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Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity
Thinking Resistances
Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, Vol. 1
Edited by
Gerald Siegmund und Stefan Hölscher
diaphanes
www.diaphanes.net
André Lepecki
From Partaking to Initiating:
Leadingfollowing as Dance’s (a-personal) Political Singularity 21
Oliver Marchart
Dancing Politics. Political Reflections on Choreography,
Dance and Protest 39
Bojana Kunst
Working Out Contemporaneity. Dance and Post-Fordism 59
Ulas Aktas
Civilisational Wilderness or Civilderness and
Cultural Immune Systems 97
Petra Sabisch
Choreographing Participatory Relations
Contamination and Articulation 109
Bojana Cvejić
On the Choreographic Production of Problems 135
Mark Franko
Myth, Nationalism and Embodiment in “American Document” 163
Ana Vujanović
Notes on the Politicality of Contemporary Dance 181
Gabriele Klein
The (Micro-)Politics of Social Choreography
Aesthetic and Political Strategies of Protest and Participation 193
Randy Martin
Mobilizing Dance
Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative 209
Ramsay Burt
The Biopolitics of Modernist Dance and Suffragette Protest 247
Isabell Lorey
Politics of Immunization and the Precarious Life 259
Gerald Raunig
After Community: Condividuality 271
Introduction
Moving Times
The past ten years have seen a re-emergence of the need to think about
and conceptualise the arts in general and dance in particular in terms
of the political. Developments in globalised neo-liberal capitalism and
the changes it has produced in the social fabric seem to beg for a state-
ment of some kind from the artistic field. What is more, these changes
increasingly affect the production and reception of dance itself, thereby
laying bare the ideological underpinnings of its claim for artistic free-
dom and criticality. If Eve Chiapello is right in claiming that the current
state of capitalist development has appropriated the artists’ critique of
the social and its demand for freedom into its very own mode of opera-
tion, the arts are indeed in a conundrum.1 The freedom of the artists,
so it seems, equals the freedom of globalised capital and its modes of
production. It comes as no surprise, then, that re-thinking the relation
of dance and politics is high on the agenda of dance practitioners and
scholars alike. Recent developments in the world economy suggest
that Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” of self, other and
society, which he developed in his lecture series between 1977 and
1979, is more pertinent than ever.2 Whereas the citizens of the one
world have involuntarily become bearers and shares of incalculable
risks, the frontiers to the other world are protected more and more
rigorously. Examples of this are the overflowing refugee camps on the
southern Italian coast as well as international airports that resemble
high security prisons searching and registering masses of bodies in
their microstructures with new technological devices. While one part
of the world population deterritorialises itself voluntarily, the other
part is forcibly prevented from entering this space, which is defined by
its increasing mobility, acceleration, and high speed communication
highways. Neoliberal dispositifs of power are linked with technologies
to secure and enclose territories, discourses and bodies whose general
1 Eve Chiapello, “Evolution und Kooption. Die ‘Künstlerkritik’ und der normative
Wandel”, in Christoph Menke und Juliane Rebentisch, eds., Kreation und Depression.
Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2010), pp. 38–51.
2 Michel Foucault, Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung. Geschichte der Gouver
nementalität I (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006); Michel Foucault, Die Geburt der
Biopolitik. Geschichte der Gouvernementalität II (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006).
3 See Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, transl. Brian Massumi
(New York: Continuum, 2004).
4 Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie, Réimpression précédée d’une Notice sûr les
Danses du XVIe siècle par Laure Fonta, reprint of the edition Paris 1888 (Bologna:
Bibliotheca Musica Bononiensis, 1981).
10
10 Andrew Hewitt suggests this with his idea of “social choreography”; Andrew
Hewitt, Social Choreography. Ideology as Performance in Dance and in Everyday
Movement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005).
11 See Gerald Siegmund, Abwesenheit (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006); Gerald Sieg
mund, “Impossible Choreographies: Negotiating Choreography, Letter and Law in
William Forsythe’s Pieces”, in Susanne Manning and Lucia Ruprecht, eds., New
German Dance Studies (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), Chapter 13;
see also Oliver Marchart’s and Bojana Kunst’s essays in this volume.
12 See for instance: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Politisches Schreiben (Berlin: Theater der
Zeit, 2002), pp. 11–21.
11
13 Mark Franko, “Dance and the Political: States of Exception”, in Susanne Franco
and Marina Nordera, eds., Dance Discourses. Keywords in Dance Research (London
and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 12.
14 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible (Lon
don and New York: Continuum, 2006).
12
Viewed against this background, how did dance and how does dance,
then, do politics with the body in the public (theatrical) space? How
can it become political? Contributors to the symposium and the
present book that documents its proceedings were invited to think
about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance,
and globalisation from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies,
History, Philosophy, and Sociology.
The essays grouped together under this heading locate the critical
and political dimension of dance in the kind of excessive enjoyment it
produces, thus bestowing agency on its subjects.
In his contribution to this volume, André Lepecki identifies Jacques
Rancière’s notion of subjectivity implicit in his concept of the aesthetic
regime as one of disinterested perception. Although Lepecki appreci-
ates the idea of a suspension of the hierarchy between form and matter,
and, respectively, activity and passivity and the free play of faculties as
it was conceived by Kant and Schiller, he underlines that there is a cer-
tain danger inherent in notions of aesthetics derived from German Ide-
alism. The free play of perception may work perfectly well within the
fluid patterns and flexible powers of what Gilles Deleuze once named
the society of control. According to Lepecki, what is needed today is a
new concept of initiation derived from the notion of energeia.
13
Following form the idea of enjoyment, the authors in this section focus
on dance as a non-textual activity. They advocate dance as a field of
sensorial intensities that provides ways of non-hierarchical relations
between dancers and dancers and audiences alike. What kind of politi-
cal potential does the autist have in rejecting language as a system of
ordering thoughts and experiences? Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
turn to texts written by autists describing their perception of the world
dealing with their expressive striving. Immersed in an open and non-
hierarchical field of sensual stimuli, Manning and Massumi thus turn
the autist into the perfect aesthetic subject. Theorising this experience
with Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of prehension on
the one hand and pragmatism on the other, they develop their own
14
15
Contrary to modernist belief, the essays in this section share the view
that choreography is not confined to a separate aesthetic sphere.
Rather, it moves towards what Andrew Hewitt calls social choreog-
raphy. Arguing with modernist assumptions of the political nature of
theatre and dance, Ana Vujanović identifies three modes of relating art
to politics: engaged performance, the politicality of the performance
medium, and the political nature of modes of production. Since in
neo-liberal economies, performance and politics are ambiguously close
to each other in sharing the same visibility and, as a consequence, a
certain self-exhaustion in the public sphere, she argues for a specific
politicality of contemporary dance, which intervenes in specific con-
texts in order to transform them. Seen from this perspective the how of
political acting becomes at least as much – if not even more – pertinent
than the what.
Gabriele Klein deals with the question of participation both in public
space and in art institutions. As for Ana Vujanović, for her aesthetic
strategies and sensibilities are no longer confined to a separate artistic
sphere, but infiltrate the public sphere and our everyday lives on a
profound level. Understood as social choreographies, choreographies
do not exist separately from social norms and structures. Instead, they
perform them. The social choreographies and their micro-politics are
then located in the various tensions between protest and participa-
tion and hint toward a globalized world in motion. Klein distinguishes
between three modes of audience participation that she calls implicit,
taking part and involvement.
Randy Martin is interested in the logic of what he calls the social
derivative, especially in times of an obvious (financial) crisis. Rather
16
Departing from the notion of social protest that underlies almost all of
the above essays, this section explicitly deals with the notion of com-
munity and questions its status in the current political debate. In his
text on early 20th-century protest, Ramsay Burt juxtaposes the political
protest of the Suffragette movement and Nijinsky’s choreography of Le
Sacre du Printemps. Drawing on the tropes of biopolitics and immu-
nity in Roberto Esposito’s work, Burt identifies both Emily Howard
Davison’s death and Maria Plitz’s dancing of the role of the Chosen
One as sacrifices for a change in and a re-definition of the national
community. He proposes that both the modernist ballet and political
activism are expressions of feminist protest: a physical protest against
the state’s invasion of its people’s private spheres and the increasing
biopolitical power over their life.
Taking an oppositional standpoint, Isabell Lorey holds that under
the current rule of governance communitarian protest und resistance
tend to be immunized by the ruling powers. She distinguishes between
three figures into which the politics of immunization can be divided.
Whereas the first two figures of the immune – juridical immunity and
biopolitical immunization – both confirm domination, Lorey’s third
category, constituent immunization, is a subversive figure. To develop
this, she turns to the motif of exodus in a story told by Titus Livius
about the conflict between the plebeians and the patricians in Ancient
Rome and its adaptation in contemporary postoperaist discourses.
17
18
Art is not an aesthetic human activity that can also, in certain circumstances,
acquire a political significance. Art is inherently political, because it is an
activity that renders inactive and contemplates the senses and habitual
gestures of human beings and in so doing opens them up to a new potential
use. This is why art resembles politics and philosophy almost to the point
of becoming one with them. What poetry does for the power to speak and
art does for the senses, politics and philosophy must do for the biological,
economic, and social activities – they show what the human body can do and
open it up to a new potential use.2
21
22
23
11 See Rancière, Dissensus, p. 37. As he states there: “The police is that which says
that here, on this street, there is nothing to see, and so nothing to do but to move
along.”
24
25
19 Ibid., p. 214.
20 Ibid., p. 16.
21 Ibid., p. 17.
26
22 Ibid., p. 14.
27
23 Ibid., p. 16.
24 Ibid., p. 14.
25 “I call ‘distribution of the sensible’ a generally implicit law that defines the forms
of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed.
