Essay by Timothy Walters for Contextualising Practice
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge that I live, work and study on the unceded lands of the Bunurong, Woi Wurrung/Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I would also like to acknowledge their (at least) 40,000 years of harmonious coexistence with these lands and express my admiration for Aboriginal ways of knowing and being, which serve as a standard bearer within the context of this essay.
Prologue
I believe it would be fair to say my artistic practice is characterised by a certain conceptual and material promiscuity, resulting in an output that seemingly drifts from one focus to another. At the heart of it is an amorphous nebula of interests, curiosities, theories, experiences, relationships, anxieties and desires that form the psycho-social-geographical-temporal backdrop to my life. My practice is the ongoing process of mapping this space, discovering areas of intensity and their degrees of interconnectedness. What emerges are constellations or virtual figurations of self expressed in material form, like so many fossils embedded along the strata of time and place, signposting an endless process of becoming. This essay will focus on the conceptual themes that not only guide my practice but are my motivation for pursuing art in the first place.
Not My Narrative: A Western Historical Backdrop
I feel as though I were cast adrift in an ocean of cultural debris aboard a crude raft rough-hewn from the trash. As my vessel steadily falls apart, I search for better parts to build a glorious junk.
One of my core artistic motivations is a sense of disembeddedness, attributable to the endlessly provisional nature of my early environment due to violence, repossession, arson, being taken to the United Kingdom as a teenager, numerous evictions and having an effectively non-existent extended family. There was a sense of not belonging. Always the newcomer to established social circles, without an easy way to introduce who I was or from whence I came, even friends seemed as if they were strangers. I realised it was not just me but a symptom of the world I was living in. I was born late in the 20th century in a world where the cosy narratives of old had already been drowned out by the noise of global capital, mass media and information technology.
In 1979 French philosopher and literary critic Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He describes this condition as our ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ because of the advances in scientific knowledge. The metanarratives in question are those of the industrial age, in which knowledge progresses humanity towards a stable, emancipated state, whether a result of the free market or the abolition of class. The horrors of the early 20th century and the splintering of empires exposed these metanarratives as fiction, revealing instead a reality in which scientific knowledge was merely a commodity whose legitimacy lay not in some tale of human enlightenment and salvation, but in the power it bestowed upon those who could possess it (Lyotard 1984). Ancient beliefs and religious narratives had long been contradicted and replaced by science, but even the stories we told about science had become irrelevant. The pace of scientific knowledge and its consolidation into the hands of powerful organisations has now outstripped our efforts to interpret what it all means. We have become hyper-connected global citizens before we have even had a chance to negotiate the terms and conditions of such an arrangement.
Thirty years after Lyotard, English writer and political theorist Mark Fisher provides a bleak update to the state of our condition. In that time, emboldened by the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, our capitalist overlords have “successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society […] should be run as a business” (Fisher 2009:17). Under this political and social paradigm, which Fisher (2009) labels Capitalist Realism, there is not even a conceivable alternative to the ecocidal and dehumanising program of late capitalism, in which consumption of clichéd revivalism is our only recourse to self-expression. This depressing model of subjectivity is echoed by Professor of Medieval Literature, Helen Fulton, who claims that “[m]edia narratives tell us stories about who we think we are, and in so doing, they skillfully reproduce the freely choosing consumers of global capitalism” (Fulton 2005:7).
What underlies this Capitalist Realist anti-narrative are the foundations of capitalist thought, namely, the denial of subjective interpretation in favour of scientific empiricism as the only credible source of knowledge. As Lyotard (1984) explains, science is legitimated on its own terms, which is to say, scientific knowledge is legitimate because it is scientific. The scientific method produces reliable models of reality that allow us to control nature. It does not matter if we understand nature; it only matters that we know enough to manipulate it for our own ends. This is the logic of power: greed is good, might is right, and so forth. In an article for New Literary History, Professor of Comparative Literature Hanna Meretoja discusses an ongoing debate between conflicting positions on human narrative. On one side is the reductive, I would add condescending, view that narrative “is ‘merely’ a ‘cognitive instrument’ that enables us to come to terms with the disorder of the real” (Meretoja 2014:91). This is the view that discredits narratives as the silly stories we tell ourselves, presumably because we lack the intellectual capacity to apply scientific rigour to our experience within an obviously chaotic and meaningless reality [sarcasm]. However, Meretoja correctly points out that this view “is not ontologically neutral: it is based on a certain conception of the nature of reality as a nonnarrative flux of events onto which meaningful order is projected” (2014:91). In other words, this view is itself just another narrative, specifically, the triumphalist myth of rational man’s victory over the chaotic forces of nature and subsequently, the powerful over the powerless. Capitalist Realism is an assertion of power, not a meaningful interpretation of reality.
