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'Art, Matter and Making'
7th March 2016
by Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Bevis Fenner I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Cheng-Chu Weng
Summary
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
The reading material selected for this PIRG session, ‘New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialism’ by James L. Smith, looked to understand some of the cross resonance between the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard and the materialism of the twenty-first century. Smith brought together Bachelard’s philosophy on the interpretation of elements, the poetics of reverie and material imagination with Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett (2010) and Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire and Water as Elemental Ideas by David Macauley (2010). The investigation into a new Bachelard emerging from the synthesis of ideas that engaged with a more ‘diffuse, more complex, network of images, an ecological awareness and an ethic of conservation’ (Smith 2012, 165) provided an engaging backdrop for our discussions around material, making and thinking.
According to the emerging trend of new materialists thought, matter is no longer considered to be inert but to hold transformative qualities to be ‘agentive, indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways.’ (Hickey-Moody and Page 2016, 2). Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant materialism’ also reinforces the idea that matter as ‘passive stuff, as raw, brute or inert’ is no longer applicable but instead ‘an ability to feel the vitality of the object, be it with the reason or the body, gives the option of a political engagement with the world that avoids deadening or flattening objects or reducing nature to utility.’ (Smith 2012, 158)
The power of matter to exert influence over the human subject makes us reconsider the agential properties of elements. Bennett argues for a world of ‘intimate liveliness and distributed agency’ where human interaction with matter that has ‘affect, bahaviour, vitality and agency’ questions the human-centric theories of action (ibid, 158). In a world such as this, agency is not solely the province of humans but as something that emerge through the configuration of human and non-human forces.
Theoretical physicist and professor of feminist studies Karan Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ also echoes the idea of distributed agency. According to Barad, ‘agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings’. Agency, therefore, ‘is not something possessed by humans or non-humans but is an ‘enactment’’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 56). Agency, for Barad, is something that emerges through the process of ‘intra-acting’, a term introduced by Barad to conceptualize the action between matters and to propose a new way of thinking causality.
The ‘object-oriented’ philosophy, where matter has power to hold and shape how humans perceive and interact with the world provided context for lively discussion to take place and during the session, we touched on other areas of theory such as Deleuze and Guttari’s idea of ‘whatness and thingness’ (‘A Thousand Plateaus’), the affect theory, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of affordance, Heidegger’s notion of ‘handling’ and ‘understanding’ (‘The Questions Concerning Technology’) as well as feminist theories, namely that of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz (‘Volatile Bodies’). Furthermore, contemporary geographical studies were mentioned as reference points to reflect on how our environmental perceptions (how we connected with the world of material stuff) may also be affected by the ways we interact with the material matters of the world.
The discussion developed into thoughts around embodied learning through material pedagogy and ‘material thinking’ (to borrow Paul Carter’s term). According to Hickey-Moody and Page, material pedagogy and materials thinking do not look at learning as a passive process of simply acquiring information but instead conceives learning to be a ‘relational process where theory is entangled with everyday practice’ (Hickey-Moody and Page 2016, 13). Learning through material thinking points to a process of ‘becoming’ through the relational interaction of body and matter, which is different from understanding using cognitive faculties.
As research artists, the idea that materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by artists, but rather the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence that come into play to interact with the artists’ creativity, resonated with all of us and the session concluded with a small collaged postcard-art making workshop in an attempt to ‘join the hand, mind and eye’ (Carter 2004, xiii).
Whilst choosing the materials for the collage, everyone was asked to be conscious about the way they chose the images and handled the materials. We spent around twenty minutes to create the small artworks which was followed by a presentation of the works around the table and a short discussion. The presentation revealed interesting insights into how the artist’s mind worked during the process of making. Intuition seemed to be backed up with certain habitual characteristics for choosing colours and textures of the materials as well as how they were physically handled.
Studies around new materialism and material thinking offer rich grounds to think about our relationship with the material world around us. As we learn more about the world that surrounds us, we proceed to learn how to better correspond with it. As Tim Ingold emphasizes, ‘the mind is very much connected with the body where the thinking corresponds to what is happening to the material.’ (Ingold 2013, 7). The potentials of relational interaction between human and non-human matter that new materialists draw out are exciting perspective to broaden and transform our sense of Being in the world.
click here for list of bibliography
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
Bachelard and Deleuze and Guattari, amongst others, had posited the idea that objects/ materials are not inert but have a vitality of their own. These philosophers are being revisited and recontextualised for current thinking, especially in terms of ecology (Jane Bennett) and science (David Macauley). Using as impetus a paper[1] written by an Australian PhD candidate in 2012, in which Bachelard’s ideas are closely linked with those of Bennett and Macauley, Noriko led our discussion on how we might rethink our strategies on eg. climate change if we were to engage with matter with the acknowledgement of its vitality. We struggled for a while to come to terms with the whole notion of everything having potentiality to either change itself, be changed or be the cause of change.
This notion has implications for our approach to art practice: artists, like philosophers, are attempting to engage with materials/matter/ideas in a way that cannot be quantifiable but enables creative development through recognition of the materials’ affect, i.e. their potentiality.
This led into discussion of the relational and reciprocal process inherent in working with tools and materials, the interrogation of habitudinal gestures and the artist’s role in subverting these.
