Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research [1 ed.] 3863351185, 9783863351182

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_ AHAMKARA: PARTICULES ELEMENTAIRES OF FIRST-PERSON co|~|sc|ousmass1

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Sarat Maharaj: One of your striking contributions to neuroscience and consciousness studies is your focus on the ‘view from Wi_thin’—0n how the mind ticks from inside its own activity. You have referred to this as the ‘first-person’ standpoint. Its ‘second— and third-person’ counterparts, ifwe may speak with such brittle distinctions, tend to look at mental processes and experience ‘objectively.’ How does the ‘1‘irst—person’ stance—the mind tackling its own streaming flux, its own procedures and operation%come about in your approach; what are its origins? -

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Francisco Varela: The honest answer is that it was related to my interest in Buddhism picked up in 1974. I left Chile after the coup d’etat in 1973, the Pinochet story. I went to the U.S. and that ti1n%i974. was a bit ofa crisis for me. My Whole world was gone. I to ok a job at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, as a neutoscientist because I needed something. I ran into this very interesting person from Tibet called Chogyam Trungpa. He had come to the West as a young man, studied at Oxford and migrated to the States in the early ‘7os. He was a pioneer in bridging traditional Tibetan Buddhism and the West. He died in 1987. I met him early in 1974. He was so perceptive. I talked about my personal life—because like I said, I didn’t know what to do—and he had tremendous advice. Most of all, he said, "W'hy don’1: you try and work a little bit with your own mind? lust think about who you are. You know, sit down for a while and look at it.’ He began to teach me basic Buddhist Siddhi or Shame meditation. I fell i_n love with it. That was really the beginning ofunderstanding that the first—person emphasis is an attainable, doable strategy. It teaches you things you don’t know; and you actually get to know who you are in clearer ways. That’s really the origin. For years, it was a sepuation of personal/professional life. Then for seven or eight years, I was a complete meditation fanatic.

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The recording of this interview was arranged and conducted by Hans Ulrich Ubrfst it took place at the Hospital Pitié—SaLpétriére. Paris on 11 September ZUUU. it was first published in Dbrisi [Z003].

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SM: I was wondering ifwe could say that the experience of exile and emigration—or the sense oftrauma itself, ofrupture and melt down—might have contributed to your sensing the creative potential ofthe ‘first—person’ stance, to the value ofits force? FV: My feeling is that trauma gave me an open state of mind. I grew up in a milieu in Chile where we had me idea ofre-inventing the S outhern continent, what we call ‘America.’ [Laughs] At the time, the most obvious thing for 11 young person was to take a ‘left’ position, with a heavy dose of MarxismI was fascinated by science. My interests were in Western philosophy. I WAS ‘rationalist’ through and through, a materialist-rationalist, as you would expect from somebody with that background. Witli the coup d’état—I mean,

for people who haven’t been through such an experience—Wh&t it Sllwiefs takes us way beyond the rational mind. To see a fascist regime all ofa sudden crop up in the middle ofthe street is as ifsociety’s been turned inside 01-1’E—3l-l

