Symposium Mediating Immedicay: Abstracts & Bios

Cécile Guédon (Harvard University) Articulating Modernity: Choreographing Abstraction This talk proposes that modernity offers a salient example to examine affect in dance and other visual arts. My contention is that at the onset of the twentieth century, motion gets transmitted through a set of shaping gestures generating dynamic aesthetic objects. Such kinaesthetic objects, in turn, demand from the spectator an articulation of space through time: this specific kind of spectatorial engagement requires lending a mobile attention to unstable artistic form, from grasping jolting rhythms and following diagrammatic contours to deciphering graphic lines. I will first analyse abstraction as part of the aesthetics of discontinuity, which is identified as a characterising feature of Modernism. Motion is indeed made discontinuous through its figuration: representing movement sensations implies a process of abstraction, by means of removal, distortion and obliquity. This talk proposes then that in specific instances abstraction can be made sense of thanks to the choreographic strategy of articulation, which enables the subject to re-appropriate the discontinuous features of abstract works through the agile use of the kinaesthetic empathy—thus opening a precarious path for their interpretation by the reader/spectator. Finally, three aspects of the choreographic representation are sheer abstractions of motion: enacted rhythms, dynamic lines and fluid contours. The very obliquity of these figurations of motion allows for a process of articulation on the subject’s part—defined more accurately as a mapping out of temporal series. Such abstraction–a mere choreography of aesthetic gestures–triggers, in turn, a choreographic process of empowerment and recuperation of full agency for modernist, kinaesthetic subjects.

Bio Cécile Guédon is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Department of Comparative Literature (July 2015-June 2018). She was previously a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Romance Languages and Literatures/Visual and Environmental Studies Departments at Harvard University (August 2014-June 2015) and a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Intermediality at the University of Groningen (Sept. 2012-July 2014). She was awarded her PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies in July 2014 (London Consortium, Birkbeck College, under the supervision of Daniel Albright, Harvard University and Steven Connor, Cambridge University). Her monograph Abstraction in Motion: A Choreographic Approach to Modernism is currently under review (2017). She is a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Evental Aesthetics (UCLA/University of Southern California).

Erin Manning (Concordia University) A Manifesto for Immediation Immediation is a technique more than it is a descriptor. It is what moves the event into another register. A politics of fabulation invariably accompanies it, a fabulation that resists organizing the telling of the event into the kind of consumable bite-sized description that would narrate it as a linear arc. The attempt is to become more attuned to the differences between those kinds of narratives that hold the event hostage and those that continue to breed openings. It’s not that these more normative narratives don’t enter the world: they do. Our task is to craft the conditions for events that resist this kind of telling, opting instead for a fabulation that undermines the very question of an event’s localization in a single place, activating not the truth of a myth framed by the collective, but its power of the false, as Deleuze might say - the power of the event to claim its falsification from itself. With the power of the false, time begins to err, undermining the imposition of continuity. Time as metric is disrupted, but not just that: time folds. (Manning 2017, forthcoming) This manifesto will foreground a set of propositions for the concept of immediation. We tend to commit to mediation as a necessary term, defining experience as being ordered in advance by outside influences that come together in a way that requires mediation as a third term.

William James disputes this with his concept of radical empiricism: To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as “real” as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement.

What radical empiricism foregrounds is that the relation is immediately part of any process.

The relation is not external to terms but internal to their becoming. In Gilbert Simondon’s terms, this means that the associated milieu of experience is as vital as any of the terms of experience. If we adopt a philosophy of the event, which states that there is no omnipresence to experience (theological or otherwise), this means that there is no mediation in the process of the event’s coming to be. All experience is immediating.

Bio Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement.

Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014) and The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016).

Ben Anderson (Durham University) Neoliberal Structures of Feeling How does a dominant structure of feeling change and through what forms does it live on?

And how do people live with/in and relate to structures of feeling as they become residual, as they continue to mediate whilst being distant and immediate, proximate and remote? Thinking in relation to the event of ‘Brexit’ in the UK and the widespread diagnosis of the ‘end of neoliberalism’, this paper will explore these questions by considering transformations and emergences across various contemporary structures of feeling – specifically the forms of disaffection and enthusiasm, boredom and outrage, and hope and detachment that have attached to, mediated and become the event of ‘Brexit’ as people encounter and relate to it. As such, it considers how neoliberalisms (de/un)form through a series of shared, widespread, affective qualities that are sometimes choreographed, but rarely add up to a coherent whole.

By drawing into relation the terms ‘structure’ and ‘feeling’ the concept of ‘structures of feeling’ implies an unresolvable indeterminacy or perhaps oscillation between absence and presence, form and formlessness, coherence and incoherence, and cause and effect. Thinking with the concept in the context of Brexit and claims of the ‘end of neoliberalism’ changes the kinds of questions we might ask about how something begins and ends and lives on. By staying awhile with various (post) Brexit scenes and situations in the UK, the paper will explore the changing intensities of neoliberal structures of feeling, as well as introduce activist and artistic efforts that hope to choreograph other modes of being in relation.

Bio Ben Anderson is a Professor in Human Geography at Durham University (Department of Geography). Over the past five years, his research has focused on how affects such as emergency, hope and fear are part of contemporary political and cultural life. His monograph on theories of affect – Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge) – was published in 2014. Supported by a 2013 Phillip Leverhulme Prize, he is currently conducting a genealogy of the government of emergencies in the UK that focuses on the birth of the emergency state. He is also working on a series of projects that examines the affective geographies of contemporary neoliberal lives. This paper relates to work on (Post)Brexit Futures with Dr Helen Wilson (University of Manchester) that explores how Brexit becomes present as an event and is mediated by people’s (non)relations to the future.