We ended by trying to put this thinking into practice through a simple collage workshop: we each created a postcard sized piece of work and shared our thinking about our decision making about materials, form and meaning.
Jane A Bennett
Thank you, Noriko, for a stimulating session introducing the shift in focus onto the role played by materials in the interrelation of theory and practice. The practical session following the discussion emphasised the value of the visual enactment of thinking. Although I welcome this shift in thinking which acknowledges the value of practice as well as theory, it is something which artist researchers already know well. I felt that the texts were written from a place of thinking rather than of making. They ‘fetishized ‘materials’ rather than thought about them on a practical level which, in the end, is how we engage with them.
There is a difference between what we write from a logical, theoretical position and what we discover when we actually get our hands dirty and work with materials. (Ref: Tim Ingold, Making, 2013, Routledge.) Because materials don’t always do what we expect them to do. Whilst I found Karen Barad’s claims verged on anthropomorphising materials, the re-visualising of their properties does reinvigorate how we think about them. Therefore, I attempted to think through you question ‘How do you apply material thinking in your research?’ while actually using materials and see what answers the materials themselves gave me.
From my own experience, I know that I need to get the balance right between reading and writing and making. There is something that happens in the process of making, when the hands engage with the materials and thinking takes a back seat, that allows space for all those questions that arise from reading and thinking to jostle for position and sort themselves out.
On this occasion, I took out a box of pastels to play with to aid the thinking process and began drawing the side of a stick across the paper and gently rubbing the powder in. I then experimented with the edge of the stick to make hard, fine lines. The nature and condition of the materials themselves tend to dictate how we use them.
In describing this process retrospectively, I realise I had been using the pastels in a familiar way and it is sometimes in the imagination that new ways to use them arise. Thinking back to the PIRG Chalk workshop, because the materials were virtually valueless we felt free to use them with impunity and break/throw/crush them at will. Perhaps we need to take materials out of their usual context to free up how we think of using them. And allow ourselves the freedom to play with them to see where they take us – or, perhaps I should say, we take them.
Bevis Fenner
Noriko led an interesting and stimulating session in which she built upon the group’s understandings of material thinking, previously explored in relation to Bachelard and tentatively disseminated via the group’s recent exhibition at the Link gallery, Winchester. The session was split into two halves, the first focusing on theory and the second on making. Noriko began by outlining ‘new materialism’ - a recent development in social sciences and humanities research that draws upon aspects of Husserlian phenomenology and the embodied and haptic ideas of Merleau-Ponty and takes them further, beyond notions of subjective consciousness and the body as primary agents of material understanding and transformation. In other words, to develop understandings of a material world that is not simply a collection of objects to be upheld by the mind and worked upon by the body. It is a recognition of the forces at work in the material world and how they work upon us; our subjective understandings and our bodily responses and reactions.
The emerging trend of new materialism posits the idea of rethinking materials not as passive objects but agentive matter, active within affective networks of human and non-human forces. One of the key ideas within this, is the notion of affect. The term originates in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza but is developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988). In his notes from the book, translator Brian Massumi defines affect and affection as the following:
AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection (Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies) (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: xvi).
Whilst this definition is quite broad, it does hint at the idea that our experiences in the material world can affect our capacity for bodily action. Moreover, it has political and ethical implications in terms of the extent to which our capacity for bodily action within the material world is not only habitual, but habituated through apparatuses of power. This, for example, is particularly true of architecture and ‘public’ spaces. In this direction, Belinda described the notion of affordances or the consideration of what an object, building or space requires you to do. Cheng-Chu pointed out the similarities between the idea of bodily habituation and Heidegger’s notion of ready-to-hand, the idea that we already know things – a hammer for example – before we attempt to use them. Conversely, habitual relations with things also bring out their qualities beyond our expectations. They allow us to move beyond assumptions about what things are, thus enabling us to consider what things can become. Repeated action can be transformative over time, as it allows individuals to occupy or habituate different spatial and temporal frameworks, much in the same way as mindfulness meditation. For example, if we use a hammer ‘knock-up’ a shelf in a hurry because we need to get our books or materials off the floor in order to start work on an urgent project, then the action of hammering has very different implications from using it to make plot dividers on an allotment garden over the duration of a warm spring day. Here the longer duration and environmental factors enable a re-habituation of hammering. What appears to be repetitive or mundane becomes a two-way dialogue with the material world in which, by interacting with things in a non-subjective way, things ‘intra-act’ upon us subjectively. They change us in small ways and enable the process of becoming or as Deleuze put’s it ‘...habit draws something new from repetition – namely difference (Deleuze, 1994). In this direction I suggested that the idea of performance and performativity – as theorised by Judith Butler – was a way of thinking about bodily habituation.
