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“There is the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of
experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (Winnicott, 230).
“Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary
ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality” (Debord, Toward a
Situationist International).
“Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals,
during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful
melody, mountains, the moon, the sea–all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever
do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have these moments at all, and are themselves
intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.” (Nietzsche, 1995, p.117)
“a man loses his umbrella, and he searches desperately for it all day, but he loses himself—and does not
even notice.” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p.24)
“In a word, the emotional subject and the object of the emotion are united in an indissoluble synthesis.
The emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world.” (Sartre, 1962, p.56)
Ever since my undergraduate studies in art history, my interest in avant-garde
performance art has kept me preoccupied with questions about the aesthetic moment. How do
we piece together the remnants of a performance in a way that most effectively represents the
transiency of that moment in which the actions took place? How do we, as art historians,
reperform that moment in our scholarship in ways that allow us to archive the moment in which
we were never present. Of course, I learned that before I can ask that question, I must first begin
to understand the moment itself. How was it constructed? What were the spatial and temporal
boundaries? What were the reactions of the audience that contributed to the artist’s
performance? Out of all of these questions, it was the latter that was the hardest to define. I
quickly became drawn to the phenomena of human experience, or rather human experiencing,
and the time-space dimension in which an experience reveals the boundaries of the human
condition. Naturally, my following question was how do we know these moments of experience
that reveal our human condition and wake us up to this moment of awareness? By refusing easy
answers, and a lot of research that required a lot of legwork, I came to the existentialists who fed
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my curiosity and satisfied my intellectual thirst. My exposure to Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre
introduced me to the concept of emotions as ways of knowing the spatial and temporal
boundaries where experience happens. It became quite clear to me that the study of emotions as
a kind of prosthetic, as a kind of aid that is understood outside of our skin, will be a key
component in understanding a moment that seems to be always escaping our understanding. By
understanding the time-space of a moment as a moment of experience through a pedagogy of
emotions, I find myself hopeful of the possibility of creating a pedagogy of moments which can
help us understand moments as having the potential for self-understanding and selftransformation.
Therefore, you can imagine my relief when a graduate seminar in the “Philosophy of
Emotions and Affect” was offered. I jumped at the opportunity to further flesh-out my questions,
and begin to develop a pedagogy of moments with the help of my colleagues and our course
instructor, Professor Boler. This paper will address the unifying concepts that I recognized in
relation to moments, with specific observations on the ways in which these scholars of emotion
took up the time-space boundaries of affect. In demonstrating the arguments made by these
scholars and the ways in which they were discussed in the classroom, I would like to make the
argument that this affective temporal space that exists between binaries is one that is
“discovered” and “colonized”. In making this argument, I would like to clarify the necessity of
exploring these temporal spaces as opposed to taking them up for another cause and therefore
misunderstanding the inherent qualities of this phenomenon. As opposed to the worrisome
approach of these scholars, I would like to understand this time-space as something that needs to
be explored. There are two ways that I will explore the time-space of the moment: through an
existential and phenomenological investigation of the boundaries of moments, and through an
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analysis of the ways in which these moments are constructed. I will rely on the observations and
critiques of the course material for the former, and on the philosophy of the Situationist
International for the latter. In exploring the time-space boundaries of a moment in these ways, I
will argue the necessity of understanding our emotions as a kind of bodily prosthetic that wakes
us up to our existential moment. In no way is this essay an attempt to develop a pedagogy of
moments, but rather, it is meant to inspire hope for the possibility of such a pedagogy by making
clear what needs to be first known about moments.
Most, if not all, of the readings for the “Philosophy of Emotions and Affect” seminar
have attempted to situate emotions and affect within a kind of “space”. This space has been
called a linguistic space (between signified and signifier), a psychological space (between the
conscious and the unconscious), a political space (between citizens and a public realm), and a
phenomenological space (between the subject and the object) to name a few. In my written
responses and in classroom discussions, I have referred to this “space” as a third space, as a
s/place between binaries. However, I have recently discovered that by naming this space in this
way, I made unknowing references to other scholars such as Edward Soja, Robert Putnam and/or
hommi bhabha. More problematically, by naming this space I am “othering” it and making it
something that it is not by seeking to articulate something that is inherently unarticulable.
