IDENTITY AS SENSATION
“To aestheticize something is not to prettify or to decorate it, but to render it more attune to sensing” (Investigative Aesthetics, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, p.33)
If we seek fact through the senses, we must find what makes sense of sense.
~+~
An incident occurs.
Its first act is to record the trauma of its time. The mark, debris, scarification of its passing. On all levels, this record is laid down. From the molecular to the planetary, the conscious to the sub-conscious, the unbodied to the corporeal, the theoretical to the practical, the record of this incident is laid down. Evidence of its passing is recorded, in some way, on some level. Some of these recordings will be obvious to us, others not so, and in many cases, the majority will remain hidden from our perceptions.
Those entities that are accessible but not accessed are what we know to be and call choices. We choose to leave them be or engage in them. Even if we chose to ignore them their existence is still acknowledged through that rejection. The nature of these choices has little to do with relationships between these entities, how they relate to and affect each other. But it has more to do with a top-down hierarchical socio-political structure that includes but is not limited to, class, gender, sexuality and material and economic wealth. It is within these paradigms that these choices are located and fixed. They exist within a well-defined and delineated set of contracts that ensure the continued existence of a limited notion of aesthetics and its application within the visual arts, our culture, and the world at large. Within this limited understanding, they engage, relate, and acknowledge the dominance of their existence and influence and it is within this world of choice that most of us live, exist and find sustainable satisfactory forms. This is the world of binary thinking of our parents and their parents, before them. It is a world of representation. We need to replace this world of representation and replace it with one we cannot experience or know of at the moment, one that we cannot see and is yet to find traction. Yet it exists. This is a world defined, shaped and policed by the senses and sensation, a world which we know exists but has denied us by the Cartesian world of our parents.
Within this world of the senses these records either register or erase, build, or destroy. Sometimes they may appear cancerous eating away at what we think we know to be true. Our instinct is to withdraw, become defensive about what we think is true. Sometimes they appear benign and seem to have little or no bearing on the order of things, but they all leave some form of an evidential trace as to their existence. Their conditions appear differently to different entities and reveal themselves at different times in different circumstances. Many contest the collective account of the hegemony as best they can in the light of the fact that whatever hegemonic matrix is in power usually is in opposition to such revelations. Those that are allowed to find form are entities that have been recognized to conform to a mechanics or notion that serves a specific purpose. This includes notions of sexuality, gender, social/political class, material, and economic wealth that have remained fixed for generations. As such they have a singular view of themselves and central to the existence and role of such entities is the oppression of other contesting entities and representations.
Yet we respond to all these entities. We obliquely map them to our understanding of who we think we are. We are always transformed (on whatever level these transformations are registered) and our relationship to these stimuli (living and/or otherwise) is forever changed from one moment to the next. These transformations are trapped between layers of sensorial strata. Their positionality becomes a fixed reality that posits that recurring action mutates and fixes experience into a habit over time and over time habit becomes truth. This is a foundationalist notion of identity. One that assumes it must be in place first for action to be taken upon it. In this context, “Sense” makes no sense and prescribed predeterminism gives rise to the accepted notions of the fixed nature of all matter. (See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble p. 194 – 5).
To access these unrepresented records and reveal their truth to power we will not only have to bring to bear our capacity to sense beyond what we are currently capable of but also understand how the senses are to make sense.
These trapped layers of sensorial fact are accessible through aesthetics. They are released when the social/political conditions are such that the notion of self and/or identity are under threat and the only way to safeguard their existence is to change their very nature by making accessible those representations that had been previously hidden from view and experience. The other becomes known and new post-human definitions can be experienced. It will be through the unconditional adoption of aesthetics that we will engage these sensorial layers of strata and their notions of self, identity, and subjectivity. The Greek definition of aesthesis is to describe that which pertains to the senses. Aesthetics, therefore, involves sensing. It is concerned with our exposure to the world, our awareness, impression, and insight into how we experience it. Most importantly (at least in the context of this text) it is concerned with how we Sense the world and how we register and/or are affected by this process, Sense Making. In this sense, aesthetics refers to all sensing entities. This includes the subconscious and not only includes animals and plants but also other sensing organisms, which include the digital and computational as they are themselves capable of uncovering, marking, and anticipating in a variety of diverse ways. In other words, sense is the reaction of action as it acts upon a sensory organ. Sense-making is the experience and comprehension of what is being sensed. As Fuller and Weizman observe “making sense involves constructing means of sensing” (p34).