[…] This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the
one hand, as that which separates and excludes; on the other, as that which allows
participation.” – Rancière, Dissensus, p. 36.
28
26 See Luc Boltanski, ”The Present Left and the Longing for Revolution”, Daniel
Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw eds., Under Pressure. Pictures, Subjects, and the New
Spirit of Capitalism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008).
27 Giorgio Agamben, What is an apparatus? (California: Stanford University Press,
2009), p. 23.
29
28 As Gabriel Rockhill explains, for Rancière, “the essence of the police, therefore,
is not repression but rather a certain distribution of the sensible that precludes the
emergence of politics.” – Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 89.
29 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 206.
30
30 See Randy Martin, Critical moves: Dance studies in theory and politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998).
31 See Mark Franko, Dancing modernism/performing politics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
31
32 For verbs as events, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia
University Press): “For it is not true that the verb represents an action. It expresses
an event.” – Ibid., p. 184.
33 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 177.
32
33
39 Ibid., p. 108.
40 See, for instance: http://www.erinmovement.com/erin_manning_dance.html.
34
35
36
37
38
Dancing Politics
Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest
What is the lesson politics can draw from dance? In the following I will
not so much approach this question by focusing on dance as a genre of
fine arts. Of course, as an art form, dance has always been articulated
with politics: from the initial moments of ballet at the court of Louis
XIV, where it was an intrinsic element of what Habermas called the
representational public sphere of the court and a central element in
constructing the grandiose public persona of the sovereign, via New
York’s Workers’ Dance League with their intriguing slogan: Dance is a
weapon in the revolutionary class struggle, to the innumerable dance
events today driven by more or less radical political intentions. While
it would be fascinating to present a political history of dance, this is
not going to be my concern. For the start, I would like to approach
the question from the opposite angle, from the perspective of politics
and the role dance plays within political practices. In other words, this
chapter will not be so much concerned with whatever is political in
dance as a cultural or artistic genre, but with what might be dance-like
in political acting. What happens, we will ask, when today’s sovereign,
the people, start dancing publicly for reasons of protest? Only after this
question has been clarified, I will return to two examples of “dancing
politically” that originated from the art field – “East Side Story” by
the Croatian artist Igor Grubic, and “How long is now?” by the Israeli
performance collective Public Movement.
39
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a
cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a
grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade,
he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly
not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who
was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity
would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind
his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into
my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for
anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should
demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect
me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a
cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to
self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism
meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons,
persecution, everything.2
1 Alix Kates Shulman: “Dances With Feminists”, in Women’s Review of Books IX:3
(1991).
2 Emma Goldman: Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Cosimo 2008), p. 56.
40
This is a nice story from the good old days of 70s anarchism and Anti-
Vietnam protests. Yet it does not in itself provide us with answers to
a far-reaching set of questions: Why was the apocryphal quote that
successful? Why did it obviously touch at the very core of contemporary
activists’ self-understanding? Why, in general, do people seem to long
for the articulation of politics with dance? In short: Why is there a real
wish for more than simply a politics of dance – a wish for dancing
politically?
There can be no simple answer to these questions, but it appears
that the slogan describes something rooted in the very logic of politi-
cal mobilization. For what is conjured up by the slogan is a particular
supplement or excessive element that is added to a concrete demand
or cause. The same logic can be detected in the famous conjunction
“Bread and Roses”, another apocryphal slogan that is commonly attrib-
uted to workers, mostly women, on strike against the textile industry
in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. Even though it is impossible to
verify whether or not such a phrase was actually used in the Lawrence
strike, the slogan was highly successful as an imaginary focus point
for later protests. As in the case of the Goldman slogan, something
excessive and non-utilitarian is demanded, even though it remains not
entirely clear what precisely these “roses” or these “beautiful, radi-
ant things” actually are. As supplements to a concrete demand, these
sublime objects seem to remind us that no protest – perhaps nothing
in the world – follows utilitarian considerations only. Certainly, there
is always a Cause of protest, which can be more or less concrete (a
particular grievance, the lowering of the wages, for instance) or more
or less abstract (like exploitation, or alienation in general), and goals
or objectives will be formulated to overcome these grievances. But
if the goal, should it eventually be attained, does not entirely fill out
the lack initially experienced as a Cause of action, there will remain
a gap between the Cause of the protest and the object attained. Even
if a particular goal is attained, say, if someone like Obama eventually
41
Let us, for a moment, revisit Arendt’s highly original and, I would
claim, subversive account of political acting that runs counter to most
aspects of today’s commonsensical notion of politics (politics as a bor-
ing if not dirty business, politicians as a corrupt cast of untouchables,
hated by everyone, etc.). According to Arendt, the idea that doing
politics is a burden rather than something exciting only came into the
3 Let me just mention in passing that this is in stark contrast to some of today’s
theories of the political, rather successful ones, that display a sort of juvenile, or
rather masculinist fascination not with dancing but with terror and violence. I’m
thinking in particular of the work of Slavoj Žižek.
42
43
44
45
For this reason we will have to come to terms with the fact that, in
order to talk about real life politics, we have to supplement the supple-
ment; that is to say, we have to add to the Arendtian category of public
happiness further categories, whether we like these categories or not,
that allow for a more precise und comprehensive understanding of
political acting. In a quasi-transcendental sense one may speak about
the minimal conditions of politics, conditions that allow us to discern
a political form of dance from its communal form, e.g. a lap dance
confronting the riot police from a Milonga in the streets of Buenos
Aires. Even though there is no space here to develop a more extensive
argument, which I have tried to work out elsewhere, some of these
minimal conditions can be detected phenomenologically in the most
modest political activities such as lap-dancing.11 As this very example
10 Like everything else in the world, this Toronto lap dance can also be found on
YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fhGneV6rQg
11 See chapter 10 on Minimal Politics in Oliver Marchart: Die politische Differenz.
Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2010); and Oliver Marchart: “Democracy and Minimal Politics: The
46
Political Difference and Its Consequences”, South Atlantic Quarterly 110, Fall 2011
(4):, pp. 965–973.
12 This is, by the way what happened to Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of
dance if there ever was one, when his mind glided into darkness: it is reported that
his landlady, concerned about Nietzsche turning mad, glanced through the door in
his room where she saw Nietzsche dancing naked.
13 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London
and New York: Verso, 1985).
47
48
14 One may just think, as examples, of the masculinist militancy of bodies formed
into the choreography of a uniformed “black block”; or, on the other end of the
scale, of the joyous frivolity of bodies choreographed into a partying Pink and Silver
block.
49
Let us try and apply the conceptual apparatus developed above to two
particular examples not so much of dancing politics than of political
dance. Igor Grubic’s East Side Story grew out of the deep distress the
Croatian artist experienced when confronted with video material from
the Gay Pride parades in Belgrade in 2001 and in Zagreb in 2002. At
these parades demonstrators faced not only the most vulgar verbal
insults by passers-by, they were even exposed to physical violence by
organized neo-fascists. Until today, one may add, Pride parades have
been immensely contentious in some Eastern European countries.
Sometimes they are simply interdicted by the authorities, sometimes
they are violently attacked by those who perceive of themselves as
members of a homogenous, “healthy” and, doubtlessly, heterosexual
people. In the West, though, these parades, from the very moment
of their invention, are famous for having integrated dance into their
carnevalesque protest repertoire. In doing so, they have managed to
re-capture public visibility in their own non-violent ways; and even
though some have criticized increasing commercialization and the loss
of political engagement (as it is the case with Berlin’s parade), it can-
not be denied that, precisely as political demonstrations, Pride parades
have been immensely successful.
It is at this point – the function of dancing politically – where Grubic
intervened. Being a visual artist himself, he set out to collaborate with
dancers and choreographers in order to restage the original protest
event. As the folder to the presentation of the piece resulting from this
collaboration says: “In a primitive community that brutally reacts to
differences, a small group of creative people, resembling a resistance
movement, will try to change people’s consciousness through a dance
ritual …” In the two-channel video installation first shown in the Bel-
grade Museum of Contemporary Art, one sees on one side of the room
the TV-material of the original events while on the other wall the danc-
ers are projected. What they did was not simply imitating the bodily
movements of violent protest. Rather, they dissected the movements
and translated the resulting elements into a choreography in which a
single dancer may incorporate gestures of both sides, sometimes within
a single flow of movement. Then all four dancers would reassemble
and, in a more obvious or recognizable way, stage bodily movements
that, if only remotely, bring to mind the original clashes.
Some might object that this work has nothing to do with art perfor-
mance in public space, as it is clearly situated intra muros, i.e. within
the walls of an art institution. Nevertheless, it remains of interest for
two reasons:
50
51
52
Let us move to the second example in order to see what it takes for
an artistic intervention to actually make the passage into politics. The
double dimension of “dancing politics” through protest – choreogra-
phy and dance – is reactivated in most performances of the Israeli
collective Public Movement, founded in 2006 by the dancer and chore-
ographer Dana Yahalomi and the visual artist Omer Krieger (and led
by Yahalomi alone since 2011). The name of the group refers, on the
one hand, to the ritualized choreographies of a nation state “public”
and, on the other, to the political or protest movements of a potential
counter-public – in other words: to state choreographies and to protest
choreographies. What is of importance is the fact that these choreog-
raphies will always be inscribed into the bodily knowledge of indi-
viduals. As Yahalomi puts it: “Politics exists within our bodies, as an
often dormant knowledge.”18 In their performances, these unconscious
incorporations of the state are very often re-assembled into dream-like
choreographic sequences.
For instance, in their performance “Also Thus!” in 2009, the group
staged a fictitious state ritual in front of the fascist architecture of the
Berlin Olympia stadium.
