Philosophical Perspectives on Artistic Agency

Philosophical Perspectives on Artistic Agency: A day-long workshop

Friday, November 19th, 2021

(All sessions will be held online via zoom, all session times AEDT)

What do artists “do” when they make art? Where does the artist end and her work begin? How might accounts of the agency at work in artistic creation help us to think agency more generally? Does artistic agency have political implications? These questions and more will animate our discussions during this day-long virtual workshop, hosted by the Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (PHI) at Deakin University. The workshop will bring together scholars working on themes related to artistic agency for a series of short presentations and informal discussions. Each session listed below will consist of a presentation of around 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes for questions and discussion. All are welcome.

Zoom Details

Topic: Philosophical Perspectives on Artistic Agency

Time: Nov 19, 2021 09:30 AM Australia/Melbourne

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Program

9.30 – 9:45am

Welcome

(Timothy Deane-Freeman and Alistair Macaulay, Deakin University)

9:45 – 10:45am

Riding the Currents of Creation, Agents and Actants in the Field of Dance 

Philipa Rothfield (University of Southern Denmark, La Trobe University)

10:45 – 11:45am

Intentionality without Ends: reading Klossowski’s Nietzsche alongside Practising Theory

Antonia Pont (Deakin University)

11:45 – 12pm

Coffee Break

12 – 1pm

The Genesis of an Improvisational Space: Cleaning the Canvas and the Thread of a Tune

Alistair Macaulay (Deakin University)

1-2pm

Lunch

2 – 3pm

Artistic Agency and the Painting of Sensation: Francis Bacon’s Challenge to the Standard Theory of Action

Sean Bowden (Deakin University)

3 – 4pm

Castoriadis on the Creation of the Individual

Gavin Rae (Universidad Compultense de Madrid)

4 – 4:15pm

Coffee Break

4:15 – 5:15pm

Machinic Agents: Schizoanalysis and the Semiotics of Nature

Timothy Deane-Freeman (Deakin University)

Author Abstracts and Bios

Riding the Currents of Creation, Agents and Actants in the Field of Dance 

Philipa Rothfield (University of Southern Denmark, La Trobe University)

This paper seeks to explore notions of artistic agency through a decentred, Nietzschean-Deleuzian lens (supplemented in part by Klossowski and Foucault). It follows a double trajectory, one theoretical, the other, practice-based. Its starting point is the body, thought here as a mobile, transitory formation of force. According to this mode of thought, a body forms whenever forces enter into relation. Taken into the field of dance (my primary field of practice), the suggestion is that the body moves from one corporeal state to another, a resolution of contestatory possibilities which takes shape by virtue of corporeal formation. 

What does this way of thinking suggest about the notion of artistic agency? Firstly, that the body’s moving is a matter of forces entering into relation – drawing on Nietzsche’s claim that there is no doer behind the deed. Artistic agency, the creation of work in the field of art, is poised within and according these emergent relations. I have drawn on the Nietzschean notion of overcoming in order to think through the ways in which the artist is able to make space within the practice of dancing, to facilitate the creation of new corporeal forms. The same could be said of the choreographic, that a certain kind of displacement could be said to occur within the process of making dance. I have elsewhere drawn on Deleuze’s notion of subtraction to look at the destabilisation inherent in the construction of new choreographic materials. In both cases, there is a kind of shift, a displacement of the knowing subject which facilitates another kind of moving. 

In what follows, I will orient these conceptual ideas towards a work I am currently engaged in, a feminist, intercultural collaborative project entitled, The Chronicles of Durga. Jane Bennett outlines a ‘horizontal’ ontology by way of developing a ‘vibrant’ rethinking of matter and its relation to the human. Her use of Bruno Latour’s notion of the actant and Deleuze’s concept of the operator will be adapted to this conversation, to think through the role of nonhuman materials such as technique and tradition, felt and played in the midst of making work. 

Philipa Rothfield is honorary Professor of Dance and Philosophy of the Body at the University of Southern Denmark, also Honorary Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Politics at La Trobe University. She is Creative Advisor at Dancehouse, Melbourne, Australia, and Co-Editor of the Dancehouse Diary. Recent publications include Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny, Philosophy in Motion (Routledge, 2021) and Practising with Deleuze (co-authored) (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She is a dance reviewer with over 70 reviews to her name, is Chair of the Dance Panel of the Melbourne Green Room Awards and has served on a panel of judges for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. She is an Associate Artist with Dance Exchange (Dir. Russell Dumas), and practises dance improvisation, Qi Gong and Yoga. Her most recent publication is on dance improvisation, for Philosophy of Improvisation (ed. Ravn et al), Routledge, 2021. 

