When I share my NY stories with my friends, they immediately want to know whether I had an experience of the 'real', whether I felt 'the artistic sublime', if I saw 'that moment of truth', and so on.
Quite frankly, I don't know.
I'm not even too sure about the
solidity of these categories. A unitary notion of the real, the
true, the authentic as opposed to the imagined, the spectacular,
the representational?
Experience is far more complex to
evaluate: It's multiple, fragmented, contradictory.
I set out to experiment with techniques
of dislocation in order to sever - or at least distance - myself from conventional
experiences of time, space and practice. It was my aim to open up a space
for creative play, for story-telling, for conscious living through distanciation
and defamiliarization. Within this process, I wanted to address questions
such as those elaborated by Georges Perec: Where is our life? Where is
our body? Where is our space? Dealing with these questions might well have
the power to wake us from our dreamless sleep or else infuse this sleep
with oneirism.
But as I indicated in the prologue,
it is not about the answers or even the questions so much as it is about
the search, the quest, the space in between - simply the adventures.
Much of what constituted this space
of adventure was simply a rephrasing of ordinary and known sensations of
time, space and practice. During my observation of the fleeting-fashion-family
at Cafe Gitane, for instance, my experience amounted to little more than
a subscription to spectacular myths of passionate life as proposed by the
cultural producers of the youth-commodity- and fashion industry. Encased
surreptitiously by the norms and values of dominant culture, a line of
flight from hegemony could hardly be drawn.
But at other times my experiences
were of a nature that refused easy appropriation into the mainstream discourses
of the "spectacular order": How to make sense of the various uncanny coincidences
and cases of immediacy? How to treat an autonomous moment of the present
in which a dissolving ego, stripped of perspectives of hindsight/ foresight,
gives way to less- or unmediated impressions and observations? How to situate
a subjectivity which at once feels severed from and belonging to places,
practices and people?
The concept of 'indeterminate trajectories',
invoked by Michel de Certeau, can be helpful here: As I drifted through
the cultural landscape of our society (non-places and anthropological places
alike), traced my specific trajectories, I followed different interests
and desires from the ones intended by dominant social forces. I composed
new stories from selected fragments, using the existing vocabulary and
syntax to a creative end, which at times reveals itself merely through
the sensation of oddity, incomprehensibility, disjuncture.
Such is the face of defamiliarization.
A different gaze upon a novel vista as the frame of stabilizing narratives
becomes undone. It appears that this is the foundation upon which Visions
and Auditions of Life, the conceptual ideas developed by Deleuze,
can be sensed and incorporated into a wider dynamic of becoming. Deleuze
quotes his partner Guattari who offers us an idea of what this process
of becoming could involve. He writes, "Lapses, parapraxes and symptoms
are like birds that strike their beaks against the window. It is not a
question of interpreting them. It is a question instead of identifying
their trajectory to see if they can serve as indicators of new universes
of reference acquiring a consistency sufficient for turning a situation
upside down."
If we treat the experiences of oddity,
incomprehensibility, disjuncture in terms of lapses, parapraxes and symptoms
and trace their trajectory as opposed to inserting them into prefabricated
categories of answer and question, symptom and origin, subject and object,
in fact deal with and map out the space between these polarities, we might
just be able to note Visions and Auditions that constitute
and at once perpetuate transformations occurring in transit. If such sensations,
visions and auditions and experiences establish a "consistency sufficient
for turning a situation upside down", the claim can be made that this would
be a becoming along a line of flight or ligne d'erre that may very well
be the moment of truth, the authentic experience, the resituation of body,
space and life the various theorists quoted here have had in mind.
How to evaluate or even discern
this particular "consistency" remains unresolved. It is for subjects themselves
to discover and explore the infinite trajectories that they can trace on
at least a thousand plateaux. Playing games of defamiliarization
is but a small start in the quest to resituate the body, space and life,
and its biggest accomplishment is the exposure to intensity and the introduction
of questions without which our dreamless sleep remains truly anesthesia.
So, has something been gained?
What do you think?
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