the last chapter

My primary critique or issue with Grosz’s approach in this book is the sweeping, generalized uses of terms and concepts — i.e. art, painting, music, sensation, becoming, and also sweeping claims like “Art is of the animal.” I mean, art is a lot of things, and sometimes it is these things that Grosz describes, and sometimes it is something else, or many other things not even considered in this writing. I am generally open to the critical project of this book, I think, but have to continously locate it within a very particular area of writing about art (art as in painting and music, and in relation to the natural world), should it not become contiously bothersome that ‘art’ as it is thought of here is not forgetful or dismissive of (many) other forms of art and ways that art ‘becomes’ in the world or calls its subjects into being. Perhaps this is what happens when a philospher writes about art. [I did not have this reaction when I read Architechture from the Outside, but then again I am not an architect (and neither is Grosz).] And again (just an aside), why no allusion to Deleuze’s books Cinema 1 & Cinema 2? I’m not saying it needs to be in here, but is there no fruitful dialogue between these writings — ie - the affect image or the mirror image, etc?

“There can be no art without the materials of art, but the artistic is an eruption, a leap out of materiality, the kick of virtuality now put into and extracted from matter to make it function unpredictably. Sensations, artworks, do not signify or represent…they assemble, they make, they do , they produce” (75). The most compelling writing comes when Grosz traces the lines of the virtual and the immanent through materiality and the real and then back out into the world, or cosmos. The argument that a becoming-together or becoming-other through sensation is a compelling idea. 

“Sensation has two dimensions, two types of energy: it is composed of affects and percepts. Sensation aims to extract affects from affections and percepts from perception, which is to say that it disembodies and desubjectifies affection and perception” (76). I also like this concept — would be interesting to further explore and pull apart the concepts of affect and percept as constitutive of sensation, though I do not completely agree with how Grosz frames affect here.

More on Grosz and Sensation - Jolie Ruelle

In the final chapter of Chaos, Theory and Art, Gorsz identifies the concept of sensation. I am still struggling to come to terms with the idea that sensation is somehow unmediated by our perceptions. In the case of our embodied minds I believe this to be impossible. She starts by framing art in this way. “All works of art share something in common, whatever else may distinguish different genres and techniques from each other: they are all composed of blocks of materiality becoming-sensation.”  She further states that “Sensation requires no mediation or translation. It is not representation, sign, symbol, but force, energy, rythm, and resonance. Sensation lives not in the body of the percievers, subjects, but in the body of the artwork. Art is how the body senses most directly, with, ironically, the least representational mediation….” (73). While I do believe that art affects us in a seemingly more direct manner, I find it far fetched to state that these sensations are not in us, and exist somehow in the world around us. I am inclined to believe that this feeling of externalized sensation (which might lead to a sense of universiality or singular truth),  is the working of what George Lakoff refers to as the “hidden hand.” “It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought- and that may be a serious underestimate.” (Lakoff, 13) Is it possible that what Grosz in experiencing is the workings of her unconscious thought?

I would love to hear Lakoff and Grosz debate that “Sensation exists independent of the perceptions and affections that mark a living being’s relations with its objects or its Umwelt” (77)  

In Warholls work he uses repetition to dull sensation. A viewer habituates to an image through repeated exposure.  The unconscious relationship to the image shifts, and therefor the sensation felt is no longer as potent. Is this not proof that sensation is within us and mediated? 

Grosz, Faust and Orpheus

Here, I would like to address briefly some quotes and ideas from Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art in relation to the subject of Faust and Orpheus. 

First, Grosz’s overall assertion is that art is an overabundance; it is what is left over after surviving and thriving is done. The idea of excess or overabundance is particularly prevalent in the Faust legend, as Faust is continually engaging in an overabundance of everything. The deal Faust has made with Mephistopheles is that if ever he says that he is satisfied with a particular moment, that he has reached the pinnacle of perfection and wishes to live in this one moment forever, then he is lost. Here Mephistopheles is offering him the whole of the plane of composition, but never all at once. Faust experiences it, frames it and reterritorializes it repeatedly. This is a case of overabundance at it’s maximum. I connect this to the Orpheus legend because Orpheus as the most talented musician ever is presented with an extraordinary ability to create music through the territorializing of chaos in the plane of composition. Both he and Faust suffer and are brought to their downfall by this overabundance. They are both fables in which there is too much beauty, too much art, too much music, and it cannot help or save either of them; in fact it leads directly to their downfall. 

Beth Ratay

Three is the threshold -- Emily

“Art unleashes and intensifies, through the principles of composition, what science contains and slows down through the plane of reference, precisely the creative and destructive impact of vibratory forces on bodies, on collectives, on the earth itself.  And it is only philosophy that is able to understand this common element shared by the arts and the sciences, for it is only through the mediation that philosophical concepts offers that artistic sensations and scientific theorems can interact without colonization, without the one taking over the operations of the other” (62).

