Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere
(Rikki T is travelling from London to Paris by Eurostar)
London St Pancras International, Eurostar terminal. I have just clambered onto the train and found my seat. I am beginning to relax, waiting for the train to pull out of the station. Paris is beckoning and a much anticipated break. I will be visiting a friend and seeing Valéry Grancher’s exhibition The Shiwiars Project at the Palais de Tokyo. Grancher’s visit to the Amazon jungle is the subject of his exhibition. A project too close to mine to be missed, and a perfect excuse for a trip to Paris.
The train is pulling out of the station; we are on the move. I enjoy this space of limbo, of in-betweenness. Being in transit, between one place and another, leaving one world behind and not yet immersed in another. It is always a good time to think. The suspense between places frees up the mind. While I am hurtling through space, my mind is free to roam, think, daydream or just switch off, sink into travel drowsiness. I lean back, begin to unwind, sip my cappuccino. The coffee is good. The train is gliding through the outskirts of London. I wonder what my friend’s place is going to be like. She has just moved from London to Paris and has been given student housing. She had been concerned about where she would end up, and mentioned that the refurbishment of some of the units was long overdue.
My mind wanders. I find myself thinking about Renée Green’s auto-ethnographic account of the Unité Project. 1 Has the thought of staying in a crumbling student accommodation triggered the connection? I imagine Renée Green’s incongruous appearance amongst the remaining inhabitants of the mostly derelict housing estate. I can well picture the awkwardness of the final party she describes in her field journal: residents solidly clinging to one another, just like the artists who have descended on the building for the duration of the project. I ask myself what kind of ethnography this constitutes. Or, is this not an ethnographic project at all? Renée Green certainly talks about her part of the project as fieldwork.2 Curator Yves Aupetitallot is ambitious in his aims. He wants social-political transformation and deliberately shuns art institutions, situating the project in Corbusier’s social architecture, or what is left of it, instead.3 But as has been pointed out, the failure of Corbusier’s utopianism of social living is mirrored in the notable divide and sense of alienation between the artists and the inhabitants.
Escaping the clutches of the art world proves a difficult affair, even if spatially removed from the spaces of art. This project does not appear to make sense to the local inhabitants, yet it figures in the art world. I wonder what the local residents would have made of Green’s choice collection of books on the improvised bookshelf in her Unité apartment. She has photographed the bookshelf for the auto-ethnographic account of her residence at Unité.4 I had a good look at the titles. All art and cultural studies. In her essay she mentions a text by Zola. She explains that she already owns an English copy and has bought a French edition en route to Firminy.5 But it is not on the shelf. I wonder why. Is the photo carefully edited for the art world aficionados and intellectuals she anticipates will be engaging with the project? I admit I was hoping to find a trashy novel, something that would locate her in this bizarre place, or at least in France. Something personal. Or maybe even some real ethnography?
Books. I have taken light reading for the trip. A fictionalized memoir by an Australian journalist of her life amongst the French.6 Just the sort of thing Deleuze–Guattari would hate – a ‘journalist’s novel’! A book naively, or maybe even cynically, masquerading as literature. I admit I simply figured it a fitting read for the trip to Paris. Not too taxing and hopefully entertaining. I open the book and immerse myself in Sarah’s life amongst the French, Paris seen with the eyes of an outsider. A female Australian outsider I should add.
It was a city and culture I was familiar with – at least that’s what I thought back then. When I was a child my family had toured France in a tiny campervan and my eyes had popped at the chocolates and the cheeses. At secondary school I studied French and saw the films by Truffaut and Resnais which had struck me as enigmatic and European, although I couldn’t have said why. When I was sixteen I lived in England for a year and I came to Paris several times. In my mind, these experiences added up to knowledge of France and some understanding of its people. Then, a little over ten years later, […] when the time came to actually live in Paris, I figured belonging and integrating would take merely a matter of months.
Now, remembering my early naiveté draws a smile. The truth is that nearly all preconceptions of France turned out to be false. It hardly needs to be said that living in a place is totally different from visiting it. And yet this blatantly obvious statement does need to be said, particularly about Paris, the most visited city in the world. 7
I look up. The service trolley is approaching. It is slowly making its way along the narrow aisle, its approach signalled by the sound of crisp packets opening, coke or beer cans being popped, and repeated, detailed exchanges as to the required sugars. It slowly cranks past me in its servile pace.
I return to the book. I have lost my place. Searching for it, I ponder what I have just read. Cultures are complex and complicated things. When do you really understand, when are you really an insider? Insider of what? Or is it better to be an outsider looking in? My thoughts return to Renée Green. The reviewers of the Unité project see Green as cultural tourist, masquerader and infiltrating critic.8 She, however, describes herself as a ‘character’ from the metropolis, New York to be precise, but also as a product of the African diaspora, like some of the local residents. Green notes her surprise about the friendliness of the encounters in Unité’s lift and corridors. She tells us that in New York, tension is constant.9 We always make sense of our world based on our past experiences and background, whether international artists or Unité residents of North African descent who think, as she tells us, Green must be North African, at least in part.10 Italo Calvino’s famous fictional conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo springs to mind. The Khan seeks greater knowledge of his empire. He turns to Marco because he is from the outside. Does he think Marco can see more clearly because he is external to the empire? Or is it a matter of inside and outside, Khan and Marco, joining forces and seeing together, maybe a truer or larger picture?
