The three figures walk, chattering in an excited manner about mundane details of last night’s dinner, unable to notice much outside their own selves. Mouths occupied with the business of language, dominated by a need to classify and make sense of experience. This is not dissimilar to how philosopher Michel Serres in The Five Senses remarks on the anaesthetizing effects of language, as a noisy group descends, interrupting his moment of solitude as he reclines against the steps at Epidaurus.
The group, or hullabaloo, arrives shrouded in language that operates like an all-encompassing vehicle: shouting, talking, squawking, reading extracts from guidebooks, pointing, laughing, discussing. Such behaviour causes Serres to ask: what is it that they really saw or experienced? Serres’s remarks point to lack of attunement to the present locality in which such a group finds themselves. The place and its circumstances seem unimportant in the rushed attempt to make sense and categorize. Language, Serres claims, is an addiction; it is ‘the stingy dope’ to which we have given ourselves, it is a tool of analysis, one capable of destructing the variables to which our senses are attentive (2008: 9).
Following Serres, and in relation to this vibrant practice, it might therefore be necessary to consider the body’s experience in the world as porous, one through which sensorial understanding is not merely confined to strict meanings found in the exact utterances of language, but one sensitive to the potentially more subtle, vibratory character detectable in the matter of the world.
As the three figures walk, they become stiller, quieter, slowing to another rhythm, more attuned to their surroundings, seeking silence in the land and in each other’s company. Their bodies move in unison, fatigued by the uphill curve of the terrain. They move from the relatively soft (slightly frozen) ground, to a pathway of dense, dried leaves, though at the time this is barely registered. Their chatter dies down; the pace slackens, becoming more in-sync with their surroundings. A fallen tree obstructs the path, a red kite circles above and beyond the canopy of trees, the foliage underfoot grows gradually less crisp and somewhat moist. They stop, turning themselves from the path of leaves stretched out in front, toward that which is just off the path. Their attention shifts, the motivation is unclear. Don Ihde has noted, in relation to auditory engagement, that ‘focal phenomena can be selected such that other focal phenomena become background or fringe phenomena’ (2007: 74). As examples, Ihde cites the city dweller, able to hear a coin drop on the train platform even as a train approaches, or the jungle habitant able to hear the whisper of the adder, despite the chatter of the monkeys (ibid.). During the excursions, something equivalent to a shift in auditory focal attention occurs, as the three figures are re-orientated from what lies directly in front of them, toward that which is just off to the side of the path.
As Rei Terada suggests: ‘To be told what to perceive is to be told what not to look at, and when to cut a look short; it’s also to be told where to look — to maintain one’s focus on the things that matter’ (2009: 200–01).
Turning away from the path the three figures actively disorient themselves from the main route, allowing their attention to be shaped by whatever comes next. It is anthropologist Keith H. Basso who suggests that the ‘experience of sensing places’ is ‘roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic’ (1996: 55), whereas anthropologist Steven Feld notes how ‘sound both emanates from and penetrates bodies; this reciprocity of reflection and absorption is a creative means of orientation — one that tunes bodies to places and times through their sounding potential’ (2003: 226).
A place then, can be considered as an area animated by the ideas and feelings of those who attend to them. Further to this, a place itself can, in turn, be animated by the ideas and attention bestowed on it. Basso notes, via Satre, how forms of attention fostered between subjects and objects enable places to obtain a field of meaning. Basso claims ‘even in total stillness, places may seem to speak’ (1996: 56). Yet, they are only enabled to speak to the extent that those who place their attention on them allow them to. Basso further states how ‘places also provide points from which to look out on life, to grasp one’s position in the order of things, to contemplate from somewhere in particular’ (ibid.).
Despite the indication in Basso’s account that objects and places might play a role in how attention is shaped and informed, it seems that, from his account, this ultimately serves the human figure to situate their perceptive faculties in relation to their position in the world.
Returning to Bennett’s ecology of vibrational relations in Vibrant Matter (2010), a notable shift in positions arises. Bennett, the three figures remind themselves, argues for the human body as merely another component within the vibrational event of life thereby diminishing boundaries between human and non-human entities. This is evident in their attentiveness to the well’s ‘thing-power’ and the contemplation of their shared material vitality (ibid.: 17). Such a state, as described by Bennett, avoids making any concrete claims and instead attempts to look for points of commonality.
This position, they realize, resonates with Terada’s description of the figure of the phenomenophile as the lingering state they are experiencing expresses dissatisfaction with how the world is classified.
