Immediation II Edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen Immediation II Immediations Series Editor: SenseLab “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains” – A.N. Whitehead The aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires. It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational fabric. Co-composition. “The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile” – A. N. Whitehead Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be answered by the Series authors. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory, movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture, philosophy … the range is free. We invite you to roam it. Immediation II Edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2019 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2019. Copyright © 2019, Erin Manning, Anna Munster, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen. Chapters copyright their respective authors unless otherwise noted. This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration © 2019 Leslie Plumb Cover Design by Leslie Plumb Typeset in Open Sans, an open font. Print ISBN 978-1-78542-084-9 Vol I Print ISBN 978-1-78542-061-0 Vol I PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-062-7 Vol II Print ISBN 978-1-78542-024-5 Vol II PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-025-2 Freely available online at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/immediation OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents List of Diagrams and Figures 335 Fourth Movement Collective Assemblages of Enunciation Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen Prelude 338 Lone Bertelsen The Productive Unconscious, Immediation and a New Micropolitics 341 Nicole de Brabandere Edging Semblance 356 Erin Manning Experimenting Immediation: Collaboration and the Politics of Fabulation 361 Fifth Movement Becoming-Bodies Erin Manning Prelude 398 Mattie Sempert Navel Gazing, or, The Immanent Twist 401 Sher Doruff Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure 413 Justy Phillips The Fictiōnella: Immediating Relations Through Fictiōneering 432 Sixth Movement Paradoxes of Form Anna Munster Prelude 440 Gerko Egert Everyday Abstractions. Immediation and the Powers of Choreography 443 Michael Hornblow So Soon Too Late: Affective Shifts in a Ketl 456 Jonas Fritsch An Eco-logic of Urban Interactive Environments 477 Jondi Keane The Practice of Immediating: Toward the Ground of Our Own Activity 489 Brian Massumi Immediation Unlimited 501 Erin Manning, Anna Munster, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen Twisting Into the Middle 3 544 Notes on Contributors 545 Works Cited 549 Contents Immediation I 578 List of Diagrams and Figures Conceptual Diagram 4 p. 337 Figure 41. Intimate Transactions, “Participant navigating on Mark III Body Aluminium Shelf”. p. 349 Figure 42. Intimate Transactions, “Two Participants meet at the end of the 25 min. experience”. p. 350 Figure 43. Intimate Transactions, “Intimate Transactions Shared body group” p. 352 Figures 44-47 by Nicole de Brabandere. p. 357-60 Conceptual Diagram 5 p. 397 Conceptual Diagram 6 p. 439 Figure 48. Ketl. p. 458 Figure 49. Ketl, Processing screenshot. p. 460 Figure 50. Ketl. p. 469 Figure 51. Ketl. p. 472 Figure 52. Immediations Collage. p. 483 Figure 53. Installation view of PAN & ZOOM set up. p. 492 Figure 54. PAN & ZOOM spatial layout of installation drawings p. 493 Figure 55. Working with improviser-participant in ZOOM. p. 493 Figure 56. Expansion and compression of the event-field in ZOOM drawing. p. 495 Figure 57. Improviser-participants recording video in ZOOM. p. 496 Figure 58. The moving wall in ZOOM. p. 497 Coda p. 500 Fourth Movement Collective Assemblages of Enunciation Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen Prelude The question “what is collectivity in terms of immediation?” is important to pose in order to get a sense of the extended intensity in expressions of virtual forces and in sudden radical changes. Experiences of co-composing can be experienced as encounter-events of human/ non-human assemblages of enunciation. They are felt and expressed on a collective level of experience. Even if you as a subject are alone at another space and place, events as such are felt and experienced on a collective level of experience. Immediations change takes place affectively-immediately. The notion of collective experience in immediation’s events might be framed as taking place at the level of “the productive unconscious” as connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalytic” approach to psychoanalysis. The productive unconscious is here an expression of the collectively felt joint force of expression and creation. This collective unconscious is embedded in the immediation of an event and can be felt as a tendency or inclination. In Lone Bertelsen’s article the “productive unconscious” is connected to Félix Guattari’s notion of an “ethico-aesthetic practice” as well as to Bracha Ettinger’s notion of a “matrixial unconscious.” The latter refers neither to subjectivity, inter-subjectivity nor collectivity but to a co-creative relational web that is “wider than relations between signifiers or texts and includes the more affective materiality and sociality of the ‘real’” (Immediation II, 343) What Guattari and Ettinger have in common is the exploration of the unconscious as a plural multiplicity in which differentiation operates—even on the level of subjectivity, since a constituent force of becoming is experienced as a co-emerging of “I and non-I” (in Ettinger’s words). This constituent force of the matrixical unconscious thus is “proto-ethical” to what can Prelude 339 be experienced as social in affective immediating events. Bertelsen explains the forces of a productive unconscious in relation to her own experience of differential co-composing in the exploration of the “dual site network installation” Intimate Transactions, made by The Transmute Collective (with artistic director Keith Armstrong). Nicole de Brabandere presents her own photographic explorations of Suzanne Langer’s writings on the semblance of movement that can be virtually experienced by non-moving representations of movement like for example a Greek meander. In Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (2011) Brian Massumi further explores Langer’s work in relation to the forces of events. Nicole de Brabandere’s works are especially composed to explore how rhythm, space, surface and form might affectively spark tensions and thus create semblances of transversal movement in- or outside the frame. These works can be experienced as immediating micro-events in which the virtual forces “come to life” as transversal semblances of movement. In Erin Manning’s article, writing itself is explored as a collective assemblage of fabulations or thoughts-in-motion. This exploration of immediation from a schizoanalytic approach sets off from the question of how engagement and creative event-making can be valued while unfolding rather than in its exhibited, presentational form. The question of how to make an event’s unfolding and its living ecologies of collective explorations primary to the individuals taking part in it—and not to hold on to former events nor to traditional forms of reporting, archiving or habits—is key to a continued engagement. Or as stated by Manning: “How can an event mark its punctuation in an account that continues the work of the event?” One approach to this is to tell stories of events in a fabulating manner in which “the power of the false” (Deleuze) decomposes linearity, relations of cause and effect, mythmaking and makes even time fall off its hinges of chronology—to instead take on a folding relation to an event’s passing. Precisely as “[a] fabulation’s content can never be seen as limited to the story itself ” (Immediation II, 388) the immediations of events are on the level of futurity more complex than we can describe or represent. The falsifying cut of fabulation operates on the level of immediation, and its success cannot be measured in its utterances but only by its potential coupling of two kinds of time: “the time of the now and the time of the will have been. Time becomes operative, experiential” (Immediation II, 389). So, a politics of (the need of) fabulation would have to include the schizoanalytic as a technique for making apparent “the simultaneity 340 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen of incompossible presents … the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.” (Deleuze 1989: 131). This is necessary in order to recognize the events potentialities beyond our individual taking part in it—and to recognize and valuate an event’s creative and anarchic potentialities. Lone Bertelsen The Productive Unconscious, Immediation and a New Micropolitics It seems to me essential to organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices regarding the formation of the unconscious.