SENSE, SENSATION AND AFFECT

“We do everything so automatically that we have forgotten the poignancy of smell, of physical anguish, of tactile sensations of all kinds.”

Lygia Clark

In the writing of Jean-Luc Nancy, sense cuts across the grain of thinking.Sense is what creates the possibility of representations and as suchis a mode of circulation within which spacings of exposure occur. It isthat which determines direction, provides for the density of andco-extensivity of things. As beings we do not have sense, but rather, weare sense.

“Body is the total signifier…”

“Sign of itself and being-itselfof the sign: this is the doubleformula of the body in all its states,in all its possibilities.”

Jean-Luc Nancy Corpus

The Victorious Youth 310 BC

With Aristotle knowledge begins with sense perceptions and therebyconnects experience to matter and form.

Shiva Nataraja, CholaSouth India

Jiun Onko 1718-1804Seated Bodhidharma

Titian,Flaying of Marysas, 1570’s

“the body is a most peculiar “thing,” for it is

never quite reducible to being merely a

thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise

above the status of thing. Thus it is both a

thing and a nonthing, an object which

somehow contains or coexists with an

interiority, an object able to take itself and

others as subjects, a unique kind of object

not reducible to other objects.”

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies

“our eyes are not only articulate organs of sight; they are also the emotionally expressive organs of crying… Is it merely an accidental or contingent fact that eyes are capable of crying as well as seeing? Or is crying in the most intimate, most closely touching relationship to seeing? What is the ontological significance of crying as a mode of visionary being?”

David Michael Levin The Opening of Vision

Pablo PicassoWeeping Woman1937

Marlene Dumas,For Whom the Bells Toll

Emotion from Latin e….movere: to move out, to migrate, to transport an object

Emotions are related to expression which exists prior to the distinction of body and mind

Emotion is a projection or display of feeling and can be feigned

Emotion is psychological whereas affect is physiological

Feelings connote both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions)

Feelings are sensations measured against previous experiences. Feelings are personal..

Affects are not structured by narratives or interpretations

Passion has an intense goal orientated quality. Requires the quality of compulsion

Pathos is emotion for the other

Pathos is the combination of representation and intensity

Intensities are free-floating and impersonal

Intensions have a representational content

Francesca WoodmanSelf-Portrait Talking to Vince1975-8

Willem de KooningRosy-Fingered Dawn atLouse Point, 1963

Ana Mendieta

For Merleau-Ponty both the world and the body share a common existential

ground, general medium or element of materiality which he called flesh. Subject

and object inhabit each other, with flesh connoting the structure of reversibility.

In this schema all things are both passive and active in turn, likewise inside and

outside rotate sense. This intertwining of the subjective body and the objective

world gives us a vision of the world in which subtle levels of movement within

differentiation are always apparent. We might observe ways in which our

subjective body image can be materialized objectively through a transfer of

“postural schema.” Flesh cannot be reduced to matter, or to being, but rather is

the tie that binds them together, a “midway between the spatio-temporal

individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle.” Even though body and

world are different there is a form of reversibility that is capable of acting upon

and being acted upon.

“Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind.Then there is abiding in the Seer’s own form.”

Patanjali

Instead of a body of definite structures and organs we have a body of flows, points and confluences. Chakras, channels, chi, etheric and subtle bodies, polarities, auras are all partof a network of invisible forces describing quite another sense of the body. The first structurederives from a mechanical world view that separates component operations of the bodyand the other is drawn from ancient wholistic philosophies largely Eastern in origin.