The other side of this debate is the hermeneutic or interpretive view, in which an underlying narrative structure:
“is seen to characterize all experience, even the most elementary sense perception, and therefore the process of interpreting experiences is not an additional procedure of knowing but constitutes the original structure of ‘being-in-the-world’” (Meretoja 2014:96)
It is important to note that this view does not try to discredit science by asserting some sort of primacy of belief, it merely insists that the nature of our being is inherently interpretive. Science can be seen as an extension of our ability to observe the world, but it is not the only form of knowledge. In the past, humans interpreted their observations of the world and encoded them into relatable narratives, which situated us within a stable onto-epistemological framework. Through their recitation and performance, we could transmit knowledge and reinforce a way of being coherent with what we knew to be true. Narratives provide us with a lived understanding of what we know about the world.
As interpretative subjects we cannot forego the process of storytelling. The problem is that we have arrogantly raced ahead with very little understanding of ourselves or the world. We know so much but understand so little. As a result, Meretoja argues, “our narrative interpretations are affected by stereotypical narrative schemes that perpetuate the dominant power structures of contemporary society” (2014:98). As these narratives are exposed as falsehoods or as self-serving lies, they can no longer claim to embody what we know to be true, leaving us in a position of not understanding the world. Finally, Meretoja states that the “hermeneutic way of thinking, which stresses that interpretations have real, material, world-constituting effects, challenges the dichotomous view that we either interpret the world or change it” (2014:101). She is referring, of course, to a well known quote by German philosopher Karl Marx, who said that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx 2000:170). I feel the world has changed quite significantly since 1848, yet our interpretations are noticeably insufficient. We need a robust interpretation of life and the universe, one which is coherent with what we know to be true and can sustain the complexities of a rapidly changing world. Such a task will require vast research across all facets of existence, not to mention immeasurable quantities of imagination. For me, pursuing an artistic practice as a mode of research combines academic freedom, imagination, collectivity and, most of all, the ability to bring interpretive knowledge into material being. Art is my exploratory vehicle, powered by the dual action of imagining/doing.
I’m Not A Jack-of-all-anything
If you go down enough rabbit-holes you will discover they all lead to the rabbit city.
In my dogged pursuit of understanding, I find myself traversing the fields of academia like a wandering merchant of intellectual artefacts. My broad approach to learning and refusal to specialise has left me in a position where I cannot claim expertise on anything. Still, I do have an ability to identify relationships and pathways between seemingly unrelated matters. For a long time, I considered this a problematic indecisiveness that was holding me back from finding my passion. It turns out my passion is everything – or at least a little bit of everything. My artistic methodology involves mapping those relationships and pathways and exploring the possibilities for imagination that reside between things. I can only work with a limited number of things at once, so the process is slow and the works seemingly disparate, but each project amounts to a compression of ideas into points of density in successive maps. This artistic approach to learning and understanding could be termed nomadic, in the language of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the equally French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, whose collaborative writing has been highly influential in my own work and deserves discussion.
A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guattari, is an incredibly dense text which I discovered at the start of my studies and am still trying to digest fully. The text references countless literary, philosophical and technical works, requiring constant tangential research. It is like a hypertext document in which every other word is a link to another document. It is a difficult journey but one full of compelling concepts and chance discoveries that have found their way into my practice.
My first conceptual encounter was the ‘rhizome’, which is described as a non-hierarchical way of thinking, the spontaneous, sideways propagation of a tuber as opposed to the predictable, vertical branching of a tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). This resonates with my sideways approach to learning and provides a tool with which I can generate ideas. I start with a word or concept on paper, then draw lines to whatever comes to mind, which sounds a lot like a mind map, but there is a particular emphasis on allowing the ideas to drift as far as possible. I then pay attention to the various interconnections between ideas and allow those to inspire new pathways that I could not access by dwelling on any one or group of things. In Sceptical Spiritualism 2023, I began with a prompted task for which I constructed an icosahedron from electrical wire. This served as a starting point for my rhizomatic map. I then explored the intersections between philosopher David Chalmers’ panpsychist model of consciousness as a phenomenon that is embedded in the fabric of the universe, medieval philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s view that God is just the universe trying to get to know itself, and various occult and religious symbols, and ended up with a work about the soul as an internal reflection of one’s connections to the external world (Chalmers 1996; Spinoza 1954).
