Excerpt: I Feel Therefore I Think

Goliath
Extending trauma studies into new territory, Jill Bennett proposes a philosophically informed way of engaging politically with traumatic feeling in visual art. She does not present a new philosophical theory of affect, but her mapping of observations from trauma studies onto Gilles Deleuze’s perspectives on art and thought is innovative. She draws first from Proust and Signs, in which the intellectual work of the poet is ranked above that of the philosopher. According to Deleuze, the philosopher reasons voluntarily and conventionally, thus conceiving only the possible, whereas the poet “scrutinizes the signs in which the truth betrays itself.” (2) The sensory impression (an affecting image encountered fortuitously in everyday life) or the “sensuous sign,” he contends, is the stimulus necessary to mobilize the involuntary ordering of faculties (memory, imagination, intelligence) that are involved in the creative process of art. Only this involuntary intellectual process, which is prompted by encounter with the sensuous sign, conceives “essences.” (3)

Positing that affect is also integral to the composition of the artwork, Bennett refers to Deleuze’s discussion of Francis Bacon’s painting, in Logic of Sensation. “Sensation is what is being painted,” Deleuze claims, “what is being painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is being experienced as sustaining this sensation” (37). Bennett relates this artistic experience of “painting sensation” to that of traumatic memory, which she says sustains sensation in the present, rather than speaking out of memory or experience. Although Deleuze is not particularly concerned with the aesthetic experience of the viewer, Bennett adopts his perspective on the “memory image” to explain the viewer’s aesthetic engagement, arguing that if art is a form of memory image, it can be understood as evoking “a memory for more than one subject, constituted through an engagement with differential positions, colliding in the present” (44-45). In this way, says Bennett, aesthetic encounter leads to a change in perception. She does not describe the process as reception, which suggests subjective interiorization, but concentrates on what affect does and the way it circulates intersubjectively. As she says, she derives theory from the visual, rather than applying theory to visual art. Importing a notion of empathy from trauma studies, Bennett introduces the term “empathic vision,” a way of seeing that emerges from the aesthetic encounter, which entails the conjunction of affective and critical operations.

Using examples of contemporary art produced in the wake of trauma that is suffered as a consequence of political or sexual violence, Bennett claims this art is “political” rather than “subjective”; it does not offer a privileged, interior view of the subject, but extends trauma into external space and “lived” place. Her examples include Gordon Bennett’s painting of Captain Cook pointing from Australia to the Twin Towers (Notes to Basquiat: The End of Irony, 2001), Gavin Younge’s installation of a circle of video-machine-laden bicycles recording his trip through Angola (Forces Favourites, 1997), and Paul Seawright’s “snapshot” photographs of places once traversed by Irish murder victims (Sectarian Murder Series, 1998). These works do not depict, explain, or reflect trauma. Rather, in an affecting way, they present visual signs that have metonymic connections to trauma, calling into the bodies and minds of viewers a sense of unease and awareness of trauma’s dissociating, haunting presence. Articulated in time, like traumatic memory, the art’s impact is often delayed or deferred, but the affective force of the aesthetic encounter lingers, bringing about sustained contemplation. Empathic vision is art’s self-reflexive way of engendering feeling for another and, simultaneously, forcing recognition of “an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (10). It is not only art’s way of processing the possibility of empathetic social relations in the world, but a mode of realizing this possibility in the aesthetic encounter, a method of transforming perception and contributing to thought. Above all, empathic vision is a “manner of doing politics” (152).

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accessed 24 July 2009
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