Could Green be seen as a contemporary, art-nomad equivalent of Marco Polo, I wonder? Both produce accounts of their travels for a wider audience; both record their experiences. On reflection, probably a far-fetched comparison. Green’s self-identity is also rather different from Marco Polo’s. She states that she is curious about the site, and sees her presence as a ‘peace offering’ or ‘as a joke’.11 She makes it clear that the project is about her. Others will only appear if they enter her narrative space.12 Her auto-ethnographic documentary fiction reflects on the distance between the artists on-site, the inhabitants in situ and the unfamiliar environment.
Marco reveals little about himself in his Travels. But Calvino has him report to the emperor with gestures and objects until he has learned the Khan’s language. Then they reverse roles. Now the Khan reports on cities, the cities he thinks and imagines, and asks Marco to check his dreams against the real of his empire. Yet the cities visited by Marco always differ.13 But then neither of them is certain they ever went anywhere, ever left the space of wordless contemplation where they meet in silence, pondering the world. What goes on in the empire’s cities turns out to be a very complex affair. What do you see? How can you describe what you see? Words? Gestures? Silences? And the ear that shapes the story to be told?14 Memory? The Khan is suspicious, accuses him of withholding the full story, to only report irrelevant appearances. Where are the ‘moods, states of grace, elegies’15 the cities harbour?, he queries. Why no mention of the surge of elements, of molecules arranged in patterns, diamonds taking shape?16 When the Khan asks Marco why he keeps quiet about Venice, Marco replies,
Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice […] To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice. 17
Venice is everywhere. When keen anthropologists flounder in the Amazon lowlands, delirious with the desire to decipher Shipibo designs, they do not hear what the Shipibo are saying, because – Venice is everywhere. Their Venice is phosphene theory, which holds that drug-induced retinal experiences of ‘seeing stars’ are but subjective images generated within the eye and brain that ‘reflect the neural organization of the visual pathway’.18 They cannot mean, they cannot have anything to say about the world, are just neural sparks that are cultural only to the extent that meaning is imposed. It is perplexing. Is this the predicament of intercultural communication? The inevitable misapprehension, mis- or non-translation across paradigms? Or maybe not? There is the anthropologist, ethno-botanist and art historian Claudia Müller-Ebeling who somehow ended up with Shipibo-Conibo designs in Nepal, showing the patterns to a Nepalese shaman to see what he made of it. She writes,
Driven by scholarly curiosity I had made a habit of showing male and female shamans I encountered in my field trips in Asia and South America photos and artefacts of alien shamanic cultures and to ask them about their symbolic meaning. I would never have imagined that Nepalese shamans would be able to make any sense of the abstract linear patterns of their South American colleagues. I expected the Sherpa shaman to only cast a brief glance at the designs and then to lay the photos and embroideries aside. Far from it! To my great astonishment he studied them with great interest and gave detailed explanations that absolutely hit the nail on the head. 19
Tantalizingly, however, Müller-Ebeling fails to tell us what the Nepalese shaman made of the designs: this might have put an end to the speculation about how and what they mean. To be fair, she does report that the reverse exercise also yielded results, that is, when she showed Nepalese thangkas to Shipibo-Conibo shamans, the latter read it without hesitation as the journey of a shaman to the spirit world. So if the shamans can interpret images across cultural boundaries, it is not so much a question of culture, but of what cultures and what modes of seeing are involved. For the cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon who studies ayahuasca hallucinations from a phenomenological perspective, the design visions are beyond culture. He states that ‘many facets of the Ayahuasca experience are actually independent of personal and socio-cultural background’.20 But this is not an endorsement of retinal theory. In fact he disagrees with the prominent view that the figurative elements seen during ayahuasca visions are but projections of ‘cultural memory on the wavering screen of colors and shapes’ interpreted as ‘motifs and personages’.21 Shanon also takes issue with phosphene theory. For him anthropology confuses phosphenes – that is, the bursts, puffs and splashes of light perceived during hallucinations – with what he tells us are ‘proper’ geometric vision. He should know as he has had more than 140 personal experiences with the hallucinogen. He has taken detailed notes about his experiences and has also conducted about 300 interviews with drug users from mixed backgrounds, cultural and otherwise.22 He compares the puffs and burst stage to beads strung on a chain, and says they form a pattern but retain their singularity. Geometric design visions proper, however, create pulsating, two- and at times three-dimensional interlocking structures and ‘compose tapestries that entirely cover the inner visual field’.23 For him this is the experience indigenous art styles emulate, not the shapes of the phosphene stage. He agrees with Gow and Keifenheim that the designs are about transformation, and states that during ayahuasca visions they are markers of transitions, of beginnings and ends. He calls them metaphoric fences:24
Several times I noted that while in a high state of visioning a geometric pattern would appear. This could close the visioning experience, or, if I dared, lead to new, and most often stronger visions. [… T]hese designs and patterns are encountered when one stage of the inebriation ends and another may or may not begin. […] Seeing them, one may conclude that the visions have ended and withdraw; or else one may forge ahead, and – like Alice stepping through the looking glass – get to new realms with even more powerful, more fantastic figurative visions. 25
He says that while initially ‘visualizations may be triggered by simple brain stimulation, as with phosphenes’, the more complex visual experiences ‘cannot be accounted for in such a simplistic, reductionist manner’.26 From his phenomenological point of view, the distinction between ‘that which is interpreted and that which is interpretation-free’27 does not make sense.
