Detours

“I saw something fuzzy that moved sometimes and stood still sometimes. I saw two different shapes. Father was like he was, quite distinct, but the other was a peculiar little thing, I don’t know what, and it was that he told me to look at.” Iris Johansson, A Different Childhood (Inkwell Books, 2012), 45.

Iris Johansson, conversation with author, Fagersta, Sweden, June 2018.

In this text, in which interpersonal relationship is a main focus, I refer to the key figures in ways that reflect my relationship with them during my artistic and doctoral research. I worked closely with Iris Johansson and Phoebe Caldwell over several years and so use their first names only, after introducing them. When referring to Fernand Deligny, who I never met, I use his full name throughout.

Iris, A Different Childhood, 212. This passage is read aloud by Iris in the video sequence that is part of my installation Iris (A Fragment) (2018–19).

Iris, email to author, September 2019.

“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition.” Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable (1953; Grove Press, 1979), 352. Cited by Mladen Dolar in his essay “The King Listens,” commissioned for the exhibition publication In the First Circle (curated by Imogen Stidworthy in collaboration with Paul Domela, Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona, 2012).

This way of conceptualizing the voice is formulated in the work of Kaja Silverman, Guy Rosolato, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Arsenii Tarkovsky: “From a volume of stone I learn language that is beyond time. / Turning around like corn in a mill I float between querns, / I have thrust myself up to my throat into two-dimensional space, / And the millstones of life and death have pulverised my spine.” From the poem “From a volume of stone I learn language that is beyond time,” in Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky, ed. and trans. Kitty Hunter Blair (Tate, 2014).

Besides A Different Childhood, Iris’s books include En Annorlunda Liv (A different life) (Forum, 2013), and En Annorlunda Verklighet (A different reality) (forthcoming 2021).

Iris, conversations with author, Dahab (South Sinai, Egypt), recorded during research and filming for the installation Iris (A Fragment).

Iris, A Different Childhood, 316.

Iris, A Different Childhood, 205.

If she is alone for more than four hours Iris can slip into a negative mode of real reality where “nothing moves inside” and she can initiate nothing. She avoids this by making sure she is in contact with people regularly and follows a precisely timed daily “schedule” starting at 4 a.m. each day.

Contemporary diagnosis frames autism as a developmental and neurological condition with certain characteristic effects, such as issues around processing sensory information through a hypersensitized nervous system. This produces infinitely wide varieties of affect, one of which is sensory overload (“autonomic storm”), experienced by many people on the autistic spectrum (discussed below in relation to the work of Phoebe Caldwell).

Iris sets out proposals for alternative social and economic structures in her books En Annorlunda Liv and En Annorlunda Verklighet.

Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Shambhala, 1992), 26. Italics in original.

Iris, telephone conversation with author, August 27, 2019.

Iris, conversation with author, Fagersta, July 2018.

Iris, conversation with author, Dahab, February 2018.

S. J., conversation with author after a therapy session with Iris in Fagersta, July 2018.

Iris, conversation with author, Dahab, February 2018.

Iris, conversation with author during filming in Fagersta, June 2018.

Camerawoman Emma Dalesman worked with me in Egypt and Sweden during filming for Iris (A Fragment).

Ingmar Bergman, 1966. Bergman’s image of two merging personalities: a hard-edged vertical cutting together of two strips of celluloid / two shots / two women’s faces spliced together.

Dictionary definitions of “rub up,” without a hyphen, include “to revive or refresh the knowledge of” and “to improve the keenness of (a mental faculty)” →.

Un blanc: a cartoon speech bubble with no words in it; also a figure of speech, introduced to me by Jacques Lin one day when we fell silent during a conversation. Along with Gisèle Durand, Jacques Lin was one of the first adults to join Fernand Deligny’s experimental living space in Monoblet, in 1967. Between 2013 and 2014 I carried out research and filmed in the small informal care home in Monoblet, where they still live with two of the autistic children (now adults) who grew up in that community. (While there I developed material for the installation Balayer – A Map of Sweeping, commissioned by the São Paulo Biennial 2014.)