This essay will engage in the notion of identity as a form of sensation and address its form and context within contemporary thinking and its application through my work and the continuing development of my methodology and studio practice. I will look at the role of the digital as a sensing organ and its appropriateness in its application within the portrait genre as a way of defining a sensorial likeness. Building upon Giles Deleuze’s writing on Francis Bacon and the role of the diagram I will contest that the use of digital media and computational realms of action can engage with and delineate new understandings of what it is to be human. This will include the notion that identity is a set of complex relationships and interactions between different entities that find substance through the unconditional and integrated freedom that comes from the creation of these relationships and their continuous, fertile transformation.
Other areas of interest include how the representation of certain images obscures other potential representations whose existence remains largely unnoticed and ignored and how these can be accessed through the senses via forensic aesthetics as they are denied within the hegemony and its Cartesian view of the world. This includes how representations can find traction and validity through the neglect of the neo-liberal and capitalist projects as they push through their need for exponential growth and development, therefore, forgoing notions of community and society that lay outside their normative considerations. It is here where identity is assumed, to be controlled by those in power and who (falsely) claim representation for the masses. I will show how the failings of these economies allow for new ways of being to be brought to the fore and can be allied together as a means of creating a sensorial likeness which Andres Weber calls “Self is self – through – other” (p.1).
There are many ways in which our notions of self can be found in a sensorial realm. In the context of my working strategies, much of this is through the rearranging of content to give new meanings and understandings of how we construct an identity. This is a collage of entities that reconfigures to make something new that does not exist before its construction (a binding principle of collage). According to Anthony Giddens, a collage is, by definition, a collection of separate narratives which when placed together express new consequences from which the hold of Cartesian thought has been withdrawn (Giddens Modernity and Self Identity, p. 26). The displacement of separate histories so that they now lay outside the rigours of time and space brings forward new understandings of what is possible. As a cultural document of identity, the collage insists and exists upon the impossibility of any pre-existing contexts. As Lev Manovich states, “to change the interface even slightly is to change the work dramatically.” (The Language of New Media, p. 67).
Such an abandonment of order and thought can only find value in the context of the realm of the senses. Cartesian thought will either bend it to a representationalist will or simply “other” the notion of such action, thus making it invisible. Although this condition of being is challenged by rising socially political and activist alternative thinking. Yet it is through the reappropriation and reordering of the very same tools and commands that have been employed for generations that the transition from thought to the senses can take place. In this text, I will look at several realms and situations where this transition can be seen to be happening. How different voices can be applied to what is, in effect, a post-humanist project where such a use finds real-world application in thought and deed. This will include social and political action as seen in Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons. Investigative aesthetics as espoused by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman and the work of Forensic Architecture, Andreas Weber’s concept of Enlivenment and the notion of identity as a moment of awareness. One that is felt through the senses and is not built upon an “empire of ideas” (Enlivenment Towards a Poetics for the Anthropocene, Andreas Weber, P.179). and the digital/computational realm that whilst drawing upon the past for context and form can if re-contextualised, create unique sensations of mutation and change.
