Clinic, Art, Life and the Creation of Concepts

At great and glad pains, by millenniums of scissions between different but inseparable aspects like Science and Art, the sacred and the profane, body and mind, self and no-self, etc, we Westerners have been searching and finding instruments to deal with impasses and to overcome handicapping dichotomies without eliminating contradictions.

Among contemporary columnists of daily living I find masters in dealing in different ways with the events, putting them in doubt and being concerned in not minimizing their complexity but bringing to the reader new and unexpected views.

One of such means is to insert oneself into the expounded situation and/or context, explaining how we think and feel about it, how the circumstances affects us. In that way, we make references from our own experiences and actions. In other words, we leave neutrality to expose our own selves.

It´s not only science, but also Art and life are conceptual. We constantly discover more enriching ways in our daily lives. We feel the precision of questioning the line of situations which challenges us. In a way, we create concepts.

A concept is something to be used. It´s a tool of thought which temporarily supports our actions in any given field. It doesn´t come to life to remain, but to be replaced by others and to be used in different ways, in different contexts. When this happens, that concept doesn´t have the original context anymore, it´s another concept, which may present new and different applications. And when I say a concept is something to be used, I mean it´s to be experienced and lived.

There are different kinds of knowledge in Western culture (as in any other culture, for that matter) which are supposed to guide us (and which can also completely misguide us!), and we hold on to them to feel secure. When we do this, we can´t grasp its references, because they usually remain beyond our experiences. We don´t embody them, so they keep away from us like the proverbial carrot in front of a donkey. They don´t do us any service, because they can´t cope with our present challenges. Paradoxically, we have the assurance of supposed knowledge, but not its references.

We are in a state of risk, when we forget the a priori knowledge, including theories and concepts discovered in the past, which were useful in other times but may not be useful anymore. But when we let go of previous knowledge – another paradox – we find new references, entering the situation and interacting with it. What happens then, however, is that in a state of risk the references come with experience and living, and the compass as well as the positions of the stars in the sky are created moment by moment. Or not. There´s no assurance.

State of risk is a concept which I try to use (to live) as much as I can in my practice, my Art and my living.

Ferreira Gullar, a well-known Brazilian writer, says he is “a constant inventor of theories – some of them even taken seriously, like the Non-Object Theory; others are unjustly ignored. But I still don´t give up, so much so that one of my most recent theories is that one of the Artist´s functions is to create the wonderful (or the astonishing) for the simple reason that we can´t find wonders enough in the world to satisfy the hunger for wonder that abides in people. (…)” (Folha de São Paulo, E 12, January 30, 2005)

I think the “Non-Object Theory” came to be in a meeting among Artists and friends, when the neo-concretists were in search of concepts that would express some aspects of Ligia Clark´s (unclassified) sculpture.

Let´s presume that their environment was informal, with no censorship or judgment. Their meeting was a place where they could take risks in a state of risk. Winnicott called the spaces which can´t be censored, so the paradoxes can be preserved, as transitional spaces. We carry (or not) the transitional spaces into our adult lives. In those spaces we are in a state of risk, and the new may (or may not) sprout.

Nevertheless, let´s not forget that it´s when we don´t have assurances that we, paradoxically, are able to create. And we very well know that censorship is ever present in us. We can be horrible judges of ourselves.

The transitional spaces are situated between someone and another someone, between the writer and the reader, between me and the world – all those endless “betweens”. I´ve mentioned above that one of the resources employed to overtake the dichotomies without suppressing the contradictions would be for the author to insert himself into the situation and/or the context he´s mentioning, becoming not a part of it but a part of one of his consisting elements, as a characteristic of an ideogram. Another powerful resource, for instance, would be to use the transitional spaces as intervals between art, science and life.

State of risk is concomitantly an interval, a place, a transitional space, a perception and consciousness state, a concept and a transitional object. It´s singular – since each state of risk could only be unique –, but it´s also plural, for the simple reason that it exists and spreads in life. One of the aspects of working in the intervals would be the inclusion of concurrence – several aspects occurring at the same time

I enjoy listening to FG saying that “one of the Artist´s functions is to create the wonderful (or the astonishing)”, because we humans are also made of monsters, fairies, witches, fantastic animals. As for me, the astonishing is that we feel alive when we experientially create new references, when we use and trans-create concepts, when we attend a state of risk. If we didn´t, we´d always be submitted to rules and a priori references which were in existence long before our births and will probably keep on being way after we are gone. So the astonishing fact is to realize we can´t create either ourselves or the world, but we can create portions of both: a micro-politic of Deleuze and Guattari.