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Susan Kozel's                                                              Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology

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Susan Kozel's                                                              Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology

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Kozel, 20-21. “This notion of a pre-reflective experience located both outside and inside oneself, like a topographical weave, is a crucial starting point for any phenomenological process: this starting point involves a willingness to receive something that may seem adverse to existing conceptual structures and an acceptance that we do not quite know where it is or what it will look like. Or to use more of Merleau-Ponty’s words, we have to allow for the “obverse” and the “reverse” of experience to shine through, and to intersect at oblique angles. Once some notion of the pre-reflective is drawn into the process of reflection, “there is a thought traveling in a circle where the condition and the conditioned, the reflection and the unreflected, are in a reciprocal, if not symmetrical, relationship, where the end is in the beginning as much as the beginning is in the end” (ibid.). The complexity of the construct of the pre-reflective is further enhanced when it is questioned from the perspective of the body, or as Rajchman (2001) says, the “being of sensation.” Its abstraction tends toward an ephemeral immateriality, yet its challenge to language and logic makes the pre-reflective seem to be the domain of corporeality. Can the pre-reflective be abstract and corporeal at the same time? The body has rigorous and detailed structures of knowledge and communication, coming from many directions, according to its own logic and structures of meaning. The voice of physical experience spans registers of language:

words, gestures, sound, colors, textures, smells. There is never any question of entrapping corporeality in the domain of the pre-reflective, as if it were forever mute, brute, and material; bodies are at home at the fringes of language and have one foot squarely in the fertile ground from which new

knowledge enters into existing conceptual paradigms, but they are also highly articulate.”

“It is the explicit reference to art that make his words both enticing and provocative, along with the suggestion that sense data has cohesion in the form of a being. Claiming that art is “non-categorical” in no way implies that it is nonintellectual, but that the web of the corporeal, sensual,

emotional, intellectual, and social that informs the creative act is not a de facto reinforcement of

existing categories.”

Kozel, 22. “The circle of hyper-reflection can be so finely grained, in such tiny loops that it can be done in the midst of experience...According to Merleau-Ponty, this reflective dynamic could be described by the prefix “meta” or simply as “reflection from the midst”; it is an immersed and kinaesthetic reflection rather than unidirectional or once-removed.”

Kozel, 23. “This occurs, as Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated, even without positing a duality between body and mind. As we assess the artistic, social, and corporeal implications of developments in computational devices and ambient systems, we need to have a method and an intent to receive information from our own bodies and from the bodies of others. In giving voice to diverse corporeal states we can overcome naive distinctions between matter and spirit, between body and mind. The second reason for crafting a role for the pre-reflective is that it can open a way for understanding the deep entanglement between reflection and experience, between thinking and making, which is so important to many arts and sciences.”

Kozel, 24. “The truth offered through phenomenology is better expressed as relevance, and the way it functions is described effectively by Gaston Bachelard in terms of reverberation, resonance, and repercussion: powerful words for being multisensory and fundamentally physical, of sound and vibration, inside and outside the body. If I read a phenomenology, or witness or experience a phenomenological piece of work, it has the potential to resonate within me on several levels: cognitive, emotional, and physical. That we are not a collection of monads, but live in worlds of shared and overlapping experience and cultural, social, and historical formation, means it is possible for one person’s lived experience to shed light on another’s world. The respect for subjective experience at the heart of any phenomenology does not sever one from others but can actually form a conduit to the other.”

Kozel, 25. “This is where the phenomenological doublet of resonances and repercussions must be sensitized. The resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world, while the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence.”

—GASTON BACHELARD, The Poetics of Space

“The phenomenological impulse is to move from subjectivity to transsubjectivity. The phenomenological experience of another person unfolds across physical description with latent conceptual elements extrapolated and can be relevant to me based on my having experienced the same thing, or simply because I have the ability to construct meaning empathically, perhaps through imagination or previous experience. Quite simply, I can resonate with another’s experience. According to Bachelard, first there is a reverberation, followed by the experience in oneself of

resonances, and then there are repercussions in the way we see or feel the world. The poetic image “takes root in us” even though it originates from another."

Kozel, 28. “Connective tissue is a metaphor for understanding how a phenomenology can be communicated from one person to others.”

