dear Sondra, thanks so much for your reply,
your might be interested in this: www.metahumanism.eu, the metahumanist
Manifesto, a brief text where myself and colleague philosopher Stefan Sorgner
summarize some of these issues.
I am certainly interested in Butoh, though unfortunately I haven't deepened
into it's practice yet and my knowledge of it is very superficial, I hope
though to get to know this relational practice/methuman technology better soon.
I believe there are several significant metaformitve/metahumanist practicies
going on out there... I think that claiming the relational is a key issue in
our cartesian culture of separations, exteriorities and distances, a major
political issue...
warmest regards
Jaime
----- Original Message -----
From: Sondra Fraleigh
To: soft_skinned_space
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] METAFORMANCE - Redefining Relationality
---continuation - POST 3
Dear Jamie and all,
Jamie, you speak of inbetween-ness. The Japanese have a word for it "Ma,"
the space between. It is alive. It is also a Zen word, and many of its aspects
are ineffable. Ma is a guiding aesthetic in butoh, but you probably know this.
Endo Tadashi has a wonderful dance called simply MA. (To be a little
phenomenological) When I dance, I feel the interspaces and the inter-timings
between myself and others, myself and my environment. Finally I just dissolve
into the dance of it all. This relationality is the reason I dance.
I especially like the following from you:
The metabody is the relational body, one that is not located here or there,
but is constantly moving in the relationality of forces and affects. Reality is
thus an unquantifiable field of metabodies in changing and constitutive
relation with one another.
This is what I see, feel, when I watch a dance or listen to music -
electronic or traditional. My body is there in all senses, connected with what
I'm sensing.
Now my buzzer is ringing, and I have to go teach yoga to 80 seniors. I love
teaching them. They are so receptive and able. All in all, its a metaformance
when we work and play together. "Higher than actuality is possibility"
Heidegger so aptly catapults us toward our possible-selves.
Thank you for this informative, provoking post. I'm saving it.
Sondra
On Oct 25, 2011, at 4:29 AM, Jaime del Val wrote:
METAFORMANCE - Redefining Relationality
Genealogies of perception: from proprioception to otherception
[continuation - POST 3]
Anatomy and control
Cartographies of the body have, within the best of humanistic traditions,
fulfilled a number of reductionisms in our embodied experience.
It is stryking for instance that such broadly overwhleming and oppressive
frameworks as sexual identities are derived from the reductionism and
measurement of genital anatomies in the new born, which leads to the
assignation of a binary sex or an intersexual status, whereby genitalia are
classified according to their functionality within normative reproductive
heterosexuality.
This gives us just a faint idea how strongy human(istic) anatomy is shaping
the social body, as theories on the Body Politic suggest.
In order to map the body one must have an exterior perspective to it. What
happens if we abolish that condition? What happens if in our experience the
body becomes amorphous, and yet is still moving, alive and present?
Presence vs. identity
Presence is not to be confounded with identity, much as though in
information society it is. We may produce accounts of presence that do not rely
on identity whatsoever. Indeed in our daily experience we go through many
moments in which we don't operate through identity, we don't assume an exterior
position. When we sit in front of the sea, or of a sunset, or wonder in the
woods we don't identify, we get lost in the endless and amorphous movement of
waves and clouds and leaves. (Unless we are an expeditionary scientist from
some of our imperialistc journeys of discovery and conquest).
The relational body in metahumanism - metabodies
Metahumanism proposes an approach to embodied experiences in terms of their
relationality, their inbetweenness, to understand reality and ouserlves, not as
two independent entities, but as mutually contitutive and transformative
relational processes, thus emphasising the meaning of "in betweenness" that the
prefix Meta also had in ancient greek. In proposing the Metahumanist Manifesto,
both Stefan Sorgner and I felt that this prefix was more to the point than the
prefix post- since our point is in the relational, or starts there, leading
into the amorphous.
Every technology is a relational technology, is articulating or setting to
motion of modes of relationality. We have seen what modes of relationality
cartesian technologies of information society puts into motion: exteriorities
and borders hidden behind façades and rethorics of conectivity, that are the
condition of possibility of identification and form as instruments of control.
The metabody is the relational body, one that is not located here or there,
but is constantly moving in the relationality of forces and affects. Reality is
thus an unquantifiable field of metabodies in changing and constitutive
relation with one another.
Metamedia Metaformance - relational technologies
If we intervene in the modes of relationality being aware that this will
transform us and that to which we relate - it will displace and eventually
dissolve the identifying border -, we may work thorugh all of the given
anatomies, cartographies and forms through which we usually structure our
experience.
This includes or starts with a reworking of our sensory apparatuses, the
relational technologies par excellance.
The process of reworking relationalities at different levels is what I call
a metaformance, which exceeds the dualisms of spectacular control society, and
goes beyond perspectivism to introduce immanentism: we are never exterior to
that to which we relate, we are never exterior to the relationality itself.
Arguably some of the artworks that have been called performances could be
understood in terms of metaformance, since they were reworking relationalities
at different levels (of the body in its capabilities and potentials, of the
relation to the audience, etc). Even the most apparently non-procedural works
of art can be reviewed under this light. It is tragic in this sense that the
notion of artistic object, so suitable to markets, has pervaded discourses on
art for so long, while I am almost certain than many painters, for instance,
have experienced their work as a neverending relational process.
Metaformance puts the relationailty in the forefront of investigation,
though we could say, like Picasso, "Je ne cherche pas, je trouve", since the
contingencies in metadiciplinary work are so great that we are often more
imbricated in openning us a way amidst the jungle of things we encounter and
have little time to look for other.
Metaformance is metamedia, since it operates in the conditions of
possibility of media themselves not trying to define another fixed sensory
anatomy, but in an endless amorphogenesis, where new potential media emerge.
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