 October 2012, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdkS0TgEG30> [screenshot by Emma Marks, 25 June 2020]
Figure. 5
Helen Murer, The Kiss < http://www.helenmaurer.co.uk/index.php?page=57> [screenshot by Emma Marks, 1 May 2020]
Figure. 6
YouTube responses to Matt Maher’s video: Concrete Romance: Objectum-Sexuality on YouTube 9 August 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEDwr8ndvIM> [screenshot by Emma Marks, 1 July 2020].
Figure. 7
Marcus Coates, The Plover’s Wing, 2008 in Marcus Coates / TateShots 23 Mar 2009 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfBgWtAIbRc> [screenshot by Emma Marks, 12 June 2020]
Figure. 8
Adam Buick, Rolling Clay < https://www.adambuick.com/projects/rolling-clay/> [screenshot by Emma Marks, 3rd July 2020]
Figure. 9
Richard Serra, Verblist, 1967-68 Gallery label from the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017 <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152793> [screenshot by Emma Marks, May 2020]
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Introduction Acknowledging that every aspect of human being is grounded in specific forms of bodily engagement with an environment requires a far-reaching rethinking of who and what we are. Marks Johnson, 20071
1
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago &London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) p.1.
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I’m interested in how we engage with our environments. I had recently been using stopmotion films to explore intuitive, imagined encounters between clay and mundane objects. I experimented with drawing pins, a comb, a wet wipe, some string and a toothbrush among other objects. The clay I used was white stoneware (see figure. 1). Whilst reflecting on this work, in conversation, I found myself describing the films as: Sensual-encounters with ordinary things. This phrase resonated with me. So, I began researching how I might be able to define it based on critical enquiry and cultural references. I started to speculate. If an ordinary encounter with an ordinary thing is ordinary, what is a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing? How and why might we go about creating or revealing one? I invite you on a journey where we can investigate the micro/macro-ness of exploring sensualencounters with ordinary things and ‘rethinking who and what we are’.
Figure. 1
Emma Marks, Film stills from Encounter experiments, 2020
I will start by probing each word individually as I work towards tentatively proposing a meaning for the term: Sensual-encounters with ordinary things. I am aware that I run the risk of explaining away, such precarious momentary encounters. To nail one down might be like trying to capture and pin a butterfly – in which case I would not wish to fail or succeed. How might we go about finding or eliciting such encounters with ordinary things? What can we learn from this exercise? We are looking for a heightened experience and affect beyond
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the mundane. It is a heightened sense of wonder and enchantment that an artist may experience when inspired or making. It is also found in the moments of enchantment that Jane Bennett urgently asks us to look for in our contemporary world.2 This exercise will blur Heidegger’s boundaries between art and the ordinary.3 Our enquiry leads us through New Materialist thinking in terms of subjective, phenomenological experience and its effect on ways of being in the world. We will discuss “worlding”4 without needing Heidegger’s ‘complete world view’.5 Instead we will look to Donna Haraway to allow for speculative ways of world-making: ‘We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking speciations and knottings.’6 Due to the subjective nature of a sensual-encounter, I have chosen to investigate a number of partial situations rather than searching for universal truths and objective facts. In my quest for tales of extraordinary experiences with ordinary things we will journey to aliens; storytellers; fairies; objectum sexuals; and shamans. Along the way we will come across some commonalities in how to conjure a sensual-encounter, whether through ritual, predisposition or process. We will then consider sensual-encounters as a craft within art practice by visiting artists in lockdown; ceramicists; and verbs. Since this investigation is about first-person experience, I also request some active participation from you. Look around you and please, choose an ordinary thing within easy reach that you consider to be normal, commonplace or standard.7 This is the object that I am going to ask you to have a sensual-encounter with. Please keep it with you throughout this journey. I will refer to it as we go as Agent1.
2
Jane Bennett, The Wonder of Minor Experiences in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3–16. 3 Raj Singh, ‘Heidegger and the World in an Artwork’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no.3, 1990, pp. 215–222. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/431763. Accessed 20 July 2020. 4 “Worlding is informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur. It is above all an embodied and enacted process – a way of being in the world - consisting of an individual's whole-person act of attending to the world.” Patricia Pisters & Stephen Besser, Worlding the brain by, March 17 2016 <https://worldingthebrain2016.com> [accessed 1 July 2020]. 5 Ibid. 6Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016) p.97. 7 What is ordinary to you might not be ordinary to me (although I am sure we could collaborate quite easily on coming up with a list of commonly ordinary things between us). However, the point is that sensual-enounters are all about subjective experience. So, it is important that the ordinary thing you choose, is ordinary to you, irrespective of anyone else’s view.
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Exploring words 8
Sensual-
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-encounter
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Ordinary Things
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SensualI have chosen the word sensual to bring full bodily engagement into these encounters. Bodily engagement escorts a delicious connection between these words: SENSIBLE SENSITIVE SENSUAL Fake Maths: The following chart is a representation of how bodily engagement increases as an encounter develops from sensible to sensitive to sensual.
Bodily engagment during encounter 35 32
Bodily engagement
30 25 20 15 10 8 5 2 0
0 Sensible
Sensitive
Sensual
Increasing awareness of bodily engagement allowing greater empathy, intuition and curiosity
Figure.2
Emma Marks, Fake Maths, 2020
Embodiment theory brings a paradigm shift to our understanding of what knowledge and wisdom is. Is it more sensible to live life more sensually? Kearney beautifully merges the ideas of the sensible and the sensitive in arguing his case for Carnal Hermeneutics:8 Wisdom in the end, is about taste and tact. That’s what we mean, isn’t it, when we say that someone sensible is someone sensitive: they have “the touch,” as a healer, teacher, artist, lover. They are attentive, careful, tentative. They get it. To have the right touch is to touch and be touched wisely. Touching well is living well.9
8 9
Richard Kearney, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ New Literary History, (Vol. 46, 2015) p.99-124. Ibid, p.100.