 

Intentionality without Ends: reading Klossowski’s Nietzsche alongside Practising Theory

Antonia Pont (Deakin University)

In conversation with Pierre Klossowski’s 1969 work Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, this paper asks what the practitioner—as artist, mover, yogi, lover, thinker, etc.—might tacitly know about how action obtains, and how this then informs their approach to practices, to actions more generally, as well as to conceptualisations of ‘doing’ in daily life. Written in tandem with a creative nonfiction essay called ‘Procrastination Isn’t’, this paper undertakes a preliminary investigation into intersections between practising theory and what Klossowski analyses about Nietzsche’s lived encounters with notions of ‘will’, ‘self’ and ‘impulse’. Might we consider Nietzsche’s personal ordeals, in the realms of thought and the body, as themselves a kind of intensive practising (structured, repeated, open-ended, transformative)? Taking cues from Klossowski’s analyses, the paper will argue that artists (as cipher for those who-embark-intentionally-without-knowing-whereto), create—in the future anterior—what will have been ‘agency’: a stabilised ‘after-effect’, constituted retroactively by the movement of a delicate methodology. By forgetting, or subtracting ‘themselves’ from, both the imprecise fiction of a discrete and mostly-conscious agential self, as well as the ubiquitous technocratic discourses that mine and manipulate via this concept, ‘artists’ (read inclusively) may turn out to have been ‘those’ able to proceed accurately, with a canny, goal-less intentionality that enacts the repetitions-we-are differently.

Antonia Pont is Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin, and a member of DML, ADI and PHI. She writes poetry, essays and theoretical works, and is also a long-time Zen and yoga practitioner. Her monograph A Philosophy of Practising with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (2021) is published with EUP. Other works include You Will Know Not In Advance What You’ll Feel (poetry, 2019, Rabbit Poets Series), and the co-authored Practising With Deleuze (2017, EUP). Her essay series ‘Thinking Feeling’ can be found across platforms such as Literary Hub, The Lifted Brow, and Antithesis.

 

The Genesis of an Improvisational Space: Cleaning the Canvas and the Thread of a Tune

Alistair Macaulay (Deakin University)

Musical improvisation challenges traditional notions of action and agency because its spontaneity demands that the success conditions of the action cannot be specified in advance.  While it has been argued that improvisation is analogous to Wittgenstein’s example of finding the summative word on the tip of the tongue, it is not clear that success conditions are realised during improvised action. This is at odds with our ability to distinguish idiosyncratic improvisatory styles. This paper proposes a notion of improvisational space, a field of play that evolves alongside the sound organization performed, to explain the agency of the improvisor, while they transform and are transformed by the demands of the action.  Drawing on Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon and lectures on painting, this paper re-interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s oft quoted picture of improvisation from A Thousand Plateaus of launching forth, embarking on a line of flight. By exploring the links between these two texts, particularly the notions of diagram, chaos germ, and territorialization, we perceive what an improvisor is doing and what it means to intend something unforeseen. Much like Deleuze’s painter, an improvisor cleans a canvas. An improvisor follows up on the matters of fact and points of disorder that emerge from their brushstrokes from which a signature, a unique style, is discerned.   

Alistair Macaulay is a PhD candidate at Deakin University and piano tuner, researching the challenges improvisation poses to philosophy of music and action and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. After studying philosophy at the University of Melbourne, he turned to jazz performance at the University of South Australia.  

 

Artistic Agency and the Painting of Sensation: Francis Bacon’s Challenge to the Standard Theory of Action

Sean Bowden (Deakin University)

This paper reconstructs Francis Bacon’s understanding of the aim of his art, the nature of his artistic practice and his own agency, and examines its implications for the standard theory of action. Drawing on Bacon’s interviews and developing several of Deleuze’s suggestive proposals in his monograph on Bacon, the article makes several claims. First, Bacon did not aim to paint determinate objects of experience or intentional content, but rather to “actualize” sub-representational sensation. Second, the relation between Bacon’s paintings and what the paintings are paintings of should thus be understood, not in terms of representation, but rather expression. Third, the expression of sub-representational sensation in Bacon’s paintings is inseparable from the experimental transformation of a complex “expressive medium”, embracing the historical, encultured and material dimensions of painterly practice. Fourth, because Bacon could not represent to himself the success conditions constitutive of his intentional activity in advance of that activity, he understood them to be progressively specified in and through what is a self-consciously experimental but situated process. Finally, I will conclude by considering the challenge that such an approach to artistic agency presents to standard theories of action and agency and suggest a way to accommodate it.

Sean Bowden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. He is the author of The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (EUP 2011), and has published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, European Journal of Philosophy, Angelaki, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a monograph on action and agency in Deleuze.