We also discussed the importance of new materialism in breaking down Cartesian relations of subject / object or binary divisions of inside / outside. In particular Yonat explained her thinking on maternal subjectivity, the abject and the maternal body. There was a suggestion that thinking in terms of affects theories and material thinking provides an empirical ethics that enables us to move beyond the more dogmatic aspects of feminism and towards a way of thinking about the feminine. Belinda’s ideas on architecture and spatial design suggested that thinking beyond objectification was an attentive ethics very much aligned a feminine way of understanding the world beyond insides and outsides. I suggested a connection between Bachelard’s idea of material imagination and Deleuzian thinking. In particular the possibility that we can connect with the natural world without attempting to anthropomorphisise it; we can understand its ‘thingness’ and opposed to its ‘whatness’. One member of the group brought out this idea in relation to naturalist’s ideas about living like or amongst animals in order to understand them rather then merely observe them as objects. I recalled the recent story of a naturalist living underground and digging through mud to experience the sensations and temporality of being a badger. In Deleuzian thinking this researcher’s approach is less about being than becoming-badger; of reaching out from beyond the body to affective connections through which ‘badger-ness’ can become a thought rather than a stereotype. Deleuze and Guattari have a word for the situated qualities and infinite contingencies of material thinking that move us beyond subjectivity but can reconstitute us as individuals in the process of becoming. They call it haecceity:
There is a mode of individuation very different from from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance… A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing of a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 261).
We struggled as a group to consider material relations on a molecular level. After all, as Jane pointed out, we can’t just pick up a coffee mug and stretch it! Likewise, can this inert object really talk to us as a sentient being? I reflected on this for some time after the session, and found the idea of an agentive coffee mug very difficult. Then I started to think about the language people use to describe their relations with coffee: “I’m going for a coffee”, “can I get a coffee”, “let’s go for a Starbucks”. This made me think of branding and the idea of consumer objects – of fetishism. But beyond this, I started to think about the absurdity of thinking of “a coffee” as an object. There seemed to be the disconnectedness in thinking about a dynamic liquid (on a molecular level), which ‘intra-acts’ on our senses and quite literally on our insides, merely as a consumer fetish object. After all, we don’t let our coffees go cold and put them on display shelves! Instead, we experience coffee through sight, smell and touch, and beyond those senses, through steam, distortion of light, and through the qualities and atmospheres of the day, the hour, the moment. Coffee does so much more than just being an object. It has what Barad (2007) calls ‘nonhuman agency’. It can help us go beyond ourselves, to experience the world outside of our desire for a hot beverage in a chunky branded paper cup. Coffee, through its affective relations can become part of what Böhme (1993) calls ‘atmospheres’:
'We are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them. We are also unsure where they are. They seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze' (Böhme, 1993 in Hawkins, 2015: 291).
In the second half of session we inadvertently questioned the habitual nature of making, as each person in the group had to respond to the materials that Noriko had brought by producing a postcard. After we had cut, stuck and drawn, we reflected on what we had made, both individually and as a group. One of the things that became apparent from this exercise was that each of us had very different and personal ways of responding to and engaging with the materials. There was something unique about the methods and processes each of us used, which seemed to represent a kind of material thinking – thinking-through-things. Moreover, in sharing a space and materials, and in talking about what we had made, there was a connection that brought us together. Whilst this notion seems unsubstantiated and vague – particularly considering many in the group have been meeting for over two years – we also welcomed two new members in this session (Tessa and Belinda). And on a personal level, I felt that their communication of their chosen materials, methods and processes told me more about them as thinkers than conversation alone, which can often be a way of reaching consensus rather than expressing an individual’s inter and ‘intra-action’ with the world.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Hawkins, H. (2015). Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters. Edited by Hawkins, H. and Straughan, E. Farnham: Ashgate.
Belinda Michell
Notes and thoughts in progresss
Writing space, plan, plain and matter.
‘inscapes’
A mug.
Matter, mater, mother, speak back,
particles of clay, moulded form.
Handled, held, I sipped my tea.
A table.
Brown Formica, steel grey legs,
poly prop chairs, scrape across the floor.
Cold steel mingles under, feet shift.
A list.
Black lines, folded sheets, circling letters,
fibres of cellulose pulp, meshed as a piece.
Tasted, semolina and almond paste.
A room.
White paint smeared across the walls,
electric lights on, kettle beaming.
Sky enters through plates of glass.
A building.
Door swing, push, lean on, pull handles,
step through, a long corridor, a grey plain.
Breathe in place, open out and hold again.
A city
Grains of gravel bound with fluid,
a floor pitted, memories shift below.
Wrapped in a coat, stamping the ground.
As part of the Noriko’s making session, I reflected on how much my work is based in the making of design, its materiality, through the habituated use of a cutting knife, mat and steel rule, the love of a precise line. I had the pleasure of cutting into a book about interior design where interiors are about comfort, objects, curtains and their organisation. Of cutting through and into its depth, to allow multi-layered surfaces to emerge and to re-engage text based material relationally to a ‘new materialism,’ where the ‘matter’ is seen as active.
As a designer I work with plan, section and elevation, a 0.18 pen or clutch pencil. The formal and conceptual are valued over the material (Ed Lloyd Thomas, K. 2007, Material Matters, Architecture and material practice, Routledge). Time and time again I return to material practices as a way to engage with affect and the construction of space and place making. The workshop supported an affirmation of my practice within the context of an art school, to re-engage it with material conversations.
Yonat Nitzan-Green
I would like to briefly respond to Noriko’s question: ‘How do you apply material thinking in your research?’ through unpacking the term ‘material thinking’.
