AVONMOUTH-SEVERN BEACH LITTORAL - performativities of emptiness

17 March 2008
11am-4.30pm
Wickham Theatre
University of Bristol
Cantocks Close
Bristol BS8 1UP

The symposium brings participants together at the University of Bristol to present material from the weekend, once again taking as a starting point Walter Benjamin's observation that 'When someone goes on a trip (s)he has something to tell about'.

Participants on the weekend will be joined by Ika Willis (Classics, Bristol), who will act as discussant for the day.

10.30-11.00

Arrival and coffee

11.00-11.30

Welcome and introduction

11.30-1.00pm

Group 1

Jo Carruthers (English, U of Bristol), Tim Cole (Historical Studies, U of Bristol), J D Dewsbury (Geographical Sciences, U of Bristol), Jim Dixon (Archaeology/Art, Media and Design, U of Bristol/UWE), Moira Gavin (independent artist), Jem Noble (independent artist), Angela Piccini (Drama, U of Bristol), Carol Stevens (UWE), John Wylie (Exeter)

1.00-2.00

Lunch (provided)

2.00-3.30

Group 2

Iain Biggs (Art, Media and Design, UWE), Penny Bickle (Archaeology, Cardiff), Owain Jones (Countryside and Community Research Institute, U of Gloucester), Mike Pearson (Performance Studies, UW Aberystwyth), Clare Thornton (independent artist)

Download
Viewsymposium_penny.doc

3.30-4.00

Tea/Coffee

4.00-4.45 Closing discussion with Ika Willis (Classics)

Ten minute report: Reporting back

I’m going to speak briefly about working with the transect.

The task When Mike, Claire, Penny, Owain and I agreed to use a transect as the focus of group activity, I needed a task to disrupt my usual sampling habits. The group’s suggestions led to my using the toe of my left boot as a marker after every fifth step. I would then notice both what was next to the object that first took my attention and the full sensory range of my experience in that moment, including any memories. I made brief notes, occasional small drawings, put material in small transparent plastic bags, and took some photographs. My amplified notes are on the Wiki.

Although I’m only going to refer to six of the sixty-three observations I made on the transect in order to reflect on method, what I want to say is informed both by the whole process and by the group work that proceeded it.

Observation 1: Curb side - wet (grass) / cold (left) side of my body due to the wind blowing from that direction – sound of vehicles traversing the road behind me, mostly left to right. Close-up: leaf debris, grass stalks, matted.

Observation 12: A small piece of burnt-looking clinker almost at the point where the railway embankment material ends and an irregular poured slab of concrete for the pipe footings begins - a small piece of cement shaped like a duck’s foot. I’m aware of strong raking sunlight from behind my left shoulder and the sound of a single-engine airplane off in the direction of the sun.

Observation 19: ‘Fruit” from an unidentified plant bagged for later. Still don’t know what it is. Colder in the shadow. Birds have gone silent but there are distant unidentifiable sounds all around. Stillness. Then the sound that was identified yesterday (by either Mike or Owain) as gunfire across on the Welsh side of the estuary starts up. Can that be correct? Would the military really use firing ranges on a Sunday? If not, is it the water moving stones, etc?

Reflection: The transect task shifted me away from the over-directed attention of an authoritative observer; towards finding a way to enlarge and loosen that mode of attention with listening as an active receptivity - both to the multiplicities of the world at large and to internal thoughts, sensations and feelings. This enlarging and loosening is what I tried to convey in the workshop brief through notions of amateurism and the Observer Book of the Overlooked.

First - the transect as method encouraged me to not over-focus my attention; to resisting the desire – reinforced by professional and institutional expectations - to reduce my field of attention to what I am already well equipped to grasp. Second – something has to be reported back to the group, in principle if not in practice. Reporting back is a responsibility – as at Epynt, witnessing to others invites additional care and attention. Third – care towards witnessing shows how much my attention fluctuates, introducing uncertainties as to the interpretation of my sense perceptions. So, in Observation 19, I doubt the match between my experience and the meaning I attribute to it on the say-so of others.

Q - Are these three points indicative of basic “rules” for group practice of attention?