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ofthe incredibly dark, mysterious sides ofthe human mind made visible- The suffering and violence, friends being lcilled, and the rest is shattering. For the first time I had the experience of saying, ‘I don’t understand a thing; I $Ifli[£I€ (SCA.Nl\‘El ulRM1 7D =14! mm-in smnsm - B4'mn:nld:l:LR‘|I='e-]Jivisio|| Amhmu: Fm!-1' flag: 4: Divislnn Jaeqm-1: - mmnmaa Nwpimlisifimi I-C hbpkul as jaw. 7D Pnvmufl smmsx: 56 Pan]' I on l_'|ve1'.\n -I" saga 47 Pkvil-Inn d: rmzmrq dz Dflolelcenx 89a ‘I0 Eilimall s=1=p1m=I=i=e~ mum nasmsw -$1 Bfifimenld: h fan:Q- Dlvlsim s-iIm1rImm1=m|=:Amb»a= mu: 59 asIimI:d=m;1m=mi= :nZ|IinL 2 CfllI“dlJ»|:Vl|§H|D4i0B-I 65 BEkfime:|iPumlImHn-CuIw|lminnR.DC-Fntpih1inliua1’:(Z’ilng& S2 =15? Bi'nin1:mPhi1ip¢:Cha.lHnRDC-Bilimenl Find 4| e!m::=md= l:Fwc: - Divisiwlfllfilmbanls Plug, u Pzvillwl Charis omen me“ 1' élzgg 47 Pavillm: dc Fuliwrld dc l':n-lnlueelll 1:: L2 Cam da zoiusulhulinns Pm|w::Snus»SoL Bfidmenl om-I owe: lscmmu -G H54 Divi!-iw| Mwnyw (own-:I:\icu:|:i,=) - Pavillon Anmnin6ou=1(e:nng:=;hI=_: 65 :l6I5 Uniié dz namuzmiugl umwm S3 Billmenl inc pmumpmm, 5-6 I:r41 P:'vmonr\aIunin owe» B:l£ime1'u.dehF\'|Ic: aamwmrsuwmm Immvsgiqn flmimm Binjmflln Dellsfla - HasgiLI1iHIi0r|l':t 2' dug. Pnvil-Ian lzyrlni -Cnnlularinvt 5:'I:s|:Im deb Fame - Diviswu sum Wnnumlle ?:u:l J‘ =1.-4; Biiimrnl 0: Kwmlulugie - Comflhfim IIDC-Hwphz3.isn1i0Ill'ei 2' 5133:. Biimam. dc ummm-=5» Biflflbflllfin ' - on!ui::fiufllLD€' Balimd flap. Bitiinmliiaman cms=rR.\> S‘-12“-kl: an

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SM: The East Coast mob!

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FV: Did Duchamp ever point out what he felt was his most successful art ilhflt wasn’t art? Did he have examples? SM: I must say I can’t quite imagine him even suggesting one. Perhaps the project he secretly worked on, Etant donnés (1946—6 6), comes close. He was working on it when it was assumed he had stopped doing art. Does 11I1001< like he was doing something that wasn’t? 7 _ At the time Erant domzés was revealed, I suppose, it didn t qulte

look like art at all. A strange, suip—sh0w Peephole ‘1hI°1181_1Wh1¢1‘1 We see,

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somewhat brus quely, a full—frontal nude in a landscape, with a II10t0T1S8d, moving waterfall. It became a model for what is today taken for granted as ‘installation’: a genre that is neither the nude nor landscape, neither palnung nor sculpture, neither diorama nor film——but takes in all elements. Netz. Netz, Net-1? Maybe now it has become very much of ‘.A_rt’—exactly what he had sought to avoid. He was trying to manoeuvre between practices, between fixated ideas of art/non-art, know1edge/n0n—knowledge—t11e SPHCB 01‘ pmjna?

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FV: That’s very close to my heart because that’s basically your thread of Ariadneainto your own growtlil 111 the Buddhist context. The symptom 15, you see, thisprajna growing or not. Then you can tell whether you re making any progress (if there is such a thing). TI111'1gPa always Said We all h3~VePmJ"'1@ every human being. But most people have ‘baby pflljflfl fa Potenlilal that has to develop. I feel when somebody is acting {Tom the basls ofpmima’ You can see it. There is a quality to itfintelligent spontaneity. But this can easily degrade into, you know, ‘goofy golf,’ as they say in A11-‘IETICH. HUO: Can you expand a bit on the notion ofthis kind ofsp ontaneity?