‘To understand the world through “material thinking” (Carter 2004) rather than conceptual thinking requires a particular responsiveness to the way materials are behaving within the process of making. Material thinking occurs in the joining of hand, eye and mind.’ (Suzuki-Bosco, ‘Art, Matter and Making’, 2016).
What can be said about this ‘particular responsiveness’?
How to understand ‘the way materials are behaving’?
Is material thinking really occurs only ‘in the joining of hand, eye and mind’?
Artists work with a huge variety of objects and materials taken from the art tradition, nature, the everyday, or the rare and expensive. Each artist chooses his or her particular materials. Why do artists choose to engage with some materials only? This question may seek its answers in the psychological and psychoanalytical world. I believe that artists’ engagement with and responds to materials is a mutual, two-way choice. Just as I choose my materials, the materials choose me. As an artist, I am interested in all materials, but to a varied degrees. The materials that inspire me and call for my attention come from my bio-socio-psychological her-story. These include bodily materials, as well as earth and stone, the materials that surrounded me during my childhood in kibbutz Heftzi-bah (Israel). So, one aspect of this ‘particular responsiveness’ is memory.
A ‘second round’ of engagement with bodily materials and childhood memory occurs for women in the experiences of pregnancy, birth and child-raising. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the ‘abject’ relates to the maternal body. Kristeva writes: ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1982, p. 4). Pregnancy, for example, is a state when a woman finds herself between one or more beings which may undermine the perception of her identity. Her organism has increased, there is more material in her body; material that counts as life from a specific point in time. Pregnancy is phenomenological. One may read psychological theories, but first of all, to my mind, it is a lesson in listening to one’s own body, when even this fact becomes blurred (“is it my body or our bodies?”). Why listening? Because being pregnant is a good example of a situation where the sense of vision is not enough. Indeed, it is a kind of listening which involves all the senses working together. A second aspect of this ‘particular responsiveness’ is, therefore, of a phenomenological nature.
Listening is fundamental in tuning in to ‘the way materials are behaving’ and therefore is in itself material thinking. In his phenomenological inquiry of the poetic image Gaston Bachelard employs Eugene Minkowsky’s phenomenology of reverberations. Bachelard writes: ‘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, 1994, p. xxii). If we understand matter as reverberations, or resonances, then the gap between ‘us’ and ‘it’ becomes smaller. As James L. Smith writes in reference to the political scientist Jane Bennett’s book, Vibrant Matter: ‘By dwelling within a world in which matter has affect, behaviour, vitality and agency, the us and the it become intertwined.’ (James L. Smith ‘New Bachelards? Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialism’, p. 158). I prefer to imagine that there is a gap, a small gap, between ‘us’ and ‘it’ in which we can say ‘yes’ to the invitation, extended by the repercussions, to create meaning through taking responsibility for our actions in the world.
Cheng-Chu Weng
The seminar centres upon the discussion of the ‘material thinking’. Noriko Suzuki-Bosco draws up Paul Carter’s material thinking theory to question: How do you apply material thinking in your research? This opening up the definition of the material, and point out the delicate relationship between the material and the body (particular means the human flesh). Suzuki-Bosco suggests us to think material wildly, which is not limit to the tools or objects, as she said: “Materials are therefore not just passive objects to be used by the artists but rather the materials themselves have their own intelligence that come into play when interacting with the artist’s creative intelligence” (2016: 1). Along the similar line to Martin Heidegger’s intentionality, this is a theory that against the Western philosophical tradition, divide the relationship between people and things, or subjects and objects, for example. Heidegger suggests “in reality, things can show themselves to us in a variety of different ways, depending on the kind of involvement that we have with them” (cited in Julian Thomas, 2006: 46). On the other hand, the sense of involvement perhaps based on the practicing, to draw Heidegger’s famous example, hammer. Through practicing, the method of hammering is building up in the physical engagement, in the consequence that, the hammer is ‘ready-to –hand’. As a practice-based Ph.D. candidate believes the process of creation is a practicing of the intentionality.
James L. Smith referring Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter as an example that the artworks exist as nonhuman bodies, which is able to help us to understand Gaston Bachelard’s material imagination. Moreover, to connect this theoretical debate with the personal experience, whilst Bennet said: “The power of the object could, if reframed, be a kind of impersonal affect…” (cited in Smith, 2012: 159), reminds me the Drawing Together Project with Dr Sunil Manghani; the international relationship between the participants and objects (chalks) truly show the power of object as Bennet described. It is hard to persuade people to use chalk and mark on the ground, yet once people hold chalks, they start to enjoy the international phenomena or they are in the material imagination moment. However, the other artist, Smith refers to is David Macauley, who’s work involve in the certain ‘material element’, dynamic, for example. This draw out the idea of “mobility of images” in Bachelard’s Air and Dreams account, the movement as the feature of the materials, which become a suitable term for my practice; the practice particular engagement with the Japanese tissue paper, for instance.
The making workshop could see the elements of the ‘ready to hand’, each one has a different method to engage with the materials. Although this is a workshop in a short time, the process of making could see each of us has embodied and applied the material thinking in the different ways. Finally, thanks, Suzuki-Bosco lead a useful and joyful session.