However, for the sake of this paper, I will refer to this space as space x.
For many of the scholars that we read in the seminar, space x has been discovered as a
linguistic space. For Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz (2009), they locate the study of
emotion within a linguistic Discourse which “allows us to explore how speech and writing
provides the means by which local views of emotion have their effects and take their
significance” (p. 109). They turn to Bourdieu to understand emotions a social phenomena, as
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habits that are formed by cultural texts of spaces (p. 107). Similarly, Elizabeth Ellsworth
understands space x as an empowering space within the classroom where “by speaking, in their
“authentic voices,” students are seen to make themselves visible and define themselves as
authors of their own world” (p. 100). In “Essentialism in the Classroom,” Diane Fuss (1989)
takes up poststructural linguistics to discover space x as an essentialist space “from which to
speak and, simultaneously, to deconstruct these spaces of ideological production to keep them
from solidifying” (p. 188). The simultaneous act of deconstructing and constructing and
authorizing and de-authorizing speech is a metamorphic space “where we become what we
know; where ontology shades into epistemology” (p. 113). This linguistic space is understood
more poetically in Franz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Mask” and Audre Lorde’s “The
Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Both Fanon and Lorde discover space x
as a space that both depends on and is outside of language, and in its ambiguity, this space is a
freeing space where the self is revealed. But it is also the space where one is not. Fanon (1967)
recognizes the danger of being in this linguistic space where one is erased:
...my shoulders slipped out of the framework of the world, my feet could no
longer feel the touch of the ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro
future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no
longer wholly black, I was damned (p. 138).
Lorde discovers this linguistic space that gives voice to silence, but similar to Fanon, it
is a dangerous space since this unsilencing runs the risk of not being heard (Lorde,
1984, p. 42). Compared to the prior scholars who I suggest discover space x as a
linguistic space, Fanon’s and Lorde’s poetic discomfort with this ambiguous space is
the closest to exploring the dimensions of space x. I would like to argue that their
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approach to space x is a phenomenological exploration of linguistics. The phenomenon
of linguistics makes visible the boundaries of the moment when and where we can catch
language as an object that appears and disappears in passing.
Another way that space x has been discovered by scholars who we read and
discussed in class is as a political space. In her chapter “The Political Relevance of the
Emotions,” Rebecca Kingston (2008) gives the reader an historical overview of the
place of passions in the public realm in order to account for the current situation of
liberal democracy. She recognizes three shifts of the passion/public relationship within
three major intellectual moves: the ancients who believed that the passions are caused
by a relation to things in and of a common world, the Cartesian physiological
understanding of the passions as an effect of product of public life, and a modern
synthesis of the cause and effect of passions as an imaginative appropriation. It is
important to note that Kingston is not using the word emotion. The passions, unlike the
existential understanding of emotions, are a collective state that both informs and is
informed by social construct. Therefore, Kingston is able to discover these passions
that are caused by our experiences in the world, as political. She recognizes the
democratic urgency of understanding this political passion as a way of “retuning our
normative understanding of politics so as to respond more suitably with the complexity
of political life as we experience it” (p. 125). The passions, as something that is
experienced “out there” as opposed to within one’s self is political. Similarly, in
Elizabeth Alexander’s (1994) piece “Can you be BLACK and Look at This,” she
attempts to find a language about “her people” in discovering the spectacle of space x as
political. She wants to know “what it is to think of oneself, in this day and age, as
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having a people” (p. 78). She looks at the media and spectacle of our political life, and
argues that this space is responsible for cultural memories that are taken up as
knowledge. According to Alexander, the “knowledge” that comes from this political
space stands in the way of an authentic understanding of having a people. Sara Ahmed
(2004) discovers what emotions do in a political space. By identifying this political
space as having boundaries within which emotions move, she explores the ways in
which a national identity is shaped. She discovers this space as involving “affective
forms of reorientation” which is an effect of circulating emotions, and that this is
inherently political (p. 8). Therefore, this is very similar to Kingston’s political
passions. Both consider space x to be a space within a polis, where emotions reflect our
being-in-the-polis.