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FV: I ‘feel ‘intelligent spontaneity’ is what you see in the beginnings of improvisation, the moment when everybody is suspended. You see Keith Iarrett, all ofa sudden, getting into his piano or the Indian drum, a moment of PUT?! Passion Vvhell HI1 individual acts, in my exp erience—individuals who have highly-developed minds they often tend to be like that. It’s almost like prajna, I feel. It has a smell to it. It stops your Inind—the very first symptom is that it attempts to stop your mind. It happens a lot in the Dalai Lama’s cornpany. He’s a brilliantpmjna guy. Vi/hen you enter in conversation, oftentimes you find yourselflistening with full intent, so your conceptual mind just stops. Hispmjna has brought up your own. A mutuality. It’s like affection calling out affection—that can just sort ofmelt you down. You become affectionate.

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HUD: So it happens in conversation? FV: In conversation. In encounters, but usually in conversation. It’s a very

interesting thing everybody notices with the Dalai Lama. I took my wife to the meeting with last March. She isn’t particularly Buddhist. After two days, she said to me I ve never been with somebody like that. There is something very unusual there.’ And she said exactly like I did, ‘My mind stops.’ [Laughs]

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HUO: Could it be accounted for by experirnents, such as those that you mentioned today? Vi/hat exactly happens at the moment ‘mind stops’? Could you

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FV: With the Dalai Lama, it is too hard. That’s why I bring people like Mathieu Ricard. Eventually I do want to do that. For he’s the lcind ofperson that can get himselfin a position where there is no stream ofconceptual thinking. Vvhatever he does is in terms ofprajna. This would be not unlike the 3D perception experiments we spoke of; but maybe that's too fiat, too simple, too poor a performance to relate to the experience of‘the mind stops.’ Slowly, we want to get there.

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SM: Are elements of consciousness always only knowable ‘at one remove’through some mode ofrepresentation, sign—system, or medium that has to relay them? Is a sense ofimmediacy and presence strictly impossible? Are we trapped in the prisonhouse oflanguage, where there is no direct, unmediated access to experience? EV I don’treally believe that we are always speaking through representation, or hvmg the moment through it. I think the first-person approach, the hands—on,

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actually doing, exploring mind——and what you hnd through itfshows that the lj_vi11g present has a depth which is just that. It s not representing anything. Within that living present, we can also have a discourse or a I13ItIat1IiE!I.Wl10 you are, what you’re doing, whatever. In that sense, of course, linguistically mediated, it has the quality of representation. ‘ I g d Butl think I have a generic problem with representation . The wor almost means anything. The content ofmy experience is not a representation of anything. It’s a presentation. You might say that language ca_ri_represcI1t something through its semantic links. That’s very much the lOg1C13.11 s view. There vou have items in language; it’s about semantic correspondence. That might be fine for logic; but human language is inseparably linked 1:0 @1110tionsa to the body Even psychoanalysis is about how language is so totally embedded in the constant going—on of the emergence Of Illllld. ’f0l' I-1_$ F0 speak of presentation rather than a representation. But to see all l111g‘LIl.lSUC occurrences—a dialogue or discussion—as representationiseems to me to be phenomenologically poor. Ifthat is the issue, I really don t see it that way. It seems more true ofthe tradition ofseeing language as a semantic object.

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SM: I’m tussling with the issue, but I haven’: the glimmer ofan answer. Leaving aside language as representation, what if we. say that whatever: emerges _ . - I has to have a sigrufymg system, a vehicle to articulate it. It sort of stands in for the experience, and conveys it to the mmd. FV: Why couldn’t it just articulate what it articulates? Suppose you take 13_-nguage as something with which we couple with the world. It follows there is no representation. It is what it is. We are moving in and with the world. The sign system is good for signifying objects. Vi/‘hen it comes to language and interpersonal interactions, what you have is a coupling with another person, a dance of coordination of action. Language sits in there. VVhy does it have to stand for something else? '

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SM: I suppose, because we normally say that a language hasrcpeflialfile 51$‘-I15 and sigrrifiers of some sort, counters and units that stand—in for someth1ng—an external delivery system to put across experience. However, you are speaking ofianguage as coupling with the world, an interactive system. FV: The repetitiveness and syntarcity oflmguage Sl10111d not i111PlY that it has to

stand for something else. The syntax I understand; 155 the S@1'flFi11Ti¢ argimlent I don’t get. It does not seem to me to be necessary, unless one has a view of reality thatneeds knowledge to be some form ofsemantic inirrormg. But what

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ifknowledge is. the shaping ofyour actions in the world? That sense comes from action, not from representing anything. Let’s put away the syntax. The semantics is more a pragmatics: meaning is in what it does, rather than what it stands for: as you know, a well—develop ed argument in pragmatic linguistics.

