The Adventitious Subject

We picture creation as the treatment of a subject by a form chosen to serve it. Against this picture, I would like to construct a concept, the “adventitious subject”. The subject of a work is not sown in advance by the artist; it comes up in the handling of a material, it recognises itself after the fact, and it is made of the bonds it weaves between us.

“Which subjects suit virtual reality?”

When people ask me about virtual reality, the question almost always arrives in this form. Are there subjects that lend themselves better to immersion than to flat film, things that could only be told inside a headset? For a long time I found this question interesting, and I can no longer ask it that way, because it rests on a picture of creative work that matches neither what I experience when I create nor what I observe in others.

This picture holds that there is, on one side, a subject, something to say, and on the other, techniques, materials and apparatuses whose role is to treat that subject as well as possible. One would choose the form the way one chooses a tool from a box, according to the task at hand, and the work would already exist before being made, in the shape of an intention that fabrication merely embodies. A decade or so ago, when I began working with small 360° cameras, I still half believed it, and I searched through books for the new narrative grammar that this spherical image was, I thought, bound to demand.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in What Is Philosophy? (1991), define philosophy as the activity of creating concepts. A concept, for them, does not fall from the sky, and it does not merely name something that already existed. It is constructed in response to a problem that forces us to think, it has components that hold together, and it bears the signature of the person who made it, as the cogito bears Descartes’s or duration bears Bergson’s. The problem that forces me to think is this picture of the subject coming first and the form second, which organises discourses on creation and funding applications even though it does not describe what happens when one creates. I would like to construct here the concept that answers this problem, which I propose to call the adventitious subject. But a concept is not made in a vacuum; one must first establish where the picture to be replaced comes from, and what experience the concept feeds on.

Simondon’s brick, seen from outside the workshop

The picture of a subject treated by a form has a long philosophical history. It is the hylomorphic scheme, given its classic formulation by Aristotle, according to which every thing results from the meeting of a form and a matter. The sculptor imposes the form of the statue on the bronze, and from this couple the object is born. Aristotle himself thought of matter as potentiality rather than as pure passivity, but the tradition retained the scheme in its simple version, where form is active and matter docile, and it is in this version that it served for centuries to think fabrication in general, then the work of art in particular, where the subject, the idea, the intention occupy the place of form, and techniques that of matter.

Gilbert Simondon criticised it in his 1958 thesis, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, starting from the simplest example there is, the moulding of a brick. The mould seems to impose its form on a passive clay, but this clay has been extracted, crushed, moistened, kneaded at length, and it arrives at the mould bearing properties that make the taking of form possible, so that the mould acts only by leaning on them. The taking of form is a joint operation, in which what we called matter and what we called form meet halfway, and Simondon names this operation individuation, of which the individual, the brick, the statue, the work, is only the result. He adds that the hylomorphic scheme corresponds to the point of view of the person who stays outside the workshop and sees only what goes in and what comes out. The person who works inside the workshop never experiences things that way.

Deleuze and Guattari extended this critique in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), where the artisan is described as the one who follows a matter in movement, a bearer of singularities, the fibres and knots of wood for instance, instead of imposing on it a form conceived in advance; following matter in this way is, they write, “intuition in action”. This lineage shows that philosophy has already disarmed, at the level of the fabrication of things, the scheme that discourses on art keep applying to the fabrication of works. The production dossier of a film is written from outside the workshop; it presents a subject, then the means required to treat it, because that is the language funding institutions demand. What the person making the film experiences belongs to another logic.

Films that must be watched twice

With three classes of secondary-school pupils from the Lyon metropolitan area, we made films in virtual reality. The 360-degree camera films everything around itself, which turns the shooting space into a theatre stage where there is nowhere to hide. Out of this constraint, and not out of a subject decided in advance, forms invented themselves. In several films, a scene plays out in front of the camera while a narrator, placed behind it, recounts what is happening. The spectator, inside the headset, can watch the scene, or turn around and watch the person speaking, the two coexisting in space. These are films made to be seen twice, once from each side, and the very idea that they must be seen twice is part of the proposition.

This form was not deduced from a subject. It was born of what the camera allowed and of what the pupils tried by placing their bodies in space, and it was only afterwards, watching together what had been made, that one could begin to talk about what these films were saying. There were subjects, but they had come in a second moment, carried by the form, revealed by it. The same goes, on an entirely different scale, for cinema itself, whose inventors had not perceived that it would serve to tell stories; it was uses, attempts and diversions that brought out, after the fact, what this technique had to say.