Space x has also been discovered as a psychological space by some of the
scholars that we read for the seminar. Of all the ways in which this space has been
discovered, this is one that I am less worried about, and one that gives me hope and the
courage to explore this space as a moment. What makes this discovery different from
the rest is the recognition of time and its relationship to space. In his visit to our
classroom, Fadi Abou-Rihan introduced to us the concept of the Interregnum as the
border between our conscious daily lives and our unconscious. According to him, this
border is a space all on its own that informs the two realms and their boundaries, and in
this way, functions very much like the realm of dreams where the “I” is unstable and is
constantly being reproduced. Inherent in this realm is the suspension of time as timely
(conscious time) and time as timeless (unconscious time). This suspension in time is
experiencing the two experiences of time. He refers to the medieval concept of Aevum
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to name this time-space and state of being. Also, he refers to Winnicott’s concept of the
transitional space as having the same characteristics as his notion of the Interregnum.
This transitional space is what Winnicott discovers as the third part of the life of human
beings, “an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life
both contribute” (Winnicott, 1951, p. 230). Winnicott further suggests the necessity of
a transitional object that helps one to experience this space between inner reality and
external life. In knowing the transitional object, it can give us clues about the
dimension of the transitional space that one experiences. Deleuze and Guattari identify
desire as revealing this space of human experience. Unlike Winnicott’s Freudian
analysis, Deleuze and Guattari go beyond traditional psychoanalysis to understand how
the unconscious produces, creates and is dynamic. They locate this unconscious
between Freud’s conscious/unconscious dualism, and develop a schizoanalytic
subjectivity. Unlike the traditional notion of the subject as the ultimate essence of
individuation, the schizoanalytic subject is fragmented, has multiple strata, and can
therefore go beyond its “individuality.” Although they reveal this space where
schizoanalytic subject and its unconscious desire is involved in a process that produces
a product that is the process, they fail to catch this producing/product identity (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1983, p. 7). Since the subject is self-referential in its production, the
subject not only expresses the system of production, but is an expression of that system.
Therefore, if we think about the subject in this way, we can begin to explore the subject
as a form of expression. This would require an aesthetic approach as opposed to a strict
phenomenological or existential one.
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Therefore, I am not criticizing all of the readings that we did for the seminar as
discovering space x. As we have seen with psychoanalysis and the poetic essays of
Lorde and Fanon, it is possible to discover boundaries through exploration. But key to
these “discoveries” is an exploration of the unknown. A successful explored discovery
is one that requires a kind of scholarly attitude, an attitude that recognizes the ambiguity
of the human world while resisting the temptation to resolve this ambiguity by grasping
toward whatever is familiar. With this attitude, the explored discovery of space x can
also be a self-discovery, a discovery that recognizes that we are not “at home” in the
world, that we are not awake to our everyday moments that make up and inform our
experiences. How can we wake up the schizoanalytic self? When and where can we
grasp our invisibility? What should we expect to feel? One thing is for sure, we have to
be prepared to lose the “discovered” feeling of ourselves, and allow ourselves to be
frightened and lost. I believe that these feelings will let us know when and where we
are exploring a space where we can no longer recognize ourselves. It is what we do in
that moment of feeling lost and frightened that is crucial. For we often find ourselves
feeling this way, but do not understand why, leaving us to believe that there is
something wrong with us. In order to be conscious of our unconscious moments of
existence, we need to trust our feelings of panic, loneliness and fear. Just as waking
makes dreams unreal, so can waking to another level of consciousness make our
ordinary existence unreal. This space of Interregnum requires us to think about time
differently in order to open the way to the possibilities of new experiences.