To my mind the story should be recounted in terms of the pas de deux […] In this pas de deux, the mind dances, so to speak, with the products of both brain and mind. […] All that happens under the intoxication is the product of brain activity, just as all that happens is the product of the dance of the mind. Likewise, all is real and all is the product of the imagination. 28
It seems that it all boils down to perception in the end, which in Western culture is corralled by science. Science as unassailable truth. Cultures are allowed to differ, but nature remains hors champ, beyond culture, is allocated a place of purity, of universal truth. The anthropologist Latour calls it an arrogant universalism or the ‘Internal Great Divide’,29 that is, the conception of nature as outside of culture, as universal and knowable by means of Western science alone.
One society – and it is always the Western one – defines the general framework of Nature with respect to which the others are situated. 30
He holds that it should be natures-cultures instead. Latour has put it well. Science sets the West apart, is the basis for claims of superior knowledge, the arrogant assumption that there is only one way of looking.31
In Shipibo-Conibo culture thinking and seeing are linked. Seeing is characterized by a double regime of inner and outer.32 But perception touches on nature, or, in this instance, the retina and neural pathways. And we are stuck with Venice. Not the real Venice of course, the watery Serenissima of the Adriatic, but science’s Eurocentricity. Superior knowledge is claimed and researchers turn the other way – for the most part that is. Gow does think about the story of how Sangama reads the newspaper and how he could have ‘learnt to read in school’ at a time when nobody educated Indians.33
You folks listen to me, but others belittle me. They say ‘Sangama the ignorant, the liar. He does his lying by reading dirty paper from the outhouse.’ They laugh at me, and distort my words all the time. Why should my eyes be like theirs? My eyes are not like theirs. 34
Gow is trying to mediate the two worlds that meet when anthropologists turn up in remote villages in the Amazon and go native for a bit, yet need to cater to the academic world and the demand for results and academic narratives.
My mind wanders. I look out of the window, see the landscape gliding past. The steady movement of the train is comforting. I feel sleepy.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of your eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. 35
Bergson and his penchant for movement. In one way Bergson should be seen as the predecessor of today’s neo-nomads flitting around the world. But only in one way, the outside way. Actually not at all. He thought of the succession of positions taken by objects moving through space, like the train shuttling through Kent right now, as a view from the outside of ‘things’. For him this is not really movement, or not the movement that matters. Quite literally so, as it is really about matter, what we think matter to be. Rather than seeing it as dead and inert, Bergson declares matter and movement to be identical. Our world is not composed of things, but of images in constant movement, our bodies among them. We know the present as the plane where these images – be they smells, colours, sounds and so forth – concur and marry with a reservoir of memories, simultaneously confirming and augmenting our picture of the world. Memory, perception, and the ‘real’ – again. Venice, the Khan and Marco, travelling and yet sitting still in their garden of contemplation, dressed in silk kimonos.36
| Kublai: | I do not know when you have had the time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems you have never moved from this garden. |
| Polo: | […] At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold. |
| Kublai: | I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, […] and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army. […] |
| Polo: | Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of peppers in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living. 37 |
Calvino’s image is suggestive: Kublai’s garden as an in-between, a space apart that allows thoughts to silently emerge – like my journey, on the train, shuttling between departure and destination. I have to think of Bergson’s reactive gap which for him defines human-centric perception. For Bergson, matter is always on the move; it is only our thoughts that think in static modes. He reasons that we need to think in terms of life, think mobile thoughts,38 not the static ideas Platonism considers to be the essence of reality. For Bergson, they are but ‘snapshots of becoming mistaken for the real’,39 singled out moments of an ever-changing reality. His is a dynamic and creative philosophy of immanence. It is based on an effort of sympathy, an intuiting of the flux of the ‘real’ and a radical shift in thinking perception. The experiencing human subject is no longer central to perception; it does not need a witnessing consciousness to occur. Human-centric perception is but a special scenario of the constant, perceptual exchanges in matter. It all starts with matter-image: Bergson posits an inner luminosity of matter. In my mind, this evokes the lucent designs that appear in shamanic visions, or how I imagine them from the literature, incessantly shifting and changing forms, unless firmed up by song. Are the designs pointing to Bergson’s sub-atomic world of variation, the divergent and creative processes of nature, Deleuze’s world of the simulacra, I wonder?
