Oliver Jones
April 3rd, 2011
CSCT 767
Dr. David Clark
The Affective Planes of Goya’s “El Perro”, or, the Submerged Head of a Starfish
As a child I was fascinated by images of the odd forms indwelling the marine abyss. I
amassed glossy laminate volumes of water-coloured creatures and marvelled over the strange
assemblies that stalked the wreck of the Titanic under the pale illumination of Ballard’s
documentaries. At eight years old, I found the mummified shell of a minuscule crab amidst the
grey crags of the Donegal coastline. I coveted it intensely. Brownish green, rigid and thorny,
eyes frozen in death, the crab became the encrusted trace of an unthinkable provenance that
would not square with the representations I had been afforded. I treasured it for private
reflection.
Contemplating Goya’s “El Perro”, I sense the disclosure of an expansive terrain of being
that exceeds the linear refrain of a perspective-oriented visual culture. The creature’s head, black
and shining, all but crushed under a graded wash of brown, beige and grey, is haunted by the
palimpsest of a prior figure. The ears are pert; the eye is dull in steely blue. The snout is
dimpled with bulbous nodules; the surface is ragged and rich with the deep grain and texture of
an earthen medium. The granularity of its composition, the pith of its layered strata recall the
profound sand of Otmar Thormann’s “Dreaming Dogs”. “El Perro” reveres a somatic complex
of corporeality that escapes the negating gaze of its audience.
Scattered about the desktop before the glowing console that impels my present response
are the technologized remainder of a modernized disciplinary metaphysic; an imagistic museum
of the fossilized, the plastic, and the marble-eyed. Black soapstone worn smooth on an ancient
beach line, the grey cross-section of a marine flower recovered from the rubble at Long Branch,
the dagger-edged teeth of extinct sharks all brown and sand and scoured gristle of calcified
gumline. A miniature warthog of intense detail and colouring, an oversized tag strung round a
forequarter to stake the reputation of its plastic branding with a bold red “S”. A plush-toy
microbe, a yellow ulcer with beady eyes and braided flagellum upended in a comic repose. A
webcam, a disc of Attenborough, a squish-toy grenade. An obsidian block of matte polymer
upright in homage to the most famous cinematic rendering of the militarized bestiary. I shift
through reproductions of the painting and marvel at the earthen, fleshly investments of Goya’s
broad, blackened palette: fantastic visions of atrophy dug up from the petrifying soup of media;
simian menace soothsaying cruelties into the mute ear of my own withered becoming. One
wonders if the archival commerce of dislocated signs reverses into a terminal simulacrum of the
ordering of things. Tomorrow I will produce “El Perro” on a commercial printer. The image
will pop with a vivid, depthless Technicolor and when the ink has dried in 1200 dpi I will mount
it to my right and ponder, incanting to myself through the atemporal chime of the clattering
machine.
Some years ago I came across the moving image of a tensile creature. An ophiuoroid
“brittle star” encased in a saltwater tank, fluorescent lighting rippling across the surface. A hand
breaks the tension. The twisting figure, maroon, beige and grey, impels itself across the sand
with a regular, practiced thrashing. This agent, absent of any organ I can recognize as brain,
commands a body to react with electric intensity to the disturbance of its spatial horizon: it darts
from the intrusion of environment. This body vibrates with the pulsating of nerve and lightsensing node. I glimpse the immersion of an acoustic plateau through the refraction of fluid
density. I am disturbed by a field of affective sensations that registers no central hub, no pointed,
singular emphasis beyond the corporeality of the present environment. This fear is reciprocated.
A friend and I spent the summer attempting to relate this abyssal plateau through private
experiment with audio recording, discharging odd, scathing, atemporal music through a voiceless
computer manipulation. Radar affects, garbled squawking. Snaps, clicks, hisses. Overloaded
signals and electric tensions. Compositions were deemed “too human” and discarded. Others
were fetishized for their radiating waves of intensity. The overproduction of signs discloses an
unthinkable field to the searching agent. Vampire molluscs, volcanic worms, eyeless eels and
barbed crustaceans. The translation of a lightless universe of immersive density reveals the
tremendous extent of the void between the sensible and the sensory.
I am immersed in the frantic overproduction of the caustic peal of my own stupefied
becoming. My world is the anxious play of phantasmagoria immersed in the numbing flux of a
mechanized visual field. All my efforts to overcome it through the contemplation of a
responsive animality come up hard against the representational and reflexive inadequacy of an
electrified televisual apparatus to “capturing” the corporeal immersion of a wholly acoustic
being. I behold an abyss of difference that shakes the anxious frame of my becoming and I sense
that I am poor in world. Still, I recognize the struggle against my own dispersion as I recognize
the museal machine that potentiates the recapitulation of aletheia: even the child seeks the formal
revelation of the concealed in the translation of the world of matter.
The signifying horizon of a machinic age bears witness to an immersive corporeal agency
through an affective movement beyond the singular, deliberating logic of the speaking subject
and the abjections of the visual field. The signs and sounds of technological being empower
trajectories of sensation which reveal the submerged, fluid dimensionality of the affective organs
of an expansive biological life-world. If Goya opens us to the possibilities of animal Dasein
(and I am suggesting that he does) it is because “El Perro” implores moral responsibility at the
level of the sensory disclosure of a mortal being: our anthropocentric failure to account for the
corporeality of the vastest number.