Before we investigate these domains and the arguments they raise, it is important to say that none of them should be considered singularities. As in all aspect of existence within the universe, they are all very much related to each other, both directly and obliquely. The intersectionality of these debates ensures their uniqueness, ensuring that fresh perspectives are taken and new forms of being are illuminated. The aim of these relationships is to be absolved of the tyranny of the Artist's thinking (*). To think as a unique individual situated alongside an infinite number of other such entities. Where each is an island of separate thought and deed and only coming together for the exploitation of one party or another. In this context, identity is an entity. A product of numerous paradigms relating to each other at all times and all levels with their expression through, and as, sensorial engagement. Here, identity reflects the spirit of its experimental origins and creation within a sense of flux and change, where research and practice are inherent qualities of human behaviour. A lived experience.
~+~
John Akomfrah is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and theorist in whose work we can see the disinvestment of the implied identity tropes of the hegemony. In his work, he uses digital media to address and solve many of the issues associated with black cinema. For him, digital technologies address many of the problems he must confront as a black filmmaker in his work. As he states,
“Once you begin to work with the immediate retrievals that the digital allows, you can begin to construct all sorts of new histories. When one brings diaspora and cinema together, it seems to me that one can come up with a completely new sense of not simply what cinema is but how one might define it” (Digitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora, John Akomfrah, Journal of Media Practice, Vol 11, No. 1, P.28)
For Akomfrah, the digital address’ several “tyrannies” that hamper the expression of a black voice in cinema. These tyrannies are an investment in representation, discerning what is authentic for the audience, and defining the social and political boundaries of the aesthetics employed in the applications of these tyrannies. These limits are defined by the “artist” and the “author” and the implications and ordering that these words imply.
As he says digital media is much more accessible, making possible a wider range of representations. It involves less capital to produce than analogue filmmaking again making it more likely to be used by lower-income practitioners. As a result, more footage can be shot for less and an experimental approach is easily imbued. In Kara Keeling's “Queer Times, Black Futures” (p.56 – 59) she draws comparisons between digital media with jazz music. With its emphasis upon the experimental and improvision. This includes easier access to editing and post-production tools thus elevating the potential to improvise and draw out new potential entities and experiences by drawing them through the computational matrix. And finally and simply expressed the digital gives potential to anyone with a smartphone and the right software to make a film, thus the notion of what is, and who can be artists is therefore mutated into something more flexible and fluid.
However, the role of the digital in altering the recording technologies of the film opens a more fundamental change as these technologies previously “have been imbricated with racial epistemologies” (Kara Keeling p.122). In working within a profilmic reality the deferred implication is towards the predominant theories of a white, racialised, colonial, and patriarchal image that supports the prevailing hegemonic structure. One that has never been black, queer, or feminist. It obliterates the “Other” and lives within the formal representational matrix laid down through Cartesian thought/discourse. The digital as Akomfrah contends makes it more visible, and as such makes more space for new perceptions, assessments, and experiences of what has been previously considered invisible. This includes the increased visibility of transforming vibrations as new relationships and connections make themselves known within the digital realm. The result is that whilst the digital allows for the retrieval of what is normally lost within the cartesian, analogue matrix, it also allows for new legitimate narratives to be written as well as placing these narratives into the debate of the post-human and how that can be manifested in the real and resistant world. As Lev Manovich writes in “The Language of New Media.”
“A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window through which we can enter places thousands of miles away. Finally, with the help of a mouse or a video camera, a computer can be transformed into an intelligent being capable of engaging us in dialogue” (P.92)
~+~
In Andreas Weber’s “Enlivenment, Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, he writes the following.
“Every living being’s identity unfolds as a transformation of the other through one's self. This self emerges through perceptions and through being touched, through sensual exchanges, through symbols and metaphors and through the impact of molecules of light, all of which somehow transfer their relevance to the ongoing self-creation of the body.” (p.1)
What can we take from this passage? Where do these transformations take place, and how do they find traction in the day-to-day experience of ourselves and others? In using this passage as an incident of action. As a starting point. I shall take a deep delve into how the forsaken spaces of reality, that are hidden from our day-to-day observations can find meaning through the senses. We shall begin this investigation, not through the visual arts, but through Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall Street.” A short story that concisely articulates and exposes the precarious nature of cartesian thought. It is achieved through the detournement of the social and political epistemological matrices by, what is in effect, a single transformative and fundamentalist action. As Giles Deleuze says of Melville’s Bartleby.
