The Persistent Smile of the Cheshire Cat: Explorations in the Agency of Matter Through Art-Making

Questions about the material nature of discursive practices seem to hang in the air like the persistent smile of the Cheshire cat. (Barad, 2007, p. 64)

In this paper, I am thinking ahead of what I know how to think. I am playing at the deconstructive edge of the language/matter binary, exploring the materiality of concepts, and the agency of matter. I am playing with the interconnected agencies of organic and inorganic matter through my own encounter with art-making. Through that art-making, I explore my own past-present-future response-ability in its emergent intra-action with the agentic materiality of the uncanny “thing” that emerged in an entanglement with art-making.

Through art, Deleuze suggests, and through literature, lines of flight may open up that are not otherwise readily accessible through the conceptual tools of philosophy and social science. Philosophy and art work on different planes, each is capable of creation, the work of the artist is to create “affects or sensations on the plane of composition” (Uhlmann, 2009, p. 60). Through my art-making, in this project, I return to “the ligaments of power, sentiment, and moral conduct that constitute the heaving form of the social body” (Luxon, 2016, p. 2), as I experienced them, in one particular moment, in 1970, in the days after my husband died. That moment, which is only past in a linear conception of time, is still present in new materialist terms, where space and time and matter are mutually enfolded and enfolding. What comes to matter about the past changes in yet-to-come emplacements, and with shifts in what is being made to matter:

the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold; the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering. (Barad, 2014, p. 181)

Linear time is disrupted in new materialist thought, as is the individualized, essentialized humanist subject. My project here draws on what is called in everyday terms “my experience,” but it is not my possession alone; the thing we name “I” is not separate from the world but of the diffractive spacetimemattering of the world. As Barad says, “we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity . . . we are part of that nature we seek to understand” (Barad, 2003, p. 828). “‘Humans’ do not simply assemble different apparatuses for satisfying particular knowledge projects but are themselves specific local parts of the world’s ongoing reconfiguring” (Barad, 2003, p. 829, emphasis added). Being intra-actively of the world, always becoming, there can be, she says, “no ‘I’ that exists outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story” (Barad, 2014, p. 181).

Although I set out to tell you a story here that is personal, in the process of telling the story, I am inevitably re-patterning and re-configuring not only what might be understood as “myself,” but “what happened” will shift also as it is dispersed and diffracted through the processes of art-making. The “I” that writes here is of the diffraction pattern, it “is not me alone and never was, that is [it is] always already multiply dispersed and diffracted through spacetime(mattering) . . . in its ongoing being-becoming” (Barad, 2014, pp. 181-182).

The encounter with art-making that I work with here begins with a memory from the days after my marriage ended in 1970. That ending took place on the cusp of a social revolution so far-reaching that people born in subsequent decades can find it hard to imagine the time before now—even though that past time goes on iteratively re-working itself in the present and the future.

This project emerged in my involvement in Jody Thomson’s research into the experience of art therapists working with people who are dying. What does the art-making actually do, we asked. How is it material in the dying process? Jody nominated as the trigger question for the two of us to work with in this exploration of the agency of art-making, “first memory of someone close to me dying.”

That trigger question involved me in a re-turn to my husband’s death. Not a return, but a re-turn, in which the ethico-onto-epistemology of that past placetime would open up, and change, in surprising and unexpected ways. Even of a particle of light, Barad says, “it is possible to not merely change what it will have done after the fact but to change who/what it will have been, that is, its very ontology” (Barad, 2014, p. 180). So it is, with this re-turning, to a particular death.

My husband, Larry, killed himself when I was 25 and he was 29, and the children were 4, 2, and 1. I have continuing nightmares still, almost 50 years later; a nightmare of stabbing him, of a mattress filled with blood, of both escaping and accepting my fate as the guilty one; a nightmare in which he kills our children and then me. He was, in Cixous’s sense, my “best known unknown thing.” When we write, Cixous says, or make works of art,

We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. . . . Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. (Cixous, 1993, p. 38)

And so I set out not knowing where I was going, open to the possibility of coming to know differently through an encounter with/in an experience of art-making. In entering into an encounter with art-making, I was not setting out, then, to represent the already known, but to open myself up to the unknown, to an encounter with the uncanny:

[The text or art work] slides a few roots under the ground while it allows another to be lifted in the air. What in one figure appears a figure of science seems later to resemble some type of fiction . . . [like Hamlet] reading in a book about himself while noticing that memory, in retrospect, serves as prophecy. (Cixous, 1976, p. 526)

I have re-visited my marriage many times, in writing, in the years since it ended. I wrote, for example, to Jonathan in Plateau 4 of our book Deleuze and Collaborative Writing:

The way I experience my life can’t be disentangled from my marriage or Larry’s death. And his death can’t be disentangled from his marriage to me. We were in a sense each other’s problem, where a “problem is life’s way of responding to or questioning what is not itself” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 21). Just as a tree meets the problem of the large rock underneath it by growing roots around it, so my life has grown around the large immovable rock of an impossible, fatal task that was set for me and that I willingly took up. [My husband and I and the prison system] were coimplicated in the storyline that said if only I could love well enough, he could heal. The problem I took on was to love well enough. I wrapped my life around it, and the lives of my children, for five terrible years . . . . (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, & Davies, 2011, pp. 128-129) (see Figure 1)

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Figure 1.

Roots and a rock.

The language, as it took shape and meaning in the words that flowed between me and Jonathan, on that plateau, was physical and emotional. His words back to my account of Larry’s life made me weep each time I read them. We were both deeply affected by the words that moved between us. Our words were not incorporeal; they were not abstractions, drifting in the ether, but materially connected and connecting—not just the smile, you might say, but the body of Alice’s cat.

And so, in this exploration of the question of what the art-making does, I found myself in my kitchen setting out to explore my first memory of the death of an intimate other, not through words this time, but through color and images. My kitchen is not immediately obvious as a space that might invite the chaos that followed. It is, rather, an orderly space, but that orderliness held me safe while I engaged in what became a chaotic intra-action between my body and the uncanny materiality of the art-work, where the art-work came toward me, unexpectedly (Cixous, 1976) (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

My kitchen.

As it happened, I had just bought a new pair of sneakers, which came in a mundane but somehow beautiful box. As I turned it over and over, I realized it was an inviting play of surfaces to work with. It had a beautifully hinged lid that made it different from other boxes. I placed it on my kitchen table to ponder what I might do with it.

The encounter with the box took place over three days. Each morning, when I rose from sleep, the box would draw me to it, and compel me to keep intra-acting with it throughout the day; over those three days, the box and I were entangled, affecting each other and being affected. Ryan (2017) says, “Artists change what they see and are changed by what they make, nothing is actually immutable, nothing sits still . . .” (np). I would not call myself an artist, by any stretch of the imagination, but that process of mutual change is what I was stumbling into.

The trigger question had taken me straight to a night 47 years ago:

I was driving home in the car in which my husband had killed himself. I had wanted nothing to do with that car. It horrified me to sit where he had sat when he died. But my brother-in-law insisted that I keep it; and so I found myself driving through pelting rain, so thick I could barely see through the windscreen. The dark, rain-blanketed night was spasmodically ruptured with bolts of lightning and cracks of thunder so loud that the car shook. Out of one of those explosive bolts a terrifying black shape catapulted out of the sky toward me, as if it would break through the windscreen. I swerved across the road, and it missed.

So he could return, I thought, even after death, and finish off the job he hadn’t managed to complete.

In an individualizing, pathologizing reading of human subjectivity, this memory—the fact that I remember it at all, and that it still affects me—can be read as a failure on my part to “let the past go.” But in a new materialist framing of subjectivity, memory is much more than the individual who holds on to it. Memory, Barad says, is “the pattern of sedimented unfoldings of iterative intra-activity—[and] is written into the fabric of the world. The world ‘holds’ the memory of all traces, or rather, the world is its memory (enfolded materialization)” (Barad, 2014, p. 182). She goes on,

To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that “we” are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come. (Barad, 2014, p. 182)

My art-making, then, was one such opening—to the indeterminacy of what was to come.

I wanted to paint the box a mystical, cerulean blue; the kind of blue you sometimes find in Japanese woodcuts and in tropical oceans, a blue that might, in Yeats’s words, sing peace into my breast (Yeats, 1889). I wanted my box to be a thing of beauty—not of horror.

I painted layer after layer of paint onto the box in search of that mystical blue. The inside I painted red. I wasn’t thinking of my nightmare of the blood-filled mattress; rather, the image of a blood red interior simply inserted itself into the assemblage that was emerging on my kitchen table. I painted it so feverishly that there are spots of red blood still on my white kitchen wall. My kitchen table had become a place of chaos, of “material and organic uncertainty” (Grosz, 2008, p. 3).

I wanted to seal the box shut. I imagined painting a moreton bay fig on the top, whose powerful roots would grow around the box, down the side, closing over the joint between the lid and the box, sealing it forever (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Moreton bay fig roots.

I held tenaciously to that image over the rest of that first day, but eventually, I abandoned it. I couldn’t see how to realize what was in my mind’s eye. And anyway, the box was pressing me to attend to its interior.

