Sweet Spots

Sweet Spots thinks transversally across language and body, and between text and tissue. This assemblage of essays collectively proposes that words—that is, language that lands as written text—are more-than-human material. And, these materials, composed of forces and flows and tendencies, are capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the making. The practice of acupuncture—and its relational thinking—often makes its presence felt to twirl the text-tissue of the bodying essays. Ficto-critical thinking is threaded throughout to activate concepts from process philosophy and use the work of other thinkers (William James, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few) to forge imaginative connections. Entangled in the text-tissue are an assortment of entities, such as bickering body parts, quivering jellyfish, heart pacemaker cells, a narwhal tooth, Taoist parables, always with ubiquitous, stretchy connective tissue — from gooey interstitial fluid to thick planes of fascia — ever present to ensure that the essaying bodies become, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the one-which-includes-the-many-includes-the-one. The essaying bodies orient towards the sweetest sweet spot which is found, not in the center, but slightly askew, felt in the reverbing more-than that carries their potential. Crucially, this produces a shift in perspective away from self-enclosed bodies and experts toward a care for the connective tissue of relation

Sweet Spots

Sweet Spots thinks transversally across language and body, and between text and tissue. This assemblage of essays collectively proposes that words—that is, language that lands as written text—are more-than-human material. And, these materials, composed of forces and flows and tendencies, are capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the making. The practice of acupuncture—and its relational thinking—often makes its presence felt to twirl the text-tissue of the bodying essays. Ficto-critical thinking is threaded throughout to activate concepts from process philosophy and use the work of other thinkers (William James, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few) to forge imaginative connections. Entangled in the text-tissue are an assortment of entities, such as bickering body parts, quivering jellyfish, heart pacemaker cells, a narwhal tooth, Taoist parables, always with ubiquitous, stretchy connective tissue — from gooey interstitial fluid to thick planes of fascia — ever present to ensure that the essaying bodies become, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the one-which-includes-the-many-includes-the-one. The essaying bodies orient towards the sweetest sweet spot which is found, not in the center, but slightly askew, felt in the reverbing more-than that carries their potential. Crucially, this produces a shift in perspective away from self-enclosed bodies and experts toward a care for the connective tissue of relation

Midwife of An-arché: Toward a Poetics of Becoming-with-Woman

This project explores the connections between midwifery and the ethical demands attendant to poetic practice. Through verse and prose, I unfold a figuration of the midwife that traverses the boundaries between Levinasian heteronomy and Deleuzian heteromorphism, and is a constitutive factor in sites of resistance to the biomedical territorialisation of the creative body. Chief archival and methodological components that inform the thesis include: a historiography of childbirth - tracing the development of ‘holistic’ and ‘interventionist’ paradigms, and the ideological underpinnings of the phallocratic takeover of the birthing room in certain Western countries; idiographic insights gathered from dialogues with maternal practitioners and mothers, including residents of The Farm in Tennessee - where I participated in a midwifery workshop week; an experiential inquiry into Holotropic Breathwork - to facilitate access to non-ordinary states of consciousness; and a negotiation between Marxist-feminist and poststructuralist articulations of ethico-political agency. Subject matter ranges from a consideration of the ethical import of the placental economy to the bio-intelligent tissue of the psoas, the banishment of Anne Hutchinson from Massachusetts Bay to the legacy of the ‘Twilight Sleep’ movement. Sustained critical attention is devoted to Mina Loy’s “Parturition”, and contemporary poets that have acknowledged Loy as an influence, such as Lara Glenum. I suggest that, despite the absence of a birth attendant on the symbolic level, Loy’s poem resonates with the investments of midwifery, instating a ‘subjectin- process’ that woks through and against abstruse and instrumental discourses, defying both the technocratic erasure of maternal knowing and the fetishistic reduction of labour to an end-product. Art’s capacity for opening up a corporeallycharged zone of between-ness is further elaborated in an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker - through which the treatment of spatiotemporality is aligned with the imperatives of midwifery guardianship.

