St George's Field: Aesthetico-Affective Acts

Odette Dewhurst, at the University of Leeds, alerted me to this gravestone in the university cemetery, St George's Field. She found it in August 2011 and when I went there in February this year (2012) it was still there (see image below).

The gravestone is of a similar style to many others located in this part of the garden. It is not of a particularly impressive design and contains the words "IN MEMORY OF/ JAMES ROBINSON MASON OF LEEDS/who died March 15th 1840/aged 45 Years". With yellow and red chalk or pastel someone has drawn a flying (rising?) bird in an expressionist style, in a way that makes the bird look like it is taking off and moving upwards. Odette has called it a phoenix. I am not sure if it was the intention of the artist to be a phoenix, but it does look like one and the semiotic context (a graveyard, death, ashes) could suggest it is.

This drawing is temporary: if it was not removed by anyone at the university (by estates staff or students), it would eventually be removed by 'the elements'. The artwork serves as a schizoanalytical action in that it incorporates both an "aesthetic production" and a "micro-political act". (Guattari 1998: 433) The artwork could also be considered in relation to the concept of death, providing one assumes it is a phoenix; but, also because of its situation in a graveyard. Félix Guattari poses the problem of the death instinct in relation to desire, explaining that in contemporary society with its dominant capitalist subjectivity, schizoanalysis enables the death instinct to be side-stepped by desire which then subjectively changes in differing situations. (1998: 72) For this reason the phoenix drawing could be considered the symbol that represents the presence of schizocartography actually taking place in St George's Field. The Situationist Raoul Vaneigem believed that for a true aesthetic of daily life we must all become artists in our negation of the death instinct in the way it was for Freud in the superego's submission to dominant individuals and structures. (2010: 95) This demonstrates that creativity does not have to be opposed to death but that, in a sense, they rise concurrently outside of any dichotomous relationship that dictates some inevitably destructive end.

Guattari says of his aesthetic paradigm that:

it has ethico-political implications because to speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative instance with regard to the thing created, inflection of the state of things, bifurcation beyond pre-established schemas, once again taking into account the fate of alterity in its extreme modalities. (1995: 105)

The creative instance of the phoenix drawing is something that we cannot temporally tie down exactly, since we do not know when it was created, nor who the artist is. However, we can examine it in regards to its moving away from dominant modes of representation and pose some questions around its reception. For example, is it an anarchic work of art? Could it be considered to be graffiti? And, if there were relatives of the deceased still living, and they liked the artwork, would either of the two questions be relevant?

I ask these questions so as to place the art in the context of a potential viewer of the work in the sense that they would become the interface of a new assemblage: the 'university' would likely view it differently than a random student wandering through the garden. This is why this artwork could be considered a transversal object, because it helps us consider the situation from two directions:

The establishment of such a transversalist bridge leads us to postulate the existence of a certain type of entity inhabiting both domains, such that the incorporeals of value and virtuality become endowed with an ontological depth both equal to objects set in energetico-spatial-temporal coordinates. (Guattari 1995: 109)

The question of aesthetics is not only posed in regards to the multiplicity of the subjectivities of the potential viewers, but we are also pointed in the opposite direction, towards the origins of the dead person in the grave, to their personal and familial history. This also draws our attention to the issue of alterity as it is for St George's Field; not only in relation to the paupers grave, none of which were properly spared in the 1960s landscaping, but also to the question of who decided which gravestone survived and which did not.

Links to St George's Field posts in this series:
Subjectification and Singularization
Decontextualization and Desire
Traversing Transversality

References:
Guattari, Félix.' Schizoanalysis', The Yale Journal of Criticism, 11, 2 (1998), 433-439.
Vaneigem, Raoul. 2010. The Revolution of Everyday Life: An Illustrated Reader: Part 1 (Great Britain: Justpress).
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

St George's Field: Subjectification and Singularization

The chapel at the centre of St George's Field has an undercroft - or columbarium (a vaulted storage space, usually used for cremated remains) - which is no longer accessible from inside or outside the chapel. Despite this, on 23rd June 2011, during a Leeds Psychogeography Group walk, it was discovered that the outside 'wall' of the undercroft had fallen down in one place, revealing the inside.

