Where are all the bodies buried? Towards a creative-relational inquiry

Abstract

This thesis attempts a step towards a postqualitative and creative-relational line of inquiry. That is to say, a mode of inquiry that thinks with the posthumanities (post- structure, post-phenomena, post-representation, post-human). A mode that makes a move towards an embodied, experience-near inquiry that cherishes its relationship with theory and is explicit and open about the process of that inquiry.

Framed as three encounter-events, I read-think-write of, with, and into the strange intimacies of these [inci]dents, the unfamiliar feelings, and their force- full expression. I follow a transversal line, re/locating these affects as recondite ‘mo[ve]ments:’ conceptions of moving bodies moving bodies — a communion between people, objects, spaces, and atmospheres — as entanglements of movement and moment, on and at the scale of experience. These are peculiar mo[ve]ments that evade parsing into recognisable, corpo-affective dimensions of intimacy and that enlarge the milieu of the encounter, articulate the extension of the event, and pay attention to that which moves across experience, but that nonetheless evades the frame.

I characterise the rendering of these encounter-events as experi[e]ments. Each a queer chemistry provoked by the haeccetic mo[ve]ments of each encounter-event. I put concepts to work, construing ideas and notions from an array of scholars whom I identify as being loosely, tightly, or otherwise in agencement with Deleuzian and DeleuzoGuattarian thought. Foremost, I follow the [particularly] Deleuzian line that is the conception of concepts themselves. I create concepts as I go, moved by Deleuze’s provocation that concept-making is a creative — and eventful — act. I fabricate mobile, elastic, and playful concepts that are animated by the feelings of a mo[ve]ment (and contrariwise). In doing so, I attempt to offer a [singularly] detailed, and close-up line of inquiry in the midst of bodies and their relations: a hematic, sanguinary, visceral, and affective account of the encounter; the felt feeling of bodies happening as a sensuous event.