Bergson attributes a quality of ‘imageness’ to matter on the level of sub-atomic streamings. Matter, according to Bergson, is simultaneously movement and a set of images in flux, acting and reacting to one another. Or, to be more precise, these active-reactive movement-images constitute an undulating, co-implicated world of molecular flux. This perception of ripplings between movement-images unseats the brain as the privileged seat of consciousness. It rather is but an ‘image’ among ‘images’, participating equally in this ‘universal variation’, receiving and transmitting movement.40
The train glides smoothly along the tracks as I contemplate matter’s incessant motion. I try Bergson’s suggestion of how to imagine matter’s inner motion. His proposition seems simple and straightforward: Abolish your consciousness, and
matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers. 41
As this is difficult to imagine, he adds a step-by-step guide:
[F]irst […] connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations on the spot, finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility. […] You will obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception. 42
Bergson is right. It is exhausting. I give up and puzzle over Bergson’s notion of subjective and objective perception instead; particularly objective perception, which, he declares, is foundational.
The image reflected by a living image is precisely what will be called perception. 43
‘Image framing image’ is the objective pole of perception, or perception in matter. It is unlimited, completely open and vastly more extensive and encompassing than subjective perception.
An atom, for example, perceives infinitely more than we do and, at the limit, perceives the whole universe […]44
Objective perception, the perceptual flux of variation, sub-atomic quivers that emanate in all directions, immediately reactive to all other images. This is the non-human dimension reunited with culture. Matter is no longer on the other side of Latour’s Internal Great Divide45 but is part of life, has perception.
It is true that an image may be without being perceived – it may be present without being represented […]46
Whether seen, discovered, chanced upon or not, the images are always already there. What about the retinal sparks, I wonder? How do they fit into this picture? For science perception is what human consciousness engages with – bodily processes do not qualify. But for Bergson matter perceives, and for him non-human and human perception co-exist – human perception is but a limited instance of the all-pervasive perception in matter.
The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception – a photograph would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph […] is already taken, already developed in the heart of things and at all the points of space? 47
The photograph is already taken – perception occurs with or without human intervention. Bodily sensation participates in the exchanges that are part of objective perception, the reactive gap allows for memory and consciousness. Bergson’s human perception is premised on participation in movement-matter and a stepping outside of these reactive exchanges.
In true armchair anthropologist fashion I imagine the shamans listening to the songs of the spirits at night, adding their voice to these musical exchanges. Reading Bergson’s model of perception through Shipibo-Conibo shamanic trances as described by anthropologists and – equally – reading the trance visions through Bergson’s propositions is thought provoking. Could it change the story of the Shipibo-Conibo designs? For Bergson human perception, or subjective perception as he calls it, evolves from the perceptual substratum of universal variation by an act of limitation and centring. It involves a filtering, a selection, a discarding of surplus perceptions, a subtractive act.
The thing is the image as it is in itself, as it is related to all the other images to whose action it completely submits and in which it reacts immediately. But the [subjective] perception of the thing is the same image related to another special image which frames it, and which only retains a partial action from it, and only reacts to it mediately. In [subjective] perception thus defined, there is never anything else or anything more than there is in the thing: on the contrary, there is ‘less’. We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs. 48
Subjective perception is premised on a reactive gap between received and executed motion. A non-automatic response is introduced, a delaying of reaction.49 The interval allows for choice and variance. It defines the consciously perceiving image as a ‘centre of indetermination’. What a radical repositioning of received opinion! The brain is no longer the ‘centre’ where images are ‘manufactured’ on the basis of sensual data received. It is only ‘an interval, a gap between an action and a reaction’50 in the ‘acentred universe of images’.51 The photograph is always already taken!
I note Bergson uses the term perception in a somewhat blanket fashion. He locates perception’s fundamental exchanges in the substratum of matter. Yet a lot of the time, when writing about perception, he clearly has human-centric, subjective processes in mind. Even if there is only a difference of degree rather than of kind52 between the two aspects of perception, should he not be more specific as to which aspect of perception he is talking about? Should he not be saying objective or subjective perception? Is he not reintroducing a human-centric perspective if he assumes ‘perception’ as a matter of course to stand for subjective perception?
Then there is memory. That is, there is more to subjective perception than the subtractive act. Perception is replete with things, people and situations remembered which overlay the sense data received in the perceptive act.
