How Can We Create New Senses?
My work combines neurobiology, art-history and literature to follow up on Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion that it is possible to “create new senses” without recourse to surgery. Reexamining the French avant-garde through current-day writings in physiology, I look at how artists have remapped the ways their reader-viewers coordinate their external senses, memory, imagination, and desire, showing that artists have, indeed, managed to create new senses.
Beyond Perception: Towards a Proprioceptive Poetics
As early as the 1990’s Frederick Jameson and Gilles Deleuze suggested that socio-economic and cultural changes served as an imperative to grow new organs and develop new senses. Both claimed that art, not genetics, was the mechanism for doing so. Beyond the Perceptual Model re-examines French and American avant-garde art through a physiological lens, showing how that artists of the twentieth century invoked proprioception, a muscle-and-tissue based coordinative faculty that allows humans to balance, and experience motion, texture and shifts, to indeed create new senses.
The turn towards a proprioceptive, or projective aesthetic, I show was accompanied by a move away from an aesthetic of realism. As artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet involved proprioception to teach their reader-viewers new ways of coordinating the external senses, imagination, memory and desire they created senses such as a “navigational sense of balance” (Duchamp) to a materialist “sense of possibility” (Duras) that, while more abstract than the traditional five senses, have proved to be just the right senses to help us navigate the gapped, complex, and often contradictory conditions associated with complex socio-economic conditions of late capitalism.
Read more here.
Court Trials, The Speculative Imagination, and decision-making without a centralized horizon
Court trials are strange when it comes to the question of narrative. While we might think they are about filling in a complete image of a crime scene, based on ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’ the process actually yields something quite different.
With jurors becoming ‘the canvas’ on which a verdict is drawn out, the juxtaposed interpretations of lawyers draw out images based on gapped, overlapping, contradictory pictures. In the washing back and forth of “facts” drawn out from witness testimonies and sensory evidence possibilities are strategically opened and eliminated, based on the juxtaposed interpretations. Salience becomes more important than filling in the full story.
Often the defendant feels sidelined until at last the space of possibilities shrinks down to a point where a yes or no (binary) verdict is possible.
See my interviews with lawyer poets Vanessa Place and M. NourbeSe Philip.
Marguerite Duras’ Open Materialism: the role of imaginative projections in Marxist Materialism
The external senses are deterministic. That is the vivid details we experience through our senses are completely filled in. The images we imagine while reading, however, are indeterminate. Each person imagines these in their own way.
Complaining that ‘movies are the same every time they are played,’ however, Marguerite Duras juxtaposed the visual imagines in her film Le Camion, with a voice-over narrative that tells about characters not visually present in the filmed scenes. The result is that viewers use their imaginations to fill in the characters, and since every person imagines that filled in character in their own way the movie, while still shared, is different for each viewer.
Read the full text of my working paper, download a pdf, or take a look at some play with the projective imagination done with Kinetech.