7th March 2016
by Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Tessa Atton I Jane Bennett I Bevis Fenner I Belinda Mitchell I Yonat Nitzan-Green I Cheng-Chu Weng
Summary
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
The reading material selected for this PIRG session, ‘New Bachelards?: Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialism’ by James L. Smith, looked to understand some of the cross resonance between the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard and the materialism of the twenty-first century. Smith brought together Bachelard’s philosophy on the interpretation of elements, the poetics of reverie and material imagination with Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett (2010) and Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire and Water as Elemental Ideas by David Macauley (2010). The investigation into a new Bachelard emerging from the synthesis of ideas that engaged with a more ‘diffuse, more complex, network of images, an ecological awareness and an ethic of conservation’ (Smith 2012, 165) provided an engaging backdrop for our discussions around material, making and thinking.
According to the emerging trend of new materialists thought, matter is no longer considered to be inert but to hold transformative qualities to be ‘agentive, indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways.’ (Hickey-Moody and Page 2016, 2). Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant materialism’ also reinforces the idea that matter as ‘passive stuff, as raw, brute or inert’ is no longer applicable but instead ‘an ability to feel the vitality of the object, be it with the reason or the body, gives the option of a political engagement with the world that avoids deadening or flattening objects or reducing nature to utility.’ (Smith 2012, 158)
The power of matter to exert influence over the human subject makes us reconsider the agential properties of elements. Bennett argues for a world of ‘intimate liveliness and distributed agency’ where human interaction with matter that has ‘affect, bahaviour, vitality and agency’ questions the human-centric theories of action (ibid, 158). In a world such as this, agency is not solely the province of humans but as something that emerge through the configuration of human and non-human forces.
Theoretical physicist and professor of feminist studies Karan Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ also echoes the idea of distributed agency. According to Barad, ‘agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings’. Agency, therefore, ‘is not something possessed by humans or non-humans but is an ‘enactment’’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 56). Agency, for Barad, is something that emerges through the process of ‘intra-acting’, a term introduced by Barad to conceptualize the action between matters and to propose a new way of thinking causality.
The ‘object-oriented’ philosophy, where matter has power to hold and shape how humans perceive and interact with the world provided context for lively discussion to take place and during the session, we touched on other areas of theory such as Deleuze and Guttari’s idea of ‘whatness and thingness’ (‘A Thousand Plateaus’), the affect theory, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of affordance, Heidegger’s notion of ‘handling’ and ‘understanding’ (‘The Questions Concerning Technology’) as well as feminist theories, namely that of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz (‘Volatile Bodies’). Furthermore, contemporary geographical studies were mentioned as reference points to reflect on how our environmental perceptions (how we connected with the world of material stuff) may also be affected by the ways we interact with the material matters of the world.
The discussion developed into thoughts around embodied learning through material pedagogy and ‘material thinking’ (to borrow Paul Carter’s term). According to Hickey-Moody and Page, material pedagogy and materials thinking do not look at learning as a passive process of simply acquiring information but instead conceives learning to be a ‘relational process where theory is entangled with everyday practice’ (Hickey-Moody and Page 2016, 13). Learning through material thinking points to a process of ‘becoming’ through the relational interaction of body and matter, which is different from understanding using cognitive faculties.
As research artists, the idea that materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by artists, but rather the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence that come into play to interact with the artists’ creativity, resonated with all of us and the session concluded with a small collaged postcard-art making workshop in an attempt to ‘join the hand, mind and eye’ (Carter 2004, xiii).
Whilst choosing the materials for the collage, everyone was asked to be conscious about the way they chose the images and handled the materials. We spent around twenty minutes to create the small artworks which was followed by a presentation of the works around the table and a short discussion. The presentation revealed interesting insights into how the artist’s mind worked during the process of making. Intuition seemed to be backed up with certain habitual characteristics for choosing colours and textures of the materials as well as how they were physically handled.
Studies around new materialism and material thinking offer rich grounds to think about our relationship with the material world around us. As we learn more about the world that surrounds us, we proceed to learn how to better correspond with it. As Tim Ingold emphasizes, ‘the mind is very much connected with the body where the thinking corresponds to what is happening to the material.’ (Ingold 2013, 7). The potentials of relational interaction between human and non-human matter that new materialists draw out are exciting perspective to broaden and transform our sense of Being in the world.
click here for list of bibliography
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
Bachelard and Deleuze and Guattari, amongst others, had posited the idea that objects/ materials are not inert but have a vitality of their own. These philosophers are being revisited and recontextualised for current thinking, especially in terms of ecology (Jane Bennett) and science (David Macauley). Using as impetus a paper[1] written by an Australian PhD candidate in 2012, in which Bachelard’s ideas are closely linked with those of Bennett and Macauley, Noriko led our discussion on how we might rethink our strategies on eg. climate change if we were to engage with matter with the acknowledgement of its vitality. We struggled for a while to come to terms with the whole notion of everything having potentiality to either change itself, be changed or be the cause of change.
This notion has implications for our approach to art practice: artists, like philosophers, are attempting to engage with materials/matter/ideas in a way that cannot be quantifiable but enables creative development through recognition of the materials’ affect, i.e. their potentiality.