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Kearney describes ‘Carnal Hermeneutics’ in terms of how we interpret the world through our flesh. He discusses ‘the flesh’ not simply as the site for sensation (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) but also as the site for interpreting meaning and orientation in the world. 10 Kearney’s hypothesis goes still further beyond the sensible and sensitive. He enters the realm of the sensual by embracing carnal sensations and interpretations. He refers to MerleauPonty’s in proclaiming that ‘desire and love’ are not ‘bundles of instincts’ governed by natural laws nor strategies of some wilful mind, but carnal interplays where the self ‘opens out upon another’.11 This is where I propose we find our sensual-encounter, in this awareness of ‘carnal interplay’ and ‘opening out upon another’. I have chosen the word Sensual rather than Sensuous deliberately. Sensuality brings us desire, wonder and allure in a bodily sense. It allows ordinary things to allure us.
10 11
Richard Kearney, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ p.99. Ibid. p.114.
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-encounter I have chosen the word encounter to focus on individual casual engagements with everyday objects.
Dictionary definitions: encounter (noun): A meeting with a person or thing, esp when casual or unexpected 12 A hostile meeting; contest or conflict 13 A meeting, especially one that happens by chance 14 An occasion when people have sex, usually with someone they have not met before15 A meeting especially one that is sudden, unexpected or violent16 An incident in which police shoot dead a suspected criminal 17 The word Encounter apparently comes from Vulgar Latin incotnrare (unattested) and from Latin contra (against, opposite).18 An encounter is a type of meeting or engagement. I do not want to focus on the adversarial component in the meaning of the word. But for the purposes of this exploration, I welcome the casual and unexpected, and the potential for sex and danger. I also welcome the unattested; the nameless; the unspecified; the undesignated; and the secret. While remaining earthly and grounded in the material of encounters, we are looking discursively as well as sensuously beyond the mundane. My proposed sensual-encounter enters Stacy Alaimo’s theoretical site of Trans-Corporeality. She describes it as a “literal “contact zone” between human corporeality and more-than-human nature”.19 20
12
Collins English Dictionary. Copyright Harper Collins Publishers <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/encounter> [accessed April 2020]. 13 Ibid. 14 Cambridge Dictionary < https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/encounter> [accessed April 2020]. 15 Ibid. 16 Oxford Dictionary < https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/encounter_2> [accessed April 2020]. 17 Ibid. 18 Collins English Dictionary. 19 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 238. 20 Alaimo further qualifies that ‘the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through entangled territories of the material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.’ Ibid. p238.
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Ordinary Things ‘We are human only by contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.’21 Really this discussion is relevant to all nature; everything that is not our corporeal self, or as Alaimo describes it: ‘more-than-human nature’. 22 I have chosen ordinary things because they are the most ubiquitous and seemingly least mysterious. We are used to encountering them on a daily basis with a view to their affordances. They are the physical, material things that make up our everyday worlds and that we are most likely to take for granted. By investigating sensual-encounters with ordinary things we are entering more deeply into the entangled relationships of our daily existence. In our rational times, if we choose to forgo spiritual realms, can there be more to human-tothing relationships than simply function or fetish?23 I propose that we can find out through practicing sensual-encounters with ordinary things. This is a practical exercise in companionship with New Materialist theories that we will reference throughout, including Vibrant Matter;24 Entanglement Theory;25 embodiment theories;26 Carnal Hermeneutics;27 OOO;28 Trans-corporeality;29 and sf worlding30. It could be said that any of these theories give us the rational back up to allow us to enter into the heightened experiences of encounters with the unknown and unknowable, through the allure of matter itself rather than relating to spiritual or mystical realms. New Materialism acknowledges the vitality of all matter and the fundamental importance of its ability to act. It could be said that New Materialist theories in themselves inject the extraordinary back into the ordinary. What was passive, inert and often overlooked, is now to be considered lively and emergent beyond our previous imaginations. Furthermore, as well as acknowledging matter’s ability to act, Karen Barad asks us to consider agency ‘not an attribute whatsoever – it is doing/being in its intra-activity.’ 31 So, matter is being and doing 21
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 2nd edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 2107 p.22. 22 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 238. 23 I use the term ‘fetish’ here to represent a disenchanted view of humans being hoodwinked by objects, whether as ‘commodity fetish’ (Marx) or sexual fetish (Freud). This will be discussed further on p. xx. 24 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). 25 Ian Hodder, Entangled, An Archeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). 26 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 27 Kearney, Richard, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ In New Literary History (May 2015 Vol. 46 Issue: Number 1) pp99-124. 28Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (UK: A Pelican Book, Penguin, 2018). 29 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) pp237264. 30 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016). 31 Karen Barad in Trans-Corporeal Feminisms by Stacy Alaimo, p248.