It is at this point that I would like to turn to the avant-garde group of artists,
activists and scholars known as the Situationist International. In describing their
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philosophy and critique of postmodern capitalist culture, and illustrating the ways in
which their project of creating situations was an attempt to wake people up from their
amnesic state, my goal is to understand space x as a moment that can be created for
exploration. Although the group consisted of many members, all who were originally
part of smaller artistic groups, I would like to concentrate on the two dominant
personalities, Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, who were responsible for the group’s
Manifesto and core theoretical ideas. Considering that both Lefebvre and Debord were
social theorists, I think that it would be useful to first understand the ways in which both
scholars understood space x, and how their theories were later applied to and found their
pragmatic potential in the Situationist International movement.
Looking back at Lefebvre’s association with the Dadaists, we can compare his
concept of “moments of presence” to the artists’ attack on tradition and their techniques
to shock audiences out of their traditional ways of living their everyday lives.
Particularly, Lefebvre was interested in the ways in which Dada turned everyday objects
into art, and forced the viewer to contemplate and challenge the structure of everyday
meaning. According to Lefebvre, this “forcing” the viewer to contemplate the wider
significance of some “things,” happens in a flash. This flash is what Lefebvre calls
“moments of presence” (Shields, 1999, p. 59). So by taking an object out of its
“natural” setting, for example by taking a urinal and placing it in a museum, a flash of
contemplation happens. In creating this aesthetic situation, a moment is created in
which one challenges the structure of everyday meaning and patterns. However, how
would one know that one is contemplating? In his 1959 article “Justice and Truth,”
Lefebvre understands the awareness to “moments of presence” by comparing it to the
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experience of being in love (p. 14). A moment, like love, defines a form and is defined
by a form, it has “a certain constancy over time, an element common to a number of
instants, events, situations and dialectical movements (as in “historical moment,”
“negative moment” or “moment of reflection”)” (Lefebvre, 1958, p. 24). Our awareness
of experiencing love awakens us to the dimension of a moment. In this way, Lefebvre
argues that this awareness of love and experience of a moment is inherent in
revolutions. Moments are unlike situations, rather, moments create situations. These
moments are sociological, meaning that they have the potential to create a collective
revolution of everyday life, creating what Lefebvre calls the “Total Man” and ending his
alienation (p. 46). Humans need moments, in the same way that they need love. The
trick is to catch it in what Lefebvre calls the impossible-possible:
Love is a moment. By this I mean first the permanent temptation of the absolute.
Love tends toward the absolute; if not it does not exist. However, the absolute is
impossible, unliveable, untenable, absurd. In its neighbourhood lurks madness: the
alienation of one’s feelings and passions, that of solitude, or the renunciation of that
which is not it. It slyly seizes, takes hold of you...(p. 343).
Therefore, the dimension of a potential revolution shares the same dimensions of the
moment, which shares the same dimensions of the experience of love. Revolutions have
the potential to make possible moments of love, and wake us from the banality of everyday
life to a conscious awareness of being in a time-space.
Like Lefebvre, Guy Debord was also initially inspired by the Dadaist movement.
