What’s happening here? Basically, what we’re trying to cultivate in Polimprov is what Massumi has called an ‘event space’ towards ‘alter-accomplishment’ REF. That is to say, a site of provocation, refusal and small-scale counter-practice against the arbitrary logics imposed by capitalist realism on contemporary artistic and cultural production.
In doing that, we wilfully range around an ‘acid communist’ bad-trip constellation of insurgent imagination and chaotic practice much of which sits uneasily with its associates in a promiscuous but (we believe) productive multiplicity of nebulae: Benjamin’s revolutionary Kabballism; Vaneigem’s movement of the free spirit; Marcuse, Fromme, and Reich; Ernst Bloch’s ‘not yet’; all magic and unorthodox Marxists; the experimenters of early Soviet society; truants, workplace militants, and the striking ‘raggy lads’ (and lasses) of the Uk coalfields; Syndicalists, POUMists, and One-Big-Unionists; Autonomists, Petroleuses: anarchists of many hues; acid communists and all benign tricksters, esotericists and Darmha bums just-sitting and tripping-out against capitalism’s ruinous sorcery; Trocci and everyone else who walked the psychonautic routes of the perilous poison path.
And closest of all to us, all those who ‘hear, see and move otherwise‘ in the liberatory improvised performance spaces of the everyday while consistently refusing to ever ‘become enamoured of power’: the European and British improvised music community in all its idiosyncratic and beautiful oddity; more widely, Fluxus artists Alison Knowles, Michele Bernstein, Monte LaYoung, Robert Filliou, George Brecht; Jean-Jacque Lebel + the happenings in France; High Red Centre + Gutai artists in Japan; Tropicália in Brazil; Situationists UK + Europe, Mierle Laderman Ukeles in New York: Dutch Provo: King Mob: OHO in former Yugoslavia: Bay Area artists Joan Brown and Bruce Conner; Welfare State International; Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Army; The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination; Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir; Chto Delat; Meredith Monk; REPOhistory; 1000 Gestalten; The Knot; Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home; Voina; Plastique Fantastique… and… and…and…who have consistently refused to ever ‘become enamoured of power’.
Hovering transversally over all our projects, however, as fertilely multiple, as some imminent and preponderating Indra’s net are the breathing machine of Deleuze and Guattari and the virtual multiplicities that their work has actualised.
To write SA, D and G, Non rep theory, process phil Institutional analysis and unconscious
Of the projects we’ve initiated in the last 20 years or so it’s probably Alchemy/Schmalchemy that best encapsulates the enticingly lurid spirit of this cornucopia.
Georgina Born has described as the ‘empractice’ of social aesthetics. Born, herself a researcher/improviser (and founding member in 1977 of FIG, the Feminist Improvising Group) has indicated four key ways in which the political character of improvised music is evident in how the musicians operate.
[They have] shown interest in the aesthetic potential and/or effects of the socialities of performance …[they] have shown a concern with how wider, enduring social relations of difference – of race, class and/or gender, for example – enter into and may be reproduced, entrenched, refracted or re-imagined in the socialities of musical performance…[they] have seen an active engagement with institutional forms, primarily those through which their music is produced and distributed, as a necessary or even unavoidable extension of their creative practice. [And]… like socially-engaged art, improvised music has in some of its manifestations been engaged in catalysing wider political struggles for social justice and social equality (Born, 2017, p. 50)
The core of social aesthetics is a “rejection of the claim…that one can or should disentangle the social, in all its varied modalities, from experiences and conceptions of the aesthetic” (Born, Lewis and Straw, 2017: 2). Indeed, the argument is that the aesthetic and the social are not only contingently co-productive but are, in fact, inherently related. Art, music and performance practices are “immanently social” and can, in improvised performance, actually establish “novel realms of social experience, new modes of sociality” (op cit. 2017, p. 9 our emphasis) through a hybrid process the authors designate as ‘empractice’. What is more, improvisation “cannot but empractice or manifest a social aesthetics” (p.9. Original emphasis). Essentially, then, SA accentuates the capacity of art and music “to both influence social processes and to put into practice, model, enact, and experiment with novel socialities and social relations of diverse kinds” (op. cit. 2017, p.6. Our emphasis). On this account improv is, quite literally, a world-changing practice.
we suggest building on this work by deploying some of the concepts found in the ‘affective turn’ in social theory (Clough 2007) Deriving ultimately from Spinozan ideas of ‘affect’ as naming the distinctive power of bodies to form new and empowering encounters, affect theory has been summarised as drawing the following broad conclusion:
Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p1. Original emphasis)
The salient points for us here are, first, the articulation established between mobile states of relation and flows of intensity as processual, as a ‘becoming’. Second, the more-than-human notion of ‘bodies’ that is employed and, thirdly, the idea of ‘resonances’ that ‘stick’ in assemblages of bodies and worlds. This is where, we suggest, improvisation’s distinctive politics is generated. The novel notions we wish to borrow from this terrain are twofold: that of a distinction between ‘minor’ (or ‘molecular’) and ‘major’ (or ‘molar’) politics (familiar to Born, if not Prévost), and the idea of ‘transversal micro-politics’[2]. The minor/major distinction is developed across that (joint) work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that problematizes the relationship of ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’ (see Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a and 2004b). [T]ransversal micro-politics, on the other hand, is most emphatically presented in the solo writing Guattari produced on transversal group relations in institutional and political group settings (see, for example, Guattari, 2000 and 2015).
