Novel Experience & Expression

Apparatus (chart)

Experiment

Task:

Develop a new mode of discourse (thought + expression) for conveying others’ historical experience, as we imagine or intuit it.

 
“Problem” (for humanities “research” or “experiment”):

“People do not understand each other. The incomprehensible part of each of us makes up the entire basis of life.
Perhaps by reading these texts, we can work toward an effort of mediation on the incomprehensible. I do not say that we are going to understand the incomprehensible, but we have to accept it” (131).

–Hélène Cixous, “Poetry, Passion, and History” (1985)

 
 
Q. 1: how to express the lived affect of someone else’s specific historical experience?
not to describe, represent, or explain — but to undertake an “impossible” task, conveying the subjective dimension experience without judgment.

 
Q. 2: how to inscribe historicity and memory into the writing of an event, when we’ve not undergone this directly?

 
Q. 3: How to “negotiate” the history, culture, and heritage that we’ve “inherited,” — without being passive receivers (TV viewers) but responsible producers of discourse?
This “legacy” includes many aspects that we collectively try or would like to forget, (e.g. bombing Dresden; mining and nuclear testing in southwest); however, we will not make any ideological or moral judgments about what to include and leave out of our final projects.

 
 
Method for invention: CATTt

 
 
Contrast:

Historiography; referential modes of knowledge and of discourse for defining experience;
judgment (whether belief/morality/ideology or reason/science).

 
 
Analogy:

innovative forms of narrative (”novel” modes of expressing experience).

 
“Relay” texts:

Jazz, Ceremony, Crying of Lot 49; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

 
 
– deriving lessons, both about experience and specific techniques,
for our inventive compositions (final project).
Generate “inventory” of specific poetics, through blogging — update your entries with lessons and techniques.

 
Formal composition techniques:     ?     (review notes)

 
Lessons from our authors’ poetics include

– Specific historical context and references.
 
– Multimodal narratives:
“faithful” to each mode when writing in, variously, without judgment; novel as assemblage of diverse elements and narratives.
Multimodal especially by including fictional, historical, undecidable, and personal aspects.
 
– Interface
     not only mediates between known and unknown aspects; also produces resonance between seemingly disparate elements, without totalizing.
Interface figure or feature will be derived from cultural, historical/disciplinary, or personal realm — well-chosen figure will mediate (resonate across) all three levels.
 
– Narratives composed as temporal sequencing of events,
with both objective/empirical and subjective dimensions.
Grounded in experience (“concrete”; e.g. body, nature) — not abstract, allegorical, or generalization.

 
 
Theory: Gilles Deleuze on art/literature.

– Art does not concern judgment, whether of values (ideology, morality) or of reason (knowledge, science); rather, possible modes, functioning “to bring into existence and not to judge” (Essays Critical and Clinical, 1993). Thus, to understand aesthetic expression as affirmation of Life, involving relations of forces (as in nature).

 
 
Target:

Academic Discourse. Available forms are inadequate for our purpose, e.g. argument essay, “research report,” (auto)biography.

 
 
tale:

form (”output”) of expression — final project.

Working Titles: “Narrative Assemblage,” “Assemblage Expression,” “Resonance Assemblage” (?)

Final Project