Uncertainties – notes from the porch

Renata Cernadas Gaspar

I wish to live in a house with a porch. I would spend most of my time there, at the crossing of an entrance/exit, in-between inside and outside, under a shelter, looking out.

I only discovered this desire recently; last fall, to be more precise, during a road trip I did on my own through the south of Portugal. I had been feeling disoriented for many months, since my dad passed away, followed by finishing my PhD.

Uncertainties. Plenty of uncertainties amongst a visceral assurance that change emerges with or without notice. It is change for certain.

1. Disorientation: when assurance means change

Despite the overwhelming presence of a promise of change, I found myself lacking any sense of progression.

The tools for measuring distance (and weight) were suddenly beyond my reach; and so calculation was absent from my repertoire of judgement.

In my judgement, I – my body – appeared immobile.

2. Disorientation: the experience of going nowhere

During those many months of disorientation, of in-betweenness, of not-knowing how to proceed, the familiar acquired new qualities, foreign qualities.

Spaces, objects, colours, relations – all appeared both recognisable and distorted at once. The familiar seemed distant, inaccessible in its familiarity, which rendered the perception that my life was undergoing a deep transformation.

Or was it the other way around? Was it maybe that the idea of transformation changed my perception? I do not know. Still not.

3. Disorientation: not knowing which questions to formulate

The road trip was triggered by the wish to attend a presentation by Conceição Evaristo, a black feminist writer from Brazil, which was taking place 1h30 hours-drive away from my family’s home.

It felt like an adequate and meaningful beginning for a journey that did not comprise any further space-time references.

I loaded the car with what could, and could not, be of use at some point along the way.

4. Disorientation: moving by being moved

Curiosity and excitement were very high; and I had, among other less reputable items, two reliable companions: books and notebooks.

5. Disorientation: a tangible list of vague intentions

One of my companion texts was Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017).

‘A companion text [according to Ahmed] is a text whose company enabled you to proceed on a path less trodden. Such texts might spark a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity; they might share a feeling or give you resources to make sense of something that had been beyond your grasp; companion texts can prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the way you are going, you are not alone’ (16).

6. Disorientation: a resourceful path

Not having any destination beyond Evaristo’s presentation meant being thrown into constant decision-making.

Where to go next? Followed by, when to leave? When to leave? Followed by, where to go next?

It took me a while to realise: I was trying to escape the anguish of disorientation, and its disabling capacity to make choices – together with the uneasiness of considering making choices – by throwing myself into a process of being compelled to finding alternative ways to proceed.

7. Disorientation: a divergence, a deviation, a split

I was in charge of determining the space-time coordinates of my journey; I was free to engage with a new horizon of possibilities; I was responsible for shaping my own ways of experiencing the unknown.

It felt tremendously empowering.

8. Disorientation: an affirmative place of connections beyond either/or

Knowledge became truly experiential and sensational.

‘A sensation [says Ahmed] is often understood by what it is not: a sensation is not an organized or intentional response to something. And that is why sensation matters: you are left with an impression that is not clear or distinct. A sensation is often felt by the skin. The word sensational relates both to the faculty of sensation and to the arousal of strong curiosity, interest, or excitement. If a sensation is how a body is in contact with a world, then something becomes sensational when contact becomes even more intense. Perhaps then to feel is to feel this even more. Feminism [she continues] often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against’ (22).

9. Disorientation: a sensational mode of observation

Furnished with a new vocabulary of disorientation, I began transcribing my sensations. Writing down my journey became, in some ways, a writing journey, an inscription of a passage.

I tried to translate my feeling of empowerment into the writing by changing some of its rules.

I alternated English and Portuguese words; which, according to Vilém Flusser (2014) - not a companion text but still a useful one - ‘don’t mean the same things. Each language possesses its own atmosphere and, as a result, is a universe in itself’ (22).

I clashed my linguistic universes and, that way, I crashed against their fragments.

I rediscovered some words, and I found myself resisting many words, as if the attempt to anchor something of the relation between space and time was itself a form of subverting my memory.

Yet, there was a sense of agency in having writing as my companion, perhaps because, as Flusser says, ‘writing means leaving the magical power of the words behind and, by doing so, gaining a certain control over the gesture’ (23).

This gesture of writing about my journey and, with my hand, writing my journey, meant that I was expressing it in the course of experiencing it – reflection was almost synchronous with sensing.

10. Disorientation: writing to discover what she wants to write about

In putting linguistic fragments together, I was putting myself back together – assembling my journey, assembling myself.

Assembling: a recurrent feminist practice.

‘Feminism is DIY [writes Ahmed]: a form of self-assembly. No wonder feminist work is often about timing: sometimes you are too fragile to do this work; we cannot risk being shattered because we are not ready to put ourselves back together again. To get ready often means being prepared to be undone’ (27).

So, a journey within a journey of assembling, undoing, continuing assembling, persisting.

11. Disorientation: to keep going, wilfully continuing

The intense and extended correspondence with myself, through writing and constant inner-dialogue was, in retrospect, a form of research – an intuitively committed gesture of searching.