This ritual, which included mock violence and a car crash or maybe
terrorist attack against a car of the type used by German politicians,
ended with an Israeli folk dance and the audience joining in. In
this Public Movement performance, as in some others, a quasi-Zionist
occupation takes place of an anti-Jewish or anti-semitic historical
setting, a sort of over-writing which, nevertheless, leaves visible the
background. However, Public Movement do not take an explicit politi-
cal position, not even a Zionist one. Perhaps one should rather speak
about their deconstruction of Zionism as the dominant state choreog-
raphy of Israel. Like in the original Derridean sense, deconstruction
involves both an element of destruction and an element of (re-)con-
struction. With obvious reference to the constructive dimension, per-
formances of Public Movement have also been described by Yahalomi
as “pre-enactments”. They do not imitate an actual event in the past,
but engage in the paradoxical enterprise of re-staging an event that
has not yet occurred, for instance, a future state that will have imple-
mented the rituals pre-formed by Public Movement.
or “bad” should be valid criteria at all, which I doubt), it only makes it better or
worse from the perspective of the political field (where, correspondingly, its quality
as art will be of secondary importance).
18 Interview with Dana Yahalomo, Kaleidoscope (forthcoming)
53
54
Most of the criteria developed above are thus met. How long is now? is
a collective and collectivizable action by which a public in the strong
sense is curved out of urban space. This is achieved through blocking
the circulation of traffic with dancing bodies. And yet, the passage to
politics in the strict sense does not occur. Without doubt, the irritation
produced by the event has the potential to remind passers-by of the
micropolitical inscription of state choreographies in their own individ-
ual bodies. Such re-activation of bodily knowledge can have something
political, but more in a critical or analytical sense than in the sense of
protest politics. And to the extent that it remains an art performance,
the meaning and the goal of the intervention can very well remain in
the dark for most of its witnesses. In fact, Public Movement explicitly
say that they do not adhere to the “for/against paradigm” – and this is
exactly the point where we realize that a decisive element is missing:
an actual conflict that would force everyone to position herself on this
or the other side of a political antagonism.
In summer 2011 such an antagonism broke out in Israel when tents
were being planted in the centre of Tel Aviv and other cities. Starting
with the call of a single student, social protests against high living and
housing expenses grew to the point where Israel witnessed the lar est
political demonstration in its history. In the course of the protests,
Public Movement took up their intervention and offered this format
to the protesters. Again and again dozens of activists would assemble
on different crossroads in order to block traffic for 2 ½ minutes to the
music of Od lo ahavti dai.
In so doing, they actualized a conflict much wider than simply a
clash with angry car drivers. Such a momentary clash referred to the
wider line of political conflict drawn by the social protesters all over
Israel. By offering the demonstrators a new and easily collectivizable
55
19 Everyone who ever tried to organize a protest knows that it is difficult, if not
impossible to predict whether it will work out and people will join in. Sometimes,
you organize a demonstration time and again, and nobody shows up. But then,
suddenly, the conditions change and the same effort can result in the most massive
rally.
56
57
I would like to start this essay with two personal images. At the
moment I have two homes, one in Ljubljana and another in Hamburg.
In Ljubljana, my window overlooks a small circular park beside an
old people’s home, where its residents can take daily walks along the
paths of a circular shape. Whenever I look at the park through my
window, I feel that something has changed in my perception; in the
loudness of the city, a movement is revealed that cannot be looked
at without a kinaesthetic feeling being triggered in the body. These
are not only walks where slowness appears, the slowness of a body
no longer capable of the continuous and invisible transition of the
city inhabitant, harmonised with the omnipresent rhythm. Instead of
walking and moving forward, the old people are actually trying to
avoid obstacles touching the street carefully with their steps. Their
walk would not be possible if they did not while they are walking at
the same time measure the relations in the space surrounding them
making sure to not be knocked down by a cyclist, a recreational runner
or a small child chasing after its dog. When I take a break in Hamburg,
my kitchen window looks into another window, which is the window
of a small dance school (with a funny name – dancealot) where people
can learn how to dance East Coast Swing and West Coast Swing. Every
evening, the lights are turned on in a small studio inside an old aban-
doned building where young and old dancers try to attain virtuosity in
swing dancing, attempting to move smoothly and learning the steps,
touching the floor with their steps carefully, as if there might be some
obstacle on the floor, and measuring the space they can take, in order
not to bump into each other.
These two images are the same and fundamentally different at the
same time. Both images are disclosing how movement is not only get-
ting from point A to point B. Movement is not a unity of quantita-
tive differences that can be endlessly multiplied, as Deleuze warned.1
Movement is not only a transient movement in space, but it should
also be understood as change, as quantitative differentiation. As an
59
The body doesn’t only move, but it also hesitates. With the walk it
takes, it doesn’t only pass by or make a transit, but it lasts, it endures
in-between.
The same conclusion could be also drawn from the people dancing
in the dance school in Hamburg. There dancers are also stumbling,
they are slow and precarious, they hesitate a lot; however, with each
step, they leave less and less visible imprints of their hesitation on
their bodies. These dancers are internalizing the relational component
of the movement in a precise way, because only thus does it become
possible to make their movement continuous and smooth. If they want
to enjoy dancing smoothly, they have to rehearse and train in order to
2 Ibid., p. 48.
3 Laurie Anderson, Big Science, Warner Bross Records, 1982.
60
61
62
6 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles, New York: Semiotext(e),
2004), p. 41.
63
64
65
Exploitation of movement
66
11 Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’, Conference Proceedings:
Genealogies of Biopolitics, http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/massumi.pdf,
Access: 5 December 2011.
67
To move with the world (and with this movement attaining skills,
knowledge, aesthetic experience and developing collaborative net-
works) here describes specific skills that are, of course, connected with
cognitive work. However, to move with the world can also be under-
stood as a specific exploitation of the human capabilities of movement.
The relational aspect of movement today stands in the centre of exploi-
tation. Movement of the body is therefore exteriorised. It is no longer
inhabiting the interiority of the body as in 20th century Fordism, where
exactly through the interiorisation of the movement it was possible
to be a part of the bigger social machine. Subjectivities are flexible
because their bodies are organised through constant protocols of accel-
68
69
70
“There was very little difference in meaning,” says autist Daina Kru-
mins, “between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and
the turtle sitting on the log. It seems,” she continues, “that when most
people think of something being alive they really mean, human.”2
1 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938), p. 9
2 Quoted in Jean Kearns Miller, Women From Another Planet (Bloomington: 1st
Books, 2003), pp. 23–89. While we focus here on autists who would be classified
in the so-called low-functioning spectrum of autism, which is itself a spectrum, we
chose to highlight autists such as Krumins (and later Corwin), both of whom would
likely fall into the category of “aspergers” or “high-functioning” autism. The point
we are trying to emphasize is that all spectrums are neurodiverse – both that of
the neuro-typical and that of the autist – and that within the autism spectrum there
stands out a particular modality of perception. As others within the autism activist
community have pointed out, the labellings that have become commonplace in
autism in many cases only serve to re-sedimentize the assumptions of the neurotypi-
cal (or able-ist) community. See, for instance, Amanda Baggs’s blog post entitled
Aspie Supremacy Can Kill: “I know that to many aspie supremacists it doesn’t feel
like that’s what they’re doing. It feels like they are just stating common sense, that
aspies have more valuable skills, more logic, less dysfunction, whatever, than other
autistics. But that’s because having a bit of relative privilege renders them unaware
of the full consequences of their actions. They don’t realize that they have things
backwards — the more devalued you are, the more you need equality, the more you
need to be considered another important part of human diversity, etc. Not the less.
And ‘less’ is what aspie supremacy ends up meaning to those of us who (even when
we have some very valued skills in a few areas) are more vulnerable to devaluation
and all of it’s effects. Including the lethal ones.” – http://ballastexistenz.autistics.
org/?p=611, Access: 3.7.2010.
73
For autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, to hear the rocks and the
trees on an equal footing with the voices of children is a sign of what
he calls mindblindness. He defines mindblindness as an “inability to
develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human.” To
have mindblindness, he says, is to lack empathy. It is to be generally
unrelational. He says that this is what defines autists.6
Yet from the autist, we hear neither a rejection of the human, nor
a turning away from relation. What we hear is an engagement with
the more-than-human: “I attend to everything the same way with no
discrimination, so that the caw of the crow in the tree is as clear and
important as the voice of the person I’m walking with.” (Krumins) And
an engagment with a more textured relating: “My world is organized
around textures. […] All emotions, perceptions, my whole world […]
[has] been influenced by textures.”7 (Krumins)
74
“All the time shadows had to borrow the colors of the objects on which
they would fall,” writes autist and poet Tito Mukhopadhyay. “And they
colored all objects in one universal color. That color is the color of a
shadow, which is a darker color on the borrowed color.”10 A coloured
shadowing: an intertwining of fields of emergent experience not yet
defined as this or that. Not defined as this or that, yet their qualities
already interact. The fields, in their immediacy, play off each other,
lending their qualities to each other, composing a single field of mutual
action, of co-fusion and changing contrast: co-motion. An immediate
commotion of qualitative texturing. A generative holding pattern already
moving qualitatively toward an experience in the making. Coloured
shadow has emerged: a quality belonging to the compositional field.
Not to its elements, but to the immediacy of their mutual action.
75
76
77
an implicit recipe for finding the way back again to a specific “terminus” that can
be shared by different bodies, who may seal their sharing of this reaccess potential
with a demonstrative pointing-to acknowledged by both. See the development of
the example of the walk to Union Hall upon which the argument of “A World of
Pure Experience Revolves”, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996). See also the “The Thing and Its Relations” in the same
volume, and Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978).
