The Logic Of Sensation

jacky chan ~ s3155391

The nature of art and painting, as with music and prose, is the essence of revealing the invisible, capturing the forces. In this statement, it is also important to note that while it is one thing to reveal the invisible, it is also the importance of painting the organs without the body; without the literalism.

Within each artist, composer, writer, exists a culmination of experiences and morals that affect their perception and methodology in their respective field. As Deleuze points out, “Bacon harbors within himself all the violence of Ireland, and the violence of Nazism, the violence of war”1. In painting the hysteria rather than the horror, he subjects the audience to an image that allows the viewer to apply their own horror to match the hysteria. For example, the painting of the scene of the crucifixion with all the characters involved versus the expression of one individual at the crucifixion.

In this, although I don’t have to necessarily have to enjoy or actively like Bacon’s paintings, it will ultimately resonate within me and spark a cacophony of emotions regardless of my view on the physical painting. This is the importance of painting the invisible, the sensation and ultimately what great art does, to invoke sensation without forcing the artist’s sets of morals and ideals upon the audience.

Another example exists in Van Gogh’s work, in that the ability to depict the optimistic portrayal of invisible forces of a landscape or the ‘force of a sunflower seed’ beyond the inner turmoil and angst that lies within the artist demonstrates the ability to transcend the selfish endeavour for attention through art.‘It is not movement that explains the levels of sensation, it is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement’2.

The horror of the unknown scream that is seen numerously in Bacon’s work far outweighs the horror of a narrated scene. ‘The scream captures or detects an invisible force’3 , and within it, the potential for every narrated scene that exists to explain this invisible force; as Kafka spoke ‘of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door’4 . The importance of the separation between sensation and the spectacle and what Bacon distinguishes and paints primarily (sensation) is that the result of the spectacle in the painting may not ever lead to the sensation but by painting the sensation, the resulting spectacle becomes infinitely more powerful and isn’t limited to by the audience.

Francis Bacon : The Logic of Sensation

1 - Gilles Deleuze, Pg 38, Chapter 6 : Painting and Sensation, “The Logic of Sensation”, 20032 - Ibid, Pg 413 - Gilles Deleuze, Pg 60, Chapter 8 : Painting Forces, “The Logic of Sensation”, 20034 - Ibid, Pg 612

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The Autonomy of Affect

1 - Brian Massumi, Pg. 26 The Autonomy of Affect, “Cultural Critique”, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Envi-ronments, Part II (Autumn, 1995)2 - Ibid, Pg. 25

The snowman story looks at the linguistic affect that adds an additional layer onto the visual element, therefore, creating a ‘larger system composed of two interacting subsystems following entirely different rules of formation’1. In doing so, the story acquires an emotional tone that otherwise would never be there if it remained purely a visual video.

‘The factual version of the snowman story was dampening. Matter-of-factness dampens intensity.’2

It is as though factual information regardless of what the story is, attains no intensity, even if the expression of words and language used in the conveyance of the ‘emotional’ story bears little factual progression to the story.

What we want as a society driven by affect is to be able to connect with the scenario, and this seems to resonate strongest through the two levels of the visual and the language combined, where each function separately.

The relationship to a prison scenario would be the difference between the visual aspects of two crimes and the incarcerated, whilst one was purely images with no accompanying language, and the other had a factual language with emotive qualities at certain points. The second example would resonate and be more memorable than the first, largely due to the intensity and the fact that it would be between conveying a sympathetic or unlikeable tone towards the incarcerated, thereby applying some sort of emotive connection.

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Boy - Mom says death is as natural as birth, and it’s all part of the life cycle.She says we don’t reall understand it, but there are many things we dont understand, and we just have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have.I guess that makes sense....But don’t you go anywhere.

Tiger - Don’t worry.

