Instructions for literature and life: Writing-with landscape performances of joy

Abstract

Following an instructional mode I argue that writing is an activity that is practised, and that practice operates according to transversal relays between thinking and doing. Reformulating Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Literature and Life’ as an instruction manual composed of eleven steps, a reading is undertaken of the landscape encounters of the artist-architect Margit Brünner. Brünner places an emphasis on the intimate and reciprocal passage between affecting and being affected, and how this produces either a diminution or increase of joys relative to sadnesses. These movements and transitions of a life create what Brünner calls atmospheres, thereby calling attention to the deep imbrication of h..