This chapter will specifically look at the potential of the inframince to be turned into an operative tool for which it will first briefly return to a discussion of the minor versus the major and the evasive character of the inframince. To complete this discussion, it is necessary to take account of the notion of affordance, which will be considered in the context of its interpretation by the psychologist John Pickering. This chapter will conclude with a proposal for the practical application of the inframince within the curatorial, which is further developed in chapter 7, and its potential application in other fields, such as narrative medicine.
6.1. Inframince and the minor
Although literature on the inframince so far has considered different aspects of this concept and its provenance, this thesis posits that there still remains room for another interpretation, and especially for its activation. This hypothesis is underlined and given authority by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor. Duchamp’s Note nr
34: “Inhabitants of the infra-thin do-nothings” (Duchamp and Matisse, 1983, n.p.) is
seemingly overlooked by those that have thus far studied and discussed the
inframince. This reference to a state of ‘not-doing’ could potentially be problematic
when exploring the potential of the inframince as a tool within the context of the curatorial. However, it is also clear that this is a playful terminology that allows room for equally playful interpretations. It is useful to bear in mind that when Duchamp famously had given up art in favour of playing chess or ‘doing nothing’, he was in fact actively working on Given, his last major art work. Unperturbed by the possible implications of Note nr 34, this thesis therefore continues to explore the inframince’s potential as a tool, and in doing so in the first place considers its relation with the minor as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.
In his book Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2006) Simon O’Sullivan dedicates his third chapter partly to the notion of minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their book Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature (1986). In their discussion they give three determining characteristics,
1. Minor literature should deterritorialise the major language; 2. In a minor language everything is political, and
3. Minor literature is collective (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 71).
Of these three characteristics the first is especially of interest when exploring the
inframince as a potential tool. O’Sullivan thinks through all three of them in relation
to contemporary art practices, but it is especially the deterritorialisation of a major language that is important within the context of this thesis. In relation to this aspect O’Sullivan follows Deleuze and Guattari who point(ed) out that a minor literature operates from within the major literature, “using the same elements as it were but in a different manner” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 71). In connection to this “it is not so much a question of the minor or of the major but of a becoming minor in the sense of
producing movement from ‘within’ the major” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p.71). By suggesting what can be considered as major and minor within an art context O’Sullivan names, amongst others, so-called marginal and dissonant practices, such as Dada, “modernity’s ‘other voice’ as it were … which was nothing if not the making stammer, the stuttering, of language and art” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p.72). Another example would be contemporary art as “a form derived from the
international art market (and in particular the increasing presence of international biennales) – a kind of vehicular-referential ‘global language’ with a focus on the local as a minor practice acting from within (O’Sullivan, 2006, pp.72-73). Related to this latter example, this thesis proposes to take O’Sullivan’s example one step further and name it specifically as ‘global curatorial practice’, with the inframince acting as ‘a minor practice from within’. In connection to the deterritorialisation of language O’Sullivan mentions as an aside the use of “humour as a form of affirmative violence … against typical signifying formations” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 73).This thesis situates the laughter connected to humour specifically within the inframince, as a potential tool in the becoming minor of a global curatorial practice.
As for the notion of ‘becoming’, in this context it is useful to define this as “a process of an increased affective potency (increased capacity to affect and to be affected)” (Karkov, 2016) and to situate it at what Deleuze and Guattari considered “the far side,
[where] we find becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, even becomings- imperceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.248) with the last as “the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.279). As a
trajectory of affective emancipation (Karkov, 2016, p. 384, his italics) becoming can
be put to use in the way this thesis utilises the inframince as an operative tool. Resonating with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, in terms of being or becoming minor and with the inframince as possible operative tool, yet another connection is to be made, namely with Michel Serres’ view on the minor. In his book The Parasite (1980) as discussed in the chapter on cybernetics in this thesis, he argues “that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue – creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.”38
As pointed out above, it is especially the inframince’s capability of drawing attention to the minor or seemingly unimportant that is crucial. Although Duchamp does not give specific spatial examples that could be of immediate use within a curatorial context, it is his capability of drawing attention to potentialities, differences, other solutions and the world as process that should make (awareness of) the inframince mandatory in any curatorial toolkit. Although embedded, as this thesis has shown, in a strong historical and philosophical context, the inframince clearly has the potential to be applied.