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Flesh

1 - George Teyssot, Pg. 10 The mutant body of Architecture, “Flesh”, 19942 - James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, “The girl who was plugged in”, 19733 - George Teyssot, Pg. 24 The mutant body of Architecture, “Flesh”, 1994

The essay talks about the society’s arrival to ‘a disembodied style of life’ and the way people ‘dis-connect and reconnect through various networks’1 and replacing human components in the realm of cyberspace.

In the 2009 movie ‘Gamer’, society has come to accept reality games where volunteers are controlled by other humans via a virtual network, where the controller takes over the volunteer’s body and is free to do whatever he/she wishes at a price. This brings up ethical issues regarding the disconnection with oneself, and realising that your moral inhibitions are removed and in many cases, the controller acts upon desires they would never think of doing if they weren’t in control of someone else’s body. This is similar to the example given by the novel The girl who was plugged in2, in which a person’s brain is electronically implanted into a perfect artificial body. Though the similarities lie in the control of another being/object, the difference is the permanence of such a control. The other example given is another ‘game’ where controlled death-sentence convicts are pit against one another in a game of warfare, with the prize freedom for the inmate if he/she survives 10 games. The use of convicts in this scenario, particularly death-sentence, removes the morality of killing in that throughout history, with society seen as an organism, the ‘ill’ largely consisted of convicts and people of poor health, ‘an excess which must be rooted out’ where ‘the “ill” is attributed to a lack which must be compensated for’3.

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Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect

1 - Nigel Thrift, Pg. 73 “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect”2 - Ibid, Pg. 733 - Ibid, Pg. 67-68

As the study and gradual understanding of the existence of affect increases, one methodology of utilising this arises from the anticipation of affect using modern surveillance. “The oligoptic gaze of the dry schemata of modern facial recognition systems that are increasingly being used in a plethora of systems of surveillance and whose genealogy again reaches back to physiognomy”1. In using the manipulation of time in videos (a more analytical approach to Viola’s methods), locating the half second delay and the perpetrator before they realise it on a conscious level is fundamentally one of the uses of modern surveillance within cities.

From the analysis of Viola’s work in the essay, you begin to understand that ‘aspects of cities are too often neglected’ and Viola’s work ‘highlights the face as a primary composer of affect and maker of presence’2. Therefore, understanding the context of the environment and the different existing stimuli that bombard us visually, one would be able to distinguish the minute nuances of facial change that don’t belong.

Additionally, the essay mentions the resurgence of ‘urban spaces...being designed to invoke affective response’3. This means that the architectural composition of a space, urban or private, effectively affects the user. As such, the design composition of visual elements that incline our emotive response and affect, can be manipulated to decide what type of behaviour is appropriate within institutions, and ultimately makes it easier to spot the odd one out, such as security at the airport noticing subtle shifts in body language or facial expression.

It feels as though the use of the study of affect is, in examples, exploitative in conditioning the human behaviour and conforming it to a societal norm, or in an extreme way, emotional engineering.

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Of Other Spaces

1 - Michel Foucault, ‘Of other Spaces’ in Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986

The essay talks about ‘the space in which we live is…a heterogeneous space’. This fundamentally describes something basic as our own room as a collected element, similarly to something like a museum, where ‘the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs’. From this stems two distinct types of spaces, a utopia and a heterotopia.

The essay focuses on the principles of heterotopias, which by rough definitions would outline the spaces of institutions in its raw forms. The essay mentions a cemetery as a heterotopia, which, following the parallel ‘laws’ that other institutions abide by; such as ‘a precise and determined function within a society’, or only capable of ‘functioning at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’, or even a presupposed ‘system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’. Thus the comparison of the functionality and logic behind the cemetery can be applied to any institution, for example, a museum, prisons etc. However, it would seem that from all the examples given of an institution, only two, the prison and the cemetery, share the same fate and lineage while following the same outline as any other institution that exists in the city.

‘Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church’, much like the prison, yet as civilisations progressed, both these spaces began to be pushed towards the fringes of the city, more so the prison than the cemetery. Both these spaces are seen to have the potential to affect the public, the cemetery and its ‘death’ illness and the savagery of the incarcerated.

