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.
