Five Points & Lines Toward a Night-time Pedagogy

Introduction

Night-time Pedagogy is occasioned by our participation in Technologies of Lived Abstraction, a four-year international, collaborative, experimental research project based in Montreal, Canada, and organized by Brian Massumi (Workshop in Radical Empiricism, Universite de Montreal) and Erin Manning (The Sense Lab, Concordia University).

Our project is a response to TLA’s 2007 conceptual theme: “Housing the Body, Furnishing the Environment,” which will convene all participants in Montreal in August 2007. As a platform of relations, Night-time Pedagogy proposes a series of collaborative and collective aesthetico-theoretical events, performatively staged at, and as, a number of mobile sites in the city of Montreal.

The platform is made up of five points and lines that operate along aesthetic, philosophical, temporal, spatial, perceptive and social axes and that are attuned or modulated according to five haecceities or material/relational intensities of degree.

Tony Smith’s well-known anecdote of his late-night drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the early-1950s, has been for a long time, an art historical source of inspiration, one that continues to speak of the performative rather than representational dimension of art, and capacity of such artistic practice to expose us to the limits of the aesthetic. This is not so much the Kantian sublime, or if it is, then in the sense of finitude as never-ending ending, a path that will remain in its very promise and potential, incapable of being completely mapped. Not the end of the road then, but a passage that no longer relies upon the directed, delimited framing that any road provides. The fact that that famous late-night drive was a social and pedagogical event should not be forgotten. For Smith was not a solitary artist in the car that night, but was a teacher accompanied by three of his students from Cooper Union. At this point in time we would like to imagine that such outings are still possible.

Some might consider this a form of madness, and to that we say, so be it. Following the lead of Gilles Deleuze we foreground this madness and distinguish between two spatialized regimes of delirium. Paranoid Delirium—in terms of housing the body—can be understood as an absolute domestication of subjectivity and corporeality, and yet, in its madness, also function as a mode of absolute escape deep into the house, the interior of private, domestic interiority, of which the incessant struggle is not one of leaving, but of staying. Passional Delirium on the other hand, involves the never-ending night, not that which stands as partner to the day, but is a Blanchotian other night of the night, the outside of the economy of “day and night.” It is this delirious passion, in all of its aesthetic, social and pedagogical force that Tony Smith possessed on that late-night drive, and that Deleuze cites in his historical-conceptual distinction of two principal spatio-variables when he writes: “Something has changed in the situation of monads, between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings, and the new model invoked by Tony Smith, the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (The Fold, 136-137).

Night-time Pedagogy, in its folding of these spatial variables and its inflecting of these regimes of delirium, seeks to open up zones and sites of relationality that are articulated along temporal, spatial, aesthetic, perceptive and social lines of becoming. These lines, as vectors and mobile trajectories are modulated through five haeccities: surface, temperature, dark, midnight, and speed.

The following assemblages, written through the five haecceities outlined above, are offered as open-ended event scripts, non-instructional images of thought, sense, and movement, to be performed and variously realized at three separate and pre-selected sites in and around the city of Montreal.

The sleepless black cat lets her body slowly drop and lays down on the heat-radiating pavement of the runway and dreams of flying. The box is a “strange linkage, a bracket, a yoke, a knot,” its metal a “supple and adherent membrane coextensive with…an absolute interior.” Swim under it, we’re told it’s a safe. The hotel room is dark, the ceiling concrete, and the temperature is not quite right. Sleepwalk the endless late-night hallways, and ask: “where’s the doorman?”

These night-time platforms are where and when: art & aesthetics can become pedagogical, the pedagogical can become a work of art, the formal can become a matter of degree and modulation, and the Outside can be sensed as the very materiality of thought.