15 It is important to specify that there is no homogeneity of autism. We do not want
to suggest that all autists are joined in their perspective on the condition – certainly
being autistic is a significant challenge in the multi-sensorial, fast-paced culture we
find in most parts of the world today. The point we wish to make is that autism is
also a gift – perceptually, experientially, intellectually. The challenge for those all
along the spectrum of neurodiversity – especially those toward the neurotypical end
of the spectrum – is to meet difference at least halfway.
16 Jim Sinclair, “Don’t Mourn for Us”, Our Voice (Autism Network International
Newsletter), vol. 1, no. 3 (1993).
78
17 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968/1938),
p. 7
18 Slogan from a t-shirt created by the Autistic Liberation Front, in “It’s Not a Disease,
It’s a Way of Life,” Emine Saner, http://www.guardian.co.uk, Access: 8.7.2007.
19 The term “entrainment” is adapted from Albert Michotte, who uses it in his
analysis of the direct perception of causal relation. See Georges Thinès, Alan Costall,
George Butterworth, eds., Experimental Phenomenology of Perception (Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991). We also mean it as a reference to Whitehead’s own
concept for the direct perception of causal relation, which he terms “causal effi-
cacy.” Causal efficacy refers to the sense that experience is “heavy with the contact
of things gone by [referring to the immediate past, on the order of fractions of
a second], which lay their grip on our immediate selves.” In its purest form, it
is “vague, haunting, unmanageable.” In our reading, this sense of “unseen effec-
tive presences in the dark” is a limit case, because causal efficacy as a mode of
79
80
21 Etienne Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence, ed. Isabelle Stengers and
Bruno Latour (Paris: PUF, 2009), p. 16.
22 What autists do is emphasize, in their very approach to life, how the world
dances to attention as a field experience full of potential blooms, including outcomes
deemed neurotypical. It bears repeating that the autists we are thinking-with here –
Tito Mukhopadhyay, DJ Savarese, Amanda Baggs, Jim Sinclair, Larry Bissonnette,
Sue Rubin, Jamie Burke – are classified as “low-functioning,” which means that
they suffer from complex motor problems including the inability to speak and seri-
ous issues with the activation or initiation of tasks, anxiety, echolalia, etc. They
can rarely live completely without assistance. And yet their writing astounds in its
complexity, in its rhythm and tonal qualities, in its political astuteness. As Ralph
Savarese, poet and father of DJ Savarese, notes, “While acknowledging the many
challenges that accompany the condition, proponents of neurodiversity insist that
autism should not be pathologized and ‘corrected’ but, rather, celebrated as a kind
of natural, human difference. The condition affords, especially at the so-called ‘low-
functioning’ end of the spectrum, with those who have been taught to read and to
communicate, a range of gifts. One of these gifts is poetic perception and writing. For
decades it has been assumed that Autistics are the victims of an obdurate literality,
which leaves them baffled by figurative language. While this may be the case with
‘high-functioning’ Autistics or those with Asperger syndrome, it is not with classi-
cal Autistics, who have begun to demonstrate extraordinary competence. […] Only
recently have some of these Autistics been exposed to creative writing instruction,
and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.” Ralph Savarese, prospectus
for A Dispute with Nouns, or Adventures in Radical Relationality: Autism, Poetry,
and the Sensing Body (2010). Savarese has written at length about the autistic indi-
81
You’re late, you’re hurrying from the subway to the office on a crowded
rush-hour sidewalk. Bodies all around, thicker and thinner, faster and
slower, in a complex ebb and flow. In the ebb and flow, temporary
openings come and go. Your perception is focused on the coming and
going of the openings, which correspond to no thing in particular. Each
opening is a field effect. It is an artifact of the moving configuration
of the bodies around you, factoring in their relative speeds, and their
viduals listed above, focusing on their art and poetry even while exploring in a very
nuanced manner the challenges so-called “low-functioning” autists face. See his
forthcoming book as well as Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption.
On the Meaning of Family and the Politics of Neurological Difference (New York:
Other Press, 2008). For work by these autists mentioned above as well as others
in the Disability Studies community, see the special issue on autism in Disability
Studies Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1 (2010), http://www.dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43.
82
But you were thinking, with your movement. Your every movement
was a performed analysis of the field’s composition from the angle
of its affordance for getting-ahead. Entering the dance of attention,
your perceiving converged with your moving activity, and your activ-
ity was your thinking. You entered a mode of environmental aware-
ness in which to perceive is to enact thought, and thought is directly
relational. This actively relational thinking is also an expression of the
field, but in a different mode than story-telling, poetic or not, with no
immediate need for language, satisfying itself at a level with the body’s
movements: integrally embodied expression.
83
84
I was wondering why the hell that 4 had to interact with the number 2,
through a + sign. […] I looked at the number 2, wondering about the
coordinate axes of the plane surface and the probable coordinate points
that 2 would hold. And as I saw the position of 2 somewhere on the upper
side of the page, I mentally assigned it with the coordinate points of 3 and
7. Three as the x coordinate and 7 as the y coordinate. I could see the page
divided into graphic grids. I heard my aide saying something like I needed
to finish up my work. But I was busy assigning a coordinate value to 4.
Finally, I settled with the values of 3 and 9 as x and y coordinates. I gave a
quick value to the addition sign also. Then I found a whole story of number
characters other than merely 2 and 4, competing, quarreling, and asserting
themselves to be written down. Finally, I needed the help of ‘average.’ I
took the average on the x side and the average on the y side to bring peace
among the numbers.23
85
when they became unpredictable and too large for my senses to accumulate
all that they involved within their field. One moment, you may look at a pic-
ture, and at the same time you are aware of the pink wall around the picture,
you are also aware of Jack’s voice explaining something about the picture.
The very next moment you are looking at the reflection through its glass
frame, which is competing for attention while you are looking at the picture.
You may see a part of the room reflected in the glass, and you may be so
absorbed in the reflection that you may not hear anything from Jack’s voice
because you suddenly discover that those reflections are conspiring to tell
you a story. Jack’s voice may float in that story as big or small bubbles.25
86
This pen is …in the first instance, a bald that […] To get classified either as
a physical pen or as someone’s percept of a pen, it must assume a function,
and that can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that
world it is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance
of the hand, it is a physical pen. […] So far as it is instable …coming and
26 Ibid.
87
88
there may be a sudden sound of laughter that can dissolve the stories told by
the reflections and the sullen silence of the chair’s shadow with its demand-
ing noise, making you wonder which part of the funny story from Jack’s
voice you missed listening to while you were watching the giant blades of
the fan pushing out every story and sound away from it with air.28
Variations
89
“What happens if the position changes, if, say, we close the door?”
Portia Iverson asks Mukhopadhyay. “It may disrupt the whole thing,
and you may need to start once again” he responds.31 The emergence
toward objecthood, affordance, and linguistic expression has to return
to the field and start again from the “bald that” of the moment. The key
difference between the autist and the neurotypical is that the neuro-
typical does not explicitly need to start over at every moment. The neu-
rotypical has always at the ready a kind of experiential shorthand with
which to abridge the event: habit. The neurotypical has at the ready a
procedure for reconstituting something from the phases of experience’s
fielding whose immediate entertainment was skipped: the procedure
of reflective consiousness. The shortening of experience by habit and
its reconstitution by reflection go neurotypically hand in hand with the
greatest of fluidity. What falls out between habit and reflection, leaving
a gap they work in concert to smooth over with the aide of language
90
Chunking
I would probably walk into the room and see ‘check patterns’ before even
being able to identify the door as a door and the tablecloth as a tablecloth!
[…] The process of ‘resolving patterns and shapes and forms into familiar
objects’ is actually a semi-conscious one for me. […] I often tend to sit
on floors and other surfaces even if furniture is available, because it’s a
lot easier to identify ‘flat surface a person can sit on’ than it is to sort the
environment into chunks like ‘couch‘, ‘chair‘, ‘floor‘, and ‘coffee table‘. […]
There is much more. There is always more.33
91
and I had to learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-
one, and at twenty-six. The words that it took me twelve years to find have
been lost again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way
back to where I can be reasonably confident they’ll be there when I need
them. It wasn’t enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes
and ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I’ve lost track of them and
had to find them over and over again.34
Against Neuroreductionism
92
93
35 Our use in this section of “physical pole” and “perceptual pole” should not
be confused with Whitehead’s distinction between the “physical” and “mental”
poles, to which he gives a particular meaning free of the cognitive presuppositions
involved in the physical/percept distinction as it functions on the derivative level of
reflective consciousness.
94
95
The great United States of America is breathtakingly not free. Equality is not
as sacred because not everyone has access to it. Freedom is not as available
as many people think. First, free people treat my people, very smart people
who type to communicate, as mindless. Second, they underestimate us as
very bad instead of reaching out to us. The creators of everyone’s very
important Declaration of Independence wasted their breath.38
37 For a continued exploration of the ecology of diversity, see Erin Manning, “An
Ethics of Language in the Making”, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance
(forthcoming Duke UP).
38 Ralph Savarese, http://www.ralphsavarese.com/category/djs-writings/
96
1 The concept of a cultural immune system is related to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix
Guattari’s concept of a body without organs. Deleuze/Guattari: “It is a question of
making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other – not
in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of
singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no
longer be said to be extensive.” – Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Pla
teaus (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 156.
2 See Paul Virilio, Rasender Stillstand (München: Hanser, 1992) and his Revolutionen
der Geschwindigkeit (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1993).
3 Clearly, this tableau will form the background to a considerable reform in the field
of dance.
97
4 Hans Peter Weber on the term third nature: “That which is called the third nature
is therefore a) not a third (but rather an unlimited extension of radicalised and
applied knowledge concerning conditioning and upgrading, pure scientism) nor is
it b) nature (but rather the ultimate civilisational project, ‘mendeling’ itself into the
programme of generic programming at every level.” – Hans Peter Weber, Essays 3
(Berlin: sine causa Verlag, 2008), p. 194.