Another concept from A Thousand Plateaus is the ‘assemblage’, a theory that posits desire as a force producing our social reality by bringing objects, people and behaviours into correspondence with language, such that those things become coded as an assemblage. These assemblages are always already composed of other assemblages and, in turn, can be the components of larger assemblages. The ‘territory’ of an assemblage can be thought of as the boundary it draws around the various components it requires to function. Assemblages also become ‘stratified’ by their complex layering and interlocking within larger assemblages, making them seem inextricable from those relationships. However, territories are not rigidly defined. Otherwise, everything around us would be static. Assemblages are always subject to processes of deterritorialisation, decoding, re-coding and reterritorialisation, which are termed ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Delanda 2016; Buchanan 2021).
To illustrate the concept, I will give the example of a brick and a protest. A brick is an assemblage. Its territory encompasses the land from where the clay is extracted, a factory, staff and the desire to produce a saleable commodity. It is also part of a larger construction-assemblage composed of builders, plans and regulations, which code the brick as a unit of construction. Similarly, a protest is an assemblage composed of people, megaphones, placards and a desire for justice. It also exists within a larger social assemblage that codes certain actions as an expression of free speech. The brick and the protest are stratified within society such that they are defined by codes: a brick is a building material, and a protest is a lawful expression of discontent. Along the edges of territories, there is flexibility, instability and potential. Perhaps a protester feels that their rage cannot be sufficiently expressed in a sanctioned way, and they happen upon the brick. The protester decodes the brick as a building material and re-codes it as a projectile. The desire to express rage has now produced a new violent-protest-assemblage, and the brick takes a line of flight, literally through a shop window.
Political and literary theorist Frederic Jameson criticised this approach to social change because he views the pursuit of libidinal liberation as the fuel driving capitalism (1991). However, this is a mischaracterisation of the theory, and as Guattari explains in an interview,
“[l]iberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective” (2009:43).
For the expression to be collective requires social awareness, so it is clear he is not encouraging blind consumerism and self-indulgence. Instead, the focus should be on identification of the ways our subjectivity has already been coded and our desires manufactured. In the words of Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, “it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions which obstruct it” (1973:4). Sometimes, we need to forget what we think we know to see the potential inhabiting the space between matters.
This fuzzy in-between space is the domain of the nomad, whose life, Deleuze and Guattari articulate, “is the intermezzo” (1986 p.380). Italian philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti has developed this concept of a nomadic subjectivity and stresses the importance of “finding adequate representations for the sort of subjects we are in the process of becoming” (2011:11). For me, being an artist is a way of taking control of my own narrative and hopefully creating a catalyst for others to do the same. In a recent work entitled Desiring CTRL 2024 (see Figure 2), I took a collection of discarded and found objects, broke them down into their parts and re-coded them as desiring entities. These were then assembled within an aluminium casing, the exterior of which is covered in various dials and buttons and a hookah pipe. The work suggests containment within a controlling system, which extracts surplus desire for some unknown purpose. It also signposts the potential for liberation.
These have been just some of my conceptual meanderings of late. I employ my sculptural practice to think through these ideas, expressing them through a playful relationship with my materials. I am always narrating the work as I go, a bit like playing with toys for adults. It is a dual process; the concepts inspire the work, and the work gives tangibility to the concepts. In this way, my practice becomes a way of understanding and being in the world. By creating our own assemblages and consciously channelling our desires, we decode ourselves as consumers, workers or citizens and instead become narrators of the reality we wish to live.
Reference List
Braidotti R (2011) Nomadic subjects : embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory, Columbia University Press, New York.
Buchanan I (2021) Assemblage theory and method, Bloomsbury Academic, London.
Chalmers DJ (1996) The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
DeLanda E (2016) Assemblage theory, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Deleuze G and Guattari A (1987) A thousand plateaus, Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Fisher M (2009) Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?, Zero Books, Winchester.
Fulton H (2005) Narrative and media, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Guattari F (2009) Chaosophy: texts and interviews 1972-1977, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.
Jameson F (1991) Postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, England.
Lyotard JF (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Marx K (2000) The german ideology, Electric Book Company, London.
Meretoja H (2014) ‘Narrative and human existence: ontology, epistemology, and ethics’, New literary history, 45(1):89-109, doi:10.1353/nlh.2014.0001.
Spinoza B de (1954) Ethics, Hafner Publishing Company, New York.
Trungpa C (1973) Cutting through spiritual materialism, Shambhala Publications, Boston.