Care towards witnessing also helps ensure that gaps and uncertainties in experience aren’t glossed over to give a more singular, authoritative account – a constant temptation for professional mastery. Intuitively I want to link all this to A David Napier’s notion of polytheism as a distinct mode of thought predicated on an insistence on divisions of power and on the rejection of a single, omniscient authority. And to what the political theorist Jane Bennett calls “a quasi-pagan model of enchantment”. In reporting back, can I find a verbal image that supports that intuitive link?

Image as proposition: When the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s partner was very close to death, she felt no desire to conform to the expectations of the dominant culture by appealing to a Higher Authority for help. She writes: “… I had not prayed. But I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s slim feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”

Q - Why care and maintenance?

My attention endlessly oscillates – is either absorbed in addressing a concern, focus or task, or else becomes opaque, a waking sleep. Either way I stop noticing its fluctuations, its mobility. But fluctuation and mobility are, paradoxically, one prompt for my returning to a more open noticing. Again, responsibility to a group – a web of noticing – depends on a degree of care and maintenance in this respect.

Fortunately for me, it doesn’t matter whether the sounds I heard were gunfire or not. But my certainty does make it possible, on reflection, to ask whether unacknowledged preferences – in my case for natural sounds – may predetermine the whole orientation of my moment-by-moment understanding of what I hear.

Observation 20: Grey/olive-green (torn) leaf – lowest two segments on the right hand side missing. There are numerous very small clusters of black dots (fungi?) that are thicker at the edge of the leaf than towards the centre. There are also tiny drops of silvery water caught in almost invisible fine hairs all over it. The voices of two walkers pass behind me. I start to suck one of the aniseed and liquorice sweets.

Reflection: After the fieldwork I read Steven Connor on the magic of sweets. Connor links our enjoyment of sweets to “an imaginary form of swallowing up and incorporation for every object that is important to us, for every object that we think of as amenable or pleasurable”. He suggests that: “sweets are there to have their shapes transformed”, so that “their meaning is pure metamorphosis … through sweets we enact the experiencing of merging and dissolution”.

Observation 20 contains my only reference to the black, shiny, loaf-shaped Fox’s Glacier Dark aniseed and liquorice sweets that we all sucked - or perhaps crunched - while we worked on the transect. Did the taste of those dark, hard, soberly adult, slightly medicinal, sweets provide a subtle common filter for our memories and experience? What if I’d offered my co-workers those sweets made up from a promiscuous coupling of different substances – jellybeans, dolly mixtures or, my personal favourite, liquorice allsorts? Would that have changed everything?

Observation 40: A fragment of frost-shattered stone.

Penny explained that the qualities of the piece of stone I thought might have been produced by fire were in fact characteristics of the effects of frost. She also told me that archaeologists distinguish between subtle changes in the soil as much by touch as by sight.

Reflection: A critical visual culture tells me that my education as a visual artist determines a privileging of the visual. But like archaeologists my practice involves taking care in handing stuff – pencils, pens, brushes, knives, inks, coloured pigments and powdered glasses, water, paper, wood, metal, wax, oils, my own body with its rhythms and skills, and so on – all in relation to bringing something into being.

Q - Is this orientation - “taking care in handling stuff” - a transferable skill, a common practice prior to our diverse intellectual disciplines?

That stone understood through Penny’s archaeological experience offers a renewed sense of both the richness and inevitable limitation of my own practices. This reinforces my desire to access the noticing of others, grounded in other practices, and to offer a different noticing in return.

Observation 56: A small, dirty, yellow, round, stone. I’m finding it hard to look objectively for objects now in relation to my task … the wind and reflected light join with the shifting background sound in a kind of dizzy enchantment of my senses that’s as much the product of remembering the particular physical pleasures of past times spent on beaches as it is the result of my present perceptions. I’m fairly sure that there’s a powerful bodily memory at work here, one deeply engrained to take effect in these circumstances… a result of spending several somewhat dizzy hours jumping through chest-high breaking waves on a windy day in the very strong sunlight of a beach in the South of France on my honeymoon. During that time I entered an almost ecstatic, trance-like state that somehow encapsulates all my positive memories of playing on beaches.

Two final Questions: 1. What place does this experience of momentary enchantment have in an academic context? 2. If Jane Bennett is right to argue that: “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities”; is the drive to dis-enchantment offered by critical discourse as likely to be part of the problem as part of the solution?