Essaying bodies, bodying essays: write in the middle is a creative-critical research practice

This PhD blends three practices that are not ordinarily put together: creative writing, acupuncture, and process-oriented philosophy (e.g. Spinoza, William James, Whitehead). An important aim of this practice-led research is to re-present notions of body through the writing of a series of essays that demonstrate how creative and critical components can move together within one body, and also within a collection of text-bodies. The PhD explores the relation between `lyric' and `essay' and how this relationship can generate a more-than quality that has the potential to affectively move the [dissertation's] body beyond the sum of its parts. The practice of experimenting with the essay's capacity to carry the force of thought forming can, by extension, make creative practice research a site for the production of knowledge. The project demonstrates how a method of making becomes the methodology. That is, the process of thinking and making, rhizomatically, from the Deleuzian middle, not only activates the practice(s), but also becomes the outcome. Or, as Whitehead says, "Knowledge is drawn up with the immediacy of its own importance, as fresh as fish.&quot

Policing print: the novel before the police * Three card trick: a novel

This thesis is presented in two sections; the first, ‘Policing Print: The novel and the practice of law enforcement 1720-1750,’ is a critical essay examining the interrelated development of the novel and the culture of policing in eighteenth-century London. ‘Policing Print’ investigates what D.A. Miller refers to as ‘the possibility of a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police.’ While Miller’s book, The Novel and the Police, engages with post-1860 novels and policing practices, this thesis takes his subject back further and argues that the eighteenth-century novel was already engaged with the culture and practice of policing. The second, though primary, section is the historical novel, Three Card Trick, which is a fictionalised telling of the confrontation between the notorious housebreaker, Jack Sheppard, and the thief-taker, Jonathan Wild. Three Card Trick is an attempt to write a crime novel differently; to bend and stretch the genre in order to make it speak to the specificities of my historical characters and the milieu in which they are embedded. Three Card Trick therefore derives its narrative structures and strategies from the acts and institutions of crime and law enforcement which it describes; Wild is at once criminal and policeman, antagonist and ally, Sheppard both self-interested criminal and ascendant folk hero. These two parts of the thesis are significantly in dialogue with each other. ‘Policing Print’ argues that the novel and the culture of policing informed and were informed by one another. Attention to this movement between novelistic and policing practice produces new readings of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Henry Fielding’s The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great. In turn, these readings directly shape the creative methodology of my novel, Three Card Trick, by enabling it to engage creatively with the arguments made in my critical work

Screening interiority : dream, the unconscious, emotion and imagination in cinematic language

The portrayal of film characters' inner experience ensures a level of audience engagement often precluded in primarily plot-driven narratives. Yet, there is a prevailing notion that interiority is the exclusive domain of literature. To counter this pedagogy, the thesis explores how filmmakers can externalise dream; the unconscious; emotional journeys, and the realm of the imagination through cinematic language. The study draws on a theoretical framework that incorporates psychoanalytic film theory, neo-formalism and literary theory, and which engages to some extent with authorship. The compatibilist methodological approach draws on these modes of analysis, while systematically bridging theory and practice. The thesis dovetails with a creative component - the screenplay of Zinzi and the Boondogle, a children's feature film. Through this case study, the thesis examines the largely undocumented relationship between film theory and analysis on the one hand, and screenwriting and film production on the other. The research explores a number of areas germane to the screenplay, starting by uncovering innovative ways in which dreams can illuminate character interiority. It finds that animation, in its ability to render visible the metaphysical, is a compelling means of screening inner processes. Jan Svankmajer blends live action filmmaking with animation to bespeak the interpenetration of the conscious and unconscious realms. Hayao Miyazaki uses anime to construct otherworldly realms that reflect adolescent girls' rites of passage. In films that draw on African storytelling, animation is shown to make manifest the imaginative realm. Finally, the adaptation of the screenplay Zinzi and the Boondogle into a novel tests ways in which cinema and literature can divergently - but equally - evoke characters' interior lives. The thesis counters the pedagogy which insists that film is suited only to external action. Rather, the research reveals potent cinematic means of evoking oneiric and fantasy lives - bridging the traditional chasm between film theory and praxis and inviting further meetings between these discourses