“It means only what it says, literally. And what it says, and repeats is I would prefer not to. This is the formula of its glory that drives everyone crazy.” (Bartleby; or, The Formula, Giles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. p.1)
Such an implacable position arises from such a simple action because he situates it within the framework of the privileged ontological (that only appear to be so by their repeated repetition within a social and political framework) and epistemological realities of violence that is to be found in the Cartesian order of things. It is a refusal that confronts such violence and reaches for recognition through a sensorial realm. He does not explain his missive and that doing so immediately shifts him from being an irritant, by refusing to do the tasks for which he has been employed, to becoming a radical with a fundamentalist agenda that like all good fundamentalists he refuses to defend or share. His rebellion is situated not within his actions but by his inaction. It is the silences that radicalise his position and continues to cast him in a radical light. Punctuated only by the sound of the repetition of his formula “I would prefer not to” he problematises the lawyer's “conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall St, Herman Melville p.1). and throws him into a moral/philosophical dilemma. The lawyer's reaction is a quest for biographical data that he hopes to form some understanding of his dissident employee. In doing so hoping to find some small detail to untangle Bartleby’s position. He does this not out of any general concern for his employee, but as a means of leverage to undermine his position. As Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman say details can be weaponised. Such an action reassigns data (especially biographic details) as a whole. All nuance is lost and context is reduced to binary readings of right/wrong, black/white, left/right and so on. In doing so they are decontextualised and can be used to deny or negate any inconvenient fact/realities that might undermine the hegemonic structures that they threaten. In doing so the lawyer is not only using biography to undermine Bartleby’s crusade but to derail the transformations that he has now been exposed to. To move them away from the sensorial realm and lock them down with the representational matrix. One that the lawyer understands and lives in but feels is under threat.
What Bartleby stands for is the transformation onto a sensorial plain. Like Charon the ferryman taking the damned souls across the Styx and into Hades, Bartleby offered the conduit through which we can all access the sensorial. In “preferring not to” he, in effect, bypasses the lawyer's world and passes beyond reach and such considerations. His actions make it impossible for him to continue as the scrivener he was originally employed to be. In a normative world Bartleby would be othered, thrown out, as he lives outside the Lawyers experience and knowledge, but here he becomes something else. He mutates. He is neither being nor not being but transforms outside of the visions of his employer and staff. He becomes beyond their understanding and influence, and despite their best efforts is destined to find the course that his senses have laid out before him. “The formula is devastating because it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any non-preferred.” (Bartleby; or, The Formula, Giles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. p. 3). The simple phrase not only annihilates his role as a scrivener but also as a human being in the limited capacity of those who would need to understand and judge him. As Deleuze observes “he had to refuse the former in order to render the latter impossible” (Bartleby; or, The Formula, Giles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. p. 3). It is as if in his use of the limited language he does use, Bartleby gathers up all language (another screen) and pushes it until it reaches its limits and breaks through to some other plain beyond the comprehension of his peers. It becomes the inverse of another language one that utilises the soul, silence, and blood in its discovery. One that lives within the experience of the realm of the senses.
Melville understands Bartleby’s psychosis because he gives us no insight into his fundamentalist yet sensorial world. The reader is held in place firmly within the fixed Cartesian reading of the world by the lawyer and the hubris he demonstrates in trying to understand him. Like him we are confused and given no reason for our protagonist's intransigence. This understanding or rather lack of understanding can also be seen in Velazquez’s Las Meninas where the viewer is reduced to a fixed and reductive point, held in place by the constrains and mores of social class and kudos evident in the gaze of the Artist himself and the reflections on the King and Queen of Spain that are observed in the reflection in the mirror at the back of the room. All we can witness is the devastation it reeks upon the world of representation (as well as upon his material self). Kara Kelling describes Bartelby as “Of this world but also situated at a border with another one perhaps always imperceptible just beyond the Wall” (Queer Times, Black Futures p. 101). And Deleuze alludes to another narrative that is the inverse of the one narrated by the lawyer. Yet it is tempting to believe that whatever this story is it does exist and is somehow accessible and somehow transferrable through the exchange of sensorial relevance of the ongoing creation of the self. If we can accept Bartleby and his formula, we can accept what he is not. This gives us the potential for exchange. It is defining relationships of identity through the other. Through the senses.
