notes while listening/reading:
- roland noted that freud noted that all religion is rooted in mysticism or oceanic feeling
- freud thinks it is difficult to undertake a scientific study of feeling - he cant perceive it within himself but can see it in others
- freud says that OF looks back at a time when "ego included everything" - during infancy

- kristeva: "she describes the oceanic as a depressive denial, a form of symbolic suicide, and a “fantasy of untouchable fullness” that “leads the subject to commit suicide without anguish of disintegration, as a reuniting with archaic non-integration, as lethal as it is jubilatory, ‘oceanic’"
- kristeva relates feminine melancholia with the "lethal" ocean
- maternal and threatening // and requiring paternal intervention
- kristeva: OF is a premature death, paradoxically a preemptive defence against death
- kristeva: OF is the prereligious need to "believe"
- "The capacity to “name” the experience ensures that the oceanic does not become a “catastrophic” dissolution of the self (thus, writing can also be a way to manage the oceanic)."
- "Perhaps, rather than trying to purge, disavow, avoid, or control, the “traumatic excitation” of ocean feeling, it makes more sense to dwell in it, to silence the repulsive dread of maternal suffocation, to inhabit the feeling (getting filled-up and blissed-out) knowing full well that on the other side of the experience lies an opportunity to assimilate the gift (of direct knowledge of the space beyond and outside the ego) by processing and naming it (in psychoanalysis or through artistic creation and other acts of sublimation)."

- spinoza's ethics inspired roland's conception of the OF due a to a mystical experience R had
- "While Kristeva relates oceanic feeling to melancholia (and feminine melancholia in particular), Rolland—perhaps drawing on Spinoza’s affective philosophy—relates oceanic feeling to joy. This is a significant distinction because, for Spinoza, the ‘sad passions’ (what we might call depression or melancholia) decreases a body’s capacity to act, whereas joy enhances it. Thus we might distinguish between Kristeva’s morbid oceanic and Rolland’s vitalist oceanic"
- spinoza equates natures to god

- "But if we concede that communism failed, perhaps it is not due to a failure to figure out the best possible social and economic modes of organization, but because we didn’t have the affective and imaginative resources to even begin to envision a mode of existence centered on connectedness over differentiation."

- affective state (definition): This term refers to the experience of feeling the underlying emotional state. The description often distinguishes between the more diffused longer term experiences (termed moods) and the more focused short term experiences (termed emotions).

- “We form constellations. Our bodies are never isolated, are always enmeshed in shifting patterns of relations. Scattered across space, our selves form patterns, trace connections ethical but unseen. They give us consistency and form outside of our solitude. When we make our connections material, our constellations take shape, become tactile, make worlds” (Friendship 62).
- communal living and its impact on a realisation that the self can rarely be understood in isolation

- moten: similar to freud and roland's take on OF
- blackness is connected to and produced by the ocean
- blackness/OF are connected to the maternal but doesn't frame it as threatening like Kristeva
- "the sea unsettles being" and is linked to slavery
- the sea = passage of ontological rupture
- blackness is not fixed to a particular landbase like OF//marked by dislocation
- "For Moten blackness is also an ejection from the symbolics of legitimate personhood. Thus blackness is an uncoded zone of being that exist outside the arena of social recognition."
- "undercommon sociality" = the condition of possibility for the creation of insurgent black social life
- Moten: It’s terrible to have come from nothing but the sea, which is nowhere, navigable only in its constant autodislocation. The absence of solidity seems to demand some other ceremony of hailing that will have been carried out on some more exalted frequency” (“Blackness and Nothingness” 744).
- citizen of the sea = being stateless // "We study our seaborne variance, sent by its prehistory into arrivance without arrival, as a poetics of lore, of abnormal articulation, where the relation between joint and flesh is the pleated distance of a musical moment that is emphatically, palpably imperceptible and, therefore, exhausts description. "


- OF can be source of creation
- activities to induce OF: meditation, rhythmic breathing, psychedelic drugs, participating in a riot, fasting, sleep-deprivation, tantric sex, BDSM play, chanting, emotional pain and grief, physical pain, exercise, prayer, music, experiences of collective euphoria and any number of other activities that push one to a threshold state of consciousness.
- talks about the impact of trauma on a person's perception of the self // "The linking of trauma to oceanic feeling might support the idea that oceanic feeling is a kind of manic defense against pain. However, even if this were the case, it still might (paradoxically) also be true that the oceanic is a source of ecstatic joy: a kind of terrible gift."

by Jackie Wang

* somehow, partially consumed in all 3

Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect

reflection/thoughts:
I caught myself connecting Wang's text/presentation to two things:

1/ Experiences that induce an exploration of the vastness within a self. Here I will mainly be referring to a previous project of mine, "Intimate Immensity", wherein I wrote/researched how mixed reality and immersive art create embodied experiences that induce moments of contemplation that inadvertently blur the boundaries between the participant's inner and outer world. The central text of this thesis (and the consequent installation I made) was text taken from "The Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard wrote about several examples taken from poetry which illustrate the correlation between space and self. I noted that although both the inner and outer worlds consume us simultaneously, it is the inner world that can be controlled by us with conviction rather than the outer. This can lead to an expansion of the inner self and a more distinct sense of self. But although I started my writing/research into this topic by focusing on physical isolation, I was soon exposed to the notion that seeing oneself in connection with another can provide strong moments of self-perception too. It is through our connections with the outer world + others, that we refine that deep sense of self, by exposing it to the differences and similarities between us and others. "Our bodies are never isolated, are always enmeshed in shifting patterns of relations. Scattered across space, our selves form patterns, trace connections ethical but unseen. They give us consistency and form outside of our solitude. When we make our connections material, our constellations take shape, become tactile, make worlds”. For me, it is in this notion of connection, constellation, that I perceive the jubilatory, vitalist oceanic feeling Wang writes about.

2/ Core-core, a recent TikTok trend that essentially deals with users looking in on themselves within the construct of TikTok. The title refers to previous trends that have been titled "___"-core based on whatever it is at the centre of it. This trend/movement which truly took off in early 2023, has resulted in several video art (I'd call them art - because why not) works on the platform each presenting a collage of (most often) archival material showing the sheer visual, material saturation that exists on this platform while also displaying the morbid realities of our world today. It can be seen as provocative in some ways. And like most things on this app, it is also a call for reaction - whatever that may be for each of us. I found myself thinking of this trend while hearing/reading Wang talks about Kristeva's view of the Ocean Feeling as a morbid, melancholic feeling. "Kristeva’s oceanic is a kind of premature death that is paradoxically a preemptive defense against death." This is how I see core-core as well. It is an attempt to address or act against the saturation of the platform while employing the same saturation/exaggeration to invoke an out-of-body(or out-of-phone/TikTok) feeling in us - forcing us to zoom out of that little rectangle and reconvene with our selves, in our physicality with others rather than the virtuality of our presence as seen there. But to be honest, when I see content like this on the app, I'm usually mystified by the feeling that this app has given people the space to hold their sense of self quite strongly (even if some of it is just fabricated, false) as opposed to some other social media platforms today. I often see more self-assertive, self-localising conversations about issues related to the social, cultural and political fabric of our world there than on other platforms. "The capacity to “name” the experience ensures that the oceanic does not become a“catastrophic” dissolution of the self" (Wang).