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at the same time. Jane Bennett asks us ‘to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination and organic/inorganic’.32 Suddenly the ordinary thing you have chosen and called Agent1 is, in theory, quite extraordinary. I invite you to seek the extraordinary within the ordinary. To do so, you need to leave behind the ordinary state of knowing. I have no clear ritualistic instructions to give you in order to commune with Agent1 in this speculative way. Nor can I show you. I’m not even here. I don’t know what you have chosen. I am not you. Consider this as practice. Let’s see if we can work out together what’s possible? This is not a search for truth. I am asking you to open up to some mutual fictions and other frameworks for encounter. Since the more-than-human world does not speak a human language, we are speculating for other ways to commune with our world, through first person experience. Like Jane Bennett3334 and Martha Kenney35, we are looking for moments of enchantment and wonder already available in our contemporary world. I am prescribing sensual-encounters as another antidote to what Bennett describes as the ‘pervasive narrative’ of ‘Disenchanted Modernism’36. Bennett warns of the dangers of a disenchanted relationship with contemporary life, as she promotes ‘alter-tales’37. From what I can see there is an urgent need to further investigate subjective phenomenological experience as we re-negotiate relationships with our familiar worlds. We are not looking for re-enchantment, infatuation or mysticism. The aim is to illicit moments of enchantment and wonder in the material of ordinary things. I propose that perhaps sensual-encounters with ordinary things can be learnt or attuned through practice like a craft. In which case it is an exercise worth attention as we re-negotiate our lives ‘at the end of the Anthropocene’38. Ultimately, I think there is something liberating about looking to the familiar for what Bennett describes as “that strange combination of delight and disturbance”.39 32
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.x. Jane Bennett refers to a “contemporary world sprinkled with natural and cultural sites that have the power to “enchant”. 34 Jane Bennett, “The Wonder of Minor Experiences” in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.3. 35 Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention: Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013) p.1.< https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsc_etd> [accessed June 2020]. (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013). 36 “It goes something like this: There once was a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a pre-existing web of relations, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, the political order took the form of organic community. Then this premodern world gave ways to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism and the beurocratic state – all of which combined disenchant the world.” Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) p.7. 37 Ibid, p.4. 38 James Lovelock, Novacene – The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2019). 39 Bennett, Vibrant Matter p.xi. 33
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Sensual-encounters with ordinary things in extraordinary situations 14
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
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Storytellers
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Fairies
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Objectum Sexuals
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Shamans
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind For our first, extraordinary setting, I bring you to this 1977 American science fiction film, written and directed by Steven Spielberg.40 What is a close encounter of the THIRD KIND? The film’s categorisation of Close Encounters in fact references J. Allen Hynek’s book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry.41 The Hynek Scale is a classification of six levels for UFO sightings arranged according to increasing proximity. It is worth pointing out at this stage, that while Hynek’s definition of a Close encounter serves our purposes, the Hynek scale does not. This can be illustrated through the official trailer for the 40th Anniversary re-release of the film where the encounters are classified hierarchically placing sight first, then evidence, then contact: THE FIRST KIND: SIGHTING THE SECOND KIND: EVIDENCE THE THRID KIND: CONTACT42
Figure. 3
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Official Trailer
If we define contact as the state of physical touching, this hierarchical ordering of encounters, easily fits in line with traditional ideas where the higher, rational self seeks control over the lower bodily self. It concurs with the classical hierarchy of the five senses where Plato
40
41
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. By Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977). Allen J. Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. (Boston: Da Capo Press,1998, 1972).
42
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Official Trailer, online video, YouTube, 25 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpQ3G08k48 [accessed 29 March 2019].
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champions sight as ‘the noblest of the senses’43. Whereas touch and tactility are always last: dirty, carnal and immediate. The Hynek Scale does not serve our purpose because rather than a hierarchical scale of compartmentalised sensory perception, our sensual-encounter requires full and immediate ‘carnal attention’.44 Hynek defines a ‘Close Encounter’ as an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object.45 I’d like to propose to you a comparative definition for a sensual-encounter in the context of this discussion. Sensual-encounter:
An event in which a person approaches an identified object, as if it were unidentified, with full carnal attention.
I give you this pop culture reference because it rolls off my tongue, similarly to our title: Sensual-encounters with ordinary things. I also give it to you because the story invites us to enter into the unknown. I want to use this narrative of alien encounter to approach our everyday encounters. Remember we are looking for the unexpected and unattested. If you (re)visit the film, I’d also like to draw your attention to the wonderful moments that the main protagonist (Roy Neary) shares with shaving foam and mashed potato (Figure. 4). He also builds a monumental sculpture of a mountain in his living room out of dirt from his garden. His alien encounter was so compelling it appears he has a bodily need to create these physical forms.
Figure. 4
43 44 45
Roy Neary and Mashed Potato
Richard Kearney, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ p.103. Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics?, p.117. Allen J. Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.
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Engel theorizes Roy’s role in the film as translator of visions into physical form: The film suggests that the ability to have visions and translate them into physical form through physical action – the factors which make a person a visual or dramatic artist, or a filmmaker, are among the factors which distinguish Neary and Guiler and fit them for the new world humankind is entering with the arrival of the Mother Ship. They are the ones who were invited.46 Engel takes the view that it is Roy’s artistic need to manifest his visionary experience into external physical form that qualifies him and his friend Jillian for invitations to Spielberg’s new world of humankind. Despite its great appeal, I think this is a simplistic idea of what qualifies an artist and a romantic view of the future of mankind. Importantly, in their summation, the materials Roy chooses are not taken into account. Roy experiences intense moments of being enchanted by the shaving foam, the mashed potato, and the dirt. Rather than asserting his visions on inert material, it could be construed that he is discovering something life changing through communing with ‘ordinary things’. He is engaging with each material encounter in a physical and bodily way. He loses himself in the mashed potato. Like a maker in the zone. Like a shaman in a trance. Like someone in love. Perhaps like you having a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing? He is not simply a translator of visions into physical form. This is a reciprocal and bodily encounter with matter. Roy and the mashed potato form a momentary attachment through action and experience. The mashed potato is affected, Roy is affected. Roy understands the world very differently now and behaves differently as a result. I think there are things we can learn from Roy. We are looking to the ordinary for the extraordinary; the unfamiliar; the strange; the wonderful; the enchanting. To look at something familiar as if it is unfamiliar can be unsettling. Freud discussed this in his essays on the uncanny. He observed that the switch of the homely (Heimliche) into the ‘unhomely’ (Unheimliche) is often unnerving for us. He cited examples of the uncanny such as objects coming alive, the doppelganger effect and instances when childhood beliefs that we have grown out of suddenly appear real. 47 Not only am I asking you to look for the unhomely (unfamiliar) in the homely (familiar), I am also asking you to embrace the ability of inanimate objects to exhibit “independence or aliveness constituting the outside of our own experience”.48 This encounter is not about exploring the Uncanny. However, I can’t promise that these sensual-encounters will never be uncanny. I don’t want you to be put off by the potential
46
Charlene Engel, Language and the Music of the spheres: Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in The Films of Stephen Spielberg: Critical Essays, edited by Charles LP Silet (Oxford: Scarecrow Press Inc, 2002) p.53. 47 Jamie Ruers, The Uncanny < https://www.freud.org.uk/2019/09/18/the-uncanny/> [accessed May 2020]. 48 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.4.