Kozel, 29. “Fabric is everywhere and always metaphorical in use—it could easily serve as an image

of substance.”

—JACQUES LACAN, Écrits

Kozel, 29-30. “Connective tissue spreads throughout the body in a three-dimensional web without interruption, from head to foot. It surrounds and infuses all our organs and bones, down to the cellular level. It extends from just below the dermis to surround and infuse muscles, bones, nerves, blood vessels, organs, and even cells. The deepest level of connective tissue is the craniosacral or dural, which

encases the central nervous system and the brain. It is a bodily system implicit to both structure and neural functioning. It has been conjectured that if every structure of the body were removed except fascia, the body would retain its shape. The opposite is true. Human connective tissue, also called fascia or the fascial web, “so permeates the body as to be part of the immediate environment

of every cell. Without its support the brain would be runny custard, the liver would spread

through the abdominal cavity, and we would end up as a puddle at our own feet” (Myers 2001, 25).

Significant to our consideration of human networks or communication channels between people

is that in addition to keeping everything connected, connective tissue creates separation within

our bodies. It creates space for nerves, blood vessels, and fluids to pass. This is a reminder that

networks are not just ways for us to maintain connection; networks are ways for us to maintain

distance, or difference.”

“Connective tissue is enduring but adaptive; it has maintained its general structure and purposes

over the millennia. Its functions are evident in the earliest stages of multicelled organisms, in which

two or more cells are able to stay in contact, communicate, and resist the forces of the environment.

Yet despite this evolutionary lineage, it is not an autonomous meta-structure; it will organize along

lines of tension imposed upon it and can produce bizarre and seemingly unrelated clinical results

in adjacent areas of the body. The reason for this is that the fibers run in various directions so that

they appear interwoven without one direction dominating. And here we finally get to the relevance

of connective tissue to the pre-reflective: the fascia, which is a category of connective tissue, has

been called, in therapeutic journals, “a potential space” and “an interstitial space.”7 Connective tissue

is an embodied way of understanding not only the pre-refl ective within us but also the means

of communication within one body and between bodies. Those patterns of tension communicate

physicality and affect, pain and peace, distortion and degeneration. They hold memory over time.

Unpredictable, reshapeable, multilayered, affecting brain and body functioning, connective tissue

is a fundamentally dynamic material and network. Language and the channels between people are

material. They are like connective tissue—tensile fibers, material and immaterial, imaginary and real,

connecting and separating people, and connecting and separating meaning from itself. Beginning

to view our bodies and the spaces between bodies differently is the condition for reworking in a

Merleau-Pontian way our understanding of thought, the communication of ideas between people,

and the relation between physicality and ideas, between self and world.”

Kozel, 31. “There is a further aspect of connective tissue that acts a transition to the discussion of Merleau- Ponty in the following sections: it does not show up on X-rays, electromyograms, or computerized tomographic scans. It is an internality that is not accessible to these most prevalent forms of medical visualization.  As a space of potential, and as interstitial space, this network is quasi invisible.

The way we encounter this morphable infrastructure of the human body is by touch, either the touch of another or of ourselves, or we sense it through movement (constriction or ease of

movement, presence or absence of pain). As a living metaphor for the pre-reflective, it provides

a dimensionality and torsion that the idea of tomography cannot; it is physical, kinaesthetic, and

tactile. Previously I indicated that I would provide a series of approaches to understanding the prereflective, including linguistic, topographical, and tomographical. Here connective tissue takes the tomographical further into nonvisual, twisting, and tactile domains. As ever, a poetic corporeality

underpins all consideration of the pre-reflective.”

Kozel, 32. “Technologies that employ visuals, sound, and haptics, like art, create a much more complex relationship between the inside and the outside, between bodies and the world.”

Kozel, 33. “The body is a weave of different materialities, the body is a dynamic process, the body navigates the world at the intersection of a cluster of languages (verbal, physical, archetypal, mnemonic, unconscious). It is electric, biological, and cultural. The body is a pattern of information, and the body is both a site and a mapping onto sites. Above all, for Merleau-Ponty, bodies are flesh, and flesh is more than just bodies. Our bodies extend beyond ourselves through the operation of our senses and as such the boundary of the body, skin, is not a boundary at all. We are porous beings, and we are a part of flesh as well as being flesh. “All flesh, even that of the world, radiates beyond itself” (Merleau-Ponty).”

