Floating Donuts and Pink Pipe Joints: preliminary models for my project to hybridize the novel and the playground

February 25th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, ambient narrative, architexture, body, Deleuze, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, maze, noise, novel, play, rhizome, space

These sketches are first steps towards a visualization of my concept of “ambient narrative”. In this case, the book being read is inscribed in the walls of a warren of floating inflatable tunnels (suspended like a octopus-shaped air mattress from a ceiling), in the form of pressure sensors that, depending on the visitor’s ensconcement in a particular branch of the structure, trigger audio recordings of a story. Each chapter of the book can be accessed in a recombinant rhizomatic way – literally the visitor travels through the story, using her body, its movements and its rubbing against the plush fabric of the tunnels, as the decoding instrument that allows her to gather fragments of the hidden text. The story itself, called “In the Dark: The Story of a Disapearance” is an existential mystery or detective novel that is pieced together by the non-linear meanderings of the reader.

Nomadology: “they arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without pretext.”

March 10th, 2009 researchTags: De Certeau, Deleuze, derive, geography, Guattari, narrative, nomad, postmodernism, space, theory, time, utopia

Commenting on:

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, Blackwell Publishers, 1997)

Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Diana Fuss, Inside/Out (from Inside/Out, Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss)

Deleuze and Guattari imagining postmodern space as a desert, isotropic and boundless where mobility finds a home.

Tim Creswell, Edward Said and Dianna Fuss all seem to hone in on a key issue in the discussion of postmodern notions of spatiality (centering around the nomad, the tactician, the embodied self) and which Said specifically places at the heart of the theorist’s identity. To what extent do theorists, in making sense of their world, inevitably “reify” it, turn lived experience, and in this case, the experience of space/place into an abstraction, either by institutionalizing the theory and cutting it off from its social and historical context or by practicing theory “for theory’s sake”, as itself a form of literature?

Cresswell rightly points out that under the horizon of theorists’ successive attempts to either exalt or demonize the figure of the nomad, the nomad herself, as an embodied subject, remains unknown. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology subtracts the historical and economic substance of the nomad to extract an elegant and poetic ontology of postmodern society as a utopia structured by no-structure or freedom of movement. Lines of flight or trajectories through space replace a now intolerable fixity of points, of subjects rooted in place. In a revealing parallel with Lukacs, according to whom contemporary society has catastrophically abolished the historicity of subjects to better control them as empty objects circulating through empty space, Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics imply that the postmodern subject/nomad only acquires total mobility in space by becoming immobile in time, unmarked by the passage of time. “Unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography” – Cresswell argues that it is precisely those markers that give reality and substance to a subject, a reality that theoretical obsessions with the nomad clearly lack.

Contra theorists of Deleuze and Guattari’s ilk, Said asserts the following: “the work of the humanist critic is to materialize rather than spiritualize the culture in which we live”. This notion travels closely with Lukacs idea that the practice of theory engages on a fundamental level our awareness with the material conditions of the world and therefore serves as a basis for social action. But does “materializing” versus “spiritualizing” culture necessarily go hand in hand, like Lukacs, with reestablishing the theoretical primacy of place i.e. a lieu, or proper place to quote De Certeau and all the historical, economic, political specificity that attach themselves to place, over the attention also due to space, which in its own way, also carries with it definite political and economic implications.

After all, the ideal of spatial mobility, of transience, of boundary transgression is one that carries, not only for Deleuze and Guattari, but for De Certeau (who is concerned with the condition of the consumer) and for Fuss (who is concerned with the theoretical context of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender – and by extension, ‘heterosexual’ – experience of sexuality) the promise of a social space that is no longer delimited and limited by hierarchy, by top-down design, by notions of inclusion and exclusion. We are invited to consider the theoretical transfer from a (modernist) society in which everyone has a place or stays in their place to a (postmodernist) society in which no one is chained to/oppressed by a “proper noun” (De Certeau), but instead is a “poet of their own affairs”, slipping in and out of places according to a logic of the opportune moment. In this sense De Certeau, contra Deleuze and Guattari, does not abolish the “place” of time in the human experience, but argues for a different notion of time, one that is not structured by narratives about past and future but that seizes the story (of life) in the present, in the moment of experiencing the world.

Experiments in Narrative Cartography: Rhizome and the Interactive Documentary

February 18th, 2009 researchTags: archive, book, database, Deleuze, Guattari, interactive, mapping, maze, narrative, rhizome

Marc Ngui illustrates "A Thousand Plateaus"

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize a new way of conceptualizing narrative. What has been obfuscated by a psychoanalytic and aesthetic ideal of coherent and authoritative systems of representation is the fact that “the book is a multiplicity”, a thing with no fixed beginning or end that exists within the non-structural patterns of a “rhizome”. A rhizomatic book, instead of following a reproductive structure of branching points, is written/played by the reader according to her own spontaneous initiative to ‘map’ one signifying element onto another.

To what extent and how effectively does entrusting to the reader the task of ‘mapping’ the narrative, and thereby abandoning the framework of traditional authorship, increase our capacity and desire to, in Deleuze’s words, “experiment with different ways by which one can get a grip on reality”? If linear narrative has restricted the practice of meaning making to the task of producing representations, then we must turn towards an interactive strategy to reverse this top-down process by which images/words signify.

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theorization of the book-rhizome is a call for action on the part of practitioners – as they themselves admit, “we have not been able to do it”. The layers of hypertext that are the Internet have introduced us to the rhizome model of connectivity. I propose to articulate a possible response to this challenge in the context of storytelling media and examine the properties of the recombinant narrative space defined by A Thousand Plateaus as they apply to the database of an interactive documentary.