In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images. 53
Perception, as we erroneously call it (it should be subjective perception), is therefore mostly memory, and not perception, at all, as defined by Bergson. Hence the power of Venice! If we want to understand (subjective) perception, we need to imaginatively remove the ‘cloak of recollections’ that memory casts over our sense perceptions. If we could live in the present only, our (subjective) perceptions would be immediate and instantaneous. They would not be subject to duration, that brief prolongation of the perceptual act by memory’s work. But this purity of (subjective) perception can only be thought, can only exist in theory. At least according to Bergson.
I wonder how shamanic trance perception fits into Bergson’s scheme. If matter is the substratum of all perception, retinal sparks are part of perception. It turns out Bergson agrees with this proposition. In fact, he has explicitly addressed this issue reflecting on experiments with electric stimulation of the optical nerve and the resulting visions. For him these experiments highlight the fundamental misunderstanding of how human-centric perception, seen as exteriorization of internal states, is conceived. He thinks this is erroneous and the reverse is the case. The material universe has not ‘emerged from us’ but we have ‘emerged from it’.54 This understanding has implications for phosphene theory. For Bergson, stimulation with electricity constitutes a bodily interaction with electro-magnetic energy, that is, light.
[… W]hat he [the physicist] calls here an electromagnetic disturbance is light, so that it is really light that the optic nerve perceives objectively when subject to electric stimulus. 55
For Bergson, the experiment and the resulting sensual reactions therefore fall under the ambit of ‘common’ perceptive exchanges in the flux of matter. Yet as these sensations arise within rather than outside the body, they constitute affections ‘localized within the body’56 rather than perception. But for Bergson affections are part of subjective perception – Bergson states that there is only a ‘difference of degree and not of nature between affection and perception’.57 For a Bergsonian, therefore, subjective perception of so-called ‘phosphenes’, that is, visual phenomena resulting from electrical or chemical stimulation, constitute ‘real’ perception rather than a cultural misinterpretation of natural facts.
I look out of the window, casting my eyes over the naturescapes passing by at a reassuringly steady pace. It all seems so natural, gliding through space to the sound of the train’s steady rumble – participating in the movement yet observing the surrounds from my mobile vantage point. My thoughts return to Bergson, perception and the sub-atomic world of variation. How relevant is Bergson’s material redefinition of perception to the interpretation of ayahuasca visions, I wonder? I think about science and the nature – culture divide. The West claims that science is above culture. But Latour argues that anthropologists studying a ‘tribe of scientific researchers’ would soon come to the conclusion that there is no difference between ‘natives’ and ‘moderns’ after all. Both interpret nature through the filter of culture, yet science thinks it is not culture but fact and claims superior knowledge based on denial.
Her [the anthropologist’s]58 informers [the tribe of scientific researchers] claim that they have access to Nature, but the ethnographer sees perfectly well that they have access only to a vision, a representation of Nature that she […] cannot distinguish neatly from politics and social interests […] This tribe, like the earlier [indigenous] one, projects its own social categories on to Nature; what is new is that it pretends it has not done so. 59
This is an important point. Different cultural views of nature seriously skew field reports, as the Shipibo-Conibo example demonstrates. And anthropology’s proud history of self-critical examination skirts this issue; for all their critical acuity, neither Geertz nor Clifford, foreground this point. Only Latour champions this cause and argues that we should move from cultural relativism to ‘natural’ relativism.60
Natural relativism highlights the idea that nature is not a universal given but is conceived in disparate ways in different societies. But are we reinscribing difference in an essentializing fashion when we focus on this ‘natural’ divergence? How can we avoid relativized concepts of nature to be subsumed under multiculturalism’s neo-essentializing tendencies? Could Bergson bridge the gap? Has Bergson’s conception of nature, released from the grip of law and universality, become part of culture? Or vice-versa? Have we arrived at Latour’s natures-cultures?
I return to my earlier mental exercise.
[… F]irst […] connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations on the spot, finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility […]61
Straining to grasp this vision of movement in matter, this time I persevere with the experiment.
Now bring back your consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colors will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes. 62
As I am trying to immerse myself in this thought experiment, the following passage from an article of Gebhart-Sayer comes to mind:
[… T]he design visions are described as being overall, nonanalytical impressions of entire patterned ‘pages’ or ‘sheets’ flashed rapidly in front of the shaman’s inner eye and vanishing as soon as he tries to have a closer look. 63
Quite right, despite Bergson’s detailed instructions I could not conjure up a stable picture. But the unexpected rapport between a Western philosopher and Indians from the Amazon region is striking. Where to go from here, I wonder? Can these ideas be developed and made relevant to the discussion of Shipibo-Conibo designs?
I turn to Deleuze, who has adopted Bergson’s conception of perception and made it central to his aesthetics. He shares Bergson’s desire to overturn Platonism and, like him, has elaborated a philosophy of immanence, which declares the immutable, universal sphere behind the world of appearances an illusion. The real ‘real’ is the world of flux, of becoming. If anyone can help me in thinking through these questions, it would be Deleuze. So what is Deleuze’s take on Bergson’s two-tiered model of perception? And how can this be related to the designs?