The knot in the wood that invites the hand

The sculptor working a piece of wood encounters knots, which they had not foreseen and cannot ignore, because the material resists at that spot, deflects the gouge, proposes a direction, and what they discover while carving was written nowhere before the gesture. These knots are what Deleuze and Guattari call singularities, and the sculpture born of them is not the realisation of a project; it is the path the hand found by following them. Alain observed this as early as 1920 in his Système des beaux-arts, where he writes that artists only know what they want to make by making it, that the idea comes to them as they make, sometimes even afterwards, and that they are thus the first spectators of their own work being born. What Alain observed, Luigi Pareyson made the heart of an entire philosophy in his Aesthetics. Theory of Formativity, published in 1954. He calls “formativity” this making that invents its way of making while making, and he shows that the artist has no rule prior to the work, because each work is the rule of its own fabrication, a rule that is only discovered by fabricating.

One will object the great planned works, those that demand years of writing and organisation. But those subjects too were born somewhere, in an image glimpsed on waking or a note taken while walking, and these moments themselves belong to a confrontation with a material, which is the material of thought. Thinking is a material activity, made of chemical and electrical reactions in a brain, itself shaped by the gestures of a lifetime. André Leroi-Gourhan showed in Gesture and Speech that the hand was never the mere executor of the brain and that it is by making that humans learned to think, and Tim Ingold extended this intuition by describing the potter who discovers their gesture while shaping the clay. I have often called on them, and it seems to me that one must follow what they tell us all the way. If thought itself takes shape in gesture and in matter, then there exists no place, not even the artist’s interiority, where a subject could pre-exist the test of a material. The idea that comes on waking is already the product of a handling, the one the brain performed during the night on the material of our experiences.

The adventitious subject

I can now construct the concept. Descartes, in the third of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), distinguishes three kinds of ideas: those born with us, which he calls innate, those we fabricate ourselves, which he calls factitious, and those that come to us from outside, which he calls adventitious. The word also has a botanical sense, where an adventitious plant is one that comes up in a field where it was never sown. I propose to say that the subject of a work is adventitious, in both senses at once. It is not innate, deposited in the artist’s interiority awaiting expression, and it is not factitious either, fabricated at will the way one executes a plan. It comes from outside, and it comes up in a field that had been prepared for something else, the field of the apparatuses and materials one felt like working with.

The concept, however, displaces what it borrows from Descartes, and this displacement is its condition. For Descartes, the outside faces a mind that is separate from it. The adventitious subject, for its part, can only be drawn on a plane, in the sense Deleuze gives this word, where thought and matter are continuous, the plane that Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan and Ingold each established in their own way, so that the outside from which the subject comes also passes through our own body, through our hands, through the chemistry of our brain. This is why the concept has three components, which hold together and none of which sums it up.

The first of these components is handling, and I have already described it without naming it. The subject comes in the handling of the object, because one thinks differently when one handles. The hand that follows the knot in the wood, the pupils’ bodies finding their place within the sphere of the camera, do not translate an already formed thought; they think, and they think things that seated thought would not have reached.

Next comes the after-the-fact. The adventitious subject only recognises itself retrospectively, in the time of looking at what has been made. Psychoanalysis knows this movement well; Freud named it Nachträglichkeit, which English renders as afterwardsness or deferred action, the way an event only takes on its meaning in the light of what follows it. The pupils’ films had subjects, but those subjects only became legible at the screening, together, and cinema as a whole only learned what it had to say by watching itself work for years.

The third component, the weave, is the one by which the concept parts ways with all formalism. The subject that comes up in this way is not just anything. What reveals itself in handling and in the after-the-fact is the matrix of our existence, the fabric of the bonds between us. Simondon says that individuation is never completed in the individual and that it continues in the collective, which he calls the transindividual, and the individuation of the work likewise continues beyond the object. Handling first connects us to ourselves, because it makes us think differently, and it is by this detour that we become able to weave bonds with others, looking together at what has emerged and recognising in it something of our lives.

From these three components follows the concept’s central proposition. There is no difference in nature between a subject and its form, because what we call subject and what we call form are two abstractions taken after the fact, from outside the workshop, from one and the same operation, the individuation of the work. To ask which subjects suit a given technique is to ask which form suits which form, or which subject suits which subject; the question comes undone as soon as it is asked from inside the workshop.

