For the "Something is Happening" conference last December, organized by Jordan Crandall and UCSD, I was asked us to create four short talks to be presented at different times during the span of a day in La Jolla -- at a park by the seaside, on the beach, at the Salk Institute, and others on a cliff overlooking the ocean as the night settled in.  The theme was affectual life.

Instead of quoting myself here, I thought I would tell you a bit about the thinking behind my presentations and my reaction to the event.

First off it was strange to be talking to an audience of people standing in the open air, not sitting in an enclosed space. For me this turns everything upside down, this standing up, yet I can’t figure out why. It surely connects speech, meaning intellectual, poetic, or academic, speechifying, with the posture of bodies. Yet how could that be? Aren’t talk and ideas separate from the listener’s posture?

Then there was the whisper of the wind and the play of the clouds participating in their unpredictable John Cage-ian way with the lofty ideas hurled at the universe. Never -- at least in my case -- have ideas had such a hard time of it and appeared so fragile and puny.  But when Lesley Stern and Al Lingis spoke, she in a bower and he with the surf crashing on his heels, then the symbiosis of nature with culture was heavenly precisely because of the precariousness.

I myself, at Jordan’s urging, tried to correlate my four presentations on affect with the time of day. I had initially begun with what I discern as the sadness of the late afternoon based on my memories of my mother and afternoons in Sydney where I grew up. Jordan persuaded me to change the order of presentation and keep this for the late afternoon, which happened to be on a cliff top overlooking the sun sinking into the Pacific. 

That correlation of affectuality with the movement of the sun has opened up a lot of new ideas for me. Some are grounded in high theory and culture, such as Benjamin’s Paris Arcades on the importance of awakening to dialectical thinking, the dialectical image, and indeed revolution -- as in waking up Europe from its dream sleep of the 19th century. Then there is Proust’s pervasive interest in the sleeping body combined with his emphasis on the ephemerality of affectual life. His writing on these topics is of course mind-blowing. 

But let us also open up new thoughts without the lifejacket of high theory. To me the discoveries were these. First the “magic hour” of filmmakers as pointed out to me by Marielle Nitoslawska when night meets day at dawn and dusk as the great moment for “dialectics.” And second the place of night terrors awakening the sleeper at 4:00 AM. Surely that is the privileged “moment” Benjamin should have focused on, and even more its connection to the “magic hour”?