feel tank

After three years, I feel like this blog is looping endlessly, on a one-track meditation. I know I’m pushing it, but we’re back to what I had to say about Solaris, yet again (sorry, I re-watched Soderbergh’s version on the weekend):

Perhaps the unexplained heavenly body that is Solaris is really like a dense point in a crystal solution of our ideas about sociality. When humans are introduced to that space, our loving memory of the gesture cannot help but solidify and grow like crystals at that point. In a sensory deprivation tank, we float in salty water to re-experience the womb, to put the ego to rest, to temporarily re-establish the polymorphous. Perhaps Solaris is an unabashedly “mutant womb”, a critical, concretising tank of solution that perversely builds (inter-)personality-simulations as a dramatic theatre of the social, a testing ground for social models, a prototyping space. “Hard fax” tanks, in which actual 3D objects can be reproduced by congealing a solution via the intersection of lasers, are now a reality, and are employed in real prototyping processes.

It’s thus with great excitement (via my tendency to take metaphors and puns literally) that I’ve discovered Feel Tank Chicago, a surrealist political experiment that Lauren Berlant is involved in. From the Manifesto:

Feel Tank Chicago seeks to understand the economic and the nervous system of contemporary life; to feel the risk of unlearning the taken for granted and the risk of reclaiming optimism. We are interested in the potential for “bad feelings” like hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, fear, numbness, despair and ambivalence to constitute and be constituted as forms of resistance. While we are all too aware of how the state and the media mobilize and manipulate emotions to produce a loyal citizenry and prosecute the “war on terrorism,” we are also critical of the ways in which the left and social movements relegate emotions to the so-called “private” or “individual” sphere. In opposing the facile splitting of thinking and feeling, we are for a pedagogy of complex feelings, for a surrealist and imaginative politics that embraces ambivalence, the ridiculous, and the raw.

[ tags: affect, citizenship, film, lauren-berlant, politics, public-sphere, solaris, stanislaw-lem, steven-soderbergh ]