Thinking Through Relation

Acknowledgements

This book is the fruit of discussions, relations and shared interests that have grown over many years. We are grateful to all contributors, who have responded enthusiastically to our invitation. We also wish to thank the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London for their support. Our thanks go to the anonymous readers, whose responses have improved this book, and to the wonderfully kind and efficient team at Peter Lang: our commissioning editor, Laurel Plapp, and Jaishree Thiyagarajan, who oversaw the production process. Florian Mussgnug would further like to thank Giulia Metyas for practical assistance and Simona Corso, as ever, and for illuminating his understanding of creative critical writing during a walk on the Janiculum. Thea Petrou would like to thank Editions Nous for the kind permission to cite a number of poems from Jacques Roubaud’s C. Mathelinda Nabugodi’s contribution to this volume was supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Our gratitude and debt to Timothy Mathews resonates from every part of the volume. It goes without saying that, without him, this book would not exist.

‘Art asks what the relation is of form to content. Questions about art are questions about life: about the point at which things begin to mean. Where is the line crossed from a transient perception to a moment of wonder or wound?’¹ So writes Timothy Mathews in the prologue to Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation (2013). We refer to this claim, and to its source, to set the tone for this introduction, which is a prelude to the essays that follow. Alberto Giacometti takes an important place in Mathews’s work. It builds on a long-standing fascination with the verbal and the visual, and develops and expands the ideas and insights that Mathews presents in two earlier monographs – Reading Apollinaire. Theories of Poetic Language; Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France – and in numerous other publications. It is not only a discussion of fragility, space and relationality in Giacometti’s art and writing, or a philosophical reading of several authors who have shared Giacometti’s interests and concerns, from Walter Benjamin to Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom. Mathews’s book also offers an intimate, probing examination of the power of serendipitous encounter, between artists, thinkers and artistic media, and of the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. The clarity and style of Mathews’s writing, we note, stems from his ability to attune the movements of his carefully attentive scrutiny to the materials of Giacometti’s art, in a manner that calls forth relations of line, surface, scale and proportion. Mathews’s critical practice, accordingly, does not prescribe ←1 | 2→standards of analysis or judgement that are external to Giacometti’s art, but responds to its object of inquiry with both intimacy and conceptual flexibility. Similarly, the essays in this volume have been conceived, and are presented here, as a choral response to Mathews’s own writing. We do not wish to offer a comprehensive overview or systematic analysis of his scholarly and creative work, but rather hope to make room for a curious, open-ended exploration of some of the authors and themes that Mathews has studied over the course of his distinguished career, and of the creative strategies and ethical orientations that have been of particular interest to him. For this reason, our project is shaped by an emphasis on openness and diversity. This is reflected in our choice of primary materials, and it also defines the relation between the eighteen chapters that follow. What makes each chapter relevant to the other parts of the edited collection is not the demarcation of a particular field of study or the application of a common research methodology, but rather a shared interest in aesthetic form, and a belief in the vital relevance of verbal, visual and performing art to human and more-than-human well-being. Accordingly, our book does not approach literary and cultural studies or creative critical writing as closed, axiomatised systems. Instead, we have sought to conjure a heterogeneous assemblage of diverse voices: experiences that are connected, as Mathews would say, by a common desire to cross the line from transient perception to wonder or wound. In this manner, Thinking Through Relation provides a snapshot of various recent trends in literary and cultural research, from ecocriticism to translation studies and cognitive film theory. Differences in tone and length, between chapters, exemplify the attention to style and the increasing diversity within these areas, as well as the multitude of formats, scales and rhythms of writing that have emerged during the first and second decades of the twenty-first century. Just as importantly, our collection illustrates a widespread and growing fascination with speculative thinking, situated knowledge and creative practice that can be found across many arts and humanities disciplines. This fascination is shared by all contributors to this volume. We hope that it will provide an inspiration for future research and creative encounter in this tantalisingly vast and variable field.←2 | 3→

The contributors to Thinking Through Relation include many of Timothy Mathews’s colleagues, students and friends: not mutually exclusive categories, thankfully. We come to this project from related but distinct disciplinary backgrounds – Comparative Literature, Theatre and Performance Studies, French, Visual Culture and Film, among others – and with different urgencies, but agree on some key assumptions. First, we affirm the importance of pluralism in the arts and humanities. Instead of championing a single idea of creative critical writing, we emphasise the positive ambivalence of this field and the interdependence of arguments, attitudes and styles that are in play. This is what we mean by thinking through relation: an irreducible complexity of political, social and cultural situations that will not be settled by neat solutions that focus on one interpretative category alone. Consequently, we believe that the social importance of our research cannot be stated in purely economic or institutional terms. It also stems from the artist’s or critic’s ability to query the human from diverse angles, including the position of its least privileged and most vulnerable designations. This ability, we suggest, serves as a bedrock for reasoned and respectful dialogue, in academic criticism and in wider cultural and political exchanges. It may also be evoked to give shape to new communities and projects that invite resourcefulness, generosity and kindness.² Finally, we look to Timothy Mathews’s work for a model of precision. By this, we do not mean the application of rigid protocols of knowledge, but rather the patient and open-ended scrutiny that goes hand in hand with curiosity and care. Precision, in this sense, is never entirely rule-based. Like the musician’s skill or the ability of the experienced craftsman, it develops from practice, through success and disappointment alike. It achieves neither conclusion nor perfection, but can nevertheless offer illumination and fulfilment.