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SM: The level at which language as a system ofsigiis comes in—is that at the level of narration, depiction, and description?

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FV: At that level, I have in mind language in all ofits glory and power. You can coordinate; you can describe; you can do injunctions; you can be performa'EiVe- But ill 110116 Of These do you need the idea that there is a standing-in for something. Ratherzian effective, pragmatic capacity to change; coupling with the other; and coordination, like when I say, ‘Let’s go’.

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HU0: The question that comes to mind is: where is the link to systems ofcoordination and control. Irecenrly re-read Gordon Pask, in terms of cybernetics. I mean, how far is this linked to cybernetic theory?

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FV: One link is what Gregory Bateson pleaded for: language as a perforinative look. His brilliant example is the double bind ofthe ‘schizophrenic’ mother and child in language. The mother says, ‘Don’t do this.’ Yet the phrase can convey quite the opposite in another form oflanguage—body language, usually. The double bind idea was already there iii the early days of cybernetics. Gordon Pask is second generation. He introduced the fundamental notion oflanguage as conversaci0n—what ethno —rnethodo10gists like Garfinkel and others took up later. Their point was not to isolate language as a set of sentences you look at printed on the page, but to treat it as a mode ofcoupling. Therefore, the conversational dimension is essential—to study language is to look at conversations between people. Now Gordon’s theory was incomprehensible! But his insight was absolutely right. I-lave you read his b ooks on conversation theory?

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HUO: No. But I came to it actually via Richard Hamilton and Cedric Price, because there were connections there.

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SM: As Hans Ulrich says, Hamilton and others around the Independent Group in the ‘5os in Britain had glanced at Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics. Two views oflanguage and representation were at play. In I-Iamilton’s Pop Art ofthe ‘5os", we see a version ofthe deconstructionist stance—deco ding signs, symbols of contemporary style, fashion, ads, mass culture—the ‘mythologies of

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everyday life’ as Roland Barthes put it. This is language as semiotic systern—a ‘chain of substitutes’ representing/signifying elements and experiences of the world. Alongside, was Wiener’s model ofsystems of communication as transformative processes—language and representation as intrinsic to shaping activity in the world. Is something ofthis the drift ofthe ‘funhouse’ that Hamilton, with Iohn Maclt-Iale and Iohn Voelcker, put together for the This is Tomorrow show (Whitechap el Art Gallery, 1956)? Their ‘crazy house’ was a machine for the production of new feeling, thinking and action—not just a matter ofunpacking representation. In this context, Derrida’s viewfihis ‘origin ofgeometry’ stance of the ‘5os—seems a drastic throwing into doubt of me notion of‘self—presence’, by showing how signifying systems leave us and our language experience always at ‘one remove’. Quite a scufl-le all round over language and representation.