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strangeness in this task or even the predictability of salacious tropes and fetishes known to fit into the genre of The Uncanny.
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Storytellers Embracing the aliveness of objects challenges our grown-up insistence that inanimate objects are inert unless acted upon by us. Stacy Alaimo highlights the problem of ‘How to conceive of nature’s agency (in ways that are neither anthropomorphic, nor reductive, nor sillyseeming).’49 Martha Kenney proposes a solution to this problem by asserting that ‘Storytelling is one practice (among many others!) that can render us capable of responding better ‘within and as part of the world’’.50 As part of embracing the strangeness of a sensual-encounter (while eschewing ‘the reductive’ since this exercise is all about opening up) I’d like to welcome some hints of the ‘anthropomorphic’ and the ‘silly-seeming’. Like Kenney’s ‘Fables of Attention’, I see sensualencounters as ‘playful, artful and serious’51. And remember, fables after all, are renowned for having animals and inanimate objects as the main (often speaking) protagonists. Embracing mutual fictions through stories and games removes the mundanity of already knowing everything we think we need to know. ‘Over time, the pleasurable potent of not knowing becomes squeezed into designated timeslots called play, breaks or unruly abandon where what is known can once again be rendered unfamiliar, the uncertain or unexpected met with rushes of brief wonder and delight.’52 Cocker furthermore suggests that practice and preparation is required to help us embrace the unknown. ‘To inhabit the experience of not knowing in affirmative terms requires some preparation; one’s capacity for not knowing might need to be practiced, rehearsed or relearnt.’ 53 Kenney tentatively describes her ‘fables of attention’ as ‘small vignettes about the way we pay attention to our world’.54 She describes her role in writing as a ‘technoscientific fabulist attuned to the pleasures and dangers of passionate attention.’55 The sensual-encounter that we are searching for is a moment of passionate attention; a moment of passionate attention that can elicit a sense of wonder. Perhaps passionate attention can be ‘attuned’ through practice like craft? Kenney qualifies that ‘fables of attention are not only stories about modes of attention, they teach us how to pay attention. They get under our skin and act on our sensoria.’56 As potters and wheelmakers well know, this description of fables of attention could also be used to describe the embodied know-how of skilled craftwork. 49
Alaimo, Trans-Corporeal Feminisms p.245. Karen Barad, 2007 in Book Review: Donna Haraway(2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene By Martha Kenney, Science & Technology Studies, Vol.30, Issue 2, 2017, p.75 https://sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view/63108 (accessed March 2020). 51 Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention: Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013).< https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsc_etd> [accessed June 2020] p1. 52 Emma Cocker, Tactic s for not knowing, in On Not Knowing by Elizabeth Fisher (London: Black Dog, 2013) p.26. 53Ibid. p.127 54Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention, p.1. 55 Ibid, p.7. 56 Ibid, p.8. 50
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Helen Maurer reveals a moment of sensual encounter by using an anthropomorphic narrative in her short film “The Kiss”.57 The film heightens the sensuality of the moment when she noticed the rhythmic movement of beach balls pushing against each other in a swimming pool.
Figure. 5
Helen Murer, The Kiss
In the case of Helen Maurer’s beach balls, she found something extraordinary in the ordinary. She has also shared it with us in a way that for me elicits a visceral response. How did Helen Murer tell her fable? Is it the suspended belief of the anthropomorphic narrative of beach balls kissing that allowed us a way in? Is it the strange voyeurism of the simultaneous distance and intimacy created by the rich, heady fabric and sound of the Super 8 Film? Jane Bennett’s first attempt to enhance the readers receptivity to ‘thing-power’ is also through a story of ordinary things. She likewise describes a tale of materiality that is ‘too alien and too close to see clearly’.58 The main protagonists in Bennett’s story are: 57Helen 58
Murer, The Kiss < http://www.helenmaurer.co.uk/index.php?page=57> [accessed 1 May 2020] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter p.4.
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Jane Bennett, herself One large men’s black plastic work glove One dense mat of oak pollen One unblemished dead rat One white plastic bottle cap One smooth stick of wood59 Both Bennett and Murer’s sensual-encounters achieve an intriguing combination of intimacy and remove. ‘We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other.’60
59
Jane Bennett, p.4.
60
Baudrillard in ‘Relations with Concrete Others (or, How We Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)’ in Avoiding the Subject by Clemens and Pettman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p.56.
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Fairies Claire Nahmad has spent her life trying to master the art of seeing and communicating with fairies. ‘I believe in fairies. These marvellous beings do exist, and I shall continue to remain insistent on that point. It is merely that we have lost the art of seeing and communicating with them’ 61 Nahmad’s book, has no academic references. However, she is described as ‘a herbalist and Wise woman who has spent her life learning the ancient arts and attuning herself to the life of the spirit.’62 It is these attunement skills and her version of ‘the art of seeing’ that I am interested in. Unlike Nahmad, I am not asking you to embrace the spiritual. I am asking you to embrace the presence of physical matter. What interests me is that her advice on setting up a fairy encounter is in some ways similar to what I am asking you to do. Firstly, like Merleau-Ponty, she refutes the supremacy of intellect over bodily experience.63 Secondly, Nahmad claims that ‘materialist thinking has blotted out our ability to see and communicate with fairies...’64 This materialist thinking (which she attributes to the work of the demonic Ahriman, Lord of Darkness, in ancient Persian mythology) is not referring to a sensitivity to material qualities. It is referring to what Jane Bennett describes as ‘American materialism’. In other words, commodification and hyper-consumption. Bennett similarly claims that ‘American materialism… conceals the vitality of matter.’65 Thirdly, both ask us to resist rationalist understanding of the mundane in order to lift the screen or veil that separates us from these experiences. ‘Demystification tends to screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency. Those are tendencies I resist.’ Jane Bennett. 66 Nahmad says that we need to encounter and overcome many different ‘skins of the ether before we can see fairies...’ She asserts that ‘these skins are the veil that humanity has woven to insulate itself from the fairies…and the immediacy of the invisible world.’67 We are likewise trying to dissolve boundaries and break through the insulation of mundane frameworks to reach a direct and sensual experience.