I began to look for images that could be assembled in a découpage on both the interior and the exterior. My kitchen table was soon covered in a hundred images, or more, that were bidding for a place on or in the box. Luxon (2016, p. 3) describes découpage as “collages from found fragments of shames and secrets, woven into cries, traps, and intrigues—whose effects arise kaleidoscopically with each reader.”

Each time I looked for images in books and magazines, or sat in the kitchen staring at the ones I’d already cut out, I sank into a meditative space, without language and without intent. I felt like Herrigal’s archer, who waited years for the right way to release the bowstring “unintentionally.” In archery, “in the same way as a ripe fruit bursts its skin . . . the art cannot be learned unless the arrow ‘shoots itself’” (Watts, 1957, p. 195). And so I waited, without apparent intention, and without effort, for the images to find their place.

A Japanese woodcut, which expressed the transience of life—and the exquisite beauty of life that lies in its very transience—drew me again and again into that space of waiting. In zen philosophy, the petals falling from the tree, letting go of the blossom, are integral to the tree’s particular and intense beauty. That image found its way to the top of the box, so instead of roots sealing the box shut, I began with fragile blossoms emerging from a very old tree (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

The lid of the box.

Next to find their place were a group of images that evoked the intense fear of the young woman in the memory of the storm. Unlike in the memory, where she swerved to avoid the black shadow, this composition had the shadow entering her mouth. It was compelling to look at, yet monstrous in the intensity of fear it evoked. It now appeared so intense that I worried it would be too disturbing for anyone who might look at her. I pasted her onto the bottom of the box, so that only those who could bear to see her need be confronted by her fear. And some might miss it altogether if they didn’t turn the box over.

The black shadow that plummeted toward her was in the shape of a black bird.

It wasn’t until I showed the completed box to Jody that I realized the bird was flying out of her mouth, not into it, and that the name of the painting I had taken her from was The Exorcism. I had thought I was catching the moment in the storm, but the work itself emerged otherwise, as a release from the violence of the black shadow—an abjection of it. The box had been leaping ahead of the memory “unintentionally,” without me realizing it—playing “an active role in the workings of power” (Barad, 2007, p. 65), refusing the image of being destroyed by the black shape hurtling out of the storm (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

The young woman in the storm.

And so to the blood red interior, which pulled me inexorably toward itself, toward “understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable” (Cixous, 1993, p. 38).

The moreton bay fig whose roots had grown around the immovable rock of my marriage found its way onto the base of the interior; along with two black birds fighting, feathers flying, in a fight to the death; “there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). The box and “I” were indeterminate—with/in “the surprise, the interruption, by the stranger (within) returning unannounced” (Barad, 2014, p. 178) (see Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The inside base of the box.

We kept on going, the box and I; other images were added—a skull with a black bird sitting on top and a gnarled tree with that same bird sitting on it. Then a scattering of black feathers picked up on my walk around the harbor. The interior was becoming unbearable—raw, and messy, and violent—a violent struggle I could hardly bear to look at. The image of the fight to the death was unthinkable; yet the image had inserted itself; I had been compelled by it. The box was expressing the uncanny, the incomprehensible, and I was shaken by it, and entangled with it.

I wanted to escape. I pasted on the inside of the lid a photo I had taken of a black doorway, through the glass of which is the light-filled living room built by the brother of my Danish great grandmother. A window into a past/present/future—momentarily out of the unbearable chaos that we, the box and I, were creating (see Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

The window.

Again, I worried that the images on the interior base might be too much for any unsuspecting viewer—though in truth, it was I who could not bear to look at them. I made a false bottom, with a beautiful but clichéd image of a red poppy for remembrance, with the words of zen philosophy expressing the inevitable transience of life, as well as a similar concept from a scientific treatise on death (see Figure 8).

Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death. The word “apoptosis” is Greek in origin and refers to the “dropping off” of petals or leaves from plants. It does not involve external factors. Your cells are programmed to die; you will gradually decompose and melt back into nature, re-emerging as other forms of life. (Hillman, 2017, p. 76)

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Figure 8.

The false bottom.

With this protective coating, I had pulled myself out of the uncanny, and I felt it was done. I hadn’t obliterated the horror, but I had moved it out of sight of any but the most persistent viewer. I had multiplied the surfaces that were intra-acting with each other and with the memory of the young woman caught in the storm. Each new surface multiplied the complexity of that “best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch” (Cixous, 1993, p. 38).

