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Collective Expression a Radical Pragmatics

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Collective Expression a Radical Pragmatics _____________________________ Collective Expression A Radical Pragmatics Brian Massumi Department of Communication, University of Montreal _____________________________ Now it is undeniably conceivable that a beginningless series of successive utterers should all do their work in a brief interval of time, and that so should an endless series of interpreters. Still, it is not likely to be denied that, in some cases, neither the series of utterers nor that of interpreters forms an infinite collection. When this is the case, there must be a sign without an utterer and a sign without an interpreter. ... Neither an utterer, nor even, perhaps, an interpreter is essential to a sign. … I am led to inquire whether there be not some ingredient of the utterer and some ingredient of the interpreter which not only are so essential, but are even more characteristic of signs than the utterer or interpreter themselves. – C.S. Peirce (1998: 403-404) A Technique 1. Choose a generative text. 2. Choose a minor concept weaving through the generative text. 3. Ask each person in the group to count off as a 1 or a 2. 4. Instruct the 1s that they are “posts.” 5. Instruct the 2s that they are “flows.” 6. Ask the posts to find a post: a spot in the room where they would like to have a conservation. 7. Ask the flows to pair up with a post. 8. Direct everyone to a page in the text where the minor concept occurs. Brian Massumi. “Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics.” Inflexions 8, “Radical 59 Pedagogies” (April 2015). 59-88. www.inflexions.org 9. Ask the participants to discuss the function of the minor concept, staying as close as possible to the text, with detailed attention to how it is constructed. 10. Notify participants that when exactly five minutes are up they will hear a signal, and that when they hear the signal they must end their conversation immediately, even if they are in the middle of a word. 11. When the five-minute signal sounds, ask all flows to move to the next post in a clockwise direction. 12. Repeat 8-10 times. 13. Bring the group back together and discuss in plenary session what was discovered about the minor concept and the text. This is “conceptual speed dating.” It is a technique that has been practiced at the SenseLab for ten years, and has been adapted by a number of its participants for classroom use. Its introduction at the SenseLab [1] was motivated by the disappointments of plenary discussions of assigned texts. Full-group discussions predispose participants to perform themselves – their own already-acquired knowledge or interpretive virtuosity – at the expense of truly exploratory thinking-together in the moment, for the collective movement forward into follow-up activities. Self-performance can quickly have the effect of silencing those whose practice is not primarily text-oriented or language-based, as is the case of the majority of SenseLab participants with backgrounds in dance and movement, materials-based creative processes, and media art. It also skews participation along gender lines and according to personality traits like shyness. The quality of the interaction tends to suffer as well from a conversational birth defect: the scourge of generality. It is difficult to keep a large group focused on the specificity of the text before it. In the absence of an effective anchoring in the singularity of the thinking process embodied in the text, the discussion quickly slips into comparison. Given the diversity of backgrounds, the comparative allusions inevitably reference texts or bodies of knowledge known only to a few of those present. In an attempt to overcome the divide, the discussion will invariably start to pivot on hinge words that seem at the same time to offer a common ground for understanding and to illuminate some aspect of the text at hand: “history,” “culture,” “nature,” “life,” “matter,” “space,” “time.” It could be Brian Massumi. “Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics.” Inflexions 8, “Radical 60 Pedagogies” (April 2015). 59-88. www.inflexions.org just about anything, but “subject” and “object” always figure, bringing in tow a host of others. The problem is that the force of these terms actually differ substantially from discipline to discipline, and even from text to text within a discipline. The differences hover in the background, unspoken, their mute presence creating an illusion that speakers’ remarks are actually intersecting, when a little scratching below the surface reveals that they are passing each other in the ether-sea of generality like phantom ships on a low-budget cruise. Missed encounter. The unacknowledged mutual incomprehension appears as difference of opinion, and the missed encounter is experienced as debate. What is actually accomplished is an object lesson in why Deleuze always said that the greatest enemy of thought is conversation, understood as the exchange of individual ideas and opinions. In a word, communication. The aim of the technique of conceptual speed dating is to address the group-dynamics problems of the plenary discussion format, while disenabling the tendency to default to the communicational model of verbal performance and its general sea-sickness. The conceptual speed dating technique assumes that the text under consideration is “generative”. By this is meant that no one reading can exhaust its potential for producing meaning. Each return to the text, even by the same reader, will crystallize new thoughts. One way of thinking about this generative capacity is to approach the key concepts of the text as nexuses composed of a number of conceptual lines entering into constellations of varying emphasis, certain of them rising into relief at what stand out as key passages. The particular force of these passages is synthetic, leaping out from the weave of the text as a joint effect of the contributory lines. The constellations dissolve, reform, and reconstellate around each other’s emphases as the text advances. What stands out at key passages, or in the same key passage that commends itself to attention in successive readings, moves and varies. The variation is related to many factors, not all of them internal to the text: the reader’s level of attention, how his or her understanding has been primed by the experience of the day, how knowledge and experience accumulated since the last reading informs the reading, and even (or, as we will see, especially) by modulations of attention and concern by the situation in which the reading or discussion is taking place. A generative text is Brian Massumi. “Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics.” Inflexions 8, “Radical 61 Pedagogies” (April 2015). 59-88. www.inflexions.org constitutively open to its outside. It does not just transmit significations. It welcomes inflections. It is hospitable to new thought. This puts its meaning always in-the-making, making the meaning inexhaustible. A generative text is never done. The openness of the generative text to its outside must not be reduced to a question of reception. The reader is not adding meaning to a finished text. S/he is entering the unfinishment of the text, and drawing from it a new determination. The text’s power of variation is as composed within as it is inflected from without. In the synthetic meaning-effect of a given constellation, the relevance of the contributory conceptual lines is graded. Many register less noticeably, some barely register at all. Many more do not register at all – yet are still positively contributory in virtue of how their avoidance affords other conceptual lines a chance to shine. These shaded conceptual lines are what we refer to, for the purposes of conceptual speed dating, as “minor” concepts. It is crucial to the success of the conceptual speed dating technique that the concept chosen for the exercise be a minor concept. What rises into relief at a key passage stands out from the weave of the text in a way that can be misunderstood as detaching itself from the text to claim general validity. If a danger-word, like “nature” or “subject,” occurs in the passage or is even just implied by it, the risk is extreme that the discussion will cruise into general waters. When this happens, the minor concept assumes “major” status. Major concepts, those of the general, communication-ready kind, must be avoided at all costs if the technique is to work. It is always the case that a minor concept will also be present. This is one that a reader may well not have noticed. But once attention is drawn to it, it becomes palpable how integral it is to the passage, and that the passage could not have worked its effect without it. It is also always the case that the minor concept will recur, explicitly or implied, in other passages, making it an essential, if underappreciated, contributor to the warp and weave of the entire text. Analysis of the minor concept and its textual weave offers a singular angle of approach to the text as a whole, from which new thoughts are more apt to emerge. The process of working the minor increases the sensitivity of Brian Massumi. “Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics.” Inflexions 8, “Radical 62 Pedagogies” (April 2015). 59-88. www.inflexions.org the text to its outside, and particularly to modulations owing to the particularities of the situation of the reading and discussion. This is because major concepts carry dead weight. They are laden with baggage that exerts an inertial resistance against effective variation. Minor concepts, once noticed, are self-levitating. Once the ballast of the general ideas is thrown overboard, minor concepts’ sensitivity to the outside, coupled with their intimateness to the compositional weave composing the text, makes them rise.
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