61
Claire Nahmad, Fairy Spells, Seeing and communicating with the fairies (London: Souvenir Press, 1998) p.9. Ibid. Back cover. 63 “We know not through our intellect but through our experience”. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London & New York: Routledge & K Paul Humanities Press, 1974). 64 Nahmad, Fairy Spells, p.63. 65 Bennet, Vibrant Matter, p.5. 66 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xv. 67 Nahmad, Fairy Spells, p.58. 62
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Objectum Sexuals ‘Individuals who identify as Objectum Sexuals experience emotional, romantic and/or sexual feelings towards inanimate objects’68. Matt Meher, is an Objectum Sexual, in love with the ‘North Bridge’ in Sydney69. Erika Labrie (Now Erika Eiffel) is an OS in love with and married to the Eiffel Tower 70 Eija-Riita Eklöf-Mauer is an OS in love with and married to the Berlin Wall 71 Lars Laumann featured Eija-Riita Eklöf-Mauer’s relationship with the Berlin Wall in his film Berlinmuren 2008 in a sensitive and provocative way. Kathy Noble describes it as typical of Laumann’s ‘ongoing project, exploring people and phenomena that exist on the margins of contemporary society’ She recounts how his non-judgemental approach ‘simultaneously draws you in, whilst the extraordinary stories fuel cynicism.’72 These truly are extraordinary stories. Documentaries on OS are easy to find on YouTube with some viewing figures in the hundreds of thousands for what appears to be a fairly niche attraction. Whether you consider Objectum Sexuality to be a legitimised orientation; a delusional fetish; or an autistic interpretation, I think it is fair to say that, the idea of Objectum Sexuality disturbs the boundaries between the human and more-than-human in an unsettling way. For example, here are some YouTube responses to Matt Maher’s video (see Figure. 6): ‘How can you be cynical about love between humans, while claiming that the bridge loves you????...’ Four question marks!!!! ‘I’m sorry but I can’t help but LMAO.. when he tells the bridge to ‘shhhh’’ ‘By your own definition, the bridge does not love you….’73 From what I can see, blurring the boundaries in this way induces Marshall McLuhan’s fear of humans’ role as ‘sex organs for the machine world’74. Or Levy’s example of the football as a ‘quasi-object…which can galvanise an entire stadium of spectators into what Levy
68
Julia Simner, Hughes & Sagiv, Objectum Sexuality: A sexual orientation linked with autism and synaesthesia, <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56449-0>[accessed 10 June 2020]. 69 Concrete Romance: Objectum-Sexuality on YouTube 9 August 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEDwr8ndvIM> [accessed 10 June 2020]. 70 Woman Rides The Eiffel Tower on YouTube 17 Feb 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POTA5aZxbQA> [accessed 10 June 2020]. 71 Lars Laumann, Berlinmuren (2008) < https://vimeo.com/52427622> [accessed 5 June 2020]. 72 Kathy Noble, ‘Review: Lars Laumann, Maureen Paley, London, UK in Frieze.com, 1 Sept 2009 <https://frieze.com/article/lars-laumann> [accessed June 2020]. 73 Figure.6: Concrete Romance: Objectum-Sexuality on YouTube 9 August 2010 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEDwr8ndvIM> [screen-shot by Emma Marks 1 July 2020]. 74 Marshall McLuhan in, ‘Relations with Concrete Others (or, How We Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)’ in Avoiding the Subject by Clemens and Pettman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p.49.
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(perhaps too hastily) calls collective intelligence’75. It’s as if there is a palpable fear that we too might tricked, if not by each other, by nonhuman nature. There is an apparent polarisation of humans against everything else. The YouTube responses seem like heckles from a pantomime– “look out behind you!”. And I am in the audience, shifting uncomfortably in my seat, not enjoying this story, but feeling I had to go along for research purposes. I wonder if I could get ‘Hans Grouper’ or ‘Ryan Vanderwater’76 to attempt to undertake a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing? To look for a moment of enchantment with the world without becoming enamoured, disenchanted or completely made a fool of?
Figure. 6
YouTube responses to Matt Maher’s video
From what I can see, these reviews demonstrate a response to the suspicion of hidden secrets behind objects. They could be described as representing a disenchantment of feeling 75 76
Justin Clemens & Dominic Pettman, Relations with concrete others, p.49. see names in Figure. 6.
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deceived by ideas of fetish, whether as ‘commodity fetish’ (Marx)77; sexual fetish (Freud); or disproven magical fetish. As you know, we are hoping for our sensual-encounters to explore more sensitively and more sensually the huge gap of possible human-to-thing relations between the boundaries of function and fetish. To achieve this, we need find ways to embrace the unknown, the secret and the hidden. ‘If we think we already know what is out there, we will almost surely miss most of it’78 Earlier I condoned the idea to embrace anthropomorphism and the fantastical. Let me make this clear: embrace them as Tales of fiction, not as fact. Sensual-encounters with ordinary things are not exercises in animism. Nor are they a sexual activity. However, even though I might suggest that the Berlin Wall makes an inappropriate husband, it’s interesting to think what different relationships we can try out with things through fictional role play. From a subjective viewpoint (fictional or not) it’s easier to accept, at any moment of encounter, that it is impossible to see the whole of everything all at once. We can only open up to sensual-encounters if we are without fear of becoming beguiled or ridiculed by what we do not know. This is an adventure into the unknown. Sensual-encounters invite you to embrace the allusiveness of truth. Graham Harman refers to this unknowability as ‘the mutual darkness of objects’ in his theory of Object Orientated Ontology 79. He offers us the indirect and sensuous theatrics of metaphor to try to access the ‘real object, (RO)’ 80 What is a metaphor, if not an alter-tale? Sensual-encounters are not a search for ontological truth, nor an investigation into defining aesthetics. We have discussed them as a heightened embodied experience that can be attuned through practice, perhaps like a craft. However, if allusiveness of truth and storytelling is also a key ingredient, we could consider the word ‘craft’ also in terms of the crafty craft of craft and deceit. Or the craft of theatre. Perhaps, in some situations, it is only nuance that takes us from the beguiling fetish to the enchanting craft of a sensualencounter?
77
‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’ in Capital. Vol 1 By Marx, Engels, Mandel, Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990,1976). 78
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.10. Graham Harman, p.12. 80 Ibid, p.84. 79
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In this scenario, a sensual-encounter could be described as ‘the potential for a heightened experience with ordinary things uninhibited by universal ontological approval or YouTube reviews. Algebra of speculative s’
S + sf = Se S Sf Se
81
Sensuality ‘A ubiquitous figure……sf: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.’ 81 Sensual-encounter
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble p.2.
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Shamans David Abram, Ph.D., is an ecologist, philosopher and magician. He has lived and traded magic with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas. Through his research he has mades some key discoveries that are of interest to us. Abram discovers that, in contradiction to common western understanding, the primary role of indigenous shamans is in assisting ‘the relation between the human community and the natural landscape.’ This role ‘cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes.’ 82 The Shaman, like us, is attuning himself to his environment through special encounters with it. The aim is for better relations between the human and more-than-human world. He also concludes, that ‘research in Rural Indonesia & Nepal has shown me that nonhuman nature can be perceived & experienced with far more intensity and nuance than is generally acknowledged in the west.’83 Abram attempts to demystify shamanism by looking to Merleau-Ponty’s reciprocal phenomenology and ideas of the flesh, rather than animism. Rather than claiming that all nonhuman nature has souls and feelings, Abram asserts that ‘defining another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being.’84 Again, this the sort of framework of reasoning that we have been looking at behind our sensual-encounters with ordinary things. Shamanism has been around for a long time. Whether communing in the physical presence of nature or virtually through trance, surely there are things we can learn from the actual processes and rituals of shamans? Marcus Coates brings the stark contrast of shamanistic ritual into the contemporary western world in his 2008 film The Plover’s Wing. 85 Coates arranges a meeting with the Mayor of the City of Holon, Israel. He performs a shamanistic ritual for the Mayor to gain insight into a question about the Israel-Palestinian Crisis.
82
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p.21. Ibid. p.27. 84 Ibid, p.27. 85 Marcus Coates in Marcus Coates / TateShots 23 Mar 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfBgWtAIbRc [accessed 12 June 2020]. 83
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Figure. 7
Marcus Coates, The Plover’s Wing, 2008
For me, the whole affect invites a sharing of mutual fictions. The protagonists (and vicariously the viewers) share the heightened experience of a different way of relating to the world. It’s funny, fantastical and fascinating. Nobody believes that Coates is going to solve the IsraelPalestinian Crisis by wearing a badger on his head and talking to an imaginary plover. However, this is not a put down or a stupid trick to show up the Mayor. This film asks what is possible? It raises questions about belief systems and how we relate to one another (human and well as more-than-human). It takes us on a journey from the sublime behaviour of an extreme conflict to the ridiculous badger-on-head performance. I feel there is something of this dichotomy in our journey of exploring sensual-encounters with ordinary things and ‘rethinking who and what we are’. 86
86
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago &London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) p.1.
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Sensual-encounters with ordinary things in art practice 29
Artists in Lockdowns
30
Potters
33
Verbs
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Artists in Lockdown, 2020 I wonder, what is it about the ‘lockdown situation’ that has us all talking about noticing ordinary things with new wonder and curiosity? 87 This extraordinary situation has directly disrupted our familial relationships, not only with each other but with the familiar and ordinary things that make up our everyday worlds. Listening to Helen Maurer give a lecture on Zoom, to RCA Ceramic and Glass students during lockdown 2020, I was convinced that here is a human being attuned to passionate attention. She spoke of “turning her attention to ordinary objects with a feeling of love”. She described to us how she is attuning herself to listen to the sounds and language of her home. For example, she was experimenting with the vibrations of elastic bands on the path to her front door. She described the allure of simple things in her home from the washing line to the garden fence to a hula hoop, capturing moments of light, placement or movement. 88 She was finding curiosity and wonder within her ordinary domestic setting at this extraordinary time. Kenney cites Descartes definition of wonder as ‘a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.’89 Often (although maybe not often enough) something rare or extraordinary may suddenly capture your attention. But can you elicit a sensual-encounter; a moment of wonder with the ordinary object that you already have in your hand?
87
For example, see the V&A blog of Pandemic Objects including: Hair, The Ground, The Hand Clap and Soap. <https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/pandemic-objects> [accessed June 2020]. 88 Helen Maurer, Ceramics and Glass Lecture on Zoom, Royal College of Art, 28 th April 2020. 89 Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention: Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific p.11.