This led into discussion of the relational and reciprocal process inherent in working with tools and materials, the interrogation of habitudinal gestures and the artist’s role in subverting these.
We ended by trying to put this thinking into practice through a simple collage workshop: we each created a postcard sized piece of work and shared our thinking about our decision making about materials, form and meaning.
Jane A Bennett
Thank you, Noriko, for a stimulating session introducing the shift in focus onto the role played by materials in the interrelation of theory and practice. The practical session following the discussion emphasised the value of the visual enactment of thinking. Although I welcome this shift in thinking which acknowledges the value of practice as well as theory, it is something which artist researchers already know well. I felt that the texts were written from a place of thinking rather than of making. They ‘fetishized ‘materials’ rather than thought about them on a practical level which, in the end, is how we engage with them.
There is a difference between what we write from a logical, theoretical position and what we discover when we actually get our hands dirty and work with materials. (Ref: Tim Ingold, Making, 2013, Routledge.) Because materials don’t always do what we expect them to do. Whilst I found Karen Barad’s claims verged on anthropomorphising materials, the re-visualising of their properties does reinvigorate how we think about them. Therefore, I attempted to think through you question ‘How do you apply material thinking in your research?’ while actually using materials and see what answers the materials themselves gave me.
From my own experience, I know that I need to get the balance right between reading and writing and making. There is something that happens in the process of making, when the hands engage with the materials and thinking takes a back seat, that allows space for all those questions that arise from reading and thinking to jostle for position and sort themselves out.
On this occasion, I took out a box of pastels to play with to aid the thinking process and began drawing the side of a stick across the paper and gently rubbing the powder in. I then experimented with the edge of the stick to make hard, fine lines. The nature and condition of the materials themselves tend to dictate how we use them.
In describing this process retrospectively, I realise I had been using the pastels in a familiar way and it is sometimes in the imagination that new ways to use them arise. Thinking back to the PIRG Chalk workshop, because the materials were virtually valueless we felt free to use them with impunity and break/throw/crush them at will. Perhaps we need to take materials out of their usual context to free up how we think of using them. And allow ourselves the freedom to play with them to see where they take us – or, perhaps I should say, we take them.
Bevis Fenner
Noriko led an interesting and stimulating session in which she built upon the group’s understandings of material thinking, previously explored in relation to Bachelard and tentatively disseminated via the group’s recent exhibition at the Link gallery, Winchester. The session was split into two halves, the first focusing on theory and the second on making. Noriko began by outlining ‘new materialism’ - a recent development in social sciences and humanities research that draws upon aspects of Husserlian phenomenology and the embodied and haptic ideas of Merleau-Ponty and takes them further, beyond notions of subjective consciousness and the body as primary agents of material understanding and transformation. In other words, to develop understandings of a material world that is not simply a collection of objects to be upheld by the mind and worked upon by the body. It is a recognition of the forces at work in the material world and how they work upon us; our subjective understandings and our bodily responses and reactions.
The emerging trend of new materialism posits the idea of rethinking materials not as passive objects but agentive matter, active within affective networks of human and non-human forces. One of the key ideas within this, is the notion of affect. The term originates in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza but is developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1988). In his notes from the book, translator Brian Massumi defines affect and affection as the following:
AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection (Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies) (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: xvi).
Whilst this definition is quite broad, it does hint at the idea that our experiences in the material world can affect our capacity for bodily action. Moreover, it has political and ethical implications in terms of the extent to which our capacity for bodily action within the material world is not only habitual, but habituated through apparatuses of power. This, for example, is particularly true of architecture and ‘public’ spaces. In this direction, Belinda described the notion of affordances or the consideration of what an object, building or space requires you to do. Cheng-Chu pointed out the similarities between the idea of bodily habituation and Heidegger’s notion of ready-to-hand, the idea that we already know things – a hammer for example – before we attempt to use them. Conversely, habitual relations with things also bring out their qualities beyond our expectations. They allow us to move beyond assumptions about what things are, thus enabling us to consider what things can become. Repeated action can be transformative over time, as it allows individuals to occupy or habituate different spatial and temporal frameworks, much in the same way as mindfulness meditation. For example, if we use a hammer ‘knock-up’ a shelf in a hurry because we need to get our books or materials off the floor in order to start work on an urgent project, then the action of hammering has very different implications from using it to make plot dividers on an allotment garden over the duration of a warm spring day. Here the longer duration and environmental factors enable a re-habituation of hammering. What appears to be repetitive or mundane becomes a two-way dialogue with the material world in which, by interacting with things in a non-subjective way, things ‘intra-act’ upon us subjectively. They change us in small ways and enable the process of becoming or as Deleuze put’s it ‘...habit draws something new from repetition – namely difference (Deleuze, 1994). In this direction I suggested that the idea of performance and performativity – as theorised by Judith Butler – was a way of thinking about bodily habituation.