5 Michel Foucault: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void
left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not
constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the
unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” – Michel Foucault,
The Order Of Things – An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences (London: Vintage,
2002), p. 341.
98
99
occupational custody). – See Hans Peter Weber, KreaturDenken (Berlin: sine causa,
2006), p. 523.
10 Karl Jaspers coined the term the age of axes to describe the period from 800
to 200 BC, during this period “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid
simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. And
these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.” Karl Jaspers
(2003). The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press), p. 98
100
With the term technologies of the self Michel Foucault examined the
process of the constitution of the “self” within the context of its under-
lying historical formations of power. The constitution of the self can
accordingly neither be understood completely through psychological
nor through sociological analyses. Foucault uncovers a force field in
which different forces are in effect. As examples for these forces he
cites, among others, administrative and organisational forces as well
personal forces: the force to imagine or to will. In the field of personal
forces he also sees counterforces at work. These forces cannot be situ-
ated unilaterally, neither within a person nor within society. They act
automorphously, i.e. they only organise themselves within the tension
field of the intrinsic organisation of the mind and the autonomous
sphere of contact.
The intrinsic structuring of the mind and the sphere of contact act
upon each other alternately and the forces that operate within them
are not only similarly differentiated, they are also present in a similarly
disrupted fashion and act in a similarly complex manner. Within this
process some forces and potentials are favoured, in other words a drift
sets in, commonly known as civilisational evolution.
2. Cultural sense
Where and how are the screening forces generated? As is known, not
only felicitous forces act within the mental structures of human exis-
tence. These structures are actually prone to crisis and firmly connected
to notorious stress factors. The screening forces occur retroactively
and in opposition to these stress forces. There is a “cultural sense”
as defined by Hans Peter Weber: a sense similar to the sense of hear-
ing or sight, which is geared towards moments of recovery (moments
of presentification), seeking the chance to temporarily diminish these
notorious stress factors.
There are at least three causes for their occurring, three stress factors
which contribute to the mental situation of human beings’ disposition
towards crisis.
101
11 Helmuth Plessner, The Levels of the Organic and Man. Introduction to Philosophi
cal Anthropology (unpublished).
12 Concerning the dimensionality of absence in dance see: Gerald Siegmund,
Abwesenheit – Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes. William Forsythe, Jérôme Bel,
Xavier Le Roy, Meg Stuart” (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006).
13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis
J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
14 Gilles Deleuze, Unterhandlungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 243–253.
15 Elias Canetti, Die Fliegenpein, Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995),
p. 81. Cannetti writes about the Australian Arandi term Eraritjaritjaka which
expresses precisely this longing. Heiner Goebbels, among others, made this term
the basis of a musical drama in 2004.
16 Bazon Brock, in reference to Jean-Luc Godard, discusses the avant-garde’s arrière-
garde. This arrière-garde’s aim is to prevent certain potential futures. This occurs
through the speculative forestalling of potential futures. He calls this positioning
an avant-gardism of refusal, whose espousal demands the greatest powers of
persuasion and the most immense stamina: Bazon Brock: “We call those artists,
who oppose and resist the apocalyptic prognoses of the future and the futile-seeming
develoments, arrière-gardists.” These proponents of the arrière-garde, according
to Brock, work with the supply of eschatological claims and confront them in the
102
present with future pasts. Pasts are to be conceived as former futures and the
present regarded as tomorrow’s past. The future would then be an imaginative
space in which the interplay of time forms is set in motion imaginatively, that is with
the goal of creating as many options as possible. Bazon Brock, Lustmarsch durchs
Theoriegelände (Köln: Dumont, 2008). Translation mine.
17 Peter Sloterdijk, Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001),
p. 94.
18 See Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären II. Globen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999).
19 Sloterdijk, Weltinnenraum, p. 94.
103
104
105
An aesthetics of existence
23 See Hans Peter Weber, Vom KreaturDenken (Berlin: sine causa Verlag, 2006).
24 I would also subscribe to the connection between the body without organs
and intensity as described by Deleuze/Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “That is
why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the
organisation of the organs […]; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, by
gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation.”
Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, p. 153.
106
107
to etch and writing. To dance is to write into space, spatial etching, the drawing
and textualisation of space – not in letters but in the ephemeral, invisible traces
and figures that are produced by the dancers’ motion – appearing and disappear-
ing.” – Hartmut Böhme, Sabine Huschka, ”Prolog”, Wissenskultur Tanz, ed. Sabine
Huschka (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), p. 13. Stefan Hölscher corrects this negligent
reduction of dance to a formal language belonging to the regime of knowledge (we
cannot call it a culture of knowledge). In accordance with Negri he refers to Spinoza’s
distinction between potestas (formations of power) and potentia (facility) in clas-
sifying the body. If the body, as Spinoza implies, is understood as the potential of a
facility, then there is a shift in the relation between “constitution and constitutional-
ity.” – Stefan Hölscher, unpublished dissertation, December 2010.
27 The cultural screens work along the same lines as arrière-garde art, as a conserv-
ing moment within the anthropic field, which opposes nervous changes and softens
them, makes them easier to assimilate. They are magic and transformation. Their
experience lies beneath linguistic difference, i.e. the are not based on the experience
of difference but that of intensity.
In keeping with Deleuze, this turn towards the experience of intensity must be
understood in relation to a turning away from the attempts of classical thinking to
unify thought within a highest, incontrovertible reason and intepreted as a turning
towards the fragmentary and towards metamorphosis.
In contrast to Deleuze, who understands intensities as an exposing, explosive ele-
ment (the volcano metaphor) of a “being towards becoming”- and thereby towards
a permanent state of departure and mobilisation – here becoming is brought into a
paradoxical state: “revealing” as “harbouring”.
In the understanding of art’s arrière-garde the deleuzian intensities are directed
towards people’s culturality. Thinking culturality is only possible with a rejection of
civilisational fitness-enhancement, neuro-enhancement and body-building.
28 Friedrich Hölderlin, Celebration of Peace (1801–1802) Translated by James Mitchell
(http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/friedrich-holderlin-celebration-
of-peace/).
108
The following article is based on the transcript and notes for my lecture
in the Gießen conference “Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity”. Whereas
the first and third part of the lecture were written as a kind of frame,
a passe-partout, the second and main part was articulated instanta
neously on the basis of notes. In an attempt to account for the problem
of participation and sharing within the field of choreography, dance
studies, and philosophy through an adequate method of presentation,
my contribution to the present anthology of the conference alters this
form of presentation: The argumentative lines of a prepared yet impro
vised speech have been written out, and the scripted frame becomes the
citation of a lecture choreographed in situ.
PASSE-PARTOUT
109
110
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 5–34.
4 Deleuze describes this process of conceptualization in relation to his empiricist
method: “Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple
appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation
of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of
concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as a
here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new,
111
differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows.’ Only an empiricist could say: concepts
are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond ‘anthropological
predicates.’ I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from
an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and
differenciates them.” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (London: Con-
tinuum, 2001), p. xix.
5 Sabisch, Choreographing Relations, pp. 21–27.
6 Sabisch, Choreographing Relations, pp. 157–166.
112
7 The relation between, on the one hand, Deleuze’s ontogenetic approach (relying
on a theory of the potential of relations) and, on the other, the actant-network theory
by Bruno Latour (relying on an occasionalist concept of time) is most intriguingly
elaborated by Graham Harman in Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
(Melbourne: re.press, 2009), pp. 99–228.
113
When viewing the existing writings in dance studies at the end of the
nineties, I stumbled upon a problem that seemed to traverse basically
all the texts that I had read; and in all probability my own writings
will not escape from it. Nonetheless, this problem was never directly
addressed: there was no adequate methodology for bridging the gap
between two ways of writing about choreography.
8 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham/
London: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 3–4.
9 For Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic mechanism as mere snap-
shots of movement, see. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New
York: Dover Publications, 1998), p. 308: “The movement slips through the interval,
because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd propo-
sition, that movement is made of immobilities.” As for Bergson’s insight into the
indivisibility of movement, which is closely related to his own and Deleuze’s con-
cept of becoming, see Bergson, “The Perception of Change,” in Henri Bergson: Key
Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, trans. Mabelle L. Andison
(London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 264–265: “Let us, on the contrary, endeavour to
perceive change as it is in its natural indivisibility: we see that it is the very substance
of things, and neither does movement appear to us any longer under the vanishing
form which rendered it elusive to thought, nor substance with the immutability
which made it inaccessible to our experience. Radical instability and absolute immu-
tability are therefore mere abstract views taken from outside of the continuity of real
change, abstractions which the mind then hypostatises into multiple states on the
one hand, into thing or substance on the other.” For Deleuze’s reading of and com-
mentaries on Bergson, see in particular his book Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 2002); and the first volume of his
cinema books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), pp. 1–12, 56–70.
114
115
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm#484:
“It emerges from what has been said so far that to be productive labour is a quality
of labour which in and for itself has absolutely nothing to do with the particular
content of the labour, its particular usefulness or the specific use value in which it is
expressed. [484] Labour with the same content can therefore be both productive and
unproductive.” For Deleuze’s involvement in Marxist theory, see e.g. Difference and
Repetition, p. 186, as well as Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (London:
Routledge, 2003), especially the “Introduction” on Deleuze’s project “La Grandeur
de Marx.”
