PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Our research proposal has as main guideline a question: what is the role of language in the creative process when we consider it as moving through an essential chaos? In order to clarify this question we will investigate two sets of problems: 1) which are the mechanisms of the embodiment of language and 2) how do forms seize/ keep/ diffuse forces (aesthetic schematism).
In order to do that we will have to understand in what sense can we characterize this chaos and also to what extent can that characterization contribute to deepen our understanding of the role of language in the creative process. But taking a direct approach on these two sets of problems we face upfront the embodiment of language which is a complex and difficult theme. To start unravelling it we will take as departure point the concept of body-mirror of forces, different from the one of body-mirror (of forms and qualities) suggested by Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and similar to Spinoza’s (1632-1677) concept of affective imitation.
Also, recently, Daniel Stern (1934) provides relevant clues to better clarify the concept of body-mirror of forces in his book “The Interpersonal World of the Infant” (1985) where he describes his thesis presenting the concept of affective bonding. This concept, not only identifies the bond established between mother and son as being the most important one but also associates it with vitality affections defined by such acts as running or eating that are differentiated of categorical, or Darwinian, affections (happiness, sadness, etc). For instance, the idea of becoming in Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is not fully grasped, unless we understand affective bonding as a mirroring that creates a tension (which allows an access to the concept of difference). We will therefore also have to evaluate epistemological and philosophically mirror-neurons, a discovery recently claimed by science, asking: how do they behave so that the mirroring of forces takes place? What is the relation between mirror-neurons and the self and what is their dynamics in the creative process?
We find the problematic of embodiment framed in a similar way by Françoise Dolto (1908-1988) in her main reference work: “L'image inconsciente du corps” (1984). This book allows us to trace a route that corresponds to an inquiry on aesthetic schematism: how does the body-mirror of forces embody language, how does the body’s unconscious seize forces allowing the manifestation of unconscious contents in artistic signs? In other words, what is embodiment and what is the role of body-mirror of forces in the embodiment of language?
Concerning our second set of problems, how can we endow signs and forces to images taking them as language and not as communication? We want to describe how the unconscious works on a verbal level (and others) – taking the unconscious as the body’s unconscious. How does language endows in the body? The body’s image is formed by subtle sensations (Dolto) that resemble to Leibniz’s small perceptions. What is this possibility of printing forces in-to bodies? We are at the heart of an aesthetics of forces. Even if we think of chaos as it is taken by the science of physics we know that at a certain point it is assumed that there is a confusion between emitter and receiver, a complex mirroring similar to psychotic transference (Françoise Davoine, “La folie Wittgenstein”, 2001) and “Mère folle: Récit”, 1999). We think the unconscious embodied using the notions of mirroring, infralanguage (José Gil, “Metamorphosis of the Body”, 1998), aesthetic schematism.
Psychoanalysis becomes therefore an unquestionable case study to understand the relation between language, unconscious, embodiment and forces. A study on the emphasis set on the analysis of dreams by psychoanalysis seems like an effort to answer the question: how is it possible to endow signs and forces in-to images? What we have is language taken as metaphor, as a game where forces engage in, as expression of a rhetoric of forces.
Therefore, it is also a goal of this project to show its results providing a deeper insight on what is at stake in the psychoanalytic cure. Why Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) consider the cure as a process in which the repressed comes through as language? What is decisive in language to perform a cure? Or, in aesthetics: what is a naked-image (José Gil, “A Imagem-Nua e as Pequenas Percepções”) that invites itself to “talk”? Taking this, what can we consider to be a commentary on a visual work? What is the relation between senses, aistheta and words? We will aim at providing intelligibility to what Deleuze expresses as: art thinks.
In order to do that, we will have to investigate, according to our frame of thinking, what is the unconscious of language: the pre-verbal dimension of language (Julia Kristeva, Le Langage, cet inconnu. Une initiation à la linguistique, 1969), subtle perceptions and mother-baby relationship (Dolto and Stern); prosody, tone, the relation of oral expression and vibration with the intensity of words; language as sense, gesture and performative act; intertwining of body-mirror of forces and body mirror in the communication of language itself; the verbal non-sense (forces) that sense carries; the unconscious of language as the non-sayable in the metaphor.
