When I was asked to curate the celebration of William Blake I made a film singing part of his epic poem Jerusalem. In singing it felt like I understood the meaning in what I call an extra-embodied way. This position echoes Catherine Malabou's ideas of bio-synaptic plasticity in the sense that it is always specific context that shapes the form of understanding. I continue to try and find a way to keep this lyric voice in critical theory despite the printed word's apparent stronghold on true meaning. In a passionate essay for BBC Radio 4 Katherine Rundell champions books as an entry point to wonder. It’s hard to argue with her impassioned plea for children to have access to books and the encounter with stories but something about it made me uneasy. She states that to enter a library one doesn’t need to believe in anything and then a sentence later states that to support libraries is to believe in the future. Is this belief in the future of chronological time the very story that we are so immersed in that we don’t notice? Inside the ritual song we can become aware of the hierarchy of this linear plot. Could this anthropocentric metric be the actual reason we cannot bring ourselves to let go of the drive for progress? Does it support the mythological billionaires Rundell sketches in our mind's eye and decries for robbing our children of their natural right to read and love books? Via A N Whitehead I have come to wonder about the way belief in actual story makes us real. Not the pathology of holding on to a dogma, rather the way telling ourselves into existence is how we understand ourselves and become capable of letting go and reconciling through the pragmatism of inhabiting temporal substance.
Plato told a good story about how the method of oppositional dialectic will separate us from ourselves as a part of the cosmos. His story is about how we will come to divorce feeling from thought. It is about how placing the mind outside nature in the pursuit of an ideal will only be reconciled by accepting mistakes and imperfection but it isn’t a story of how this conceptual analysis of reality is only a foothold. Perhaps he didn’t feel he needed to say this because at the time of writing it was obvious that his writing and writing in general was a speculative process – an attempt to work out how this whole mechanism of thinking and being human could work. F Scott Fitzgerald told the same story in a far more immediate way. It is about a man who cannot see that he is bound to the pursuit of an idealised concept of perfect love or the highest Form of beauty and cannot find his way back to the region of a cosmos with feeling as its fundamental basis. He cannot seem to arrive in the pragmatism in what Catherine Malabou calls the one life only. This is the life of the past moving through the present into the future or what A N Whitehead seems to think of as the “event”.
Rundell’s essay quite casually places books and human understanding into the narrative of Plato’s anthropocentric cosmos in which humans (men) are a special species set apart from the region they inhabit. As an artist researcher, I would argue that because we are undeniably a part of the cosmos, our ability to tell stories is a refined version of the cosmos expressing itself and that in our stories, as was the case with Plato, we often accidentally describe the problem rather than state the explanation. In an essay in response to the work of Arthur Jaffa, Fred Moten is clear on how a reciprocal assemblage methodology of telling is how we can might find reconciliation and “stay with the problem”,
“Let’s call it the scene of empathy. Lets call it the hesitant sociological scene. The scene of the in calculable rhythm. It is a scene neither of subjection nor objection. Looking with this hearing is a kind of building with or bearing.” (2017)
Going back to Rundell’s essay on the BBC listening app I was initially left wondering what exactly had made me feel uneasy about her line of thought (after all making a case for free access to books for all children is hard to argue with!) and then in the conclusion she accidentally wrote the answer to reconciling our belief in progress. Having created an essay in passionate defence of civic libraries she finishes by declaring that books are access to the songs we sing. Hold on, I thought, this is the very thing I am interested in and you cannot now tell me that books are the origin of this bringing together of thought and feeling. My research, via the songs of Whitehead, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari et al, has arrived in the region of singing in academia. It is not the doctrine of the printed word but the song itself that creates meaning. As Katherine Rundell herself concludes in her defence of books, when you make them inaccessible to a child,
“you cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years… it’s in writing that we have preserved our oldest most original thought, our best jokes and our most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.”
I hazard a guess that this ancient technology of song was around well before the printing press or the data centre. By inviting attendees to Sleep with Us there is the production of the kind of sagacious accident only song can produce because my father's songs were my gateway to the somatic experience of sleeping, the region where the body knows and the human is once again a part of.