According to Thoburn (2003), in broad terms ‘minor and major’ are expressions
…that characterize not entities, but processes and treatments of life. Essentially, molar [or major] processes are premised on the formation and defence of a constant or a standard that acts as a norm and a basis of judgement. As such, major relations are relations that are fixed and denumerable. (Thoburn, 2003, p7. Original emphasis)
Minor relations, in contrast, are “found in concrete moments of deviation from the dominant, model” (p.7). As an example of a limiting major (molar) politics, Parliamentary democracy (with its fixed representational structures) might well be a likely candidate. A minor (or molecular) politics, in contrast, is fundamentally processual, being “an affirmation of new senses, new lives, or new possibilities… a politics of invention’ (p.6) that urges flight from the logics of capitalism. ‘Transversality’, Guattari’s neologism, similarly expresses an explicitly liberationary dimension, this time of group relations
[ Transversality] tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality [hierarchy] and that of mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among different levels [of a group] and, above all, in different meanings. (Guattari, 2015; 113)
Both of these notions are foundational to the broader account of the ‘politics of affect’ – really, in this vocabulary, a minor politics of transversal, micro-politically productive, relations – proffered, largely as a development out of Guattari’s work, by Massumi (2015).
By the end of the nineteen eighties, Guattari (2000) had proposed a ‘mental ecology’ (alongside an ‘economic’ and an ‘environmental’ ecology) as a third key dimension of our necessary escape from what he called Integrated World Capitalism. Key to that mental ecology would be a ‘re-singularisation’ of subjectivity. In Guattarian group-work practice, re-singularisation is the micro-political dimension of transversal relationality whereby a group moves from the paralysis of the ‘subjected’ or ‘dependent’ human group to the autonomy of the ‘subject’ group. Micro-politics is thus an aesthetic-existential-affective process that is inherently anti-individualistic and which, importantly for our purpose here, pushes resolutely beyond any model of politics framed within the representational arrangements of liberal democracy – aiming, instead, towards “a being-for, to a collective intentionality, turned toward doing…” (Guattari and Negri, 2010, p. 92).
Massumi draws explicitly on this material to describe the ‘micro-political’ domain in detail. Micro-politics, he argues, occurs when relational affective/aesthetic processes return us to the “generative moment of experience at the dawning of an event” (Massumi, 2015, p.79). Each such moment, experienced ‘micro-perceptually’, opens the possibility of “reconnecting processually with what is germinal in… living” and raises the prospect of “living more intensely, more fully, with augmented powers of existence” (p.79). According to Massumi, affective politics initiated at a micro-political level “seeks the degrees of openness of any situation, in hopes of priming an alter-accomplishment” (p.52. Our emphasis).
Two further, and related, concepts from Massumi’s Politics of Affect are also valuable to us. These are ‘event-design’ and ‘event-care’. Massumi describes event-design as a shifting of the stakes of events away from issues or definable outcomes to “what can be done to open up new ground for exploration and invention that re-energises people and makes their lives …more liveable and intense” (Massumi, 2015, p.73). Event-care is, in the words of Massumi’s collaborator, Erin Manning, an experiment in
[R]econnecting to the collective in a different way, getting away from thinking about ‘being active’ in the sense of ‘doing something’ and focusing instead on ‘something doing’. This brings us back to the earlier question of affect: what does it mean to co-compose? … one of the ways we move towards this question of collective value is through the concept of event-based care… a kind of collective tending… (Erin Manning, in Massumi, 2015. pp.164-165. Our emphasis)
Non-representational theory (NRT) is prioritises action, practice, and performance over fixed “meanings” or symbolic representations. Developed largely by geographer Nigel Thrift in the 1990s and 2000s, it focuses on the “onflow” of everyday life—those fleeting, embodied moments and feelings that happen before we consciously think about or label them. Wikipedia +2
Key Concepts of NRT
- Practice and Performance: Instead of studying what a social relationship represents (like a status symbol), NRT looks at how it is enacted through movement and doing.
- Affect: This refers to the “pre-personal” capacity of bodies to affect or be affected by others. It’s about the “vibe” or atmosphere of a space—like the tension in a crowd—before it is articulated as a specific emotion.
- Embodiment: NRT takes the human body seriously as a sensing, moving entity that experiences the world through touch, rhythm, and habit.
- Precognitive Thought: It values processes that happen before conscious reflection. Much of our interaction with the world is habitual and intuitive rather than the result of deliberate calculation.
- Materiality: The theory emphasizes that “the social” isn’t just about humans; it includes the active, disruptive roles of non-human objects and environments. WordPress.com +4
Origins and Influences
NRT is a post-structuralist framework. It draws heavily from: Wikipedia +1
- Phenomenology: Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger who focused on “being-in-the-world”.
- Process Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ideas on “becoming” and “assemblages”.
- Actor-Network Theory (ANT): Bruno Latour’s focus on the relationships between humans and non-human “actants”. Wikipedia +2
Applications in Research
Researchers use NRT to study activities where the “doing” is more important than the “meaning,” such as:
- Performance Arts: Dance and musical performance.
- Everyday Mobility: Walking, cycling, and navigating through cities.
- Sensory Experiences: Gardening, listening to music, and children’s play.
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