I'm not there

In 2008, during a near fatal car accident, I sustained a very severe traumaticbrain injury, which left me physically and mentally paralysed. Drawing on theexperience of severe brain trauma, this writing explores the way that thebrain’s neuroplastic properties affect our subjective capacity to perceptuallyarchitect and move through the environments and events that unfold oursurrounding worlds.Intersecting traces of experience with medical records and ideas taken fromscience and critical theory, I embed theoretical ideas within a fragmentednarrative that recalls what it was like to person the world through a series ofunusual subjective atmospheres. Working through the conceptual offerings ofV.S Ramachandran, Norman Doidge, Shusaku Arakawa, Madeline Gins, GillesDeleuze, Felix Guattari and Catherine Malabou, one of the key contributions ofthis research is its conceptual development and articulation of proceduralsubjectivity.Procedural subjectivity is a concept that emerges through an evocation of theamorphous identities of Luella Kirn and Lucinda Mace, two characters whosepresence leaves its trace inside the writing, films and artworks I haveproduced since the moment of neurological trauma. These characters arepractical embodiments of the way that I came to understand, remember andrepresent my own subjectivity as I moved through a succession of severeneurological transformations. Embedded within different narratives,sequences and events, Luella and Lucinda are narrative versions of thedifferent variations of my own identity and a subjectivity that is activated by aneurological architecture that is constantly changing.Emerging from the development, rehearsal, directing and performing of thesetwo women, as well as an examination of ideas about neuroplasticity(Malabou 2010, p. 7) becoming (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) and proceduralarchitecture (Arakawa & Gins 2002) is the concept of procedural subjectivity.I use this term to refer to a subjective atmosphere that is constantlytransformed by a neurological becoming that is plastic and in constant flux.Expanding this conceptual framework, the project’s central question of howthe reconfiguring of a plastic neurological architecture might allow theorganism to cognitively experience the world through altered mechanisms ofmeaning, is embedded inside another question of how the plastic mutablitityof philosophical form allows the processes and findings of criticism to change.Drawing on the conceptual and aesthetic discoveries made while developingthe scripts and making the films that inform the concepts that uncovered bythis writing, I argue that a recasting of the mechanisms by which theory isproduced and received, enables a reworlding of the textual representation ofsubjective experience