One thing that comes to mind here, is of course, the dance as a figure or symbolon of Bataillean excess, one might say an 'exuberance' of holarchic interference. If holography means 'complete writing'. what could be more self-contained, more metaphysically interior as you put it than dance, and when you look at that you can see why dance has always been connected to magic, to ritual, to ceremony, because in the enactment of the range, that monstrous set of all possible movments, that exquisite discursive sweep, that narratological music of dance, there is a consonance with the mute transformation of both nature and a kind of digitalisation, a compactification of lived movement. through identification, the spectator at least possesses a body, and that language much more so than language or music is transubjective.. dance is probably the most 'totemic' of the arts, because its instrument presents an image which we can imagine experiencing.. and maybe this isnt right.. at any rate siva naranha dances the world into existence, so here we have an association of creation with kinesis. Life MOVES.. we move in life, the energon of spatiality, the ray of dance, the generative spasm, the dancer gives 'birth' to movement, and then falls into death 'throes' shudder.. the lyricism of dance is an unconscious electrical programming by 'custom' and practice.. injury as you put it.. this is coding by doing, analogical as you say, laying down tracks, the brain inscribing it self in movement, as there is an internal dialogue of words, so the dancer speaks with her body, and remembers, that is the codework of dance, from sets to sets through manifolds of unconscious mechanicity, the black box or TFM 'total fucking magic' of organicity. There is also the issue of control and translation, intention and expression, a delicate economy, a political and sexual economy which recalls RD Laing's Politics of Experience, in which various continuums or economies feed into once another to produce translations or even excesses in the sense of noise as a libidinous release of potential overflowing.. i'm fuzzing.. there is also the Barthesian issues of geometry, the way dance is maintained within the body-structure of theatre, the line of the gaze, that hierarchical idol which has been sounded by so many street performers, and which is I think unnatural to the dance yet inevitable and wonderfully aesthetic all the same, but dance wants to accrete, dancers within rings of dancers, living mandalas, energetic living structures dynamising the static narratives told around a campfire perhaps, to take the story into thatfire, to make the story a fire of dance and then to BE that fire of dance, that discurisve sex-idea-geometry-set-at-any-given-moment-actuation-flow-of-resources-continnuum that enactment of the oneness of the quantum, that display of the living artefactant of being.. Consciousness lives in fiery house, a wild animal skin of pouncing hunting marbled not-word, not-outside, that inside is pulsating and monstrous alphabete whose contours explode into ikonic relief, exclamation is a shape, within the brain, within the landscape, within time itself. dance will always be sacred because it can evoke fright if nothing else and awe and if not in its current expression then in the idea of it because it is the purest expression of the social and the purest negation in one stroke, much more so than murder even, biological solipsism, the specimen, the individual only can dance, even when in groups, each 'dancer' is a single body.... so glad you are investigating the implications of dance alan. i can't think of a better thing for a philosopher to think about really, though i hesitate to even admit there is such a thing as different from anything else.. dance philosopher writing etc.. i'm sure that was blubblub blub
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA> Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2006 11:16 PM Subject: Dance in the light of Badiou's event
Dance in the light of Badiou's event A night-dictation event. Dance events in the sense of being unprecedented, unaccountable, un- called-for. Its arrival is then allied in this sense to the digital, its appearance, its evanescence, simultaneously that of the analogic, its carrying out, its production within the body as the analogic. Just as the dance is simultaneously analogic, incapable of reproduction, incapable of recuperation (of the reproduction of the real). Just as the dance is that, it is also of the digital, in the sense of the body pressed against a second body, or the body pressed against the pull of gravity as an other body, or an other body, the dance is a dialectic between the two of them, but reduced or scraped in a sense by these two barriers which remain on the literal scale, irrepressible, so that a dance exists _there,_ within _that_ - simultaneous lewdness and de/production. Cohen's set theory of the continuum hypothesis accompanies this, 1 in the choice of hypothesis - any way decided - a decision somewhere being made - neither true nor false - can't be reproduced to that - but on the other hand a digital situation, choice or no choice - all of this is in relation with the Schroedinger cat paradox - in the sense of a collapse to a choice - although re: the cat, the choice is simply by virtue of the collapse - in dance the choice is by virtue of the choice - nonetheless a kind of forcing into one or another position - in a sense you can say with the continuum hypothesis - the continuum is produced as an alterity, an other order of things - or absorbed within the former order - within one or another order - in one case it produces itself as a horizon and in another case it is literally itself part of a spectrum of possibilities - perhaps in both cases part of a spectrum of possibilities. So we relate this to the dance - consider set theory in this sense as a allegiance to dance or dance as an allegiance to set theory. In its inertness, in its inertness, the dance remains sexualized. In this I disagree presumably with Badiou - it is always already sexualized - the body that is dancing is not the neutral body of Cunningham, but is a sexual body from which Cunningham creates a state of lassitude or with- drawal, decathexis - an almost=neurasthenic state of neutrality which only exists in relation to the sexuality of the body within the dance, within the Cunningham-dance. Furthermore the sexed body may not be a divisive body, that is it need not be that which is binary or divided to one and an other, by calling it polymorphic, not polymorphic-perverse but polymorph- ic-heterological, a whole spectrum of sexualizations, desires, always already plurality, which may not be specified according to one or another anatomical distress, one or another positioning of the anatomical. Initially one might say that dance is the interiority of the metaphysical, and if we pursue this, we can speak of dance as an interiority - of which the audience is only a (secondary) residue (just as the style of the dance is a secondary narcissistic panoply) - the audience is already an institu- tionalization, already a production by capital, by the organization of labor. The dance however is something else - the injury of the dancer - the injured dancer - guarantees that something else that dance is. One might consider the dance as a projection or reproduction within the audience. Thus for example if one plays guitar there is a sort of mimesis within, listening to another play. So the body of the dancer is within the body of the audience because both of them are involved in movement which only becomes itself. There is also the issue of accomplishment. In watching the dance, one is always watching accomplishment, that is, a certain level, regime, of preparation is necessary for any sort of production - that the regime or preparation for the external audience is one that always emphasizes an external perfection. In other words the limbs continuously arranged and rearranged in such-and-such a way according to the exigencies of the dancer generally in dialectic with the choreography. However even in situations like these, one might say that dance succeeds only by virtue of the interiority of the dancing, only by virtue of desire, desire bifurcated into sexuality, desire to produce, to perform, to twist the body in such a way, or desire which becomes muted, mitigated, by a kind of meditation in which the body even for the dancer becomes something else which is the dancer, and which transports him or her, accordingly. What is irritating, elsewhere, to critique, is the muteness of the dance in relation to all of this which gets back to all of this, to the beginning, to the inconceivabiity of recuperation, reproduction, for dance is mute, stet, shtut, nonsense, in a sense, as if that's all, as if nothing more. The most primary of arts, the body itself within the body, and the most secondary of arts, that it is dependent upon the body, that it exists in such-and-such a form only as long as such-and-such a body exists, the body of that particular dancer in relationship to that partic- ular choreography, that particular moment in time. So not only injury inhabits dance, but death as well, the two inextricably intertwined, one without the other is unthinkable, and both within the dance remain unthought.