The particular dérive that Leeds Psychogeography Group were on that day was organised on the University of Leeds campus, and took us to St George's Field. One of the members of the group mentioned the undercroft and we decided to explore it, discovering on our arrival that one of the walls had fallen down in one place, revealing the inside. Near the entrance, on the inside, was a plaque. Unfortunately, we did not photograph the plaque or record a dictation of the text appearing on it at the time, hoping to return at a later date with the appropriate equipment. However, when I returned it had been closed up, by replacing the bricks with new mortar.

I contacted the member of Leeds Psychogeography Group who read out the plaque to us, a geography research fellow at the University of Leeds, Andy Turner. This is what he remembered:

The plaque, just in from the hole, mentioned a woman from Potternewton who died as a young mother. I think she was the wife of someone and they had an infant child that died some time shortly afterwards (this was mentioned lower down on the plaque). I can't quite recall the name of the woman at present or the dates or ages that I think were mentioned. I've some vague recollection of these details...

I also contacted the Estates Office at the university in order to ask about the plaque therein, and to see if there was any information held on it by Estates. This is the relevant part of the reply, which also makes reference to it being closed up again:

Mystery solved. Our maintenance guys have blocked off the undercroft in recent months with stonework and railings to prevent access from outside by 'undesirables'. They confirm there is no access from inside the chapel and thus there is now no access in to the undercroft. They did take photographs of the plaques in the undercroft before they closed up BUT they were of such poor quality they didn't keep them. Sorry but it seems the plaques are locked up forever!

The above quote is an example of how hiding works in postmodern space in a response to administrative decisions (however, it is important to say that the original bricking-up of the undercroft goes back to the 1960s). But, also it is apparent that there are certain 'types' of people that are not welcome in the garden (the scare quotes surrounding 'undesirables' is part of the original email). One of the most troubling aspects of this closing of the undercroft is that it is now a piece of lost social history, since neither the Estates Office, nor Leeds Psychogeography Group, have the full information from the plaque. Also, while it is not clear what types of 'undesirables' are being referred to here (perhaps homeless people or maybe just inquisitive students), the space has been defined as a place that includes some people and not others, and these exclusions will involve those who are deemed not to be 'fit' as part of a wider notion of how the university should appear.

But despite this, the (re)discovery of the undercroft by Leeds Psychogeography Group provides a good illustration of how desire operates within the "subject-group". For Félix Guattari subject-groups are the opposite of subjected individuals or groups, in that they are groups or individuals who are not taken over by dominant systems of power, for example, the super-ego, or political power such as capitalism (2008a: 471). They form a line of flight which is able, in the moment, to traverse temporal and spatial boundaries at the same time bringing to light a piece of social-history which is buried within the territory.

This type of praxis satisfies Guattari's Three Ecologies: the environment, social relations and human subjectivity:

Ecological praxes strive to scout out the potential vectors of subjectification and singularization at each partial existential locus. They generally seek something that runs counter to the 'normal' order of things, a counter-repetition, an intensive given which invokes other intensities to form new existential materials. (Guattari 2008b: 30)

They momentarily create a new space in response to the subject-group currently in attendance in the territory, accounting for their collective modus operandi, but also through their individual affective reactions. Guattari calls this process "transversality", which is a particular form of communication forming a bridge that takes unconventional routes between systems. (1995: 23-24) For Guattari these connections would not be dyadic (dialectical) nor triadic (Oedipal), and would, hence, operate outside of hierarchical power structures and semiotics.