And

“Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things. . . . Things are an annex or prolongation of

itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body.”

—MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, “Eye and Mind”

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Sarah Ahmed's                                Queer Phenomenology

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Sarah Ahmed's                                Queer Phenomenology

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Ahmed, 172. “…a queer phenomenology would function as a disorientation device; it would not overcome the "misalignment'' of the horizontal and vertical axes, allowing the oblique to open up another angle on the world.”

Ahmed, 159. “And yet we can still ask, what happens if the orientation of the body is not restored? What happens when disorientation cannot simply be overcome by the "force" of the vertical? What do we do, if disorientation itself becomes worldly or becomes what is given?”

Ahmed, 167. “… a way of directing life by deciding what we do with what and where, in the very gesture toward comfort, the promise of  "that sinking feeling."

Ahmed, 164. “So what happens when the table [fabric] dances?” I added fabric in brackets to clearly illustrate how I am considering the concept of the table with the fabrics.

Ahmed, 167.  “Where does the table [fabric] take us when it dances with renewed life?” I added fabric in brackets to clearly illustrate how I am considering the concept of the table with the fabrics.

Ahmed, 164. “objects become alive not by being endowed with qualities they do not have but through a contact with them as things that have been arranged in specific ways. Such contact is bodily: it is a touch that returns to the body, as the skin of the object "impresses" the skin of the body. The "touch" itself disorientates the body, so it loses its way.”

Ahmed, 165. The critical factor of the fabrics being a physical conduit of touch is that they are both proximal and distal simultaneously: “This way of coming into contact with objects involves disorientation: the touch of the thing that transmits some thing…orientation is achieved through the loss of such physical proximity: things are kept in their place, which might be near me, but it is a nearness that does not threaten to get inside of me, or spill what is inside out.”

Ahmed, 166. “Disorientation involves contact with things, but a contact in which "things" slip as a proximity that does not hold things in place, thereby creating a feeling of distance.

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Karyn Recollet's “Choreographies of the Fall”

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Karyn Recollet's “Choreographies of the Fall”

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Recollet, Karyn. 94. “Choreographies of the fall need a collective, require all our bodies to carry out their orbiting.”

Recollet, 92. “Activating motion, bundles are time- traveling devices — vessels that refuse settlement, stillness, and landedness.”

Recollet, 93. “Choreographies of the fall resonate with the experience of Indigifuturist land- ing, as they describe motion when one’s point of origin is not solely rooted in terrestrial scales, reminding us that grounding can also originate from the stars/the celestial. Choreographies of the fall include gestures that reflect the layered strata in our atmospheric relations. These include rupturous encounters and the sounds of celestial bodies interacting — forms of diasporic organizing as matter, particles, and atoms come together and break apart. Land- ing is an Indigifuturist experience of the slipstream of diaspora.  There is a stillness to land- ing, a restive quality to the choreographies of the fall.”

​​Recollet, 96. “The ways in which we orient ourselves toward each other, our relations, our kin- ing capacities are embedded in this motion of the fall. Perhaps it is not a singular fall. Perhaps we can think of this as the falls, the falling as a way of mobilizing Indigenous forms of care and sociality. These might encompass Indigenous modes of care, “gestures of the fall” that we can embrace as the “shapes of our gatherings.”

Recollet, 97. “We find intimacy in these spaces of the restive stillness and movements because we as adoptees have fallen into place.” This quote is important because it offers language to ground into the heart; the intimacy with the self to sense intimacy with another. My idea is that in order to connect, we need to sense our self, perhaps this is where reciprocity begins? Also, how can I adopt the language of “adoptees” used by Recollect?

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Robin Wall Kimmimer's          Braiding Sweetgrass   

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Robin Wall Kimmimer's          Braiding Sweetgrass   

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Kimmimer, ix. “Of course you can do it yourself—by tying one end to a chair, or by holding it in your teeth and braiding backward away from yourself—but the sweetest way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing, watching each other’s hands, one holding steady while the other shifts the slim bundles over one another, each in its turn. Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.”

Kimmimer, x. “But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take.”