It would seem that there is a constant in that institutions naturally progress to affect us as soon as we enter its boundaries, regardless of whether there is an initiation or rite of passage, as the act of knowingly entering mentally affects us. As a result, they affect us unknowingly, such as entering a museum and acquiring an air of intelligence or entering a cemetery and feeling … .

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The Birth of the Museum

1 - Tony Bennett, Pg. 68 ‘The Birth of The Museum: History, theory, politics’, 19952 - Ibid, Pg. 723 - Ibid, Pg. 694 - Ibid, Pg. 69

The essay commented on the exhibitionary aspect of museums and expositions and likens the devices used in prisons to ‘abolish the crowd conceived as “a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together , a collective effect” and to replace it with “a collection of separate individualities”’1, so as not to create an unruly crowd internally. This is similar to the prison inner workings in that groups that gather are seen to have a more chaotic effect, and therefore the result is to isolate each prisoner. However, looking at the results of expositions, such as the Great Exhibition where the greatest surprise was the ‘orderliness of the public which, in spite of the 1,000 extra constables and 10,000 troops kept on stand-by, proved duly appreciative, decorous in its bearing and entire apolitical’2, one finds that the order of natural surveillance within these realms affect the public as soon as they enter. Having vantage points that allow the physical ability to watch over the crowd but at the same time being watched over:

‘to see and be seen, to survey yet always be under surveillance, the object of an unknown but controlling look….transforming the crowd into a constantly surveyed, self-watching, self-regulating, and, as the historical record suggests, consistently orderly public – a society watching over itself ’3

This ultimately comments on the functionality of the panopticon in prison modules where it focuses on being watched and never knowing when you’re being watched. It would seem that the successful application in the public realm within expos add an additional element, of a non-hierarchical method of surveillance instead of the ‘inmate constituting the point at which all these looks culminate’4, which puts a mental strain on the prisoner, never providing a rehabilitative measure for them.

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Complete and Austere Institutions

1 - Michel Foucault, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’ in Tell me what you want, what you really, really want, 2010

Both the essays have the ability to allow the reader to understand the concepts that drive the prison such as the impact of surveillance to make a body docile in the panopticon. There is a strong lineage that is drawn within the essay that derives from a methodical approach of how a plague-stricken town was dealt with to the surveillance technique used in prisons. However, what the essay doesn’t account for is the consideration of the rest of society in relation to the prison occupants resulting in an introverted approach to the discipline in prisons.

The essay only talks about the time spent in prison of the prisoner’s timeline and never mentions the impact of what happens beyond the prison once released back into society. As such, the evaluation of the docility of a prisoner within the institution would not be sufficient in determining the prisoner’s ability to function in a given society unless it is a collective of congruently docile bodies.

“The prison has neither exterior nor gap; it cannot be interrupted, except when its task is totally completed; its action on the individual must be uninterrupted; an unceasing discipline.”

The prisoner when subjected to a constant state of isolation or punishment will inevitably learn to adapt to the situation, given that the sentence is over a long period of time. There is a relationship in that prisoners suffer from recidivism as a result of wanting to be back into that controlled state where everything is monitored, though this largely occurs in prisoners that have grown accustomed to the environment. Therefore, Foucault’s ideology of punishment doesn’t take into account the aspect of time, though he talks about the qualitative nature of it. From a reader’s point of view, one that has never been to prison of endured what the situation depicts, hearing the controlled state of being constantly watched and monitored and kept isolated will sound terrifying. If the reader was a long time occupant of said scenario, that environment has become what they know and ultimately what they’ve grown accustomed to, and wouldn’t have as strong an impact as what we would otherwise envision.

Though the essay succeeds in drawing a link within itself, it ends up becoming like a prison in that it’s a self regulating microcosm that doesn’t take into account of certain variables that would ultimately affect the actual outcome, which is shown through the failure of a panoptic prison.