What we expect from a show, what we live through in a performance

A concept is judged by what it allows us to think, and this one first sheds light, it seems to me, on a difference that contemporary art has worked on without always naming it, the difference between performance and the show. A show presents itself as a finished form, a subject treated by a form, and that is also what the audience expects of it; people come to see the result of an individuation accomplished elsewhere and beforehand, a subject already stabilised. A performance invites something else. It announces itself as experimental, as lived, and the person attending it is no longer quite a spectator; they are a participant in an individuation under way, in a subject still adventitious, coming up before their eyes and partly thanks to their presence. Erika Fischer-Lichte, in Ästhetik des Performativen (2004, translated into English as The Transformative Power of Performance), describes the performative work as an event rather than as an object carrying meanings to be deciphered, an event produced by the co-presence of the bodies of everyone there, where what the spectators do, their reactions, their movements, feeds back into what the performers do, in a loop that makes each realisation unique. What makes art, in reception, then shifts from the object to the shared experience, and we find again what John Dewey established as early as 1934 in Art as Experience, where the work does not reside in the object but in what it makes us live. Performance, in this sense, offers the audience the position Alain reserved for the artist, that of first spectator of a work being born.

The way Pippo Delbono creates his shows demonstrates that this logic can inhabit theatre itself. Delbono has been working since the early 1980s with the same company, whose members are not all professional actors. Bobò, deaf and mute, met in 1995 at the psychiatric hospital of Aversa where he had spent more than forty years, became a central figure of the company. The shows do not start from a text; the text is often written afterwards. They are born of improvisations in rehearsal spaces, of chance, of someone walking in at a given moment, and the sequences are then composed like a score. The force of these shows, which seems almost magical to anyone discovering them, comes, to my mind, from the fact that their subject remained adventitious to the end, sprung from the very material of theatre, bodies gathered on a stage, without ever having been sown.

The script written for the funders

The same concept brings into view what is at stake in the economy of creation. When someone carries a project that demands a lot of funding, a large crew, heavy technical means, we say they have a story to tell and need these means to tell it. I believe it is often the other way round, and I say this without any contempt, for myself as much as for others. The first desire is for the crew, the apparatus, the material to handle, and the subject is constructed afterwards, because a script must be written in order to deploy these means and obtain this funding. There are filmmakers who love working with actors, others who love working on sets, others who hold to a particular crew because they know what that collective can produce. A studio, a film crew are materials in the same way as the potter’s clay, and the comfort one finds in them is akin to the sculptor’s with their piece of wood. It is in the projection of these means, or in living them out when they are more modest, that the subject discovers and refines itself. Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he preferred adapting mediocre books, because they left him room to forge the cinematic object, whereas a literary masterpiece is already complete.

This reversal locks no one into poverty of means, and there is no hierarchy in which certain subjects would demand certain means. Chris Marker’s La Jetée, in 1962, is made almost entirely of still photographs, and it is a major work of science fiction, in the history of cinema and beyond. One can make science fiction with a single character speaking to the camera, and let the images be born in the spectators’ minds; that is an aesthetic, not a fallback.

There remains the script, which was indeed written, and which the funding obtained through it has made sacrosanct. The hylomorphic language of institutions has turned an adventitious subject into an official one. Giorgio Agamben, in Profanations (2005), calls profanation the gesture that returns to common use, and first of all to play, what had been separated and made sacred. The shoot, to my mind, demands that gesture. The script must be profaned, returned to play, so that the encounter with the material of the shoot, the actors, the light, the places, the accidents, can re-establish the bond and let the subject become again what it had never ceased to be, a plant coming up where no one had sown it.

Preparing oneself to make, rather than preparing the object

This concept has, finally, a consequence for the way I approach creation, and the way I teach it. If the subject is adventitious, the essential thing is not to prepare the object in advance; it is to prepare the field and to prepare oneself to make, to enter a state, mental and physical, sometimes close to trance, in which one becomes capable of welcoming what presents itself and of making something of it in the moment. That is why I always arrive with more equipment than necessary, ready to change direction if something presents itself. The question, then, is not which subjects suit virtual reality, or any other technique. The question is to experiment, to play, and then to look, together, at what has come up, and at what it speaks of.