Spaces of Appearance: Writings on Contemporary Theatre and Performance

This thesis, a collection of previously published materials, reflects a plural and evolving engagement with theatre and performance over the past fifteen years or so: as researcher, writer, editor, teacher, practitioner, spectator. These have rarely been discreet categories for me, but rather different modalities of exploration and enquiry, interrelated spaces encouraging dynamic connectivities, flows and further questions. Section 1 offers critical accounts of the practices of four contemporary theatre directors: Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine. Section 2 draws on elements of contemporary philosophy and critical thinking to explore the mutable parameters of performance. lt proposes performative mappings of certain unpredictable, energetic events 'in proximity of performance', to borrow Matthew Goulish's phrase: contact, fire, animals, alterity, place. Section 3 contains examples of documentation of performance practices, including a thick description of a mise en scene of a major international theatre production, reflections on process, training and dramaturgy, a performance text with a framing dramaturgical statement, and personal perspectives on particular collaborations. The external Appendix comprises a recently published collection of edited and translated materials concerning five core collaborative projects realised by Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil at their base in the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris. The core concerns of this thesis include attempts to think through: • the working regimes, poetics and pedagogies of certain directors, usually in collaborative devising contexts within which the creative agency of performers is privileged; • the processes and micro-politics of collaboration, devising, and dramaturgical composition; the dramaturgical implications of trainings, narrative structures, spaces, mise en scene, and of images as multi-layered, dynamic 'fields'; • the predicament and agency of spectators in diverse performance contexts, and the ways in which spectatorial roles are posited or constructed by dramaturgies; • the imbrication of embodiment, movement and perception in performance, and the plurality of modes of perception; • the critical and political functions of theatre and theatre criticism as cultural/social practice and 'art of memory' (de Certeau), of dramaturgies as critical historiographies, and of theatre cultures (and identities) as plural, dynamic, and contested; • performance as concentrated space for inter-subjectivity and the flaring into appearance of the 'face-to-face' (Levinas); the possibility of ethical, 'response-able' encounter and exchange with another; identity as relational and in-process, alterity as productive event, the inter-personal as political; • the poetics and politics of what seems an unthinkable surplus (and constitutive 'outside') to the cognitive reach of many conventional frames and maps in theatre criticism and historiography; an exploration of acts of writing as performative propositions and provocations ('critical fictions') to think the event of meanings at/of the limits of knowledge and subjectivity. This partial listing of recurrent and evolving concerns within the thesis traces a trajectory in my evolution as a writer and thinker, a gradual displacement from the relatively 'solid ground' of theatre studies and theatre history towards more fluid and tentative articulations of the shifting 'lie of the land' in contemporary performance and philosophy. This trajectory reflects a growing fascination with present process, conditions, practices, perceptions 'in the middle', and ways of writing (about) performance as interactive and ephemeral event

Finding Spirit: A Non-Representational Ethnography of the Affective Geographies of Religion at Bethel Church

In the West, Christianity is transitioning away from institutionalised religion towards more personal forms of belief where material and embodied experiences of the divine – or spirit – are valorised. Despite this representing both a generational and cultural shift in Christian practices, little is known about how spirit forms and informs everyday life – generating experiential knowledges through which people sense and make sense of the world around them. Finding Spirit therefore sits within this gap, engaging with the seemingly immaterial but nevertheless deeply consequential dimensions of religious experience that the social sciences struggle to adequately relate to, such as spirit. Underpinned by theories of affect, Finding Spirit is an ethnography of ordinary life at Bethel; an independent Californian mega-church that teaches believers how to live naturally, supernatural lifestyles. As it explores the affective geographies of how spirit is sensed, experienced and encountered in everyday, ordinary Bethel life this thesis moves beyond the notion of spirit as a distant, otherworldly entity or a paranormal experience that occurs outside of religious belief. Essentially, Finding Spirit argues that paying attention to more-than-human relations with spirit creates opportunities to further explore affective and emotional lived experience. Drawing upon non-representational theories, Finding Spirit embraces a sense of creativity as it aims to develop methodologies that are better attuned to find spirit in the lived, sensed and in motion more-than-human worlds of Bethel. For instance, it employs a non-linear, snapshot writing style that fluctuates between the empirical and the theoretical throughout as well as experimenting with a critical disposition or mood of ‘friendliness’ as an alternative to critique. Finding Spirit therefore enriches Geography’s understandings of affective life by highlighting reality as heterogenous as well as adding to knowledges on how researchers might relate to the affectivity of becoming submerged in these alternative worldings in the field

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Let her go:Reinventing black characters in English black crime fiction

This practice-based PhD submission consists of an original novel (80% weighting) of 70,000 words and a reflective critical thesis (20% weighting) of 25,000 words. The novel, Let Her Go, seeks to expand the crime fiction genre, following the search of Saul Hanley for the reasons his daughter, Tishana, died of a drugs overdose. The work combines crime-fiction tropes with elements of the road novel and the quest, whilst allowing its central character an interior presence that explores consciousness in ways that deepen our realization of human indeterminacy and complicity whilst also questioning and re-positioning the nature of crime and criminality. The thesis opens with a series of definitions: of ‘black’ and of ‘crime fiction’. A short analysis of problematics and a periodized history of English black crime fiction follow. The thesis then examines the ways in which Let Her Go departs from pre-existing works, focusing on (a) abandonments of existing tropes, fixations and locations in the examined black crime fiction and (b) modifications and adoptions of other technical and thematic elements. The use of stream-of-consciousness and epistolary techniques is explored and the influence within the writing process of habitus, hybridity and related innovations of location. It then examines the influence of ideas drawn from criminology and jurisprudence, as well as intersections of class and gender within the novel. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the success of Let Her Go’s attempt at reinvention of black characters in crime fiction