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Potters The best people I know to appreciate the complete embodiment involved in a sensualencounter with non-human matter are my fellow ceramicists. Julian Stair describes ‘craft as an expression of bodily kinaesthetic intelligence.’90 The crafts have long championed the embodied knowledge of the potter, the carpenter or the wheel maker. Juhani Pallasmaa cites Nietzsche’s dancer and Heidegger’s cabinet maker when he convinces us of the ‘silent wisdom of the body and hand’.91 However, Stair goes further to observe that although we are accustomed to the idea of body conveying knowledge through making, dance and any physical skill, ‘the body as receiver is at odds with the orthodoxy of high modernism and post modernism.’ 92 Stair goes on to validate this point by quoting from Professor of Neurology, Oliver Sacks: ‘One does not see, or sense, or perceive in isolation – perception is always linked to behaviour and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world.’ 93 Let’s think about Roy and the mashed potato again. He is not simply exerting his embodied skill on the potato. He is communing with it. He is entering its world and it is entering his entering his world. Reciprocity is important to our understanding of the complete embodiment involved in a sensual-encounter. In your sensual encounter, I am asking you to be open to the allure of ordinary things. Then, once it has gained your passionate attention, I am asking you to reach out to it in a carnal way. This could involve touch; imagined touch; an opening out of feeling towards it. Speculate new relationships with it beyond its everyday affordance. I’d like you to bring full carnal attention to your chosen thing, like Roy did with his mashed potato. Try doing things with it or imagining doing things with it that it is not normally meant to do. Perhaps potters will be among the most attuned to such embodied, reciprocal encounters with other things? Kearney’s embodied wisdom promotes the attributes of sensitivity to full bodily sensuousness and an ability to respond sensitively. Like, you could say, a potter with clay: ‘sensation is expression, expression is sensation’94 Porcelain will respond very differently to the fingers and the body than say grogged earthenware. Each require a different sensitivity of touch. Even while working with a particular body of clay, your fingers must be sensitive to its changing plasticity and malleability as it dries throughout the making. Intuitive building requires the maker to feel and understand the material in order to work with it. Throughout the process, the clay’s responsiveness to the maker’s touch changes and so the maker’s responsiveness to the clay alters accordingly.
90
Julian Stair, The role of the body and contemporary craft – Introduction, The Body Politic, University of Northumbria, July 2000, p.10. 91 Juhani, Pallasmaa, The Thinking hand (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009) p.116. 92 Julian Stair, Ibid, p.10. 93 Oliver Sacks in The Body Politic by Julian Stair. 94 Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics?, p.117.
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Beyond the responsive making relationship with clay, we also understand the intimate bodily relationships that we share with functional ceramics, be they teacups, bowls or bathroom washbasins. And then there is the familial connection of knowing from where in the earth, that clay might have been dug, connecting us in an intimate and physical way. Adam Buick uses locally dug clays, beach aggregate and seaweed from the Pembrokeshire coastline in his moon jars. The National Museum of Cardiff describes them as ‘so alive with the Pembrokeshire landscape which they literally embody, that his passionate connection to his environment becomes unmistakeable.’95 Let’s consider that the Pembrokeshire landscape (where I grew up incidentally) is the mashed potato, and for Buick, the pots are the mountainous form that Roy created. I propose that Buick is also a human being attuned to passionate attention through regular sensualencounters with the landscape, found materials and the clay he works with. His Moon jars make those encounters manifest through the clay’s transformation into a now rare and extraordinary object, ready to elicit wonder (and possibly sensual-encounters) in others. Those built forms will also transform Buick’s life in other ways. Roy’s mountainous potato lump in itself was not so extraordinary, but the experience affected Roy in an extraordinary way by motivating him to leave his family and home and to take off on a spaceship. So, both material and artist are affected by sensual-encounters. I wonder what extraordinary effect the Rolling Clay project had on Buick when he ‘rolled a ball of clay on a one-mile circuit around Carn Llidi’? (See Figure. 8)96
Figure. 8
Adam Buick, Rolling Clay
95
Andrew Renton, National Museum of Cardiff on Adam Buick’s website < https://www.adambuick.com> [accessed on 3 July 2020]. 96 Adam Buick, Rolling Clay < https://www.adambuick.com/projects/rolling-clay/> [accessed 3rd July 2020].
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From my experience, I have found that fellow ceramicists (who spend much of their time sharing focussed bodily encounters with clay) tend to be more attuned to sensual-encounters with other things. There is a common love of all things seductively material beyond their mundane use. Perhaps Potters can be considered as craftspeople of sensual-encounters with ordinary things as well as clay? Could strong attunement to passionate attention through the practice of sensual-encounters be a key element of skilled craftsmanship itself? According to Sennett, at the higher reaches of skilled craftsmanship ‘people can feel fully and think deeply once they do it well.’ 97
97
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008) p.20.
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Verbs It could be said that through searching for a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing, we are looking for a new kind of relationship, even if it is only fleeting. As we have already discussed, the reciprocity of this intention is important. It requires active involvement from both parties. I have written a verb list to help think about the ways we tend to relate to ordinary things. Human-to-thing relations – a verb list: to use to make to own to consume to break
to fix or maintain to alter or transform to give to take to sacralise
to objectively observe to ignore or overlook to eat to explore to fall in love with?
Can you imagine writing such a one-sided and presumptuous list for human-to humanrelations? It is my hope that it would remain impossible and that any attempted list would be far more nuanced, complex, tentative and respectful. In fact, by acknowledging what Jane Bennett calls ‘Thing Power’ and the fundamental importance of the ability of all matter to act, the same point might apply for a verb list of human-to-thing relations. Similarly, Jane Bennett asks, for example ‘What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand?’98 The sensual-encounter requires you to acknowledge that more-than-human things are not inert and to oppose ‘the reduction of lively, emergent, intra-acting phenomena into passive, distinct resources for human use and control.’99 Have you tried writing a thing-to-thing verb list? Jane Bennett gives us some good examples of vital materialism through her stories of stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal and trash in her book, Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things.100 The verb list I have given you is my attempt at a common-sense overview of how I see humans relating to things within contemporary western culture as I know it. If we were to add to sensually-encounter, where would this fit into our verb list? I would suggest that it would fit somewhere between to explore and to fall in love with.
