CFP: Process Aesthetics, or, The Aesthetics of Process – First draft

Process Aesthetics, or, The Aesthetics of Process

At this summer’s seminar we would like to focus on process and the role of process within the field of aesthetics. Papers can be on the theory or theorization of process, methodological questions regarding process and aesthetics, or analytical approaches to works or objects with emphasis on process.

According to A.N. Whitehead, the world consists of events or happenings rather than solid permanent objects. Nothing comes into being once and for all. Objects can only persist insofar they renew or recreate themselves in an infinite process. “The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the first meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of its expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism’. In this sense, an organism is a nexus.” (Process and Reality, p. 214-15). To Whitehead there is no ontological difference between physical objects and mental or subjective acts. There is no essential distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, human and non-human, living and non-living. All pertains to the same process. “Secondly, each actual entity is itself only describable as an organic process. It repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm. It is a process proceeding from phase to phase, each phase being the real basis from which it successor proceeds towards the completion of the thing in question. Each actual entity bears in its constitution the ‘reasons’ why its conditions are what they are. These ‘reasons’ are the other actual entities objectified for it.” (Process and Reality, p. 215). The world is Becoming rather than Being.
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari describes nature as “a process of production” (p. 3). Thus, there is no distinction between natural and industrial production. “Everything is production, since the recording processes [enregistrement] are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced.” (p. 4). This leads Deleuze and Guattari to three different meanings of the term process. First, process means incorporating consumption and recording in production itself, making all one process. Second, process means that man and nature are not two opposite terms. They are one and the same essential reality. “Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle” (p. 5). This leads to the third meaning. Process must not be seen as an end or goal in itself. Neither is it an infinite perpetuation of itself. To put an end to the process, or to prolong it indefinitely leads to the creation of what Deleuze and Guattari labels artificial schizophrenia, that is, the mental condition. True schizophrenia is “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines” (p. 5).
“There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life; the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.” (p. 2).
The process of production diverts the current of the flow. In production the flow of energy is solidified into a product, an object that is subsequently coupled to the process of circulation and consumption. Any object is the actualization of potentials produced within the process of becoming. “Even God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibilities and passes through them. (…) It is a world of captures instead of closures.” (Deleuze: The Fold, p. 81).
The process is without end or finality, but it is not a goal in itself. “A metaphysics of process and becoming cannot do without some principle of unification, lest it drift off into atomized incoherence. But it also cannot allow such a principle to fix it into any sort of finality or closure.” (Steven Shaviro: “God, or the Body without Organs”, p. 27). Any given work, object or thing will possess a “potentiality for process” (Whitehead: Process and Reality, p. 43). Whether the ‘potential’ becomes ‘actual’ depends on ‘decision’. Whitehead does not distinguish between human and non-human subjects when it comes to deciding. Decisions are not grounded in cognitive skills but in ‘aesthetic selection’. “But this process of selection is an aesthetic one. It is felt, rather than thought (or felt before it is thought); and it is freely chosen, rather than being obligatory. The process of selection rests upon aesthetic criteria, rather than upon either cognitive or moral ones.” (Shaviro, p. 35).

We would like to explore this process aesthetics or aesthetics of process. In the words of Rosi Braidotti: ”It is therefore crucial to learn how to think about processes and not only concepts. The challenge is in how to represent in-between zones and areas of experience or perception” (Metamorphosis). The contributions could be, but are definitely not limited to following topics:

- Metamorphosis represented or mediated in art, film and literature
- Aesthetics of process
- Methodological suggestions of how to deal with process in research and knowledge production.
- Exploration of types of processual media and modes of production – are some media more processual than others?
- Temporary spaces, zones of indeterminacy and territorial becoming.
- Process planning, aesthetics of regeneration and transformation
- What is the option for the political and urge for transformation?
- Explorations and research of the circle 4 notion ‘work in progress’ what does it entail, has it impact on academia and where to draw the line for a work in progress?
- Discussions upon the claim that selection processes rest upon aesthetic criteria rather than cognitive or moral ones.

We call for contributions that discuss either theoretical approaches to process and aesthetics, analyses of concrete works or objects dealing with process, or develop methodological approaches to the field of process aesthetics.

Literature:

Braidotti, Rosi: Metamorphosis – Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002
Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990
Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press, 1983
Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia, New York: Continuum, 1987
Deleuze, Gilles: The Fold – Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Latour, Bruno: Vi har aldrig været moderne, København: Hans Reitzel, 2006
Shaviro, Steven: “Deleuze’s Encounter with Whitehead”, 2007
Shaviro, Steven: “God, or the Body without Organs”, 2008
Whitehead, A.N.: Process and Reality – An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1978