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How do we share? The secret? How will we experience? The mysteries?

1 - Jan Verwoert, ‘How do we share? The secret? How will we expeience? The mysteries?” in Secret Societies

“Under such repressive conditions the yearning for freedom and transformation could have never been born and fostered, had it not been for secret societies..”

If we look at the fundamental origin of secret societies, it consisted of nothing more than a group of people who shared a similar interest that was ostracized by a greater power that the rest of society followed, in many cases, against a religious or political dominance. Without these oppressive bodies, secret societies would never have thrived because there wouldn’t be a need to remain in secret. As a result of this fact, it should be obvious to point out that secret societies have no place in contemporary life because there is no need for it if everyone is able to freely express and question ideas. However, without knowing exactly, this is not the case, as there is still an existence of secret societies, though without the extreme punishment of death or banishment.

It would be no different in saying that certain art movements can be defined as secret societies in that they largely come from breaking the rules and constraints of what was previously accepted and developed something different, which from the outright is rarely immediately accepted (i.e, the Vienna Secessionists).

There is also the interesting notion of what drives these existences, largely from the basic desire of wanting to feel included and being part of something, which gossiping allows, where two or more people share a secret and form a mutual connection of knowing the same thing together. In this way, we can also see a secret society as not something mystical or ritualistic, but rather a grownup group of people wanting to feel like they’re a part of something, regardless of what it is, and meeting discreetly for fear of what others might think.

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Postscript on Control Societies

1 - Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in Negotiations, 1995

From the essay, it would seem as though this shift away from a society of discipline towards a society of control largely takes place in the metaphysical realm. In disciplinary societies, we were bound by a physical power within a physical barrier such as a school, barracks, or prison. That is to say, everything that restrained or feared by was tangible in the physical realm. As we explore the differences with a control society, all those physical barriers are being replaced by ones that we no longer see or know about, such as debt or the unknown being that sits on top of the hierarchy of capitalism.

“Capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production...”

We’ve steadily moved away from paying for objects that are created for their use or purpose, and have now focused on buying objects for their brand worth which is nothing more than a nametag separating it from the same object in a different store. As Deleuze puts it, “what it (capitalism) seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities”, since these branded objects aren’t produced in a factory that is of the same calibre as the price it’s sold for, instead, “production is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World”.

In previous centuries, what was paid for was always a trade of object or skill, and few would have paid for miscellaneous items that contributed little other than for pure personal satisfaction, which presently we are all victim to. Everything had a purpose to its being as defined by ‘simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks’, as opposed to ‘thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage’.

It seems unlikely that we could return back to a time when the value of an object was dependant on the skill it allowed for rather than satisfaction, as this shift into a society of control continues to prey on the society of want instead of need.

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The order of things

1 - Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ in The Order of Things, 1970

There has always been a humane strive to establish order in all aspects of life. The fundamental theories and laws in science are resulted from the human thirst for order; to make sense of everything that happens in the universe. Even know, scientist struggle with trying to establish theories to a finite solution whereby everything begins to organise in a very ordered manner. One such example is the periodic table in which all the elements are ordered in a particular manner that justifies the reason for its nature.

The example of the aphasiacs provides a raw human state in needing to put things in groups that order themselves in one established manner. However the idea that their ways of classifying objects, which end up becoming a very complicated Venn diagram thereby forcing them to repeat over and over again to the brink of anxiety, is deemed unusual proves that normality is order. Some of the most interesting classifications of personal libraries boil down to making sense only in the head of the owner. Books can be grouped into a specific colour, to shapes and sizes, all working within one library, and as more books are added, the classification begins all over again and the list is reworked. This doesn’t result in a mental breakdown as the order exists, though not universally or normally accepted, but it doesn’t matter.

The inner working system of the idea of Order can exist on many different levels, but it is the need for everything to be included and grouped that forces the order to be specific which tends to result in a finite number of solutions, reverting back to the widely accepted dominance of classical science.

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VENN DIAGRAM

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