The university's representation of the cemetery as a specific territory under its control, requires that it manages its appearance (spatially and abstractly) in a specific way in order that its incongruences are not left open to criticism. It does this through the management of what Guattari calls "transformers of signification – concrete machines.” (1984: 156) However, despite its attempts to do this, schizocartography, which opposes dominant histories, creates avenues which can be opened, revealing the voice of the other: "The cartography of abstract machinisms makes history by dismantling dominant realities and significations: they constitute the navel, the point of emergence and creationism of the machinic phylum." (Guattari 1995: 174)

Links:
St George's Field: Decontextualization and Desire
St George's Field: Traversing Transversality

References:
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Guattari, Félix and Suely Rolnik. 2008a. Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Cambridge, Mass and London: The MIT Press).
Guattari, Félix. 2008b. 'The Life and Work of Félix Guattari'. In The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pinder and Paul Sutton, 46-78. London and New York: Continuum.

St George's Field: Traversing Transversality

Gary Genosko describes Guattari's transversality as “the tool used to open hitherto closed logics and hierarchies.” (2008: 54) In a section of his book Félix Guattari: An Abberrant Introduction entitled 'Extension', Genosko discusses urban space and walking. He explains that a “transversal territory” which operates within unconventional power structures “is the site of pure potentiality and marked by such valorized terms as 'transgress' – 'deviate' – 'defy' – 'cut across' – 'disorganize' – 'smooth space'.” (Genosko 2002: 57) He says that this mode of operating in space provides an alternative form of articulation, providing one with a different self to that which is expected by the dominant powers in the capitalistic city. (2002: 58)

The act of traversing is a good example of a physical act of transversality. In mountaineering, traversing is the term used to describe how one moves sideways across a rock face, as can be seen below. This photo - taken in 2011 with a Diana F+ - shows a student who is traversing the old wall of the cemetery which now forms part of the base of the Henry Price Halls of Residence on the northern border of the University of Leeds cemetery St George's Field. This wall is located under the Henry Price building and the beams of the building can be seen in the top of the images. It is made from the original bricks of the cemetery wall and follows the original line.

Traverse is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as: "to pass or journey across, over, or through; to pass through (a region) from side to side, or from end to end". However it is further described as a type of writing: "To trace [...] continuously without lifting the pen or pencil", as a way of negotiation life: "To 'go through' life (life, time or anything figured as extended space or region)" and a form of reading: "to read through or consider thoroughly". This act of traversing in the cemetery also satisfies Genosko's list of verbs above in cutting across and deviating from the usual paths through the space. It is also an act of defiance and while the notices on the outside of the cemetery only forbid ball games, it is possible that traversing may be considered a transgressive act also. While the traversing student may not intentionally be acting defiantly, he does challenge the use of the space and also provides a new route that is inspired by his own subjective desire to respond to the environment in an unconventional way: "Transversality in the group is a dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidal hierarchization and sterile ways of transmitting messages." (1984: 22)

For Guattari it is desire that enables creativity to be expressed and challenges the accepted, and dominant, logic of a given situation. Desire is the productive, and constructive, force of life: "I propose to denominate as desire all forms of the will to live, the will to create, the will to love, the will to invent another society, another perception of the world, and another value system." (Guattari 2008: 318) To the student it might not be apparent they are crawling along the walls of the old cemetery, merely the wall of a modern building. Nevertheless, the very act itself questions both the permissions and power attached to allowing, and preventing, certain behaviours in particular places, and also the underlying logos of the space in the sense that individuals have certain 'common sense' actions expected of them.

Desire finds a route via transversality, allowing it to be released from overriding social forms that attempt to regulate the subjectivity of the individual.

Links:
St George's Field Fallow Again: A Schizocartography
The Psychogeography of Other Spaces

References:
Genosko, Gary. 2002. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London and New York: Continuum).
Genosko, Gary. 2008. 'The Life and Work of Félix Guattari', The Three Ecologies, trans. by Ian Pinder and Paul Sutton (London and New York: Continuum) pp. 46-78.
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Guattari, Félix and Suely Rolnik. 2008. Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Cambridge, Mass and London: The MIT Press).