Deleuze, of course, is not interested in cultures. He is not an anthropologist, nor does he suffer from ‘ethnographer envy’. He is thinking difference, but not in view of cultures. This does not mean, of course, that his concepts cannot be given a cultural turn, that ethnography cannot adopt them, that it has nothing to say about Shipibo-Conibo visions.
For one thing, his undoing of the Idea means there is ‘no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all points of view’.64 This statement resonates with Shohat’s and Stam’s propositions of a polycentric aesthetic,65 where Europe as normative centre of reference is differenced and a plethora of ‘dynamic locations’ are mobilized. The ‘subterranean rebelliousness of becoming’ previously held at bay by Platonic ideality, the repressed ‘other’ of the Platonic order of identity, reintroduces difference into the Platonic word ruled by the authentic original. Sanctioned copies, justified by internal resemblance to the ideal, are replaced by variance, by bad images cut loose from the model, proliferating profusely. For Deleuze the sub-atomic world of variation, or Bergson’s objective perception, is representative of these divergent and creative processes of nature, the world of the simulacra.
Like Bergson, Deleuze expands perception from the horizon of human experience to the flux of matter. But he also takes a further step. For Bergson, objective perception remains an abstract idea, a thought experiment, as we can never step away from memory, can never extract pure perception from memory’s images.66 But for Deleuze, objective perception is an experiential possibility. He sees the cinematic image as expressive of both aspects of perception, the diffused perception of the object, as well as the subtractive mode of the subjective. He argues that because of the ‘mobility of its centres and the variability of its framings’,67 cinema has the potential to exemplify the world of objective perception. Deleuze explores these two poles of perception by discussing how they play out in film. He also introduces liquidity as an interim state between subjective and objective vision, also referred to as molar and molecular perception.
[… I]f we start from a solid state, where molecules are not free to move about (molar of human perception), we move next to a liquid state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another, but we finally reach a gaseous state, defined by the free movement of each molecule. 68
For Deleuze, the condition of liquidity references a qualitative shift, which occurs in the transition from land to water to air. For him the camera is ‘naturally’ able to capture these de-solidifying perceptual shifts.
[… O]n land, movement always takes place from one point to another, always between two points, while on water the point is always between two movements: it thus marks the conversion or the inversion of movement, as in the hydraulic relationship of a dive and a counter-dive, which is found in the movement of the camera itself. 69
According to Deleuze, liquidity reaches beyond human perception, but without quite attaining the fully molecular state of gaseousness. It represents an opening of the doors of perception to a wildly different world of experience and finds expression in the fascination of French film with the element of water.
Finally, what the French School found in water was the promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as condition, as milieu. A more delicate and vaster perception, a molecular perception, peculiar to the ‘cine-eye’. 70
Maybe also the ayahuasca eye? Is there an affinity between shamanic trance perception and cinematic perception? What else has Deleuze to say about perception? For one he argues that the French School is pointing ‘towards […] this other perception, this clairvoyant function’71 but does not altogether succeed in creating the ‘new image’. It rather brings the ‘old’ image to its limit while remaining tied to ‘solidity’. For Deleuze, it is Vertov who achieves a successful articulation of ‘camera-consciousness’ representative of the ‘eye in matter’. Or, to be more precise, the combination of Vertov’s camera work and the subsequent manipulation of his shots through montage succeed in ‘carrying perception into things’.72 They achieve an articulation of a mode of seeing representative of the world of flux at the heart of matter unavailable to the human eye which the camera, even if mobile, cannot reach. And if from a human point of view montage is a construction, from the point of view of matter, it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye, which would be in things.73
It is not surprising that we have to construct it [the eye in matter] since it is given only to the eye which we do not have […] what montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend. This is the definition of objectivity, ‘to see without boundaries and distances’. Thus in this respect all procedures are legitimate, they are no longer trick shots. 74
But does this not constitute a subjective perception still? A ‘being perceived’ rather than ‘being’, even if close to ‘objective perception’? Deleuze disagrees. For him, this questioning represents an obsession with purity. He argues that it does not matter whether we trace a perception back to its original components, or rather declare it an impossibility to do so.