6.2. Inframince and affordance
This thesis suggests that “becoming minor in the sense of producing movement from ‘within’ the major” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p.71) is exactly what the inframince is capable of. It is what defines its affordance. The notion of affordance has already briefly been discussed in chapter 2 on methodology when discussing its relation with agency. In its further discussion this thesis follows the definition of the concept of affordance as used by the psychologist John Pickering as “a means to produce a theory of causation that embraces physical, natural and cultural levels of order” (Pickering, 2007, p. 64). His description of ‘Affordances as Signs’, also the title of the article that will be discussed extensively in the following section, is specifically useful in order to discuss affordance in relation to the inframince and the curatorial. Situated within a need “to [help] psychology forward, around the impasse of mechanistic metaphysics,
towards … the more biologically plausible project of creating a natural history of meaning” (Pickering, 2007, p. 69), this thesis argues that Pickering’s approach can also beautifully be applied to the curatorial. It equally ties together some of the ideas and theories already introduced in this thesis and implemented by Pickering through his discussion of, amongst others, Whitehead and Bohm.
Pickering argues that “[e]mbodied cognition helps to take psychology on beyond the limitations of both Behaviourism and the computational metaphor” (Pickering, 2007, p. 69). He reaches this insight via a discussion of Peirce and Whitehead whom he sees as sharing “a common project: to restrict the over-extension of reductionism, to show how matter must be sensate and to create an ontology of process and subjectivity (Pickering, 2007, p. 64). Pickering sets the scene by starting with a quote from Peirce from his Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism (1906) that is worth repeating here as it explicitly opens up a discussion on non-human agency: “Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world ... But … there cannot be thought without signs” (Peirce quoted in Pickering, 2007, p. 64).
Pickering sees the connection to Whitehead in Peirce’s idea of mental life as a
universal organic order and Whitehead’s view of the universe as an organic process at all levels (Pickering, 2007, p. 64). He then makes the move towards a semiotic
interaction via the physicist David Bohm who “suggested that even the minutest parts of physical systems interact via a form of semiosis” (Bohm in Pickering, 2007, p. 64), and von Uexküll who “viewed the interaction between animals and their surroundings as the detection of and response to signs” (Pickering, 2007, p. 64). The perceptual psychologist James Gibson made affordance a central concept of his influential book
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), but Pickering states that the
idea was already introduced much earlier by von Uexküll’s contemporary Koffka who had an equally “strong preference for organic holism over mechanistic reduction” (Pickering, 2007, p. 65). It was however Gibson’s approach that extended it also to design objects. This allows Pickering to introduce “[c]ultural artifacts and the practices that go with them [as] a semiotic system” (Pickering, 2007, p. 65), the understanding of which calls for “a correspondingly powerful theory that can be applied uniformly to physical, biological and cultural phenomena” (Pickering, 2007,
p. 65). Pickering builds this theory subsequently on the basis of work by, amongst others, Peirce, Whitehead, and Gibson, which in its turn allows for an extension of his discussion to the practice of the curatorial and the inframince.