But the box was not done with me. It kept pulling me back to it. Again and again I gazed at it, became re-absorbed by it. I had lived with the box and our chaos in my kitchen now for three days. Then suddenly, like one of those bolts of lightning that happen between electrically charged regions of a cloud and the ground, the storm of my three days of working with the box discharged itself, producing the image of a small gold box that would enclose one of the very rare photos of me with my husband and the three small children. In the gold box inside the blue box, he could be held safely, responsibly (see Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Larry and me and the children.

I covered over the mystical blue of the exterior with black paint. I left a gap into it at the back, resisting the total closure that the color of mourning might offer, allowing a little of the blue to remain.

Finally, both the box and I could let each other go, at least for the moment. Like ripening fruit that bursts its skin, it would continue to change as I went on to write about it, and to speak about it.

. . .

In subsequent weeks, I encountered two images of the face of a guard, in a formation with other guards, standing to protect the government of his country against the revolutionaries. ¹ His face showed first indifference toward the death of a rebel, and then contempt. The images demanded of the viewer to stand with the rebels against the guards and against their brutal indifference; yet I could not help wondering about that young man, and what that experience was of killing his own people and being unmoved by their deaths. How torn might he be, I wondered, and why do we not wonder about the experience of the guards? The borderlines are drawn, and the people on each side become intent upon their own survival—on their capacity to endure at the expense of those on the other side.

I continued over the next days to ponder that face, which had lodged itself vividly in my mind’s eye. With a shock, I realized it was my own face at the point of my husband’s death. I had endured, I was free, and I did not grieve his loss. And now the box had re-turned me, opening up the possibility of mourning, and of sorrow at a life lost to pain and violence, and given over to death. While I write these words, I am listening to the Beethoven piano sonatas that Larry used to play.

(In) Conclusion

In Barad’s words, “bodies are not simply in the world, but rather are engaged in a reconfiguration of what exists by intra-actively co-constituting the world. The dynamism of matter—human and non-human—brings forth new worlds” (Barad, 2007, pp. 54-55). The box holds the spacetimemattering of a life and a death, not representing it but co-implicated in it. In the encounter with the box, the box went ahead of me, taking me to where I could not yet go. It laid bare the way in which human subjects are always already “part of the substances, systems and becomings of the world” (Alaimo, 2014, p. 14), never floating free of the world, while in their very specificity, manifesting the systems and becomings of the world. Making a work of art is “neither internal nor external; rather it implicates, or folds in, the idea of that which creates with that which is created: the One expresses the many through being coimplicated (or interfolded) within them” (Uhlmann, 2009, p. 59).

The ligaments of power at that time were such that the world conspired with my husband to keep me and my children trapped with/in his control, and to keep him trapped in the isolation of his own profound unhappiness. This is not just my story; it is a story of entrapments in the workings of “the ligaments of power, sentiment, and moral conduct that constitute the heaving form of the social body” (Luxon, 2016, p. 2). Entrapments in repeated citations hold the social world in place and shut thought down. The inability to think outside those repetitions traps us inside a world created by our inability to think otherwise.

So what then can I say the art-making does? To begin with it makes a thing—an uncanny thing that has its own power. Things, Bennett says, are what we encounter when we give up our epistemological domination of objects through habituated practices of giving them names and identities. “Things on the other hand, . . . [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other . . . when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (Bennett, 2010, p. 2).

But art-making is about much more than its uncanny product. It is a doing in itself, an entanglement with the materiality of memory capable of shifting the world’s “pattern of sedimented unfoldings” (Barad, 2014, p. 182). Art-making works with the same power as dreams, and as poetry, opening up a space of knowing beyond what you already know how to think. It is not afraid of the uncanny, but welcomes it. It doesn’t reduce the world to binaries, such as guilty/not guilty, or to repetitive iterations of the same old stories with their individualistic tropes and moral judgments. “I was a victim” can become, instead, “I expel this horror from my body,” and “he was the aggressor” can become “this is someone whose image I can take care of, and for whom I can feel sorrow.” Art-making disperses and diffracts, opening a movement, making a place for the expression of the inexpressible to emerge, and for the taboo to find its place. It arranges the pieces of memory into a different (il)logic, and it communicates that different possibility to the viewer and to the art-maker. Art-making moves the art-maker toward itself in a series of emergent moments. It can take the art-maker, and the viewer, beyond individualistic tropes of “me” and “him,” or “me” versus “him,” to a glimpse of the spacetimemattering of social and material forces that impact on us all.

All of those elements of the art-making (not all of them always present) involve the art-maker in a re-turning—a turning again and a responding:

Responding—being responsible/response-able—to the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave is perhaps what re-turning is about. (Barad, 2014, p. 184)