Trinh T. Minh Ha, “Speaking Nearby,” interview by Nancy N. Chen, Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 21 (March 1992): 82–91.

Fernand Deligny, “Acting and the Acted,” in The Arachnean and Other Texts, trans. Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter (Univocal, 2015), 135–36. In this essay Deligny uses this anecdote to show how such “initiatives” by the autistic children reveal “aspects of ‘ourselves’ that escape us” (137). The story has been retold time and again by people connected with his experimental collective living space, especially Jacques Lin, who includes it in his autobiographical book La vie de radeau: Le réseau Deligny au quotidien (2019).

Fernand Deligny, “When the-Human-that-We-Are Is Not There,” in The Arachnean and Other Texts, 201. Throughout this part of the essay, Deligny refers to Lacan’s notion of “the real,” as developed in the latter’s text The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (W. W. Norton, 1991).

Fernand Deligny, “Camerér,” Camera-Stylo, no. 4 (September 1983). Also in Deligny, Oeuvres, ed. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (L’Arachnéen, 2007), 1742.

Deligny was friends with Louis Althusser and was interested in the latter’s concept of interpellation: the process whereby language constitutes people as subjects in terms of how they are addressed.

This paragraph draws on a commentary by Jean-Francois Chevrier on Deligny’s essay “Acheminement vers l’image” (literally “On the way to the image”). Both the commentary and the essay are published in Deligny’s Oeuvres.

I began using the term “meta-cinematic” during my doctoral research to speak of a particular relationship between the filmmaker, their recording equipment, and the situations they encounter. I see this relationship, which is central to my work, manifesting in different ways in the practices of go-betweens like Iris, Phoebe, and Fernand Deligny. Meta-cinematic situations give rise to a reflexive awareness that is less about making films (whether or not this is happening) than shaping relationships between people, in the rub-up between (their) different forms of language. These kinds of affects are an inherent part of filmmaking, but working meta-cinematically is about activating and channeling them towards other ends, including how they unfold in the space of the artwork. In this context the artwork is itself a form of language or voicing (in my practice, the artwork contains different voices and forms of language). Working with artworks and installations in a meta-cinematic modality produces different modes of awareness and relation with visitors, as well as between them. (“Meta-cinematic” is also a term from 1950s film theory, referring to an approach to filmmaking whereby the viewer is made aware that she or he is watching a fiction film. “Orthodox reflexivity affirms the role of narrative structure as a transparency; modernist reflexivity seeks to reverse this role.” William C. Siska, “Metacinema: A Modern Necessity,” Literature and Film Quarterly 7, no. 4, January 1979, 285–89. In other words, meta-cinematic filmmaking affects the relationship between the viewer and the film—but this is not the same as using it as a relational tool between people.)

Fernand Deligny worked with troubled young men in the context of the experimental project “La grande cordée” (literally “The great cord/belt,” 1948–62). Organized by an informal group of mainly communists, the project involved creating a constellation of living spaces in youth hostels for “juvenile delinquents,” away from their families and outside established institutions. This was immediately after WWII, when Deligny was working with the French Resistance. Deligny was instrumental to the project and it was his first major experiment in alternative social relations. See Yves Jeanne, “Fernand Deligny: liberté et compagnonnage,” Reliance 21, no. 3 (2006): 113–18.

Deligny, Oeuvres, 812.

Deligny developed a very singular writing voice as he tried to take account of the nonverbal within verbal language.

“Detour” was a key term used by Deligny and the other adults of his community. It described a child’s indirect and elaborate route from A to B as he or she carried out a task (fetching a water bucket, putting away the laundry). Through the practice of mapping the children’s movements, it emerged that the “ornamented” (orné) lines of such routes were neither excessive nor meaningless, but absolutely necessary to the task being carried out. They were also found to relate to the presence of objects or past events no longer visible—like the spot on the table in Deligny’s story about Janmari and the ashtray.

Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without End (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 52–53.