This finds traction through Deleuze’s observations on the work of Francis Bacon and his violent use of the diagram. In his work, Deleuze notes that for Bacon the diagram is the random mark such as the scrape, sweep and wipe off the paint. Its speed and chance (thrown paint) remove the image from the givens of representation. Just as Bartleby’s formula dismantles the givens of his employer's expectations, Bacon's use of the diagram has a similar effect on the givens of portraiture and representationalism. As Deleuze states “The diagram is a possibility of fact” (Giles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.77) or as Bacon says himself “I’m always trying to disrupt it. Half my painting activity is disrupting what I can do with ease” (Interviews With Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, p.105). This finds traction within my own practice and use of collage. Where the aim of the work is to reveal what lies outside the constraints of representation.
~+~
If we are to investigate the notion of identity as sensation, we must concede that we are also concerned with identity as the coming together, or combination of different fields of action. One where relationships can be made (or broken) and sensed. Where evidence of their transaction can be collected, collated, and called upon as and when necessary. In Fuller and Weizman’s “Investigating Aesthetics” they contest that this collection is a “community of practice” (p.195) and creates what they call an investigative commons. Here aesthetic, political, and epistemic frameworks are brought together. Within these commons, many sites exist, each of which demands a different set of actions within the commons. For example, the field establishes the commons through different modes of sensing. This negates the givens that are usually employed. This can be seen in Francis Bacon’s use of the diagram and the process of creation within my methodology when creating my work. In this context the site acknowledges the need for change. It is not reasonable. In the lab/studio, the commons take the form of collective action and enquiry. By this, I mean the needs of the Other to find a voice. The forum is where the other finds the means to express that voice. Doing so creates a new arena and form where it can articulate its positionality and make itself seen. This gives us multiple/infinite screens where relationships and their interactions can be played out. Not only does these manifest new forms to experience but also new ways to experience those forms. These can be both abstract and concrete as they create various expanded sensorial realms in which these actions can take place. In this way, the use of aesthetics will show how the senses can be used in creating a commons (see Investigating Aesthetics, Fuller and Weizman p 195-6). Sense-making, which is an inherent quality of identity as sensation, implies new ways of creating a commonality between sense-making entities. This includes both living and non-living entities that arrange these relationships regarding their environmental conditions.
We can see this to include alliances between communities which become aware of different aspects of their environment and react accordingly. For example, the Heygate Estate and Heygate Regeneration Scheme in south London saw the community come together as a social framework that used sensing aesthetics to articulate a new political and physical environment as a new commons. Another example is the tattoos of Tupac Shakur which articulate new aesthetic commons as he takes back the canvas upon which his oppression as a black man was made manifest, his skin (for further details on the equivalences in aesthetics of both the Heygate Regeneration Scheme and Tupac Shakur’s tattoos see the previous text). This further develops our sense-making abilities as new relationships, and alliances, evolve. We see how what develops from these actions is something collective, and in the case of the Heygate Regeneration Scheme, this was a socially engaged community action that pointed to something new. And for Tupac Shakur, it was reclaiming the canvas of his skin to articulate the hidden representation of his otherness. This does not mean that what is brought into being is some egalitarian utopia. The universe does not work like that, but in using aesthetics to redefine the various relationships, processes and negotiations of the senses and sense-making it does look to dismantle the binary, hierarchical, and structured thinking of cartesian thought. Through these processes, the creation of an aesthetic commons also challenges the notion of a homogenous totality. This would present itself as a world that would promise much but would fix aesthetics as a means of reflection rather than engagement, sense but not sense-making.