The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology – the study of practices of knowing in being – is probably a better was to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter. (2007:185)
Sitting on the underground train on the way to the opening of Platforms the members of CosmiKnot were saying how we could all do with a sleep. This is how we came to sing We invite you to Sleep With Us at the end of the Cloak of Longing ritual. Sleeping as performance seems like an exciting act because it's really real. We all tried our best to actually sleep but for some it would remain an act. Sleep takes us into the region of somatic experience and as a collective performance sculpture, this could be a genuine repost to the idea that art should contain a message other than "I can feel it". Sleep the prisoner's escape. Who knows perhaps in acts of collective sleep we could reconcile our differences? By hanging the cloak of tears I think I am trying to banish the ghosts of how things are supposed to be done, like stretching the canvas correctly and preserving the integrity of the materials. I painted the cloak before my dad died and of course it wasn't a cloak until i decided to start wearing it as a processional vestment. The tears are a kind of energetically lazy way of rejecting the idea that meaning must be deliberate. I think I had a sense of a memo that we need to be clever to make meaning when actually it's the opposite - meaning comes from letting go. Oddly enough I believe that there is an intelligence in trusting material process that can excel way past cognition alone. My dad died and I began to recognise how reconciling death in life could be important to collective living.
References
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Duke
Bennett, J (2010) Vibrant Matter; A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press 1st Edition Bergson, H (2004) Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books.
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Media references:
Georgeson, M (2020) Kimey Peckpo Hatches Out: A mythopoeic self-destruction story Available here: https://www.creativemediaresearch.org/post/kimey-peckpo- hatches-out
Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri, 1990 available here: https://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
Sampson, T and Georgeson, M (2021) Centre for Critical Neuro-aesthetic Interferences, available here: https://youtu.be/cJ0tsrfWdOQ
Sampson, T and Georgeson, M (2018) Notes from the technological Nonconscious Available here: https://vimeo.com/300242356
Sandiford, M and Nungak, Z (2016) Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny, available here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/qallunaat_why_white_people_are_funny/
I am an artist in acdemia pursuing the idea that the lyric voice is where meaningful understanding emerges. My ritual presentations are informed by a commitment to the improvised contingency I found re-affirmed in Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. When I was a child it seemed normal that my father sung me to sleep with folk and blues songs that wove pain, desire and death. The milieu it created felt comforting and what was probably a circumstantial act (rather than a pedagogic decision) shaped my sense that songs are a technology for creating meaning. I wonder if meaning is a word for perceiving the region with ourselves as a part of it. Some call this the power of now. It is fair to say that the Now of chronological time is quite different to the time of temporal substance through which we find ourselves in the past emerging into the future rather than the crisp crystalline moment of the present where time is always imagined slipping through the fingers of the individual vainly trying to hold on to something. My research has become about trying to expand my own idea of what understanding can be. My encounter with Fred Moten’s steadfast nurturing of the lyric voice in critical theory fed into my blossoming sense of how, upon being invited to curate a celebration of William Blake, meaning could be formed in the song itself. Like the characters at the end of Fahrenheit 451 we become the stories in embodied memory. Books and reading are still pretty much how we think of knowledge and understanding although now we can freely move between the image of the monumental library stacked with the minds of other men (Is not the very idea of the anthropocentric really just the story of men?) to the power-station of hard-drives containing the cloud of our hive mind.
Debut enaction of the Ritual performance, We Invite You To Sleep With Us at Art Collective Fair, Platforms at the Tobacco Factory, Athens 2024. The performance invites the audience to exist as somatic entities. they are sung into a ritual act of collective sleep as a means of disorientating the conceptual identity and allowing the body's knowledge to become present . The ritual appears to enact Heidegger's desire to reconcile death within life as a way to live fully with open awareness and jouissance. The Cloak of longing is described as positive grief and the blue tears suggest that colour can only ever be perceived in an experienced context rather than as the conceptual spectrum suggested by Hume in his proposed "missing shade of blue" thought exercise.
Dr Mikey Georgeson with Margaret Prescod, Yasmeen El Araby and Dorothy Max Prior.