Sensuous aggregates

On being knocked down by a car at night

There are moments in life when time and space seem to lose their hold on you. For example when I was knocked down by a car when crossing a road and everything was happening at the same time, a sort of clumping of experience in a way very different to 'normality'. Thinking about the experience from a distance I'm reminded of other people's attempts to describe the thing I might call an accelerated intuited moment. The term ‘sensuous aggregate’ is one taken from Husserl who used it to describe a ‘unified intuition’ (Farber, 2006) and is a term used to describe the various feelings and bodily knowledge that come to us through pre-cognitive thought. This ‘sensuous aggregate’ is something that I might also call a ‘feeling tone’ when describing an experience. In both 'Logical Investigations' and 'Ideas' Husserl argues that our perceptual consciousness is based in the “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle. In philosophy, 'hyle' is a noun that means matter, especially matter in its original, unorganised state. In my case a road and a car in the rain at night. It can also refer to anything that receives form from outside itself, i.e. 'that which is formed'. Hyle when brought together with some form of representation, could I think be another type of sensuous aggregate. This is the intuitive or as Williford (2013, p. 1) puts it “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, something we discover, rather than create, another possible bridge between consciousness and the experienced world. I would argue this is another aspect of what we also call our 'feeling tone'. It's the something that lies behind statements such as, "It's all going well", or "I'm anxious about something", "this is very exciting" or "I'm going to die". The general summation of my response to stimulus, determines my flight or fight response and is the overall judgement my embodied senses are making in response to what is happening out there. That judgement depends on the form I give to the perceptions I receive. 

If so, another way to approach the images I have been making is to see them as diagrams of 'sensuous aggregates'. 

Sensuous: relating to or affecting the senses rather than the intellect.

Aggregates: a whole formed by combining several separate elements.

Often more than one sense is activated at the same time when I have a feeling. So when I'm drawing I try to bring together into one representation more than one feeling tone. Perhaps a sense of cold shiver with a knotted stomach and a vision of an empty landscape on a misty day. 

Deleuze and Guattari in response I presume to their reading of Husserl, stated that art relies on the creation of sensuous aggregates. (Rodowick in Furstenau, 2010, p. 31) So art itself could in some ways be pulled into this clump of aggregates. A clump that has now reminded me of 'the paradox of the heap', a philosophical puzzle that explores the vagueness of language and the difficulty of defining vague concepts. A heap is by definition an amorphous concept, and so is a sensuous aggregate. I know what I think I'm getting at but it might only be poetry that can save me. Heap, gravel, sand etc. out of which we build roads and buildings. But not that, something else.

I thought I saw an angel

It looked like a glowing stone

It was committed to religion 

One built on death

I picked up the stone

Put it in my pocket

In the dark it opened wings out from its back

It had had a vision of my future

When I was knocked down time seemed suspended. The car lights were frozen in my mind, but I was planted into the road, slammed flat. The image that eventually arrived is now seen by myself as a sensuous diagram, starting as a very rough drawing in a notebook, it began to morph as I began to daydream what it was like to be almost dead. It was as if I was part of a scene from a film, embedded into the scenery, but still allowed to play my part. I can see the scene now, a sensuous street, at night everything has an animist soul; the lights, the glistening road, wet from continuous rain, dark shops brooding, a stolid deep red post box, looking on, mouth open as if to say something, my shopping dispersed over the damp road, broken eggs leaking yokes in the rain, as I too dissolve into the flowing waters of the gutter. But I survived and I thanked by guardian angel.

It's now over a year since the accident, but I still see myself in that moment, as if I was outside my body, yet in it. Working with people who have had traumatic accidents has reminded me that I am making images for them to inhabit as much as myself, so images will need to be made like animist objects, so that they can be inhabited by other beings, put on like clothes or crawled into like a tent. 

Reading

Aaltonen, Minna-Ella (2011) Touch, taste & devour: phenomenology of
film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations. MPhil(R) thesis. Obtained at: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2666/01/2011aaltonenmphilr.pdf accessed on 14. 11. 11 

Farber, M (2006) The foundation of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the quest for a rigorous science of philosophy London: AldineTransaction

Furstenau, M (2010) The film theory reader London: Routledge

Harvey G. (2015) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism London: Routledge

Williford, K. (2013) 'Husserl’s hyletic data and phenomenal consciousness', Phenom Cogn Sci.
1​ DOI: 10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

See also:

I swear I saw this

The topology of dreams

Drawing on experience

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Some thoughts on art and spirituality