Once there, in front of the well, they stumble closer towards it, feet squelching in the mud beneath them. They reach clumsily, hurriedly, to take photographs and record its sound. The well sits there, seemingly unmoved, concealed in the woods, ivy creeping around its mouth, small green plants protruding. Their turn toward the well initiates a naiveté, one that slows and arrests their previous chattering state. They linger, fascinated by the object before them, trying to absorb, exhaust, document, engage, understand, empathize, witness. Attuning to the presence of this natural feature, in turn, they each tune out of personal disquietudes into something of another order, something no longer of immediate importance or significance. By focusing their attention, they, in turn, begin to generate a sensitivity and understanding of the well’s affective and performative qualities.
Configurations of Concrete Things?
As the three figures make journeys to several well sites — Abecegir, Llanbadarn, Penglais, Llanafan — they generate a collection of glass bottles, animal skulls, dried leaves, mosses, fleeces, branches, and tree bark all discovered en route, or at each site.
Not only do they experience attunement through their re-orientation toward the landscape, but also towards the gathering of particular objects, in their presence. They make sense of these things as though the objects were put there in a certain combination for them to order.
They become more susceptible to other resonances and frequencies operating on and through what they encounter that might otherwise pass them by.
They share an unspoken vocabulary of common experiences, the objects house their stories, map their journeys, their relation to each other, and to the land they have walked through.
Their significance exceeds their semantic value — these everyday objects, materials, and substances seem to take on other qualities as they are used, touched, and passed around.
As philosopher Jeff Malpas has argued, the environing world, ‘umwelt’, is one in which things have a certain place within the environment and in relation to other animate and inanimate beings.
The world is not therefore encountered as a set of causes, ideas, or impressions, but as a set of concrete things (2006: 55) implying that there is always a certain direction or orientation governing our relations, providing a situatedness towards one’s surroundings.
Yet, if a certain configuration is always already implied, how might we experience or encounter objects, the landscape, each other, outside this already established order of things?
Encounters with objects found within each outdoor setting led the three figures to reconsider their status as objects to that of things. Though it might be argued that these objects are typical to any woodland journey, for them it was this skull as opposed to any skull.
This feeling is reminiscent of the distinction Jane Bennett makes between ‘it, thing’ over ‘us, being’ as she attempts to illustrate ‘the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other’ (2010: 4). In a bid to ‘enhance the receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us’ (ibid.), Bennett describes how the combination of a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, and a black glove reveal their ‘thing-power’ (ibid.), and in doing so arrive into view as a ‘contingent tableau’ (ibid.: 5) as their assemblage in the gutter exhausts their semiotic capacities, appearing outside the habitual contexts set by human subjects (ibid.: 17).
Not dissimilar, each object in their collection had, in some way, surprised them in their discovery of it; though dead matter, the encounter was ‘vibratory’. These configurations reveal particular aspects of the world in conjunction with what they are seen next to and to what is in the sensorial frame.
If we are, as Michel Serres has suggested, ‘body-box, strung tight […] covered head to toe with a tympanum’ (2008: 141), then might it be our attunement to certain resonances or vibrancies that allow different shades of the world and its objects to reveal themselves?
Findings: Experiment II
Following this vibrant practice, it seems that an apprehension of the world and its objects might better be described in terms of a kind of listening, a sensorial engagement, one that relates to ‘our whole body’ as it ‘vibrates in unison with the stimulus’, where ‘[h]earing is, like all sense perception, a way of seizing reality with all our body, including our bones and viscera’ (Gonzalez-Crussi 1989: 45 cited in Feld 1996: 96).
By attuning to the frequencies and rhythms of other non-human beings and inanimate objects, a proximity that is somehow subtler, yet more entwined than the demonstrative relations suggested in our clumsy reliance on whole linguistic units, is experienced. By focusing on listening, it becomes less important to uncover a meaning that takes the form of an exact utterance, as a longer, more drawn out attentive engagement is suggested. Listening and aural attention therefore emerge as modes that push beyond the mere ‘making sense’ of what is heard.
Through the vibrant practice, it becomes clear that to become aware or to acknowledge the micro-movements and vibrations in operation around us, it is necessary to cultivate a predisposition to our encounters with other people, places, or things so as to already generate sensitivity to the pre-signifying affective forces in operation. How we access and approach such operations requires a gradual process built up over time. It would seem that sensorial approximations exploit and recognize the body as tympanum. Pulse, pace, and rhythm are not coincidental conditions of being but intrinsic to our porous relation to the environment and our surroundings.