And this is where Flusser is helpful again; according to him, ‘our gestures are changing. We are in crisis’ (147) because there is a crisis in our gesture of searching, which is the paradigm for all our gestures (including our actions and thoughts).

Flusser is referring to a gesture of searching, ‘in which one does not know in advance what one is looking for’ (147); what he calls the ‘scientific method’, which for him is in conflict with how research is conducted, and with the position that scientific research holds in our Western society.

12. Disorientation: research in contradiction with research

Flusser criticises the ‘humanistic’ gesture and its associated ‘objective’ knowledge, which dictates the hierarchy of the ‘difference between subject and object, human being and world, I and it’ (155).

He writes: ‘There is neither an object that searching has not first turned into an object nor a subject that is not in search of something. To be an object means to be sought, and to be a subject means to search’ (151).

Importantly, ‘this is not the perception of a subject encountering an object. It is an actual relationship from which subjective and objective poles can be abstracted. Subject and object are abstract extrapolations of a concrete relation’ (151).

So, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ gesture of searching - according to Flusser, ‘we no longer believe that we make gestures but that we are gestures’ (155); searching is then, a gesture of living and ‘theory is becoming a strategy for being-alive-in-the-world’ (157).

13. Disorientation: the full, living experience of being-in-the-world

There was a sense of aliveness, of wholeness even, throughout my journey of searching and self-assembly; I think because I was compelled to rely on both my capacity to care for myself and the unpredictability of events as they unfolded.

This gesture of trust gave me a sense of direction to navigate the unknown.

14. Disorientation: a life paradox – she might need to feel disoriented to find her way

When I found the porch – a wooden cabin with a porch – I felt at home. Strange feeling: to temporarily feel at home in a strange place.

As a migrant constantly on the move – I just recently moved house for the 15th time since I left my family’s home – I am frequently asked: where are you from?

And even though I always felt more troubled by the question: what do you do? It is for me impossible to disentangle what do you do from, where are you going?

Framed by such formulations, doing and moving seem to demand a residence – a concrete, if not also permanent, form of dwelling.

For Ahmed, ‘to be questioned, to be questionable, sometimes can feel like a residence: a question becomes something you reside in’ (116).

15. Disorientation: feeling at home in the in-betweenness of a porch

My journey continued in its own present tense.

It continued there, in a past that I chose to remember in order to bring it to the here and now of this presentation.

At the same time, providing an account of my journey feels like thinking about the future. In other words, reflecting on my gesture of searching seems to imply a relocation to the present and, therefore, an actualised openness towards the future.

Such apparent contradiction of gestures stimulates a reaching out for new possibilities.

16. Disorientation: (trans)forming the gesture of searching

We’re approaching a critical aspect concerning the journey of searching: where research becomes relational and dialogic; and, where the gesture of searching becomes, in Flusser’s words, ‘a gesture in search of others’ (157).

Because, according to him, ‘perception is among other things passion, and passion is a form of perception. All of it happens in the fullness of human life’ (152); in our being with others in the world.

Passion makes me immediately turn to women. Somehow I cannot help feeling repulsed by the confrontation with the word in the text of a white male author. I recognise the word but I don’t attribute it the same value, the same ‘user-value’, as I do when I find it in a feminist text; as if they refer to different universes, like different languages with their own atmospheres – to appropriate Flusser’s own arguments.

And so I turn to Audre Lorde (2007) and the erotic as a source of power beyond sexuality; because the erotic, she says, ‘is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire’ (54).

In this sense, the satisfaction we associate with our experiences of the erotic can also be felt in the research we do, because ‘the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing’ (54).

The relevance of the erotic in relation to research (including, of course, artistic research) is that element of power which is activated in the depth of any sharing, what Lorde calls ‘that self-connection shared’ (57).

According to her, working through and towards deep connections allows us to become more reluctant to consent states of powerlessness; ‘for once we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of’ (57).

Joy is something I can easily experience in researching with friends, and in making friendships through collaboration.

17. Disorientation: (re-)searching (in) collaboration

Searching involves movement.

I don’t mean the usual way of moving through events, but rather the movement which is necessary to engage in order to remain elsewhere, where questions can be transformed, and questioning transformative.

Ahmed says: ‘to live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive as a question as well as being a life question’ (2).

18. Disorientation: in the process of moving I can see myself already arrived

Living a feminist life is a productive way of navigating through uncertainties.

And, it is in the sharing of such process of searching that lies the vitality and determination so necessary to carry on envisioning a radically progressive transformation of social and political landscapes.

Or else, how will we nurture the power to create the conditions in which we want to live and work if not by reminding each other of tapping into the joy of moving from absence and silence to action and affirmation?

Works cited:

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.

Flusser, V. (2014) Gestures. University of Minnesota Press

Lorde, A. (2007) Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In: Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Crossing Press.

Text presented at the Nordic Summer University (NSU) Circle 7 – Artistic Research / Performing Heterotopia; Winter Symposium / Disorientations; March 2020; Wroclaw, Poland