We also discussed the importance of new materialism in breaking down Cartesian relations of subject / object or binary divisions of inside / outside. In particular Yonat explained her thinking on maternal subjectivity, the abject and the maternal body. There was a suggestion that thinking in terms of affects theories and material thinking provides an empirical ethics that enables us to move beyond the more dogmatic aspects of feminism and towards a way of thinking about the feminine. Belinda’s ideas on architecture and spatial design suggested that thinking beyond objectification was an attentive ethics very much aligned a feminine way of understanding the world beyond insides and outsides. I suggested a connection between Bachelard’s idea of material imagination and Deleuzian thinking. In particular the possibility that we can connect with the natural world without attempting to anthropomorphisise it; we can understand its ‘thingness’ and opposed to its ‘whatness’. One member of the group brought out this idea in relation to naturalist’s ideas about living like or amongst animals in order to understand them rather then merely observe them as objects. I recalled the recent story of a naturalist living underground and digging through mud to experience the sensations and temporality of being a badger. In Deleuzian thinking this researcher’s approach is less about being than becoming-badger; of reaching out from beyond the body to affective connections through which ‘badger-ness’ can become a thought rather than a stereotype. Deleuze and Guattari have a word for the situated qualities and infinite contingencies of material thinking that move us beyond subjectivity but can reconstitute us as individuals in the process of becoming. They call it haecceity:
There is a mode of individuation very different from from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance… A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing of a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 261).
We struggled as a group to consider material relations on a molecular level. After all, as Jane pointed out, we can’t just pick up a coffee mug and stretch it! Likewise, can this inert object really talk to us as a sentient being? I reflected on this for some time after the session, and found the idea of an agentive coffee mug very difficult. Then I started to think about the language people use to describe their relations with coffee: “I’m going for a coffee”, “can I get a coffee”, “let’s go for a Starbucks”. This made me think of branding and the idea of consumer objects – of fetishism. But beyond this, I started to think about the absurdity of thinking of “a coffee” as an object. There seemed to be the disconnectedness in thinking about a dynamic liquid (on a molecular level), which ‘intra-acts’ on our senses and quite literally on our insides, merely as a consumer fetish object. After all, we don’t let our coffees go cold and put them on display shelves! Instead, we experience coffee through sight, smell and touch, and beyond those senses, through steam, distortion of light, and through the qualities and atmospheres of the day, the hour, the moment. Coffee does so much more than just being an object. It has what Barad (2007) calls ‘nonhuman agency’. It can help us go beyond ourselves, to experience the world outside of our desire for a hot beverage in a chunky branded paper cup. Coffee, through its affective relations can become part of what Böhme (1993) calls ‘atmospheres’:
'We are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them. We are also unsure where they are. They seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze' (Böhme, 1993 in Hawkins, 2015: 291).
In the second half of session we inadvertently questioned the habitual nature of making, as each person in the group had to respond to the materials that Noriko had brought by producing a postcard. After we had cut, stuck and drawn, we reflected on what we had made, both individually and as a group. One of the things that became apparent from this exercise was that each of us had very different and personal ways of responding to and engaging with the materials. There was something unique about the methods and processes each of us used, which seemed to represent a kind of material thinking – thinking-through-things. Moreover, in sharing a space and materials, and in talking about what we had made, there was a connection that brought us together. Whilst this notion seems unsubstantiated and vague – particularly considering many in the group have been meeting for over two years – we also welcomed two new members in this session (Tessa and Belinda). And on a personal level, I felt that their communication of their chosen materials, methods and processes told me more about them as thinkers than conversation alone, which can often be a way of reaching consensus rather than expressing an individual’s inter and ‘intra-action’ with the world.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Hawkins, H. (2015). Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters. Edited by Hawkins, H. and Straughan, E. Farnham: Ashgate.
Belinda Michell
Notes and thoughts in progresss
Writing space, plan, plain and matter.
‘inscapes’
A mug.
Matter, mater, mother, speak back,
particles of clay, moulded form.
Handled, held, I sipped my tea.
A table.
Brown Formica, steel grey legs,
poly prop chairs, scrape across the floor.
Cold steel mingles under, feet shift.
A list.
Black lines, folded sheets, circling letters,
fibres of cellulose pulp, meshed as a piece.
Tasted, semolina and almond paste.
A room.
White paint smeared across the walls,
electric lights on, kettle beaming.
Sky enters through plates of glass.
A building.
Door swing, push, lean on, pull handles,
step through, a long corridor, a grey plain.
Breathe in place, open out and hold again.
A city
Grains of gravel bound with fluid,
a floor pitted, memories shift below.
Wrapped in a coat, stamping the ground.
As part of the Noriko’s making session, I reflected on how much my work is based in the making of design, its materiality, through the habituated use of a cutting knife, mat and steel rule, the love of a precise line. I had the pleasure of cutting into a book about interior design where interiors are about comfort, objects, curtains and their organisation. Of cutting through and into its depth, to allow multi-layered surfaces to emerge and to re-engage text based material relationally to a ‘new materialism,’ where the ‘matter’ is seen as active.
As a designer I work with plan, section and elevation, a 0.18 pen or clutch pencil. The formal and conceptual are valued over the material (Ed Lloyd Thomas, K. 2007, Material Matters, Architecture and material practice, Routledge). Time and time again I return to material practices as a way to engage with affect and the construction of space and place making. The workshop supported an affirmation of my practice within the context of an art school, to re-engage it with material conversations.
Yonat Nitzan-Green
I would like to briefly respond to Noriko’s question: ‘How do you apply material thinking in your research?’ through unpacking the term ‘material thinking’.