116
When trying to think the relation between both approaches, the core
question pops up again: what is it that is actually performed in a per-
formance? I will anticipate my answer here, which actually came very
late: from my point of view, it is the relation with the audience that is
performed within a performance. I was already thinking in relations,
and of course one can think the whole performance as a relational
assemblage. However, in order to grasp the specificity of choreography
and the performing arts, one has to conceive of this relation (gestur
ing toward the audience), to account for it methodologically. What a
performance actually works with is precisely the relation we are in at
this moment.
There is a book by Rodolphe Gasché that is key to this matter of rela-
tions in which the author reassesses the century-old philosophical dis-
cussions about the ontology of relations, that is, the question whether
these relations exist or not, whether they are real or not, whether they
have substance or not. I would like to quote a passage from this book
for two reasons: first, because Gasché steps away from the opaque
necessity of pinpointing the minimal ontological quanta needed to
make a relation interesting for a philosopher, and second, because his
critique of the ontological debates has an interesting double feedback
onto the aforementioned context of dance’s ontology. In this quote,
Gasché explains how his book Of Minimal Things proceeds:
117
118
119
1. Contamination
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge,
Mass./ London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 288: “Action is not
what people do, but is instead the ‘fait-faire,’ the making-do, accomplished with
others in an event, with the specific opportunities provided by the circumstances.”
According to Deleuze, an assemblage is “a multiplicity which is made up of many
heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between terms, across
ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that
of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are
important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but
contagions, epidemics, the wind.” See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues
II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Con-
tinuum, 2006), p. 52.
19 See Xavier le Roy, Product of Circumstances, 1999. For the literature on this
performance, see Sabisch, Choreographing Relations, p. 32. For my analysis of the
performance, see pp. 32–66.
20 See Petra Sabisch, “Körper, kontaminiert. Ein Versuch mit Randnoten zur Per-
formance ‘Product of Circumstances’ von Xavier le Roy,” in de figura. Rhetorik –
Bewegung – Gestalt, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters (München: Wilhelm
Fink, 2002), pp. 311–326.
120
121
122
of the universe, unlike the nature of the blood, is not limited, but is absolutely
infinite, its parts are controlled by the nature of this infinite potency in infinite ways,
and are compelled to undergo infinite variations.”
25 For my analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s method of trancendental empiricism,
which subtends all of their writings, see Sabisch, “Transcendental Empiricism:
Deleuze and Guattari’s method,” in Choreographing Relations, pp. 67–93.
26 Marc Rölli, Gilles Deleuze. Philosophie des transzendentalen Empirismus (Vienna:
Turia & Kant, 2003), p. 37 [translation by the author]. See also Rölli, “Virtuality and
Actuality: A Note on Deleuze’s Concept of the Event,” in Deleuzian Events: Writing/
History, ed. Hanjo Berressem and Leyla Haferkamp (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009), p. 75:
123
It was the same with sensibility: the contingently imperceptible, that which
is too small or too far for the empirical exercise of our senses, stands opposed
to an essentially imperceptible which is indistinguishable from that which
can be sensed only from the point of view of a transcendental exercise. Thus
sensibility, forced by the encounter to sense the sentiendum, forces memory
in its turn to remember the memorandum, that which can only be recalled.
Finally, the third characteristic of transcendental memory is that, in turn, it
forces thought to grasp that which can only be thought, the cogitandum or
noeteon, the Essence: not the intelligible, for this is still no more than the
mode in which we think that which might be something other than thought,
but the being of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of
124
2. Articulation
125
126
127
128
37 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 266–267: “We oppose epi-
demic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduc-
tion, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidem-
ics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile,
born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again
every time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participation or nuptials
are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by
contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes inter-
mingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects. The differ-
ence is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for
example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a micro-
organism. Or in the case of a truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are
neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations.”
129
130
131
The attribute “aesthetic” is reserved for a specific usage here: with “aes-
thetic burden” I refer to an inherent aestheticism dating from Western
modern dance as the persistence of the modernist quest of choreog-
raphy and dance to reassert its disciplinary specificity, exclusiveness
and autonomy in aesthetic categories. Aestheticism in Western theat-
rical dance is rooted in the oral and mimetic practice of transmission
of movement, the “show and copy” model that rests upon the image
and imaginability of movement. Regardless of the operation a work of
contemporary dance may entail, it is more often than not presented,
received, judged, historically recognized, referenced, or transmitted
in the image of the body and movement.1 While in dance it relies on
the oral mimetic logic of producing a self-identical aesthetic object by
reproduction, the predominance of the visual in framing the sensorial
of dance is not unique for dance, but a result of the condition of circu-
lating any work as a commodity. What is specific about the arrest of
a dance work in an image is its reductiveness in so far as the imaging
1 Projects of reconstruction and re-enactment of dance often suffer from the aesthetic
burden in the sense that the formal aspects of the choreography are foregrounded
in the presentation, while the historical and contextual aspects are insufficiently
tackled.
135
136
4 This rhetoric owes some inspiration to Bruno Latour’s take on the crisis of politi-
cal representation in democracy. Bruno Latour. “From Realpolitic to Dingpolitik or
How to Make Things Public,” ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel, Making Things Public:
Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe/Cambridge MA/London: ZKM & The MIT
Press, 2005), pp. 14–41.
5 The thesis comes from my doctoral dissertation, “Choreography after Deleuze:
Performative as Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance,” at Centre for
Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University.
137
138
139
140
141
7 Quoted from Changes by BADco. demo recording from the performance at Tanz
im August, Berlin, 2007.
142
143
144
How are we to think about the relationship between dance and poli-
tics? Might it mean not only understanding dance politically, but also
considering the politics of dance? The history and the discourse of
dance is a history of the intricate negotiations between body, move-
ment and politics: what André Lepecki calls the “choreo-political.”2
And the discourses and interpretations of Dance Studies reflect and
address these questions with shifting degrees of emphasis. Yes, the
political has for some time now been a search formula for an under-
standing of dance, and one that has managed to direct public attention
to many of its different forms.
What can be said to be political is the relationship between aesthetics
and power, the coincidence of political and aesthetic representation,
for example in the dances at the court of Louis XIV – as Mark Franko’s
reading of The King’s Two Bodies referring to Kantorowicz, has
shown.3
Also political are the dances and movements portrayed by those
choreographers whose pieces deal with questions of power, hierar-
chies, law and justice, inclusions and exclusions. A random sampling
might include: Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, Jean Weidt’s work-
ers’ choirs, Valeska Gert’s socially critical dance sketches, Martha
1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft”, Noten zur Literatur,
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 11 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 49–68, here:
p. 51. (“The greatness of works of art, however, consists soley in he fact that they
give voice to what ideology hides.” – T.W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”,
Notes to Literature I, Vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, transl. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 37–54, here: p. 39) – Translation
of this article from the German by Iain W.M. Taylor.
2 See also André Lepecki, “Five thoughts on the Choreo-Political Neocolonial”, The
Third Body (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2004), pp. 143–147.
3 See also Mark Franko, “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances
of Louis XIV”, TDR, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter 1994): pp. 71–82, here: p. 74.
145
146
147
148
23 See e.g. Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator / Ein Vortrag Zur
Zuschauerperspektive”, Texte zur Kunst, Nr. 58: “Betrachter” (2005): pp. 35–51; or
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Theater als Ort des Anderen. A conversation with Gesa Ziemer”,
Theater der Zeit (Dec. 2004): pp. 26–28; and Jean-Luc Nancy, Die Ausdehnung der
Seele. Texte zu Körper, Kunst und Tanz, ed. and transl. Miriam Fischer (Berlin,
Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010); see as well Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution”, A
Potential Politics.
24 See the publication of Sfb 447 (Special Research Area) in: Performance Research
Journal, issue on “Participation and Synchronization”, ed. Kai van Eikels, Bettina
Brandl-Risi, “What Parts Of Us Can Do With Parts Of Each Other – And When”
(London: Routledge, 2011).
25 See also Gabriele Brandstetter on Frédéric Gies and other members of performance
collectives as danse praticable: “Choreographies of the Curatorial”, ed. Beatrice
von Bismarck, Cultures of the Curatorial (conference proceedings, expected to be
published in 2012).
26 For an extensive treatment of these artists’ collectives and the question of an art
of the collective see Kai van Eikels, Die Kunst des Kollektiven. Performance zwischen
Theater, Politik und Sozio-Ökonomie (Berlin, 2011, in print).
27 From 21rd to 23rd of October the NSK held a First NSK CITIZENS’ CONGRESS at
the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, which the virtual art project, the social
149
150
31 T.W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft”, p. 52. (“by refusing to submit
to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own
laws”, T.W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, p. 40).
32 T.W. Adorno, ibid., p. 49. (“objects with which to demonstrate sociological
theses”, T.W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, p. 37f).
33 The question of engagement and disengagement is raised in the contemporary
discourse on dance – hence not referring to Adorno and the Critical Theory but to
Gilles Deleuze compare André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the
Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2005).
34 T.W. Adorno: “Erpreßte Versöhnung”, p. 270. (“Extorted Reconciliation”, p. 225).
35 Ibid.
36 T.W. Adorno: “Erpreßte Versöhnung”, p. 261. (“Only by virtue of this difference,
and not by denying it, does the work of art become both work of art and correct
consciousness”, T.W. Adorno, ibid.).
37 See also Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung
nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 9. (See also: The
Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, translated by Neil
Solomon, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.). Menke stresses that the term “auton-
omy” in Adorno implies that it “occupies its own place alongside these discourses
within the pluralistic structure of modern reason”, see Menke, The Sovereignty of
Art, p. vii. (or: Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst, p. 9.).