We no longer distinguish the two pure presences of matter and memory in representation, and we no longer see anything but differences in degree between perception-recollections and recollection-perceptions. In short, we measure the mixtures with a unit that is itself impure and already mixed. 75
Deleuze has a point. The notion of purity is merely hypothetical, as all our perceptions are already mixed; there is little sense in seeking to think in terms of origins. The world of the bad copy, of simulacra, does not look back to its roots; it thrives on difference. It is characterized by ‘lines of differentiation that are […] truly creative’.76
Where does this leave Shipibo-Conibo visions, I wonder? Are they representative of the ‘eye in matter’? What would Deleuze make of the worlds they reference? As it turns out Deleuze, or rather Deleuze–Guattari have thought about the visual worlds experienced in trance perceptions; they did stray into anthropology on occasion. For one, they engage with the work of Lévi-Strauss. But would James Clifford have reason to be pleased? Did they read Lévi-Strauss because it is Lévi-Strauss, international celebrity, grand maître of French anthropology, and firmly part of the French cultural set? I wonder, especially as Deleuze and Guattari do not appear to be thinking ‘with’ the cultural contexts Lévi-Strauss explores. There is no mention of Guaycuru and Bororo Indians, or Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies, no examples. Just reflections on myths and structures. And yet Deleuze–Guattari’s hallmark is to think ‘with’ film, painting, music and so forth or, rather, the work of white, male, Western, modern artists.
But what do Deleuze–Guattari say about Lévi-Strauss? They emphatically disapprove of structuralism; they see it as reductive and premised on a closed dualist system. They make the point that structuralist analyses of cultures do not allow for ‘becomings between things’,77 and hold that structuralism moves classification from outer semblance to inner homology, displacing ‘imagination with conceptual metaphors’.78 For them, structuralism succeeds in making the world more rational, replacing imagination with an abstract system of relations.79 For Deleuze–Guattari this is not up to par.
We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human. […] Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings, since it is designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence: a correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming. 80
They also point out that structuralism’s disavowal of non-human becomings automatically denigrates cultural expressions of such phenomena delineated, for example, in the tales Lévi-Strauss gathered in the Amazon jungle. Yet Deleuze–Guattari only mention the tales, and don’t give examples of their content. They critique the structuralist system and its use of myth and see it as hooked on the regime of the signifier.
[… I]n his study of myths Lévi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by which a human becomes animal. […] It is always possible to try to explain these blocs of becoming by a correspondence between two relations, but to do so most certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under study. Must it not be admitted that myth as a frame of classification is quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments of tales? 81
But becomings must not be understood as imaginary events.
[… B]ecoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest level, as in Jung and Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. 82
For Deleuze–Guattari anthropology, structuralism and imagination fail the reality of becoming; only art is able to capture its reality. Where is Moby Dick leading Ahab so silently, ask Deleuze–Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? Through a progression of becomings, culminating in the ultimate zone of becoming the zone of imperceptibility:
Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles? 83
Deleuze–Guattari offer becomings as alternative to myth, structuralism and imagination and link them to creative acts. They also invoke the well-established trope of the artist as seer, which inheres modernist aesthetics and is closely linked to primitivism and the fascination with ethnographic artefacts. This evokes the notion of the artist as shaman, which clearly still has purchase since the New York art critic Jerry Saltz quite recently referred to Tiravanija’s work as ‘shamanistic’. Deleuze–Guattari also draw on the work of the maverick anthropologist and bestseller author Carlos Castaneda. They are not troubled by the controversy about the veracity of his writing.84 They rather welcome the ambiguity that surrounds his work and unreservedly base their discussion of trance perceptions on his observations.
So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather than an account of an initiation. 85
Deleuze–Guattari draw attention to the advice the Yaqui shaman Don Juan gives to his pupil Castaneda.
Stop! You are making me tired! Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! 86
I guess this also applies to the efforts of anthropologists in the Amazon region. Is the ingenious indigenous creation of aesthetic design therapy such an experiment? As Deleuze–Guattari remind us, Don Juan resists ‘the mechanisms of interpretation’.87 He is adamant that in order to see, one first needs to stop the world.
Stopping the world was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to the flow. 88
For Don Juan, the emphasis on meaning misses the point and Deleuze– Guattari argue that drug-induced experiences represent a leap into the peak of becomings: the sphere of the imperceptible.
If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. 89
But Deleuze–Guattari caution that we must not limit ourselves to ‘drugs’. There are other ways of becoming, of seeing differently.
Castaneda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the molar structure. 90
What is relevant to Deleuze and Guattari is that altered perceptions escape the interpretative grip of everyday consciousness. This is what the Shipibo-Conibo shaman José Santos must be thinking when anthropologists arrive with their tape recorder and questions. Stop interpreting! Stop! Have we returned to Gow’s rebuttal of meaning for Piro designs and their link to shamanic perception?
Whatever else it involves, the use of ayahuasca is a technique of visual transformation. Ayahuasca is always taken at night, and as the drug takes effect, the darkness fills up with dense patterns of coloured light, which wind and shift until they are replaced with images of people, plants, animals and places. 91
For Deleuze–Guattari these shamanic perceptions are representative of the peak of becoming, that is, the zone of imperceptibility.
[… T]he imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at the same time as perception becomes necessarily molecular: arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection. 92
Should we conclude that Shipibo-Conibo designs are representative of Deleuze–Guattari’s zone of imperceptibility? Is this the message they bear?