~+~
Identity is a commons of teaching where we must hold ourselves up to the level of teaching (so that we can be educated) but not at what the level of teaching offers. This offers nothing more than the continued pillaging of original thought and offers us nothing of value or merit. What is required is the acquiring of knowledge and experience as an ontological practice, as part of a lived experience. Where it ebbs and flows and is a series of rising and falling relationships between those who wish to be educated. By which I mean not the student-teacher discourse, but a commons of mutual transformations between entities where mutual benefits are looked at for the expense of control and representation.
In using Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s model of the “Undercommons” we can see that a sensorial sense of self is not about “knowing” who you are. It is not something gained by being subject to education, although one needs to be educated to realise this. It does, however, require one to be criminally overwhelmed by education to such an extent that we “become unfit for subjection” (Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study, p. 28), because of the paucity of this stolen education leaves no option but to steal back what was stolen from you.
~+~
At its most basic this essay, and indeed my PhD project as a whole is a call for the administration of a Post Human understanding of identity and self. The acceptance of which can be felt within the realm of the “other.” This is the realm of the outlier, the criminal, as Moten and Harney describe it. A realm where the post-human can be found outside of the normative conditions that have been so prevalent since the Enlightenment. In the real and resistant world, these conditions manifest themselves as racialised, patriarchal, and colonial discourses where it is realised that education is not knowledge and that it is, in fact, worse than that. That the education establishment of the society, the community, the school, and the university, is nothing more than a refuge for the mafia of the mediocre. It is not a place of knowledge. It is within this refuge that the individual is subjugated as a tool of propaganda and oppression within the neo-liberal/post-capitalist hegemony. Graduating as nothing more than fodder to be passed over, eaten up, used, and exploited and finally disregarded once all material wealth has been drained from the individual and the entities that stand for them. This leaves us with only one realisation and one choice. The only education worth having is the one we sneak in and steal. Not just from the university, school, or college but the capitalists, the Neo-liberalist, the bosses, and their bosses above them. From the street, the gang, and the friendship groups, our friends and neighbours. We do this because in doing this we will be no longer represented as a subjugated entity. We will reject the paths and coercive power that would shape us into being what we are not. Their oppression frees. It takes us into the realm of the irrational and away from the bad documents that would normally populate our beliefs to such a degree that they take on normative attributes. We can draw together in the knowledge that the only relationship worth having is with our fellow criminals within the infinite realm of the senses. This starts with the simple, yet profoundly radical phrase, “I would prefer not to”.
In this text, I have tried to show and articulate a number of these realms and how their action has been applied within my methodology and studio practice. Firstly, it must be said that the very fact that I am writing about this and continuing with my practice situates me within the criminal class. Melville's Bartleby, The Heygate Regeneration Scheme, and Tupac Shakur’s tattoos all position the criminal as “other.” I am situated in the same realm. Whether fictional or actual these individuals and collectives have all found form through the rejection of the subjugated life that was laid out before them. We do not understand Bartleby’s motives for his “I would prefer not to” agenda toward a life that from the point of view of his erstwhile employer seemed unworkable and impossible to understand. The Heygate Regeneration Scheme came into being as the neo-liberal hegemony abandoned a community to its own devices as it looked to develop an inner-city estate. In thinking that nothing would come from such an action the community of the Heygate Estate proved, once more, that when denied support from the empire the outlier does not flounder and disintegrate but is freed from the subjugation of the state. In doing so, it could articulate new variants of communal living that had not been represented up to then. It showed alternative ways of existing outside the hegemony's normative conditions. For the brief time that it was in existence, the Heygate Regeneration Scheme gave an intoxicating glimpse of what a life of the senses might entail. All one had to do was open one's senses to understand this. And upon the very canvas of his subjugation, Tupac Shakur redeems our sense of his otherness for his own purposes. Outlining the depth of the anti-black experience of his and his ancestors, stealing back the racism of the past and returning it to us re-presented, unfettered, upon the canvas of his own skin and clear for all to see.