98
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.viii. Ibid, p.249. 100 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010). 99
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Richard Serra describes his famous Verblist as a list of ‘actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.’101 Serra is exploring material through action. He is inviting you to explore things through subjective experience. This, as you know, is also my invitation to you. However, although I invite you to crumple, to roll or to twist Agent1 if you choose, your bodily encounter does not necessarily need to physically transform the object you have chosen. It could be an emotional or imaginative ‘open(ing) out upon another’.102 So, both Serra and I invite the endless possibilities of material exploration to help you relate to your world.103
Figure. 9
Richard Serra, Verblist, 1967-68
Richard Serra is best known for his sculptural works with sheets of rolled steel, but the Verblist of course can be applied to anything. If you were to perform every verb on Serra’s list, always starting with the same material or thing, you would become incrementally more skilled at handling that material. Through focussed and sensitive bodily engagement, you will also be gaining practice at sensual-encounters with it, as you try out multiple approaches towards it. If the object that you chose as Agent1 had been perhaps a piece of paper or some bread, you could get quite far through the Serra’s list with it. If it was a stapler, it might be more difficult. So, you will then have explored other ways of engaging with it, perhaps through placement
101
Richard Serra, Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017 <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152793> [accessed in May 2020]. 102 Richard Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics? (New Literary History, 2015) p.114. 103 In Serra’s fourth column, he has included some ‘of phrases’: of time; of tides; of simultaneity. I like to think that these can be interpreted perhaps as Serra’s appreciation of thing-to-thing relations, outside of human control.
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or juxtaposition or listening or feeling or imagining. You may feel moved to write about it in a ‘desiring attitude’ like Sartre: ... to perceive an object when I am in the desiring attitude is to caress myself with it. Thus I am sensitive not so much to the form of the object and to its instrumentality, as to its matter (gritty, smooth, tepid, greasy, rough, etc.). In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects. My shirt rubs against my skin, and I feel it. What is ordinarily for me an object most remote becomes the immediately sensible; the warmth of air, the breath of wind, the rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way, as posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh by means of their flesh. 104 It makes sense to me that the more we take part in practicing sensual-encounters, the more attuned we will become, not just to a specific material but to engaging in sensual-encounters with anything.
104
Sartre in Relations with concrete others, p.53.
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Speculations We have considered the role of sensual-encounters in skilled making by consulting artists in lockdown, ceramicists and Richard’s Serra’s verb list. We have also looked at some extraordinary tales of sensual-encounters with ordinary things within the frameworks of new materialism, science fiction, fiction and fabulations as well as creeds and persuasions. Along the way we discovered some interesting commonalities in conjuring heightened experience, irrespective of wildly different frameworks of belief. We recognise that experiencing the extraordinary within the ordinary directly affects how we live in and relate our worlds. We also recognise that these encounters are full-bodied, fleeting and precarious moments. Like moments of wonder105 or enchantment,106 they cannot be explicitly predicted or prescribed. We are seeking contemporary alternatives to rituals for conjuring and revealing them. ‘it will not do to revert to prior forms of wonder, order and redemption. No, the world must be enchanted anew – human flourishing requires it.’ 107 Kenney reminds us that ‘Different kinds of stories engender different ways of attending, responding, and relating.’108 Similarly, I propose that sensual-encounters offer experiential exercises in ways of ‘attending, responding and relating’. I have asked you to attempt to conjure your own sensual-encounters with Agent1 alongside these speculations, because (like Kenney109 and Bennett110) I believe that sensual-encounters can be attuned through practice. How did you get on? Ultimately, I hope to have started to make a case for sensual-encounters with ordinary things as a craft in itself. Which in turn causes me to question, to what extent is it a craft of embodied skill learnt through accumulated practice? Furthermore, to what extent is it a theatrical craft form?
105
Martha Kenney Fables of Attention: Wonder p.1. Jane, Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.4. 107 Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (2009) in The Practice of Enchantment: Strange Allures by Burlein and Orr in Women’s Studies Quarterly, (The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2012, Vol. 40, No.3/4) p.14. 108 Martha Kenney, Book Review: Donna Haraway (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene in Science & Technology Studies, Vol.30, Issue 2, 2017, p.75. 109 Martha Kenney Fables of Attention: Wonder, p.1. 110 Jane, Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, p.4. 106
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Bibliography Adamson, Glenn thinking through craft (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007) Adamson, Glenn, Martina Droth and Simon Olding, Things of Beauty Growing, British Studio Pottery (London: Yale University Press, 2017) Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) Auslander, Leora ‘Beyond Words in American Historical Review Vol 110 Issue: Number 4 (2005) p1015-1045 Baker, Nicholson, The Mezzanine (London: Granta Publications, London, 1998) Bennett, Jane, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010) Burlein, Ann & Jackie Orr, ‘Strange Allures’ in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2012, Vol. 40, No.3/4 Clemens & Pettman, ‘Relations with Concrete Others (or, How We Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)’ in Avoiding the Subject by Clemens and Pettman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004) Cocker, Emma, ‘Tactics for now knowing, preparing for the unexpected’ in On not knowing: how artists think, ed. By Elizabeth Fisher (London: Black Dog, 2013) Connor, Steven, Paraphernalia, The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2011) Frayling, Christopher, On Craftsmanship (London: Oberon Books, 2011) Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016) Harman, Graham, Object-Oriented Ontology (UK: A Pelican Book, Penguin, 2018) Hodder, Ian, Entangled, An Archeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012) Johnson, Mark, The Meaning of the Body - Aesthetics of Human Understanding (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
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