Too much coffee this morning, after a night of reading the work of Henri Bergson. Bergson was a French philosopher who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson argued that the intuition is deeper than the intellect. His Creative Evolution (1907) and Matter and Memory (1896) attempted to integrate the findings of biological science with a theory of consciousness. Bergson’s work was considered the main challenge to the mechanistic view of nature. His work got me thinking about what ‘style’ is …
Style is sensation.
Style is full of memories where with the ‘immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experiences’ (Bergson, 1896).
Style is where a body’s local history is literally a history of locales.
Style is an ongoing moment of joining, disconnection and contingency involving past slides, glides, rides, waves, reefs, wind, hoots, and the like whereby this occurs simultaneously with the body’s present directionality, level, balance, and distance.
Style is not just about the past but also felt-anticipation of the virtual that is like a memory of the future (what is coming up).
Style is a rhythm, repertoire, catalogue, and complex formulae.
Style is certainly like a language or music.
Style is the moment where a surfer does not surf as if they are the origin of an effort but part of movement.
Style is always different – the hues are endless and transitory.
Style is also where we attempt to economise movement, for example in competition.
Style is a dynamic system where I don’t assume to know what it means or is capable of going (I cannot paddle into a wave knowing exactly how I’m going to ride it as the wave and my body affect each other, meaning my intended style is always compromised. An affective exchange occurs prior to my making sense of it or knowing what that action might communicate).
Style is where we adapt spontaneously with a wave because our body is used to feeling the dynamic affective exchange. The stylish surfer “becomes wave” rather than rides on a wave with a set bag of tricks. In becoming-wave a stylish surfer reveals a lack of uniform procedure or definitive meaning.
Style is where a body is not a personally remembered physical co-ordination but the adoption of randomness, where that randomness is an awareness of the body as communication, energy, relations, and movement.
Style is not mechanical but affective.
Style is an Albatross
Style is … when you don’t write such self-indulgent philosophy and just do it.
Hell, yeah.
Style is the music, the romance, the chemistry, the immeasurable, the unimagined, the heart, the risk, the humiliation, the success, the excess, the unnecessary, the self-indulgence and the icing on the cake.
Style holds you back and it sets you free.
Style isn’t only an Albatross… sometimes it’s an Albatross around our neck.
I think you might have been “becoming language” there for a few sentences, Clif.
damn, nice line Rebeccajane: ‘Style isn’t only an Albatross… sometimes it’s an Albatross around our neck’. I wish I had of thought of it