First encounter with The Artistic Turn

Just a quick note after reading a few pages of The Artistic Turn (the chapter on deterritorialization and a fragment of Artist’s examples). I emphasize, I have read only a few pages. This is not a review after proper reading! These are investigation in research-in-the-making, glimpses of the first encounter between scholar and text.

Feminist upbringing immediately makes me try out replacing ‘artist’ with ‘women’, to see how the ontological and the nature/nurture or determinist/social-constructivist views work on the category as such.

In that respect it is crucial to question constantly the self-world opposition, since the ‘self’ or subject itself is not attainable for its life/living in the same manner. That is, the unregistered, the stateless, the insane, the prisoner, they are no subjects in the first place.

Why is it crucial? Because next we take Cage, Gould or Bach as prototype ‘artists’. Now how come we grant these living individuals not only the status of ‘true’ or authentic artists, but even as exemplary cases that grow rather than diminish as they move towards knowledge production/research.

Take myself, for example; having moved to musicology I figured that I didn’t fully deserve the identity ‘pianist’ anymore, let alone ‘artist’ or ‘performer’.

For the rest, of course I am content with a turn to artist-experience and creations-in-the world. But what about musicologist-experience, could that be generative and creative too? And could the specific singularity of the contingent decentered subjectivity that I am myself could be equally relevant?

It seems that personal or subjective experience can always only be justified as of greater relevance if first social consensus is reached on whether that specific shared experience is worth the status of subject.

An artist’s consciousness, an artist’s experience.

Finally, the whole question of psychoanalysis comes in: do we actually have access to our own experience? Or do the social symbolic order(s) already determine what we take for real, before it reaches consciousness? If so, then can we take still as neutral that specific individuals (Bach, Gould, Bernstein) happen to be male individuals?

The chapter on deterritorialization opens with the little girl, an often used image by Deleuze. I wrote a longer paper titled ‘What a little girl’s body can do’ that I have just uploaded and can be found under this link.

Of course these where merely critical notes, overall it seems promising. Generating new categories of subjects (artist-researcher, etcetera) certainly fits in expanding reality, in expanding what counts as life and lived experience, in the project that Butler called making gender trouble. 

This is creative thinking in practice. This is intuitive response,  not carefully constructed argumentation. It is vulnarable, please read it as such. 

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