It is especially the notion of causation that is of importance in this discussion, which Pickering frames “from the physical through the biological to the cultural levels” (Pickering, 2007, p. 66). In relation to the curatorial, in which the focus lies usually in the handling of so-called ‘dead matter’ or cultural artefacts, it is of use to repeat part of Pickering’s quote from Peirce’s opinion of these materials:
… it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relation of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness (Peirce in Pickering, 2007, p. 66). Peirce connects this insight in particular to “nature's tendency to take habits” which can be seen as “generalization, and generalization is nothing but spreading of feelings” (Peirce in Pickering, 2007, p. 66). In relation to the inframince as an operative tool, it is exactly in the creation of a habit to spot the minor and thus to create an affective approach to the curatorial that Peirce’s insight is of use. Pickering points to the fact that Whitehead had a similar view on the problematic “treat[ing] matter as a dead abstraction from the organic flow of reality” and “proposed that the ultimate constituents of nature are subjects, not objects” with a focus on “meaningful events, not material particles” (Pickering, 2007, p. 67). This connects to this thesis’ stress on a process-based approach to the curatorial.
The semiotic exchange between the various strands described above is unavoidably connected to the idea of meaning making, which is, according to Pickering, inherently subjective. Subjectivity is usually not seen as compatible with an “objective,
mechanistic worldview”, but excluding it, is in Pickering’s and this thesis’ view, to deny a truly useful method of “deal[ing] with the world in a meaningful way” (Pickering, 2007, p. 67). For Pickering, embodied cognition, which thus includes all strands of life, is the way forward. Again, this approach is in particular connected to the discipline of psychology, which Pickering sees as “returning to approaching
mental life, including conscious experience, as necessarily embodied in the actions of particular organisms and embedded in the contingencies of particular circumstances” (Pickering, 2007, p. 67). But it is clear that this notion of “actions of particular organisms and embedded in the contingencies of particular circumstances” can also be extended to curatorial practices, when, for example, translating ‘particular organisms’ to artists and curators, and ‘particular circumstances’ to places used for exhibitions. Pickering connects this notion back to Whitehead by stating that “[t]he embodied approach … resembles Whitehead’s organic philosophy of process”, which per definition is “open and productive” (Pickering, 2007, p. 68). Productivity is subsequently connected by Pickering to Peirce who saw it as “aris[ing] from continual semiotic chaining, in which the meaning of thoughts and experiences constantly unfold to create the flow of experience” (Pickering, 2007, p. 68).
The inframince is similarly capable of engendering new, and thus subversive meaning, by drawing attention to the minor and other off-centre observations. Pickering rightfully states that “…[t]o neglect the actions and experience of other mental beings is to ignore the vast matrix of mutually evolved organic order from which the human social world and human mental life emerged only very recently” (Pickering, 2007, p. 69). He combines Whitehead, biosemiotics and embodied cognition to “create a correspondingly powerful theory to address this emergence … strik[ing] a more even balance between human and non-human meanings” (Pickering, 2007, p. 69). It is clear that in this vision there is no room for boundaries of any kind. Pickering concludes that “[a]ffordances are behavioural meanings, they are signs to an organism that actions are possible” (Pickering, 2007, p. 72), alluding to both natural and culturally constructed objects. They can thus overcome any (even self- inflicted) boundaries if handled in a subversive, open-minded way. This is exactly where the inframince can be applied to precipitate a different approach to curating.
6.3. Inframince and a practical application
This thesis states that being aware of the inframince as concept and tool at all levels of the curatorial process will allow for better insights in how collaborations with and between artists, scientists, curators and audience can be made more effective. The application of the inframince can thus potentially give an answer to one of the
curator Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, artists are critical about the overpowering attention for the curator that seems to run counter to the efforts they have put into their art production, something is deeply wrong. When searching for an answer to these and other aspects of the current curatorial impasse, this thesis suggests that an awareness of the inframince as part of curatorial education could potentially prevent this issue. Learning to recognize the inframince moment can be taught on a practical level by organising lectures, seminars and master classes to introduce the concept. These should include awareness training, addressing both spatial and collaborative practice concerning the human and non-human, which is directed in the first place to ‘the world as process’ as introduced by Whitehead and advocated by Cage and Deleuze. To finally define the inframince as operative tool, it is useful to first dwell briefly on the many, often seemingly contradictory synonyms it has been accorded throughout this thesis. Ranging from Wallace’ ‘governor’ to an equivalent of Serres’ use of the ‘clinamen’ or Kubler’s ‘signal’, this fact connects to Duchamp’s claim that the concept cannot be defined and can only be alluded to through examples. This reveals its true ‘pataphysic nature, as ‘pataphysics is equally hard to define and stresses its versatile character, which allows it to be applied as a particularly performative tool within the curatorial as part of knowledge production or meaning making. Within that context curation is generally considered as an organisation of objects, regardless of their being ancient artefacts or contemporary art, but as Bennett and Connolly have indicated, and as discussed in chapter 5 of this thesis, it is worthwhile to consider objects or products within ontologies of Becoming before we start rearranging them. How do things “hang” together in a world of Becoming as Bennett and Connolly ask (2013, p. 155)?
As Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito suggest in their book Re-Collection – Art, New
Media, and Social Memory (2015) within the context of new media art, passion and
memory can play an important role in the conservation of objects in a nonmaterial way, thus alluding to the continuous process of Becoming and subsequently fading away. Bennett and Connolly explain this as a ‘phasing out’ as part of the phase-states of Becoming. They refer to Serres in their discussion of the process of Becoming within the context of noise, in which ‘a tiny little cause’ such as “that ever-so-slightly- higher pitch of sound we sometimes hear above the background noise of the wind, or
that barely perceptible little dance of water that turns out to be a premonition of a swell” (Bennett and Connolly, 2013, p. 157) leads to a ‘surge’. This can lead to a fluctuation and a bifurcation (in a positive sense) and, as it is ‘noise’, to a ‘rhythm or cadence’. If this ‘tiny little cause’ persists, it can eventually turn into ‘turbulence’ that can spin out ‘phenomena’ or ‘invariances’ as Serres calls them, and of which he distinguishes three types: a “stupid, heavy, even, odd, standing there” kind “such as a statue or a sandbag”; the kind “that is the result of a more or less steady rate of motion, such as the spinning top or the revolving Earth” and finally a ‘more
intelligent’ kind “that persists as movement itself” (Serres in Bennett and Connolly, 2013, p. 158). Of the latter, Serres gives examples such as the rivers that remain in equilibrium or the I that grows old while remaining young and resembling itself. Connected to his image of time as a crumpled handkerchief an object or a circumstance in this sense can be seen as “polychromic, multitemporal, and
[revealing] a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (Serres in Bennett and Connolly, 2013, p. 159).
The inframince that has already been connected in chapter 4 on cybernetics, to the ‘tiny little cause’ described above, becomes effective as a performative tool when there is an openness to identifying the potential of the object or the circumstance. Within a curatorial context this includes for example, the art works, the people that collaborate, and the space. It is important to learn to notice “that ever-so-slightly- higher pitch of sound” or “that barely perceptible little dance of water” (Bennett and Connolly, 2013, p. 157) in order to unleash the full potential of the things at hand. It is finding an unusual and dynamic, even cybernetic solution for situations encountered while curating; a solution that unavoidably evokes laughter because of its
ingenuousness. But in order to find this solution, one has thus to be attentive and open to ‘the process of the world’ as advocated by Whitehead, Deleuze and Cage, amongst others. True to its nature the inframince is thus not a clear cut operational tool, but one that calls for imagination and interpretation, depending on the situation at hand. It calls for an attentive looking, hearing and observing, before any curatorial concept is made, but is also applicable during the conceptualizing and installing of an exhibition. Only then can the curatorial really be seen as a creative act.
6.4. Narrative medicine
Before doing so it is however useful to point out that due to its inherent versatility it is imaginable that the inframince could also be applied in a wider field than that of curation alone, especially when that field concerns transdisciplinary or
interdisciplinary research. With this possibility in mind, the emerging science of
narrative medicine seems specifically interesting because the inframince has a natural
connection to language and interpretation. Narrative medicine and the curatorial are therefore not as disconnected as they may initially seem to be.