151
The dance performance that I would like to consider from this point
of view (of autonomy and alterity, with Adorno and Nancy), is Xavier
Le Roy’s Le Sacre du printemps, a piece that is played in the artificial
space of the theatre and that composes its material in references to the
arts of dance, music, and video/film. In what way would the aesthetics
of this performance – in so far as it opens a place of the Other, of
difference, in the apparently autonomous aesthetic reflexivity of a
dance piece over and above the reception of a dance piece (namely
Stravinsky’s/Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, 1913) – have to be
seen as political? In the press reception of Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre
du printemps41 there is a clear emphasis on the manner of producing
the performance and its contextualization, such as its relationship with
Le Roy’s Mouvements for Lachenmann (2005).42 The narrative estab-
38 See also T.W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft”, p. 60. (“contradictory
fundamental condition of society”, T.W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”,
p. 46).
39 See also Juliane Rebentisch, who refers in a similar argument to Adorno’s “Aes-
thetic” in her Essay on the Installation by Mathias Poledna: “Deconfigurations of
Community. Mathias Poledna’s Version”, printend in Mathias Poledna’s Version,
16mm black and white film, no sound, 10:10 min, ed. Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Cologne, Berlin 2004, no page numbers.
40 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Theater als Ort des Anderen”, p. 60.
41 Le Sacre du printemps, concept and performance: Xavier Le Roy; music: Igor
Stravinsky; recorded by the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle;
artistic consultants; Berno Odo Polzer, Bojana Cvejic; production: in stitu produc-
tions (D) and Le Kwatt (F); co-producer: Centre choreographique national de Mont-
pellier Languedoc-Roussillon (Xavier Le Roy was associated artist in 2007/08), Les
Substitances/Residence –Lyon, “Tanz im August” – International Dance Festival
2007 – Berlin, PACT Zollverein, choreographic center NRW – Essen.
42 See the reviews by Pirkko Husemann, “Tanz des Dirigenten. ‘Le Sacre du print-
emps’ von Xavier Le Roy bei Tanz im August 2007”, published 2007 at corpusweb,
152
In his solo Le Sacre du printemps (2007) a man comes on stage, and turns
his back on an audience bathed in brilliant light. On the downbeat of his
first move (which seems to resemble the gesture made by a musical conduc-
tor), the opening bars of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps emerge from
under the spectators’ seats. A few minutes later, the man turns to face the
audience directly and starts to ‘conduct’ them, calling on individual specta-
tors to ‘play’ their ‘instruments’ as and when the music requires it. Things
are immediately complicated, however, because the movements that would
normally produce sound are instigated, in advance, by the music itself. The
impression is of a mechanical karaoke. If the man were to leave the stage, it
appears that the music would simply continue by itself. The ‘conductor’ in
this strange concert is, of course, Le Roy who is performing in front of, and
crucially with, an audience. The latter is seated in a conventional theatre
auditorium that ‘mimics’ the spatial design of a symphonic orchestra in a
concert hall […].44
153
45 See also different articles by Millicent Hodson such as: “Ritual Design in the
New Dance: Nijinsky’s Choreographic Method”, Dance Research: The Journal of
the Society for Dance Research, Edinburgh Univ. Press, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1986):
pp. 63–77; or: “Ritual Design in the New Dance: Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps”,
Dance Research, Vol. III, No. 2 (Summer 1985): pp. 35–45.
46 On Bausch’s Sacre compare: Gabriele Brandstetter, “Le Sacre du printemps. Cho-
reographie und Ritual”, eds. Corinna Caduff, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Rituale heute.
Theorien – Kontroversen – Entwürfe (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), pp. 127–148; or Gabriele
Brandstetter, Gabriele Klein, eds., Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft. Modellanalysen
zu Pina Bauschs “Le Sacre du Printemps” (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007).
154
47 See also Noémie Salomon, “Conducting Movement: Xavier Le Roy and the
Amplification of Le Sacre du printemps”, Dance Research Journal, 43/1 (Summer
2011): pp. 65–80. In her article on Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre du printemps Noémie
Salomon focusses this aspect of conducting as dance. Upon the idea of conducting
as a practice of wielding power (and “the anti-Semitic background of the art of
conduct” (p. 73) with a view to Adorno’s denegation of Strawinsky’s music) Salo-
mon interprets Le Roy’s performance as “nothing but dance” (p. 74): “Le Roy’s art
of conduct thus intensifies the work of the body and its abilities to act and react;
[…] it amplifies gestures, sounds, affects, and histories through – and as – move-
ment, thus expanding the choreographic territory to the forceful, exhilarating, and
transformative gestures of conducting.” (p. 78). Hence, the musical fractions, the
pauses, the torsions – the turn of the figure –, as well as the inter-medial aspect and
the potentially critical part of Le Roy’s Performance are, in my opinion, overlooked
in this article.
48 See also Gabriele Brandstetter, “‘Tournez, s’il vous plaît’. Figurationen der
Wendung im Bild der Rückenfigur: Zu E.T.A. Hoffmans Die Fermate und Xavier Le
Roys Performance Sacre”, ed. Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher, Christoph
Steier, Figur – Figura – Figuration: E. T. A. Hoffmann (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2011).
155
49 The relation to this film, i.e. the “source” of the performance in a film/video,
the intermediality, and the question of the “educational” context of this project of
Rattle as a “project”, would require a separate analysis. One could advance the
thesis that here too Le Roy’s Sacre adopts a contrary position that is aesthetically
immanent and “negative”, as his concept of “learning”/assimilating runs counter to
the “disciplinary model” of Roysten Maldoom as shown in the film.
50 See also Gia Kourlas, “All the Rite moves. Xavier Le Roy faces the music (and
sort of dances)”, where Kourlas quotes Le Roy’s comments on different reactions
by the audience.
156
157
158
159
160
161
From this time until the outbreak of World War II Graham was active
in the popular front. A report on a talk she delivered in 1937 – Nazi
Destruction of the Arts – shows that Graham learned of Laban’s fall
from favor with the Culture Ministry after the Olympic Games.3 Graham
asserted in 1939 that dance itself in Germany had been “proscribed;
bound down.”4 But she conceded: “What conditions exist today, at this
time, I do not know, because very little comes out.”
The antifascist position in American art dates officially from the 1936
American Artists’ Congress. Graham collaborators Barbara Morgan
and Isamu Noguchi were signers of the original call for the Congress;
Morgan’s name also appears in 1939 on the Executive Board list of the
New York Branch.5 Graham addressed the second national convention
1 For a discussion of Graham’s politics and aesthetics in the early thirties, see
my Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995) and The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
2 Martha Graham, Letter to Rudolf von Laban, March 14, 1936. Scrapbooks, Martha
Graham archive, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Those who would not be
welcome in Germany were the Jewish members of Graham’s company.
3 “A Dancer and an Educator on Fascism”, Dance Observer (March 1937). See
Lilian Karina, “Laban’s Downfall and Post-Labanism”, ed. Lilian Karina and Marion
Kant, Hitler’s Dancers. German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, transl. Jonathan
Steinberg (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 57–61.
4 Martha Graham, “A Dancer Speaks, a talk delivered at the Professional Conference
against Nazi Persecution,” TAC (January 1939).
5 Morgan contributed to a discussion about the inclusion of photography in the Amer-
ican Artists’ Congress. See her “Photography and the Plastic Arts,” The American
163
Today the Fascist threat has come full circle. In a traditionally free and
liberty loving America, Fascism comes in the name of anti-Fascism. All the
enemies of progress suddenly become defenders of democracy. Our liberties
are destroyed to defend liberty and the policies to which our people are
committed by their government, in the name of peace, border ever closer
on overt war.7
Artist. News Bulletin of the American Artists, Congress vol. 1/no. 2 (Summer 1937).
6 3rd Annual Membership Exhibition. American Artists’ Congress (February 5–26,
1939). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C. The
John Reed clubs charter contained a platform against imperialist war and fascism
since 1932. See also Matthew Baigell, Julia Williams, eds., Artists against War and
Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (Rutgers: Rutgers University
Press, 1986). I have been unable to locate the text of Graham’s talk, “The Dance: An
Allied Art”. The theme was the artist in relation to peace, according to “The Open
Session at Carnegie Hall,” American Artist. News Bulletin of the American Artists
Congress Vol. I, no. 3 (Winter 1937), p. 1.
7 A Call to a Congress of American Artists in Defense of Culture, June 6-7-8, 1941,
New York City. Archives of American Arts, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.
Morgan was a signer of the call for the American Artists’ Congress, and her name
also appears on the Executive Board list of the New York Branch. Morgan lobbied for
the inclusion of photography in the membership of the American Artists’ Congress:
“To incorporate this group of workers in the body of the Congress would be a great
stimulation,” she wrote in “Photography and the Plastic Arts”, The American Artist.
New Bulletin of the American Artists’ Congress, vol. I, no. 2 (Winter 1937), p. 1.
8 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 147.
164
9 The original score was by Ray Green. It is preserved in the Music Division of the
Library of Congress. Green was married to Graham dancer May O’Donnell.
10 See Lincoln Kirstein, “Dance: Martha Graham at Bennington,” The Nation,
September 3, 1938, American Document clippings file, Dance Collection, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Owen Burke’s review in
New Masses was highly favorable.
11 An earlier version of this paper was published as “L’utopie antifasciste: Ameri
can Document de Martha Graham”, ed. Claire Rousier, Etre ensemble (Pantin: Centre
national de la danse, 2003), pp. 283–306. This paper is also a much shorter version
of a chapter in Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 14–44, in which the politics of American Docu
ment are analyzed in greater detail.
165
166
4, 1938. Statements that reveal Graham’s political intent were confided only to the
Daily Worker or in personal correspondence.
15 Review dated March 11, 1939, quoted from a 1940 flyer of “Martha Graham and
Dance Group”, Martha Graham archive, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
16 The American Dancer (April 1942), Martha Graham Collection, Music Division,
Library of Congress, Scrapbooks.
