Angelica Mesiti's Rapture (Silent Anthem): hearing with our eyes

Abstract

The paper examines the ways in which affect is shaped by technology and culture through a reading of Angelica Mesiti's video artwork Rapture (Silent Anthem), winner of the 2009 Blake Prize. I argue that experiences of her artwork integrate mental and bodily processes in affect, and thus the paper contributes to the body of literature which suggests that understandings of affect should see affect as more than an autonomic, pre-conscious bodily state. Mesiti's artwork instantiates a relationship between rapture and art, a subject to which Friedrich Nietzsche's writings give sustained attention. Nietzsche understands rapture as an embodied process embedded in the surrounding ethos. Two practices of aesthetic rapture – tragic rapture and the rapture of reading – are explored to develop an account of the structure of affect. Reading this structure through Mesiti's video artwork shows how neoliberal culture engages sensation and affect.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. This understanding of rapture not only runs counter to Allen's general view of rapture, but also differs from interpretations of Nietzsche such as that of Giles Fraser, who examines religious dimensions of Nietzsche as a thinker of redemption, concluding that rapture is close in spirit to Nazism because Nietzsche's later understanding of rapture remains a basically Dionysian affirmation, in which the Dionysian state is essentially about forming a unity with the masses through exclusion and expulsion. This implicates Nietzsche in the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust (Fraser 2002, 121). According to Fraser, any kind of rapture or ecstasy cannot retain its critical and skeptical aspect because as an experience rapture is an unquestioning affirmation. Other thinkers exploring the religious aspects of Nietzsche's thought are more positive in their interpretation of Nietzsche's understanding of ecstasy, for example, Roberts's examination of asceticism and mysticism in Nietzsche see them to be constructive tools for reimagining the nature and subject of religious experience (1998, 3–23).

^2. The concerns of this paper thus differ from those of Charles Altieri's in The Particulars of Rapture: Aesthetics of the Affects, which challenges how philosophers have rehabilitated the value of affectivity in recent decades but overemphasised its cognitive elements and underemphasised its differences from reason (2003). I agree with Altieri on this point, but my interest here is to provide an account of rapture that does not conceive it to be only physiological but rather attends to its cognitive, subjective and technological aspects. This is presented as an alternative to the understanding of affects currently influential in cultural theory that tends towards reducing them into autonomic bodily processes (Massumi 2002).

^3. As Jantzen has shown, the understanding of religious rapture as a private inner experience came to be associated with Christian mystic traditions, but is distant from historical practices and concepts of mysticism. Bound up with questions of gender and authority, that understanding was taken up with the decline of religious experience as a source of social and political power and the rise of the secular state (1995, 1–25).

^4. The term rapture is translated from the German rausch, which ‘no single English word – rapture, frenzy, ecstasy, transport, intoxication, delirium – can capture’, as David Farrell-Krell notes (Heidegger 1979, 92). This overflowing feeling that goes beyond the self is associated with both the creation and reception of art. Heidegger focuses on the term in his discussion of the will to power as art (1979, 92–106; 114–23), making the point, taken up here, that rapture cannot be reduced to a physiological state. (Note, however, that this discussion does not follow Heidegger's account of rapture as ‘form engendering force’, [114–123], or his conclusion that rapture is not an affect according to his definition of the latter [96–101]).

^5. As an aesthetic, bodily experience rapture is part of Nietzsche's effort to think of art as immanent and his attempt to shift the focus of aesthetic analysis from the consumer to the producer of art. Rapture may be interpreted as a kind of reconfiguration of the Kantian sublime. Like the sublime, in the witnessing of tragedy sensuous experience exceeds the capacity to think it. Unlike the sublime, this encourages the spectator toward the affirmation of sensuous existence rather than revealing suprasensible truth of reason. Varying accounts of the relationship between the Kantian sublime and rapture can be found in Marsden (2002, 47–72) and Rampley (2000, 78–109) among others. Heidegger examines rapture in relationship to Nietzsche's misreading of Kant's doctrine of the beautiful (1972).

^6. While Nietzsche's later works focus on the term ‘Dionysian’ he does not discard the Apollonian but rather incorporates it into his understanding of the Dionysian (see for instance Nietzsche 1990, 73). Both the Apollonian principle of individuation and Dionysian principle of intensity of life force in The Birth of Tragedy are described as ‘forms of intoxication’ (Nietzsche 1990, 108–10). For discussion of the Dionysian and Apollonian in the creative state see Marsden (2002, 24–47) and Heidegger (1979, 97–103).

^7. For further discussion of the relationship between rapture and tragedy, see Gordon (2001, 1–28), and Marsden (2002, 24–46).

^8. Nietzsche notes that solitude cultivates the awareness required for the experience of rapture, and the cultivation of solitude is a theme of Zarathustra and Ecce Homo. Expressing his own desire for freedom from the routine, noise and competition of modern urban life, Nietzsche writes of his need for ‘solitude – which is to say recovery, return to myself’ (1989, 233).

^9. Mesiti limits her comments about rapture to the figures in the artwork, saying that that the artwork suggests ‘that extreme experiences, where one is lost in the Moment … can happen anywhere, like a rock concert’ (Wilson 2009).

^10. In Deleuzian terms, the faces (as close ups) lose their place as an affection image in the sensory motor organization of cinema, which is broken by the long, slow shot. The faces undergo ongoing change in mien, expressing the power of their feeling. They reflect the quality of the ethereal light around them, a light that refracts through water and off skin, insisting on its own materiality to become a ‘pure, immanent or spiritual light’ (Deleuze 1986, 117).

^11. Thus, the Apollonian does not necessarily represent conceptual or visual distance, but a simultaneously distancing experience that can be embedded in different communicative mediums and forms.

^12. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mesiti's work and the work of the Kingpins (the performance group of which she was a member) are strongly engaged with music and performance (Gillies 2011).

^13. Ahmed (2004) and Clough (2008), alongside Berlant (2011) and others, provide strikingly informative analyses of how affect functions socially and politically.

^14. Morse's notion of distraction is presented in linguistic terms, as the plane of the subject engaged in a ‘here-and-now; or discourse, and the plane of an absent or non-person in another time, elsewhere, or story’ (1998, 100). The term absorption, as I am using it, is primarily concerned with sensory dynamics. Depending on whether it is part of a transformative process, absorption may or may not distract the self from its broader circumstances.

^15. See Bull (2004) for an insightful discussion of the Walkman and subsequent similar technologies as an immersive experience regulating the user's engagement with others and the environment. Berlant's (2011) discussion of Dorothy who works for a time taking dictation demonstrates work's capacity to provide an absorbing experience. The dictation is a ‘soundtrack she absorbs uncomprehendingly … as the sound fills her body she no longer needs its protective cover of fat’ (142). Showing the relevance of Benjamin's observation that technology's reorganization of the senses blurs the boundaries between leisure and work (2006), Gregg (2011) provides an illuminating discussion on the impact of online technologies on work, friendship, family and leisure professional employees (see especially 121–37). She writes that ‘Online technologies are a key factor in making today's jobs feel variously invasive, compelling, consuming, readily available, anxiety provoking, addictive … and even the source of solace [my emphasis]’ (168).

^16. For example, Fraser (2002) and Roberts (1998) are two texts among a number of books in recent years that examine Nietzsche as a religious thinker.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erika Kerruish

Erika Kerruish currently teaches cultural studies and philosophy at the Southern Cross University. Her research is centred on perception, affect and communication with an interest in immersion and new technologies. She is an editor of the journal Transformations: A Journal of Media and Culture.