My mind wanders. Gebhart-Sayer, Illius, Gow, Keifenheim, Castaneda, Deleuze–Guattari – what a diversity of people, professions and views. Each seeking to understand perception in its ‘other’ mode, bringing their conceptual backgrounds to bear. What about Rirkrit Tiravanija? I have to think of his piece for the 1993 Venice Biennale, the aluminium canoe bearing pots of boiling water for instant noodles to be handed out to visitors.93 Venice, historically the place of luxury goods and spices pouring in from all over the world, is now a place of contemporary art and tourism, which makes it yet again a place of global encounter. I can hear the echoes of the languages of the world, mingling Babel-like in Venice’s narrow lanes. Venice holds a special place in the world’s imaginary. Its watery canals and crumbling architecture are laced with romance, a place for fantasies, dreams and imaginings. A place of most unlikely encounters. Train-dreaming I imagine Shipibo-Conibo shamans, anthropologists and philosophers mingling in the streets of Venice. They have been to see the Biennale, and now hurry to Tiravanija’s for lunch. This is where they meet, sharing their meal as strangers.
Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. 94
Most of my informants articulated their conceptions of ‘spirits’ and ‘other realities’ for the first time when I questioned them, even though as experienced shamans they have trained more than a dozen apprentices. They were for the first time confronted with the difficulty of communicating verbally what to them is general and basic knowledge 95
The songs pass from the beak of the chishca bird, from its tip of the tongue to my tip of the tongue. My tip of the tongue is vibrating. The songs pass backwards and forwards between us. This is how they become strong. The chishca has a tongue like a snake: with two tips. But in the middle it has a third, smaller tip. This is where the song is created.’ 96
What are they sharing with each other while they partake of Tiravanija’s hospitality?
A fibre stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fibre. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. 97
You must listen attentively – and you must sing. When you are well intoxicated, you can hear and sing. You drink – and then you sing! Lie down and wait. They will come. Everything is coloured, has its own sound. When the spirits sing, you will sing along. They come really close and sing; then you will sing as well. That’s how it is. 98
Are they listening to each other? And if they are, what are they hearing?
Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. 99
Everyday language is not the medium normally used to transmit spiritual ideas. The shamans use the rich language of songs. It is full of images, comparisons, subtle hints. It is learning by doing. There are hardly any explanations. 100
The Great Boa is hissing and thundering
Her tongue is moving like a machine
In the centre of your eyes
I will dissolve it
I will teach you how to see 101
They have finished their noodles and now go their separate ways. They exchanged words, but have their worlds touched? What have they shared? What has been engendered by this instance of togetherness?
For Sarat Maharaj, the international space is a ‘meeting ground for a multiplicity of tongues, visual grammars and styles’.102 He reminds us how each language and culture has ‘its own system of manner of meaning’103 and how constructions of meaning often do not add up.
[… T]ranslations do not square, each overshoots the other and is opaque to it. An excess silently dribbles out. Between the constructions we are left with the remainder of the untranslatable. 104
The quest to read Shipibo-Conibo designs is a perfect example. Much more is at stake than a missing code. It is about a manner of meaning, of being in the world. Cultural translation as transmutation and transformation rather than transfer.105 Encounters have the capacity to change, to transform, and to create new ways of seeing the world. But translation thought of as a process of simply ‘carrying on’ and ‘carrying over’ occludes this possibility. It flattens difference, generates a ‘translatese’106 of sameness in which the ‘other’ vanishes, becomes but the foil for the fashioning of the self who encounters itself only.
The train’s loudspeaker comes on with a crackle. The train is approaching the Gare du Nord. Passengers are reminded to take all belongings. I hastily gather my things. Have I come to a conclusion, I wonder? As I get ready to disembark, I think of Renée Green’s incongruent presence at the Unité Party, and the lack of encounter it represents, despite best intentions. I reflect on the difficulties of encountering the other in the face of one’s preconceptions, memories and cultural situatednesses as conjured up by Calvino’s Venice.
One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see. – Giorgio Morandi 107
Clifford Geertz would like Morandi’s statement, I imagine. It is thin or thick description again, the sorting of the winks from the twitches and interpreting what they mean. It is all about context. The structuralist dream of hard and fast codes has become unstuck. Looking but not seeing. It is Marco Polo and the Khan again. You only perceive what you know already, what makes sense to you. The Shipibo-Conibo designs, while greatly admired, are not seen, or only thinly so. And in Tamil Nadu, there is a different kind of oversight. Researchers there do not seem to look where they tread, eyes firmly fixed on mighty gopuras 108 and similar lofty cultural feats. Here even thin perception seems to fail.
Seeing per se is difficult enough. Engaged in acts of cultural translation it is an even more complex affair, haunted by a plethora of spectres casting cloaks of invisibility. But is looking hard really what it takes? Should it be looking smart instead? How are we to negotiate Venice?