Paper at ‘Composing (with) Systems’ conference - March ‘25

I’m excited to be appearing on a panel at the ‘Composing (with) Systems’ conference at the end of this month. Abstract below!

Feeling and Composing (in) a World-as-Systems — some Psychoanalytic Reflections

This paper develops an interpretative orientation towards composing (with) systems. I argue that what is often undertheorised is the affective dimension of systems — how they feel. By addressing this oversight, I suggest we can come to better understand what composing (with) systems means in today’s world.

This affective focus moves us to reflect on how the ever-changing systems that define contemporary life — for instance in its digital and ecological mediations — evoke layered feelings including anxiety, dependence, wonder, and bewilderment. This focus enables us to rethink composing (with) systems, as a set of practices that navigate feelings about living in a contemporary world often understood itself to be composed of complex, interconnected systems — a world-as-systems.

I propose that psychoanalytic cultural theory is well placed to provide the terms for this methodological reflection. By way of example, I outline three modes by which composing (with) systems can be understood to negotiate aspects of felt experience of our world-as-systems.

Taking inspiration from psychoanalysts such as Donald Winnicott (and more recently Adam Blum), the first concerns bodies, and what it means for embodied beings to live through and enliven systems that are often articulated abstractly, in both compositional and everyday contexts. Second, performance today often speaks to transformative interrelationships between self and other, for instance where the self is extended technologically or distributed ecologically. Systems can create conditions of intimacy yet also afford structures for making work that can point towards depersonalisation (here Jacques Lacan and Theodor W. Adorno might be helpful) — such as where one prescribes a process that generates compositional material. Third, recalling the aesthetic concept of the sublime, contemporary systems’ global scale can induce feelings of awe. In this last aspect they approach what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls the “unthought known” — that which is in one sense known yet which is not consciously thinkable. In composing (with) systems, one paradoxically sees this systemic sublime registered yet also made manageable, through its delineation within the boundaries of the “artwork”.

In short, this paper outlines paths of critical reflection about what happens when — and why — we compose (with) systems.