In his foundational 1957 “Report on the Construction of Situations,” Debord wrote that
“Dadaism wished to be the refusal of all values of bourgeois society. Its historical role was
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to have dealt a mortal blow to the traditional conception of culture” (p. 5). He carried the
Dadaist philosophy with him when he joined the Letterist Internationale in 1952, which he
was a part of before the formation of the Situationist International. Of course, the Letterist
Internationale were already heavily influenced by avant-garde artistic movements such as
Surrealism, Futurism and Abstracct Expressionism, and were already active before Debord
joined the group. For example, their famous disruption at Easter Mass at Notre-Dame in
Paris, where one of the members dressed like a monk delivered a “sermon”, stating that
“God is dead. We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers, for your prayers have
been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe...”(Marcus, 1989, p.279). This
scandal, which provoked an angry and increasingly violent congregation, is a kind of
scandal that caught Debord’s attention, and one that he would later emulate. As opposed to
Lefebvre’s theoretical publications prior to the formation of the Situationist International,
Debord concentrated on film, and it is through these documented works of art that Debord
illustrates how situations are created. In his first film Hurelements en faveur de Sade
(Howling in favour of Sade), Debord used brief snatches of dialogue read by him and his
fellow Letterists, quoting articles of law (particularly ones about insanity), passages from
newspapers and quotes from literature, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. At one point, one
of the members of the group states:
A science of situations is to be created, which will borrow elements from
psychology, statistics, urbanism and ethics. These elements have to coincide in an
absolutely new goal: the conscious creation of situations” (Debord, 1992, p. 14).
The film ended with twenty-four minutes of complete darkness. So not only was this film
a film about situations, but it was designed to create a situation. The situation that it
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created was a reaction from the audience who either walked out of the cinema or
threatened to attack Debord (Atkins, 1997, p.77). Thus, the “construction of situations”
became a key concept for Debord and the Letterists, a concept that they arrived at through
research, experiment and exploration. In the Letterists’ newsletter Potlach (1985), Debord
states that “the adventurer is one who makes adventures happen rather than one to who
adventures happen” (p. 51). So interestingly enough, creating an intervention in everyday
life is simultaneously an exploration, an adventure. It is both a conscious effort and an
unconscious journey.
It is in Debord’s involvement with the Letterists and their concept of the
“construction of situations,” that we find the first mention of concepts such as
psychogeography, derive, and detournement. These concepts became tools to help create
and explore space x as a moment that takes place during our awareness of our unaware
state, and later become the main tenants of the Situationist International. The concept of
psychogeography arose from the Letterist’s interest in urbanism, an interest which arose
from the interest to create situations whose atmospheres are passion-filled:
“Psychogeography. The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Debord,
1996, p. 42). This study was chiefly investigated by derive, which is a drifting and trying
to lose oneself in the city. This sounds very familiar to Baudellaire’s and Benjamin’s
modern concept of the flaneur, a person who walks the newly-invented city in order to
experience it as a kind of leisure activity. What is different in derive, is that is wakes up
the flaneur from his dandy aesthetic experience. In “Theory of Derive” (1996), Debord
outlines its main elements:
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In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for
movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let
themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find
there...From the derive point of view, cities have a psychological relief, with constant
currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from
certain zones (p. 22).
This “stroll” not only allows one’s feelings to find expression, but actually provoked new
feelings when faced with “constant currents.” Therefore, derive is a tool for exploring a
space at a certain time that creates a moment where feelings are expressed. Expressions
can therefore be telling of the dimensions of this time-space of psychogeography.
Another way that Debord and the Letterists created new moments through already
existing (spatial) forms is with the technique of detournement:
Detournement is the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior
construction of the milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist art or music, but
a situationist use of those means. It is a method of propaganda, a method which
testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres (Anon, 1996, p.
70).
One can argue that this technique is borrowing from the collage work of the Dadaists and
Surrealists, however, it also extends beyond the visual arts into the philosophical realm, an
argument that is illustrated by Lautreamont’s famous declaration that detournement is like
plagiarism, and “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an
author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates false ideas, replaces it with the
right idea” (Lautreamont, 1978, p. 274). Interestingly enough, the techniques of derive and
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detournement become less of a visual art, and more of a theory-based concept when they
are transferred from the Letterist International to the Situationist International.
Considering that the Situationist International lasted for more than a decade (19571969), for the sake of this paper, I would like to focus on the mid 60’s as it is a time that
their theories and philosophies are most powerfully applied to their theories of revolution,
and in turn, have inspired the construction of activist situations. More specifically, I would
like to focus on their exhibition “Destruction of the RSG-6” to illustrate their shift from
contemporary avant-garde art towards a production of critical art that merges art and
politics, and how this shift inspired Debord’s most famous theoretical work “The Society
of the Spectacle.”