We can see the introduction of a series of other realities through the application of computational virtual worlds and digital screens. These create new relationships and understandings between the entities represented on the picture plane and those that are not. We can articulate a series of virtual worlds that live on screen and add a potent new level of understanding to the image. These are worlds that allude to a more perplexing understanding of the reality depicted whilst still paying homage to more traditional readings. These screens are inherent within the architecture of the available software, which includes our own capacity for sensory engagement, giving rise to a new sensorial likeness and the ability to sense such experiences. In my work, this is reflected in the use of Photoshop and its digital architecture. Starting with Deleuze's notion of the diagram within the work of Francis Bacon I have used the layered infrastructure of Photoshop as a means of introducing the irrational, ambivalent, non-representation mark into the portrait image that is designed not to serve the portrait from a Cartesian point of view yet are to be constituted of it. One based upon a world of representation, but to pull it away from such concerns and lock it into a sensorial experience. One that works directly onto the nervous system. Each layer becomes a screen and within each screen is an entity that exists independently within that screen. These entities have had the conditions of time and space removed from them and have no meaning until they are brought together to form new configurations of identity and ways of being. Individually each screen and the entity placed upon it are, in themselves, othered. They have no meaning within a world of representation, with no value other than that which they generate themselves as abstracted matter. With the result that the final image is devoid of meaning within Cartesian thought and experience yet when these screens are layered within the boundaries of the picture plane, they interact with each other and are transformed. They form relationships with each other that are unique, sensuous, tactile, and transient. These relationships fire our senses and bring into being new visualisations about the nature of this matter as identity, as a post-human experience. As a sensorial likeness. As Andreas Weber writes,
“We need to be touched by matter in order to understand that we are matter” (Enlivenment, Towards a Poetics for the Anthropocene, p 178).
Wireframe images depicting the layered Screens within the image and the final image with screens hidden
The notion of an aesthetic commons is another realm where we can see how the senses can be engaged to explore the potential of the post-human. As Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman write in “Investigating Aesthetics, Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth”
“Relationality always means that something is occurring beneath and beyond individuating entities and dynamics. Indeed, as the expanding academic field of the post humanities emphasises, computational systems, new biomedical forms and the urgency of ecological understanding compel us to go beyond the frame of what is understood to be individual human perception” (p.35).
For them, the role of aesthetics is an action of and upon the senses, of becoming or making sense. It is a process but also so much more, a transformation that relates beyond the action of the process. It is the act of making sense of the senses. Yet the application of an aesthetic condition is not only rooted within the senses. It suggests the ability to perceive which spans several other realms such as the political, social, and emotional realms. This is highly prevalent within the political realm when considering the post-human identity project. Questions of accountability and context are vital in understanding the role of aesthetics in the post-human understanding of identity and how that finds traction beyond the frame of perception and in articulating a notion of a sensorial sense of self.
~+~
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Investigative Aesthetics: Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman. 2021. Verso.
Gender Trouble. Judith Butler. 1990. Routledge.
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Giles Deleuze. 1981. Continuum.
Enlivenment: Towards a Poetics for the Anthropocene. Andreas Weber. 2019. MIT Press.
Modernity And Self-Identity. Anthony Giddens. 1991. Polity Press.
The Language of New Media. Lev Manovich. 2001. MIT Press.
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Stefano Harney/Fred Moten. 2013. Minor Compositions.
Digitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora. John Akomfrah. 2010. Journal of Media Practice, Vol 11 No.1.
Queer Times, Black Futures. Kara Keeling. 2019. New York University Press.
The Order of Things. Michel Foucault. 1994. Vintage Books.
Bartleby The Scrivener. Herman Melville. 1853. Melville House.
Bartleby; or, The Formula. Gilles Deleuze. 1997. Uni. Minnesota Press
Interviews With Francis Bacon. David Sylvester. 1975. Thames and Hudson.
