An Affect of an Experience

Kate Love

Description

Despite the contemporary trend of focusing on personal experience in art and writing, there is very little critical analysis of the concept of experience within fine art. The overarching conceptual aim of this book is to examine the concept of experience, as both content and as interpretative register in the context of fine art. It explores the reasons why experience, when compared to other modes of consciousness – such as understanding, knowing, perceiving or recognizing – is more aligned with the notion of actuality and thus more likely to be viewed as authentic. It then discusses the idea of writing about experience as a practice in fine art – the idea that writing can be understood as a practice like painting, sculpture, video, etc.– and explores a viable methodology for the art-writing practice.  

The book seeks to provide a more fluid interpretation of experience. In so doing, it explores the following questions: Why does the reading of experience as self-presence predominate? What is the status and value of experience as evidence? How is experience written and seen? In exploring these questions, Kate Love creates a workable strategy for writing about experience.

1 Introduction to the Materiality of Writing as a Practice  

2 Introduction to the Concept of Experience  

3 Problems with Experience as Self-Presence 

4 An Examination of the Idea of the Subject as the Source of Experience

5 Writing to Meet the Affect of the Antagonism as Experienced in the Hospital off the City Road 

6 Hovering Words: Part 1 Speaking Experience

7 Hovering Words: Part 2 Writing Experience

8 Experience and Representation

9 Experience as a Relation that is In and At the Limits of Language 

10 To Test the Above: To Look at the Separation of Experience and Language

11 Beginnings of a More Adequate Interpretation of Experience: Separation of Experience and Language (Under Erasure)

12 To Get to Some Sort of Ending: Actually More Precisely the Gradual Realisation that there is No Real Beginning, Middle or End to this Research       

Bibliography  

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• How-to
• General officer
• Writing
• General
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 13 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382143
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

An Affect of an Experience
An Affect of an Experience

and how I learnt to write about it in the context of Fine Art
Kate Love
First published in the UK in 2022 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
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Print ISBN 978-1-78938-213-6
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-215-0
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
For Jon
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Preface

1. Introduction to the Materiality of Writing as a Practice
2. Introduction to the Concept of Experience
3. Problems with Experience as Self-Presence
4. An Examination of the Idea of the Subject as the Source of Experience
5. Writing to Meet the Affect of the Antagonism as Experienced in the Hospital off the City Road
6. Hovering Words: Part 1 Speaking Experience
7. Hovering Words: Part 2 Writing Experience
8. Experience and Representation
9. Experience as a Relation That Is in and at the Limits of Language
10. To Test the Above: To Look at the Separation of Experience and Language
11. Beginnings of a More Adequate Interpretation of Experience: Separation of Experience and Language (Under Erasure)
12. To Get to Some Sort of Ending: Actually More Precisely the Gradual Realization that There Is No Real Beginning, Middle or End to This Research

Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to Dr Jose Roca, Guys Cancer Centre, London for being so caring and so thoughtful and helping me so much during the last stages of this book and to Margaret Northover, Head Stoma Nurse, Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital – who immediately saw through my status as ‘the patient’ and believed in me as a person who just happened to be in hospital and very much wanted to finish this book and who saved me at a very difficult moment. Margaret, I can never ever thank you enough for what you have done for me.
Foreword
When Kate Love died I felt many things, so much that was confused and inchoate, but also much that was sharp and painful. There were so many competing feelings and uncomprehending thoughts that I was compelled to write them and there are numerous grief-stricken notes attempting to describe what I was going through. At the time, in the early months of 2020, my head and my body were full of her, flooded with images and memories and words and looks and touches. Those anguished scribblings repeatedly say that I want to talk to her, to have just another conversation…
I remember her vividly as an interlocutor: She’d lean in, her eyes would widen, her brow furrow, her lips purse, sometimes moving her mouth ever so slightly in the shape of my words – and I knew that she was utterly concentrated, focused on everything I said, every intonation of every word, every modulation of my delivery, on every twitch of a facial muscle, every accompanying gesture. She paid attention to the tiniest workings of what you were saying. But more than that, she was tuned into those everyday bodily minutiae to listen to the affect of what you were saying. The emotional and psychological small stuff mattered so much to her because it keyed into what was important. ‘What’s the matter doll?’ she would urge affectionately, upon noticing an evasive or anxious look in my eye, when I thought I’d managed to conceal what was bothering me. She could wheedle it out. She had a way of knowing there was something more, something else, something I wasn’t divulging. Except I was divulging it – maybe not in language, yet she read it, heard it and responded to it all the same.
I know the great fortune I enjoyed as a close friend, to be able to benefit from this high-def focus on an intimate personal level. Kate was endlessly fascinated by people, curious about the things they said and did, and, more importantly, why. She had an almost preternatural ability to disarm and find out about those she met. ‘Emotional intelligence’ is perhaps an overused phrase, but Kate certainly had it. I felt its searching analysis in her shifts in tone, her questions sometimes cajoling, sometimes firm, as she worked out how to elicit that something else . And I know that many others felt it too. Former students have spoken to me of the huge influence and significance of Kate’s teaching. She taught not by drawing out what was already there – a certain Miss Jean Brodie cliché of education as facilitation – but by hearing and interpreting, listening, spending time, getting, if not to ‘the heart of the matter’, but to what you weren’t admitting, perhaps hadn’t yet identified, or could not see.
Her empathic focus on the miniscule shifts in affective tone was important not simply as an index to meaning or a way to get to the truth, although this was definitely part of it on an interpersonal scale. It was also integral to her intellectual project – her emotional acuity inseparable from her intense philosophical fascination for the complexes of experience and signification, which held the ‘truth’ at a difficult arm’s length. To paraphrase Kate in the book, if to experience is to be ‘threaded through discourse’, then, if she could help it, she would leave no affective trace of what you might be feeling, un threaded. She would urge you to bring it into discourse, to talk it out, let the conversation form the feeling and bring affect into contact with understanding.
Kate was mistrustful of the main ideological act, and watched out for what was going on in the wings. So she would always challenge investment in whatever was paraded as the thing to look at. In her work on numerous Fine Art courses in the United Kingdom, she turned her intensely curious gaze on to her students. She would delve into and query the stated reasons that might be attached to the making, thinking, or writing being shown and discussed in a group crit or tutorial. She was forever wary of absolutist forms of authenticity, whether in the dominant meanings that precede and furnish our understanding of experience, or in a subjectivism that can’t be disputed. Her tussling between ‘this’ or ‘that’ way of giving an account, between this personal anecdote and that theoretical narrative, between this external rationale and that private motivation was a way of thinking alternative ways of telling it simultaneously. This was evident both in her teaching and in her writing, and was always about acknowledging the moment by moment constitution of our subjective relation to dominant and persuasive narratives, to note our difference from them, and accept that there is always more than one possibility.
This book is not a memoir, but there is the possibility of one in its pages – the gist of other stories as she furnishes a few facts about her life to provide some autobiographical information to help set the scene of her writing, a scene that centres on the ‘girl in the Hospital off the City Road’. These anecdotal moments are threaded through the philosophical investigation, not as origin stories but as genealogies of ‘experience’ and how it is dispersed, disrupted and often consolidated through its narratives. Given its theoretical focus, there are, of course, many stories that don’t make it into the book, but the hints she gives remind me of the many she told me. I heard a lot of them over the years, in which, over numerous re-tellings, she took hold of her odd childhood, the working-class girl brought up by a widowed single mother in the 1960s (when the children were asked in school about their fathers’ occupations, she, aged 7, piped up, ‘deceased’), her social, and sexual awakenings at art college in the 1970s, her bouts of ill-health with Crohn’s disease, her OCD – and meshed them into a proudly non-normative life. For me the stories ghost the project rather than being omitted from it.
If you met her, even if you didn’t know her that well, you quickly found out that Kate was a sharer. But this giving out was matched by her ability to listen to others, focus on them, her genuine desire to hear what it was and what it taught or offered you in your work, your thinking, your making. As I have described, she would zero in on the affective variations inside your self-narration. That’s what made her notice so much in her capacity as a friend. And it was also what made her such a mine of information about others. I was always surprised at how much she knew about colleagues and acquaintances, about her neighbours and managers. This was because she not only knew how to listen, but how to ask the right questions, how to pitch the conversation to elicit the less guarded response. For her there was no separation between ‘gossip’ and the ‘official channels’. Her uncanny awareness of the peripheries of what was being performed as ostensible meaning had its political as well as pedagogical uses. She was a deft reader between the lines, and this was just as useful for sniffing out management obfuscation and euphemism, as it was for detecting anxious student gloss in a crit. An invaluable skill whose institutional uses in the university environment cannot be underestimated, although it wasn’t always appreciated as such.
For her, theory had to be ‘lived through’ in the animated, excitabl