Castoriadis on the Creation of the Individual

Gavin Rae (Universidad Compultense de Madrid)

The notion of the constituting individual is foundational for much post-Cartesian philosophy. Indeed, it is often taken to be a necessary condition of autonomous intentional agency for, so the argument goes, if the individual is not constituting and foundational then it and its actions must be dependent on something else, with this dependence necessarily undercutting its autonomy. The purpose of this paper is to show that Cornelius Castoriadis offers a particularly innovative response to this issue that undermines the foundational constituting individual, while insisting that the constituted individual is indeed capable of autonomous intentional agency. To outline this, I first demonstrate that Castoriadis decenters the individual from the foundational role often attributed to it through a two-stage process in which the individual is conceived of as (1) an effect of what he calls the radical imaginary, itself expressive of Being’s chaotic becoming, and (2) arising from the complex interplay between two expressive dimensions of the radical imaginary: the social imaginary, which includes the ideas, narratives, norms, values and so on through which a collective is both created and defined, and the radical imagination, which designates the psyche’s capacity for creative, autonomous expression. Second, rather than simply invert the long-affirmed unified subject to start with a differentiated one, I show that he conceives of the subject in terms of a unified, albeit fluctuating, psychic monad that must be turned into a differentiated individual through a process of socialization, itself premised on both violence done to the psychic monad and the latter opening itself to its other. However, rather than annihilate the psychic monad, this process sublimates the psychic monad within the socialized individual, with the consequence that (1) it is necessary to find ways within each social imaginary for the psychic monad to express its radical autonomy, and (2) the individual is always able to “use” its chaotic psychic monadism originally and creatively. Indeed, for Castoriadis, while the normalizing operations of the social imaginary are overwhelmingly powerful in bringing the individual to affirm what is socially accepted, the subtending monadism of the psyche is that which always offers the individual the possibility of acting differently and creatively. This however gives rise to the question as to how the individual can be both constituted by the social imaginary and remain autonomous from it? In response (third), I argue that whereas other psychoanalytically orientated thinkers have insisted on the importance of the psyche to the subject and, indeed, split the psyche between conscious and unconscious aspects, Castoriadis goes further by also splitting the unconscious. This leads to a distinction between what might be called the “socialized unconscious,” describing the part of the psyche that has incorporated and internalized the social norms and values learnt from the socialization process, and the “primal unconscious” that always remains distinct from the former. Rather than being seamlessly integrated, Castoriadis maintains that each exists separately to lean on the other, with the consequence that their relationship is one of creative discordance. Indeed, for Castoriadis, it is precisely because of this discordance and the pure otherness of the psychic monad that the social imaginary can never fully succeed in its aim of taming the psychic monad, while the unleashing of the psychic monad is always premised on a fundamental and violent rupture from the social imaginary/social unconscious. In fact, it is only because of this rupturing that creativity is and can be associated with genuine newness. With this, Castoriadis shows that, while the subject is embodied and socially embedded, there is a part of the subject’s psyche—which is in constant flux—that must be tamed if the individual is to arise, but which always remains distinct from the socialized dimension of the subject to permit and explain how the socialized individual is always capable of autonomously choosing its actions.

Gavin Rae is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He also maintains affiliate member status with the Contemporary Political Theory Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London (England), and the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His research interests lie in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, ontology, and ethics. He is the author of six monographs, the most recent of which are Poststructuralist Agency (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and the editor (with Emma Ingala) of Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthethics, Ethics, Politics (2021); The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (Routledge, 2019), and Subjectivity and the Political (Routledge, 2018). He has just completed a book on sexuality in twentieth century philosophy, is currently writing one of the question of will in post-Kantian philosophy, and is the Principal Investigator for a major four year project funded by the Spanish Government titled “The Politics of Reason.”

Machinic Agents: Schizoanalysis and the Semiotics of Nature

Timothy Deane-Freeman (Deakin University)

In The Machinic Unconscious, Félix Guattari writes that “it is first of all and above all in the domain of animal ethology that we shall have to base the existence of a problematics of innovation, creativity, and even freedom…” In this paper, I argue that what Guattari identifies in animal ethology -in particular the territorial songs and ritual performances of birds- is the site for a transversal opening up of our (all too) human concepts of creative agency, onto a thought of innovation, creativity and freedom as processes immanent to life or nature itself. Homo sapiens may well participate in these processes (though far less frequently than is supposed, under current global conditions), however -and contra a long tradition of Western anthropocentrism- these states are far from synonymous with the human being. Rather, for Guattari, innovation, creativity and freedom comprise the agency of “abstract machines,” incorporeal (dis)organisers which traverse concrete machinic assemblages, constituting their “cutting edges of deterritorialisation”- the experimental and undetermined fringes whereby they might become other than they are. This paper aims to provide a critical introduction to Guattari’s claims surrounding the agency of abstract machines, closing with some remarks as to the ethico-political implications of his approach.

Timothy Deane-Freeman teaches philosophy at Deakin University, Australia. His work is dedicated to the intersection of politics and aesthetics.