The title of our volume foregrounds creativity and relation. Both terms carry a positive tenor in the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary frameworks that are represented in this collection. Relational modes of knowledge ←3 | 4→production abound in the Modern Languages, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy, Music and the Visual Arts. They hold a privileged place in structures of argumentation that have become deeply familiar to researchers in the arts and humanities, and that are often employed to defend our work against external attack.³ As a result, the two terms have become near ubiquitous in recent scholarly debates. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern points out, ‘relation’ is an attractor: it holds the power to engage other terms and concepts, draws in values and disseminates feelings ‘exactly as though everyone knew what was meant’.⁴ The more-than-human world, for example, has come to be seen by many contemporary thinkers and writers as a co-constitutive presence that intersects with human culture and society in a single material and ethical force field: a tangle of relations. Human and non-human ways of being are intimately shaped by the collisions, frictions, confluences and intimacies between species, or, in the words of Stacy Alaimo, of ‘the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature’.⁵ Similarly, Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru write, ‘If today’s planetary life consists in an incessantly thickening, historically unprecedented web of relations among people, cultures, and locales, to comprehend the planetary must entail grasping the relationality embedded in it.’⁶ In a different but similarly relevant context, twenty-first-century scholarship on world literature and world history has emphasised the importance of global connectedness, shifting the focus of debates from nationally or locally embedded traditions towards spaces and practices of encounter and mediation, comparative and diachronic inquiry, cosmopolitan belonging and existential homelessness.⁷ ←4 | 5→Works of art, according to this tradition of thought, are best understood as immanent, ever-modulating force relations, which emphasise both relatedness and interruptions in relatedness, across space and time.⁸

We begin our reflection on these ideas by returning to the question that Mathews asks in Alberto Giacometti: how do we cross the line from transient perception to an intimacy that is both marvellous and painful? It would be easy enough to respond to this question if we simply chose to posit the difference between transient perception and attentive contemplation in terms of institutional orientations or disciplinary practice. The work of the literary and cultural critic, then, could be said to consist in the systematic pursuit of specialist expertise and comprehensive knowledge. Specialism, accordingly, might be imagined, from the critic’s perspective, as a gradual honing in on an object of study: a progressive, discursively and epistemologically monolinear approximation that is ultimately rewarded by complete and definitive understanding. As philosopher Raymond Geuss has shown, this conception of specialism is central to many academic knowledge practices, especially in the West. For example, it holds a powerful grip over analytic philosophy, where it functions, in Geuss’s words, as a culturally constructed myth ‘to which we have a strong tendency and perhaps a deep commitment – a commitment so deep that it generates an illusion of necessity’.⁹ The same can be said for literary and cultural studies, where the pursuit of specialist knowledge has found expression, in recent decades, in the rhetorical and epistemological conventions of critique: a mid-twentieth-century style of analysis that postulates the reader as an expert, whose scrutiny serves to interrogate and decode certain qualities ←5 | 6→of a given work of art that are not readily apparent to the non-specialist.¹⁰ Our volume wishes to interrupt this orientation and sketch a different response to Mathews’s question. We are specifically interested in experiences of aesthetic encounter and creative critical practice that serve to unsettle the singular authoritativeness of specialist knowledge, not because we wish to dismiss its importance but because we want to open the debates in our disciplines to more diverse orientations, subjectivities and narratives. At this level, our project endorses a set of challenges that have been formulated, in recent years, by cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Rita Felski, among others. It also resonates with the new idioms – centred on affect, vulnerability and creative invention – that have been explored by these writers.¹¹ Felski, for example, associates critique with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion: a spirit of critical questioning that assails the alleged neutrality of cultural and social norms and thereby exposes the ideological bias that others fail – or wilfully refuse – to see.¹² Felski acknowledges the political importance of this orientation, but suggests that it must be accompanied by a greater attention to diverse communities of reception. Vigilance and detachment, she contends, prove a poor guide to the thickness and richness of individual and communal aesthetic experience. As Felski points out, ‘works of art do not only subvert but convert, they do not only inform but transform’.¹³ In this context, it is easy to see how critique may develop into what Felski calls an ‘antinormative normativity’: ‘eternal vigilance, unchecked by alternatives, [that] can easily lapse into the complacent cadences of autopilot argument’.¹⁴ Similarly, Geuss warns his readers against disengaged abstraction and philosophical argument that seeks to ←6 | 7→depart from the specificity of situated knowledge: ‘Once we have seen through the sources of the obsession with unity, completeness, consistency, and invariability, we may become capable of seeing other possibly valuable ways of thinking and living.’¹⁵

Timothy Mathews’s work strikes a similar note. Institutionalised thinking relies on agreed protocols of assessment. But the aesthetic is unpredictable, as Mathews points out. Where the disciplinary conventions of analytic philosophy and literary critique emphasise consistency and invariability, the experience of art, for Mathews, is disorienting. It calls into question many of the activities that we commonly perform as researchers and teachers of literature and culture. In this manner, it can bring about ‘affective realignment […] a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity’, in Felski’s words.¹⁶ Mathews evokes the same experience when he describes the aesthetic as wonder or wound: a unique, volatile moment of encounter, which holds the power to display and displace established conventions. What makes criticism creative, in Mathews’s understanding, is a heightened attention to the unique materialities of the work of art, but also to the serendipities of our encounter with it. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold describes this disposition as a state of vulnerability, not unlike the experience of being in love: