Creative processes: From interventions in art to intervallic experiments through Bergson

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms

Thinking laughter beyond humour: Atmospheric refrains and ethical indeterminacies in spaces of care

“…''Nonrepresentational humour theories'' might offer another reading, suggesting that humour here mobilises a vitality within the space thus generating ''other'' affective experiences (including laughter) (Brigstocke, 2014). I would suggest however that it is instead the event of laughter itself in this situation that mobilises the shifts in atmosphere, in a similar manner to that of the previous section and that what is actually at stake is here is laughter's capacity to generate its own trajectories that exceed both humour and the intentionalities of the jokers and laughers themselves (Hughes, 2016;Williams, 2016).…”

“…Thinking of laughter in terms of atmospheres and refrains provides a vehicle through which to do this. The refrain in particular renders laughter as indeterminate, contingent and multiple: sometimes laughter produces outcomes in ways that might be expected; yet at others, it seems to produce something ''unexpected'' and new (Williams, 2016). Within the pantomime event for example, we see a moment of ''superiority'' humour, yet, in contrast, a laughter that disrupts assumed power geometries, flowing from laugher to laughed-at (Douglas, 2015), seeming to unite bodies, rather than separating them.…”

“…The fundamental point is that because laughter-refrains operate between bodies and pre-subjectively, their outcomes can be neither fully determined in advance, nor always attributed to the intentionalities of laughers themselves (Hughes, 2016;Nancy, 1993). In this way, laughter maintains the potential for what Williams (2016) describes as ''nascent creativity'' -a capacity to create something new, out of the relations between corporeality, materiality and affectivity themselves rather than through cognitive agencies (recalling Macpherson's (2008) distinctions between humour and laughter).…”

Mobility, museums and awkward unsettling

“…I've argued that APT‐E is deliberately unsettled from what was and what is, and somewhat oriented towards an open “untimely” futurity … but the volunteer's actions plausibly resist durational flow to pause before becoming, taking advantage of what duration offers as if occupied as a teetering point where creative potentials arise from retained uncertainty short of the actual instance of becoming other. Bergson argued that to discern such “points” or “states” was a false naming of start and end points within a processual life that is only ever in motion and always in interval (Williams, , p. 9), but this falls foul of Merriman's critique of “time‐space” in processural human geography, where he argues that we too often understand time‐space as a pervasive underlying energy which is forceful rather than meaningful, animating a little‐cognitised processural world (Merriman, , pp. 21–22).…”

“…I won't dwell on these moments because I want to think about how APT‐E's conservation could also be durational: how the present‐day “ever moving front of becoming” (Jones, , p. 878) forms a fertile ground on which to rehabilitate things of the past with potentials that they did and didn't have before. Although nostalgia seems to rely on returning or remembering the past as was in the present, duration invokes the past for present‐day work in a quivering and teetering state of uncertainty (Williams, , p. 7).…”