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. 106 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.

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