I like this pair of sentences.  They are carefully worded, structured, and balanced, almost in resonance with the triadic system of interdisciplinary harmony for which Grosz advocates.  While I share her enthusiasm and idealism for this type of dialog/relationship among various systems of thought, expression, practice, knowledge, etc, I am simultaneously reminded of how lacking/rare a triadic system of logic (or anything) even is, in so many things far beyond art/science/philosophy.  For example, take the Federal government of the U.S., and its three branches of government — executive, judicial, and legislative — all coordinated in elegant theoretical balance with one another in order to protect their intended function and integrity, so that they too “interact without colonization, without the one taking over the operations of the other” (62).  But we all know how slippery and easily corruptible these well intended, intricate systems play out.  In the case of the U.S. government, the intended triadic system is flawed from the very start, ironically reenforcing  mono/binary thinking instead. e.g. The executive branch reenforces the power of one in practice (maybe two if the vice president counts), and two in the electoral process (p.s. the dominant two party system we default to is an embarrassment, an oversimplification and dangerous polarization of values/platforms/issues that are not mutually exclusive, not to mention a complete insult to the very idea of “democracy” the very system is pretending to uphold).  The legislative branch reenforces two in the senate, meanwhile congress and the judicial system are dealing with numbers too big (as in, various, with no consistency, predictable uniformity) for the mono/binary mind to grasp at in a meaningful way.  But three — three is the magic number we continue to gravitate towards in every attempt to break this system of logical default.  Any yet three, somehow keeps devolving to two, and then one.  What’s up with that?  What is it about this pull to the binary, and then — the singular/point?  Why do we see soooooo many attempts to develop this triadic threshold, fumble under the very weight of the thing — skewed, overpowering, unbalanced disharmony (ego?) — it is trying to break away from?  And why is the binary (two) — an even number / harmoniously quantitative / seemingly perfect ratio — paradoxically the root of the dangerously reductive tendency that seeks to organize “the world” in such a way that it ignores and represses complexity to such a degree, that when it finally does resurface, it is categorized as something “unnatural”, irreconcilable, as something then defined and explained as a dysfunctional convolution (e.g. schizophrenia).  

This tendency to want to “snap to the grid”, to quantize (like in music software, not quantum theory) is something I’ve been reflecting on for a while.  It was one of my fascinations with the kinds of questions and experiments that Ben proposed about rhythm, meter, and perception. What is it about 1:1, 4:4, 2:1?  Our brains and our bodies keep taking us there, for better or worse.   And I realize, once again, I’ve taken this out to the metaphysical outskirts, but I don’t think it’s unfounded.  Lots of questions, lots to ponder…

Grosz Reading Response - Jolie Ruelle

Grosz states “ It will my claim here that it is not exactly true that  art is a consequence of the excesses that sexuality or the sexual drive posses, for it may be that sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be adequately sexual.”  (p 64)This reversal in thinking, that sex needs artistic intensity in order to function at all, helped me to draw a stronger delineation between sexual evolution and natural selection. It is much easier for me to come to terms with the idea that sexuality needs art or excess, rather than the idea that art derives from the excess of sexuality. In this way art can “resonate just for itself” and sexual selection can utilize the intensified sensation.

 I found it interesting that Grosz’s interpretation of sensation echoed some of Lingus’s writings on emotion. That although sensation is sensed in the perceiver, it does not live within us. Grosz discusses Straus’s distinction between perception and sensation, “Geography is the space of the map, that which is regulated by measurable abstract coordinates…Landscape by contrast is that space revealed by sensation, which has no fixed coordinates but transforms and moves as a body passes through it.” (p 72) It strikes me that this distinction is merely the difference between types of thinking, the later being based on emotional processing. It is my stance that emotion does not come from external sources. We turn to emotions or sensations in thinking that they provide a form of absolute truth, but how often are our emotions misleading, misguided by our perspective. By believing that sensations come from external sources, we again give power to this idea that there is a universal or “true” sensation that exists outside of our interpretation of it.  

Grosz states that “Sensation is that which is transmitted from the force of an event to the nervous system of a living being and from the actions of this being back onto events.” (p 72) While I believe that this happens everyday and everywhere around us, I don’t feel enough emphasis is put the interpretation of that event. “That which is transmitted” can take any number of forms at the moment it is percieved. Grosz states “Just as space and time are not in us…so sensation is not in us either. We are in it whenever we sense, and it brings us to where sensation occurs, in the artwork itself.” While Grosz doesn’t make the claim that sensation is universal, if sensations are derived from ways of perceiving, aren’t they in us?