Since the Situationist International saw themselves as creating situations where one
can explore one’s awareness to moments of everyday living, it is of no surprise that their
aim was to destroy the distinction between art and everyday life in order to wake up
people’s consciousness and inspire them to act. The “Destruction of the RSG-6” which
took place at the Exi Gallery in Denmark, the same place where the Nashists exhibited a
year earlier, was very critical in its content while also containing its own critique:
...we first of all created the atmosphere of an atomic fallout shelter as the first site
meant to provoke one to think. Subsequently one encounters a zone that stages the
rigorous negation of this art of necessity. The medium here employed in a critical
fashion is painting (Debord, 1989, p. 148).
What Debord did was paint slogans on framed canvases such as “The Realization of
Philosophy,” “Abolition of Alienated Labour,” and “The Overtaking of Art.” This was
intended as “a simultaneous ridicule and reversal of that pompous academicism currently
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in fashion which is trying to base itself on the painting of incommunicable ‘pure signs’” (p.
151). Not only was this constructed situation a form of avant-garde art, but also an
investigation of the free construction of everyday life. This event marks the groups gradual
concern for conceptual forms that inspire the audience to think, and away from their
aesthetic forms that inspired the audience to feel. This turn to theory directly inspired
Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle,” which addresses the state of amnesia that society
is in, and therefore, implicitly argues for a construction of situations that wakes people up
from the banality of their daily lives. In this text, Debord understands the birth of the
spectacle as being similar to Marx’s concept of commodity, but recognizes the ways in
which the spectacle has come to encompass “a social relationship between people that is
mediated by images” (Debord, 1994, thesis 4). This relationship turns people into mere
observers, passive contemplators and alienated beings. Similar to Lefebvre concept of the
everyday, Debord’s concept of the spectacle is also something that needs to be contested
against and explored critically. Whether it’s by creating moments of love or constructing
situations that critically reference the banality of our everyday lives, both Lefebvre and
Debord are concerned with waking us up from these constructs and series of socially
constructed moments in order to simultaneously feel, contemplate, and act.
Although masked by their social and political agenda, I believe that both Debord
and Lefebvre were existentialists at the core. Their passion for revolution is inspired by a
concern for the concrete nature of existence. Their shared belief that a person can always
make something out of what is made of him or her, that one can awake from one’s state of
inattention and exist in a moment where one’s limits are revealed, is an existential belief.
What is unclear then, is whether moments create our existential awareness, or whether it is
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our existential awareness that brings our attention to the boundaries of the moment. If we
look at emotion as something like a bodily prosthetic, I believe that the boundaries of
moments are revealed to us at the same time and space as the boundaries of our human
condition are revealed. The key to understanding space x is thus understanding our
reactions, and how those reactions are recognized outside of our skin. This recognition of
ourselves feeling is simultaneously a recognition of being in a moment. Or the way Sartre
(1962) would put it, “the emotional consciousness is primarily consciousness of the world”
(p. 56).
We have looked at the ways in which moments have been discovered. We
recognized the need to explore this time-space, an exploration that can reveal how we
ourselves have been “discovered.” We looked at the ways in which moments have been
created, both aesthetically and theoretically. Finally, we have come to the conclusion that
exploring is feeling, and when we recognize our emotional prosthetic, we are able to
consciously dwell in the boundaries of the moment. Therefore, there is reason to end this
essay on a hopeful note. In recognizing our emotional prosthetics that gives us access to
our awareness of moments, we can use these prosthetics as tools that can help us make
widely accessible meaning of moments, allowing for a pedagogy of moments. I am
hopeful that in forming a pedagogy of moments, we can create habits of attention and
critical observations that can allow us to reflect on who constructs our moments of
everyday life and how to become more responsible to the moments of our existence.