C a r l o s S e b a s t i á
A r t i s t
Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception GO TO Critical Analysis
To perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them; it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. To perceive is not to remember (26)
Henri Bergson - Matter and Memory GO TO Critical Analysis
Such an encounter, or ‘accessing’ of the event, might involve what Henri Bergson calls attention; the suspension of normal motor activity which in itself allows other ‘planes’ of reality to become perceivable.
For Bergson, it is the brain, understood as complex matter, which opens up this gap. The brain functions as an exchange system, receiving perceptions and producing reactions, and yet because of its complexity, an interval is opened up between excitation and reaction. (46 Simon O'Sullivan)
Now, by means of this interval, something extraordinary is produced or embodied: creative emotion.
Following Bergson, we “see” only what we have already seen. We see only that which we are interested. Bergson suggests and involves “the discarding of what has no interest for our needs. (47 Spanish Ed)
Paul Ricoeur - Memory, History, Forgetting
...We had left the "pure" memory in the condition of the virtual. It is at this critical point that we must retake the reading, to impel it to assign to this "pure" memory, in addition to virtuality, unconsciousness and an existence comparable to that which we attribute to external things when we do not perceive them. (551 Spanish Ed)
"the concrete act by which we re-apprehend the past in the present is recognition" (554 Spanish Ed).
To recognize a memory is to rediscover it.
Marc Augé - Oblivion
Oblivion, in short, is the living force of memory and the memory is the product of this. (28 Spanish Ed)
The fiction of others changes sense from the moment we become aware that we all live fictions. I think that if I can get rid of the "one-sidedness of the point of view," the fact that others live in fiction - say, to eliminate ambiguity, in the "narrative" - will rather help them approach me and I to them, because I also live in fiction and in "narrative". (46 Spanish Ed)
The Three Forms of Oblivion: The first is that of the return whose main claim is to recover a lost past, forgetting the present. The second is the suspense, whose main claim is to recover the present by temporarily securing it from the past and the future. The third is the beginning or re-beginning. Although in this case, it is contrary to the repetition where its pretension is to recover the future forgetting the past.
They have to be at least two to forget, that is to manage the time. (66-67 Spanish Ed)
Questioning about Memory
Sara Andersdotter - Chocking on the madeleine - Thesis GO TO Critical Analysis
(Ph.D. Awarded by The University of the Arts London March 2015) thought. The framework includes seven Deleuzian concepts applied in rethinking memory: the encounter, affect, the production of subjectivity, the minor, the virtual, the event, and mythopoesis. The thesis adopts this approach and demonstrates how the memory-event developed through phases of research. Firstly, the thesis establishes and critiques prevailing ideas and expressions of memory.
This thesis opens in my research a new investigation path, mainly around the idea of photography as a truth of our recollections.
Damian Sutton - Photography, Cinema, Memory - The Crystal Image of Time
Memory is composed of recollection images and contraction images—the two basic directions of perception. It is from recollection that perception flows and the brain makes sense of its world by organizing recollection.
The formulation of cinema chronology, for example, can also be understood as an organization of recollection. This organization is a mirror of perception: a psychologization enacted in order to make sense of Being.(37)
With a photograph, we are presented with an image that is static but that nonetheless can give a powerful sensation of time passing. (38)
Perception itself creates an image of the brain as a perception organ that acts individually and that reflects its image of the universe as if onto the ground glass or mirror that it is unable to penetrate without refraction or distortion. On the other hand, the universe is already an infinite multiplicity of viewpoints that make up the whole. The screen or mirror for this is a plane of immanence that Deleuze suggests is made up of “as many eyes as you like,” from which the eye that senses is “one movement-image amongst others . . . (46)
Walter Benjamin - Essays and Reflections
“The collector's passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—something that is classifiable—but is inflamed by its "genuineness," its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. Therefore, while tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences; and this leveling—so that "the positive and the negative ... predilection and rejection are here closely contiguous" (Schriften II, 313)” (48)
“It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile." Therefore Proust, summing up, says that the past is "somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is. (154)
In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection lose their mutual exclusiveness. (156)
Questioning about Photography
Estelle Barrett - Kristeva Reframed
...visual language and alternative stratum of "reality" operating beneath representation.
... Rejection moves between the two poles of drives and consciousness. (15)
The speaking subject, the one who uses and performs language - either in practices of making or viewing art - is at the heart of a process, revealing that the "real" is something that can be posited in advance and forever detached from instinctual and material process (21)
Kristeva’s notion of the speaking subject and the text as signifying process opens the way for a mode of analysis that acknowledges the interplay between conscious and unconscious/preconscious processes of productivity. (42)
In Black Sun, Kristeva theorises melancholia as a structuring of psychic space and suggests that through creative practice, this structuring is in some way transferred to artworks. (60)
In creative practice, the transference occurs not between the analysand and analyst, but between the artist and language itself, operating through the double articulation of the symbolic and the semiotic. The heterogeneous language of the artwork, then, becomes a site of inter-subjective exchange with the viewer. (93)
metaphors produced are not metaphors in the true sense but are an index of some non-thing or unknowable object, a hallucination of nothing (101)
Jacques Rancière - The emancipated spectator GO TO Critical Analysis
The artist’s manipulation of the world is to “dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations.”
It may happen that the loss of their illusions leads the artist to increase the pressure on the spectators: perhaps they know what to do, as long as the performance kicks them out of their passive attitude and turns them into active participants of a common world. (18 Spanish Ed)
“Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent – something that speech does just as much as photography. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. (76)
Simon O'Sullivan - Art encounters Deleuze & Guattari‘
what does art, what does this artwork, mean’? But rather, what does art, what does this artwork, do? (22)
In relation to aesthetics and affects, this function might be summed up as the making visible of the invisible, the making perceptible of the imperceptible.
Art then is to be understood as a composed thing that preserves otherwise passing sensations. ‘What is preserved – the thing or the work of art – is a bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects’ (WP 164). (p52)
In fact, both pure perception and pure memory are intuitive abstractions from what, in experience, is a mixed state of affairs (our habits of representation and of representational thought). Pure memory (‘identical to the totality of the past’) is then like pure perception (‘identical to the whole of matter’), an inhuman, super objective state which can only be accessed intuitively – we might even say imaginatively. (103)
Hal Foster - The Return of the Real
we have wired with spectacular events. This wiring connects and disconnects us simultaneously, making us at the same time psycho-technologically immediate to the events and geopolitically remote from them (226)
Questioning about Art
Milan Kundera - Unbearable lightness of being
Try to find the existential essence of the characters. The novel recounts scenes of daily life drawn with a profound transcendental meaning: the uselessness of existence and the necessity of the eternal return of Nietzsche.
The idea of the eternal return says that everything must be repeated as we have already lived it, repeated to infinity. Per negatio-nem, a life that disappears once and for all, does not return, is like a shadow, has no weight, if it has been horrible, beautiful, Elevated, that horror, that elevation or that beauty means nothing.
This idea is interesting to me in terms of the value of our thoughts, feelings and recollections and the possibility of reminding them forever or in opposition being forgotten.