See Raymond Bellour’s discussion of this history, as analyzed in Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox, Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Agamben, Means Without End, 52–53. The scope of these effects is part of the history of post-cinematic affect and how it both emerges in and shapes contemporary subjectivities and technological and globalized conditions. See Steven Shaviro, Post-cinematic Affect (Zero Books, 2010).

Giorgio Agamben begins “Notes on Gesture” by describing the spasmic, uncontrolled movements of people with Tourette’s syndrome (52–53). He suggests that some time after the arrival of cinema, everyone lost control of their gestures—that “ataxia, tics, and dystonia had become the norm.” His words evoke the current “overdiagnosis” of autism and the tendency to see signs of autism all around, in social behavior, computing skills, or how we behave with our screens. For example: →.

Janet Gurney, conversation with author. Gurney is a close associate of Phoebe Caldwell and director of the London-based charity Us in a Bus, whose therapists use Intensive Interaction and other methods of nonverbal communication with people on the autistic spectrum and people with learning difficulties.

Description of a scene from the DVD Autism and Intensive Interaction: Using Body Language to Reach Children on the Autistic Spectrum, by Phoebe Caldwell with Matt Hoghton and Penny Mytton, (Jessica Kingsly Publishers, 2010), 75 mins.

Phoebe, conversation with author, 2018, about her methods in the scene described above.

“Mirroring behavior” is a term from developmental psychology. It refers to the playful preverbal interactions, using sounds and gestures, between an infant and a parent or caregiver. It is seen as an essential stage in the interrelated processes of individuation and language development. See, for example, Daniel Stern’s study of infant development, which was groundbreaking at the time of its publication in 1985: The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Basic Books).

Phoebe, conversation with author, February 2016.

Phoebe, citing a friend who is on the autistic spectrum, in her book Hall of Mirrors, Shards of Clarity: Autism, Neuroscience and Finding a Sense of Self (Pavilion Publishers, 2017), 8.

In Always More Than One, Erin Manning draws on research into preverbal infants and their unbounded state of bodily and subjective openness (to environment, to parent/carer), questioning the cultural preoccupation with the individual and advocating a process of individuation that is much more about being in relation (with others). Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke University Press, 2012).

Christoph Berton still lives with Gisèle Durand and Jacques Lin and figures in my installation Balayer – A Map of Sweeping. See the image at the start of this essay, a video still that shows Christoph using a pen to make marks on a piece of paper as he listens to the sound his pen makes.

For example, the strip lighting used in most schools and care homes interferes with the cognitive processing of many autistic people, causing their vision to fragment and making it hard to focus.

Phoebe, Hall of Mirrors, Shards of Clarity, 12.

Donna Williams, cited in Phoebe, Hall of Mirrors, Shards of Clarity, 36.

Phoebe, conversation with author, February 2017. Phoebe advised the mother to speak in a natural tone instead of her special voice. The boy’s table-jumping stopped immediately and he was able to stop wearing the helmet he had been using for several years.

Phoebe, conversation with author at Phoebe’s home in Settle, Yorkshire, 2017. The passage is part of the voiceover in my video (Phoebe) note towards a future work (2017).

The video is from Phoebe’s personal archive.

Phoebe, conversation with author, Settle, Yorkshire, 2017. Part of the voiceover in my video (Phoebe) note towards a future work.

Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 53. In the context of theater, free improvisation is an approach to improvisation developed in the 1950s and ’60s by the director Peter Brooke, to achieve the closest attunement between actors and open up new dimensions of relation between them and with audiences.

The Indian screen-music composer Mani Kaul made a comparison between the role of rules in improvised Indian raga music and the role of rules in spoken language. “I am speaking English, my second language. I have no idea what I am going to say next and nor do you. I am improvising. But the moment I make a mistake, you will know it.” From a lecture delivered at the School of Sound, South Bank Centre, London, June 2000.

Phoebe, conversation with author. Duende is “a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with flamenco,” according to Wikipedia →. Federico Garcia Lorca said that “all arts are capable of duende, but where it finds its greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die and open their contours against an exact present.” “Play and Theory of the Duende,” lecture delivered in Buenos Aires, 1933.

Phoebe, in numerous conversations and publications.