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FV: I’ve always been a little puzzled about Derridian dzfliirance though I have read him only partially and recently more than before. Fm always very impressed: he’s so damned, unbearably smart. They shouldn’t let people as intelligent as him walk around like that. [Laughs] His stuff on djfiqérance has something re~act_ive*ab0ut it—to be a little critical ofhow he treats ‘immediacy’. In his early, long commentary on the origin ofgeometry, how can you not agree? He drives the nail all the way through. But having done that, he seems, more recently, to take a more balanced position. Because it’s not that immediacy is totally impossible. Rather it’s always on the run, you cannot rest on it, it will always pull itselfaway. That seems to me very different from always falling into a linguistic interpretation. The life oflanguage and meaning can indeed seem constantly to pull you along. You cannot nest in any particular present moment. It’s not absolute that dpflférance would be the only place where one could be. It’s perhaps better to think ofdifiifimnce as dynamics ofall present moments. That’s my reading. Fm not so sure he would disagree all that much today with that. SM: The tendency has been to Whittle down his thinking to saying that he is speaking ofeither presence or absence—when his drift is the undecidable. It’s becoming more apparent that we have to probe ‘immediacy and presence’ on several fronts. From one position, it appears we can’t be here and now, because we are always dispersed into there and then. The elusive sense of‘self- presence’ has always flitted on. But this way of speaking has pitfalls. It suggests some sort ofready-made substance, some entity that is fugitive-—uncatchable—rnaybe but an entity, no less. As you say, through dflerance perhaps we need to look at temporality. For me this would be duration, the continuous stream ofbecoming, each moment passing into and becoming its other, a ceaseless production

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. 0fdiff herence. W b 3 netofrepresentation, concept-language, slgn-system can ever ope to catch its flow and flux except at a brutally reductive price? Fll: Therefore, lsay the sense of ‘now’ does have a depth to it, which is what gives it sight of immediacy. This is exactly where the preconceptual can come 111, 01' What you call the aconceptual. SM: Derrida himselfremarks that his ‘concepts’ are not strictly concepts—p erhaps more image -ideas? Might he have even used ‘non- conceptual’ to signal ~.~

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level We dogfeeli’ fu1presence— a sence.‘The issue remains that at some , _ PQWBI ly an experience of self-presence’; of ‘being on the SPOE ; the persistence ofa sense of selfand identity, to which ‘I’ have recourse, and Whlch I C311 get h01d Of; the ego’s activity or ahamlcara as the Sanslg-it g0ES—Blements ofeveryday first person consciousness. But dissecting through l1nguistics—it is not something easy to sustain in analytical terms.

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at that. But there are tlila twe‘ 1 limst eliirihlvldual‘ the Conscwus Indlwdual is what I call the ‘ hilo ene‘l:is"‘ eI‘es‘ W are n?‘ Offhe amenatu-re‘ one comes with Yourlentirfbodl 9‘ Prlconceptual ‘ ‘-‘vhlchlife, Severyflung _ _ 1.Y 11111e1'1tance—ernot1onal Conscious that and unconscious life, that is going to shape that present and move it along, give 1t 3 dYT1a1'BlC_ The other is‘inter—subjectiveness, the social, distributed nature Ofthe self that language is 8°5l1g t0 pull, in all senses that it normally does Husserrs analysis is missing both 0ffl10Se. Somehow it is incomplete, all ofthe‘ p§:1;pi1;:eptuil—or aconceptual—and preconceptual are missing. He only has _ _ Pt‘-la P11’?-ITle’C€1'. In that sense, I thmk Derrida is right. ifyou reduce tlfllllgs }ust to the point ofmeasurable language, it’s oversirnplifying, I thin];

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subject One da lacy ‘ ‘S Denldlan dewenteredness Ofthe _ i Y, Hlaybe wlaen I retire, I want to write on the phenomenology Offimef-to put these three together. It’s a bit daunting.

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HUD: So far an unrealised project?

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References

Hayward, Jeremy W. and Francisco J. Vsreia. 1992. Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind. Boston; Snarnbhela.

Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J.Varela. 1998. The tree of knowledge: The Biological Roots ofHuman Understanding (tr. R. Paolucci]. Boston and London: Snarnbhala.

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Uhrist, Hans Ulrich. 2003. Interviews. Volume 7. Milan: Etlizioni Charts: 539-559.

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Sachs, ALl:|e. 2002. Different Kinds of Truth: The South African Truth and Reconciliation

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Comrnission in Enwezor, Okwui [ed] Experiments with Truth. Documents H, Platform 2.

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