‘To understand the world through “material thinking” (Carter 2004) rather than conceptual thinking requires a particular responsiveness to the way materials are behaving within the process of making. Material thinking occurs in the joining of hand, eye and mind.’ (Suzuki-Bosco, ‘Art, Matter and Making’, 2016).
What can be said about this ‘particular responsiveness’?
How to understand ‘the way materials are behaving’?
Is material thinking really occurs only ‘in the joining of hand, eye and mind’?
Artists work with a huge variety of objects and materials taken from the art tradition, nature, the everyday, or the rare and expensive. Each artist chooses his or her particular materials. Why do artists choose to engage with some materials only? This question may seek its answers in the psychological and psychoanalytical world. I believe that artists’ engagement with and responds to materials is a mutual, two-way choice. Just as I choose my materials, the materials choose me. As an artist, I am interested in all materials, but to a varied degrees. The materials that inspire me and call for my attention come from my bio-socio-psychological her-story. These include bodily materials, as well as earth and stone, the materials that surrounded me during my childhood in kibbutz Heftzi-bah (Israel). So, one aspect of this ‘particular responsiveness’ is memory.
A ‘second round’ of engagement with bodily materials and childhood memory occurs for women in the experiences of pregnancy, birth and child-raising. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the ‘abject’ relates to the maternal body. Kristeva writes: ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1982, p. 4). Pregnancy, for example, is a state when a woman finds herself between one or more beings which may undermine the perception of her identity. Her organism has increased, there is more material in her body; material that counts as life from a specific point in time. Pregnancy is phenomenological. One may read psychological theories, but first of all, to my mind, it is a lesson in listening to one’s own body, when even this fact becomes blurred (“is it my body or our bodies?”). Why listening? Because being pregnant is a good example of a situation where the sense of vision is not enough. Indeed, it is a kind of listening which involves all the senses working together. A second aspect of this ‘particular responsiveness’ is, therefore, of a phenomenological nature.
Listening is fundamental in tuning in to ‘the way materials are behaving’ and therefore is in itself material thinking. In his phenomenological inquiry of the poetic image Gaston Bachelard employs Eugene Minkowsky’s phenomenology of reverberations. Bachelard writes: ‘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, 1994, p. xxii). If we understand matter as reverberations, or resonances, then the gap between ‘us’ and ‘it’ becomes smaller. As James L. Smith writes in reference to the political scientist Jane Bennett’s book, Vibrant Matter: ‘By dwelling within a world in which matter has affect, behaviour, vitality and agency, the us and the it become intertwined.’ (James L. Smith ‘New Bachelards? Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialism’, p. 158). I prefer to imagine that there is a gap, a small gap, between ‘us’ and ‘it’ in which we can say ‘yes’ to the invitation, extended by the repercussions, to create meaning through taking responsibility for our actions in the world.
Cheng-Chu Weng
The seminar centres upon the discussion of the ‘material thinking’. Noriko Suzuki-Bosco draws up Paul Carter’s material thinking theory to question: How do you apply material thinking in your research? This opening up the definition of the material, and point out the delicate relationship between the material and the body (particular means the human flesh). Suzuki-Bosco suggests us to think material wildly, which is not limit to the tools or objects, as she said: “Materials are therefore not just passive objects to be used by the artists but rather the materials themselves have their own intelligence that come into play when interacting with the artist’s creative intelligence” (2016: 1). Along the similar line to Martin Heidegger’s intentionality, this is a theory that against the Western philosophical tradition, divide the relationship between people and things, or subjects and objects, for example. Heidegger suggests “in reality, things can show themselves to us in a variety of different ways, depending on the kind of involvement that we have with them” (cited in Julian Thomas, 2006: 46). On the other hand, the sense of involvement perhaps based on the practicing, to draw Heidegger’s famous example, hammer. Through practicing, the method of hammering is building up in the physical engagement, in the consequence that, the hammer is ‘ready-to –hand’. As a practice-based Ph.D. candidate believes the process of creation is a practicing of the intentionality.
James L. Smith referring Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter as an example that the artworks exist as nonhuman bodies, which is able to help us to understand Gaston Bachelard’s material imagination. Moreover, to connect this theoretical debate with the personal experience, whilst Bennet said: “The power of the object could, if reframed, be a kind of impersonal affect…” (cited in Smith, 2012: 159), reminds me the Drawing Together Project with Dr Sunil Manghani; the international relationship between the participants and objects (chalks) truly show the power of object as Bennet described. It is hard to persuade people to use chalk and mark on the ground, yet once people hold chalks, they start to enjoy the international phenomena or they are in the material imagination moment. However, the other artist, Smith refers to is David Macauley, who’s work involve in the certain ‘material element’, dynamic, for example. This draw out the idea of “mobility of images” in Bachelard’s Air and Dreams account, the movement as the feature of the materials, which become a suitable term for my practice; the practice particular engagement with the Japanese tissue paper, for instance.
The making workshop could see the elements of the ‘ready to hand’, each one has a different method to engage with the materials. Although this is a workshop in a short time, the process of making could see each of us has embodied and applied the material thinking in the different ways. Finally, thanks, Suzuki-Bosco lead a useful and joyful session.