17 Maureen Needham Costonis cited American Document for Graham’s demonstrated
ability to mix politics with art. See her “American Document: A Neglected Graham
Work”, Proceedings Society of Dance History Scholars, Twelfth Annual Conference,
Arizona State University, 17–19 February 1989, pp. 72–81.
18 “Dance Libretto: American Document, by Martha Graham,” Theatre Arts 26/9
(September 1942), p. 565.
19 Ibid.
20 Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French
Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 125.
21 Inge Baxmann, Mythos Gemeinschaft: Körper und Tanzkulturen in der Moderne
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), pp. 179–252.
167
It is very evident that we enjoy this liberty pre-eminently when we are making
an effort to create a new individuality in ourselves, thus endeavouring to
break the bonds of habit which enclose us […] It seems to me that this
psychology of the deeper life must be represented in the following way […]
To say that we are acting, implies that we are creating an imaginary world
placed ahead of the present world and composed of movements which
depend entirely on us.”23
22 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme & J. Roth (Glencoe, IL:
the Free Press, 1950), p. 58.
23 Ibid., p. 55–6.
24 Ibid., p. 56.
168
25 Ibid., p. 57.
26 Willy Gianinazzi, Naissance du mythe moderne. Georges Sorel et la crise de la
pensée savante (1889–1914) (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
2006), p. 85.
27 Martha Graham quoted in Merle Armitage, Martha Graham 1937 (New York:
Dance Horizons, 1966), p. 103.
28 David Gross, “Myth and Symbol in Georges Sorel”, eds. Seymour Drscher, David
Sabean, Allan Sharlin, Political Symbolism in Modern Europe. Essays in Honor of
George L. Mosse (New Brunswick, London: Transaction Books, 1982), p. 105.
29 Hawkins sailed for Europe on June 22, 1933 and returned on August 5th. Erick
Hawkins Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress: box 77, folder 4.
30 Serenade premiered on June 10, 1934 in White Plains, New York.
31 Jean Erdman interview with Don McDonagh, October 4, 1993, Dance Collection,
New York Pubic Library for the Performing Arts: *MGZTL 4–2567.
169
170
171
38 Ibid.
39 “Dance libretto,” p. 86.
40 D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. George J. Zytaruk and
James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 470.
41 Ibid., p. 470.
42 The book is, however, not entirely trustworthy. See Victoria Geduld, “Martha
Graham’s Gilded Cage: Blood Memory: An Autobiography (1991)” forthcoming in
Dance Research Journal (2013).
43 Graham cited in Wayne D. Shirley, Ballet for Martha and Ballets for Martha
(Washington: Library of Congress, 1997), p. 14.
172
44 “The Nazi Myth,” transl. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990):
p. 304.
45 Morgan specifies: “Today great latitude of speed has become a commonplace by
virtue of fast pan film emulsions, fast corrected lenses, synchroflashes, speedlamps,
moviefloods, and photofloods. Action has free rein!” – The place of action in Mor-
gan’s aesthetics of dance photography deserves further analysis. Barbara Morgan,
“Dance Photography,” The Complete Photographer 18/3 (New York: National Edu-
cational Alliance, 1942): p. 1133.
46 Barbara Morgan, “Dance Into Photography,” Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in
Photographs (Hastings-on-Hudson: Morgan & Morgan, 1941), p. 149.
47 Morgan, “Dance Photography”, p. 1134.
173
174
175
176
177
The connection between politics and dance is one of the most dis-
cussed topics in the performing arts today. Before I take a closer look
at what constitutes this link, I will introduce some epistemic and social
frameworks within which we can speak of politics when we speak
about contemporary performance and art in general. Then, I will con-
tinue with a discussion of the characteristic modalities of politicality
that I register on the actual international dance scene.
To begin with, I want to emphasize that my focus in this text will not
be a particular politics of contemporary dance. Rather, I want to con-
centrate on the problematics of politicality as the aspect of an artwork
or art practice that addresses the ways it acts and intervenes in the
public sphere. In doing so, politicality implies discussions about and
conflicts around topics such as the subjects and objects that perform
in a public sphere, the arrangement of positions and power relations
among them, the distribution of the sensible, and the ideological dis-
courses that shape a common symbolic and sensorial order of society,
which affects its material structure and partitions. Therefore, my aim
here is neither to advocate political art nor to divide dance perfor-
mances into socio-politically engaged ones on the one hand and l’art-
pour-l’art practices on the other hand. Instead, I would like to stress
the necessity to think a broad and complex grid of politicality as an
aspect that characterizes each and every performance – be it political
or apolitical, resistant or complicit, transformative or servile – as a
social event that is practiced in public.
During the 20th century the development of the mass media has con-
tested art’s visibility in the public sphere. Furthermore, the general
aestheticization of everyday life has deprived art of its almost exclu-
sive claim on the aesthetic sphere. Taking into account the histori-
cally marginal place of art in society, the question of why we should
deal with the politicality of dance and performance at all is a pressing
one. To answer it requires a broader rethinking of both the concept
of politics and the idea of art as a social practice. Trying to think this
question beyond metaphorical terms and metaphysical verifications,
I will straightforwardly – and thus to a certain extent schematically –
181
[In] the performing arts (as distinguished from the creative art of making),
the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product
which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes
1 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998); and also further reflections in On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1991).
2 An elaborated critical answer to this challenge can be found in the work of the
Austrian group WochenKlausur; see: http://www.wochenklausur.at/, especially
“From the Object to the Concrete Intervention”, http://www.wochenklausur.at/
kunst.php?lang=en, Access: 26 March 2011.
182
3 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future; Six Exercises in Political Thought (New
York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 153 f.
4 For further elaborations on this see: Giorgio Agamben, “Poiesis and Praxis”, “Pri-
vation Is Like a Face”, in The Man Without Content (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), pp. 68–94, pp. 59–68. As Agamben’s theses would be a digression
on my main topic here, I only want to mention that they show that a return to
praxis today won’t re-politicize art, as the practice is not that what it was in Ancient
Greece, but is – already from the 19th century onwards – conceived as an expression
of individual human will and creative forces; see also: Ana Vujanović, “What do we
actually do when … make art”, Maska 127–130 & Amfiteatar 2 (2010)
5 E.g. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour”, http://www.generation-online.
org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm (30 March 2011); “Le renouvellement du concept
de production et ses sémiotiques” (Chapter 1), http://www.howtodothingsbythe-
ory.info/2010/06/22/public-editing-3-reference-text_1-le-renouvellement-du-con-
cept-de-production-et-ses-semiotiques/ (30 March 2011); Michael Hardt, Antonio
Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Virno, A Gram
mar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).
183
184
Thus we have arrived at the degree zero of thinking the issue of art-
and-politics and its attractiveness to contemporary critical thought.
Although the viewpoints briefly introduced above are divergent, we
can conclude from them all that today the relation of art to politics as
something outside the field of art collapses more and more. Instead,
art becomes itself embedded within the political, and thus turns into
one of the training grounds or battlegrounds for the political practices
of Western societies.
185
The first modality is based on the idea that dance as art is a specific type
of social discourse. As such it has the capacity to speak about social
subjects and critical issues such as inequality, intolerance, militarism,
misogyny, dictatorship, fascism, racism, etc. In this sense, the role of
the (political) performance is to raise public awareness and to function
as a critical commentary on a particular social problem. Accordingly,
the medium of performance is not deemed to be an important factor
of its politicality. Moreover, it is considered as a mere formal aspect
of the dance piece, which is neutral and in itself relieved from politi-
cal messages. Therefore, the medium is capable of conveying different
messages coming from the content of the performance.
This modality is not a new one. It has already existed since the early
decades of the 20th century in various performing arts practices and
works that considered the political primarily in terms of contents,
themes, or subjects. The conception might be found both in modern-
ism – including also some segments of the historical avant-garde and
neo-avant-garde in the ‘60s – and, on the other hand, in Socialist real-
ism, the political and workers’ theatre and dance.9 This inherently
divergent scope seems paradoxical, but is not. The crucial idea that
enables all these different practices to understand the political in this
way is that of the representational character of art together with its
exceptional status in society. Consequently, from the perspective of
this mode of politicality, dance could be divided into politically engaged
dance and l’art pour l’art dance. While engaged dance deals directly
with social-political issues, the latter conceives of the dance discipline
as an autonomous field of human creativity, individual expression,
and emancipation of the individual body, which was seen as free from
the social infra-structure and functionality.
In any case, a politically critical remark is that both categories are
bound to the idea of the privileged, transcendental status of dance as
art, which is from this outside position able to speak about society and
politics – or prefers not to do so. What both positions neglect is that
186
187
This framework provides us with a strong tool for thinking the politicality
of dance even in the cases traditionally seen as politically indifferent
or apolitical. Speaking historically, one can say that, for instance, the
(post-)minimal dance of the Judson Church Dance Company (Yvonne
Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, etc.) practiced an emancipatory
politics without saying a word on political themes.11 It was clearly
engaged in democratization, individual liberation, and emancipation
in the spirit of the ‘60s by the problematization of inherited images of
dance, body, and techniques, and by offering critical alternatives to
them, by introducing for example pedestrian bodies and movements
which were inclusive (‘democratic’) and non-virtuoso.
Today, we could approach the choreographies by Xavier Le Roy,
Jérôme Bel, Bad.co and Nikolina Bujas Pristaš, Bojana Mladenović,
Juan Dominguez, Vera Mantero, Mette Ingvartsen, Eduard Gabia,
10 See a consistent analysis of the socio-political practice of the artistic signifiers in:
Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rastko Mo²nik, Danijel Levski, Jure Mikuž, “Umetnost,
družba/tekst” (“Art, Society/Text”), Problemi-Razprave 3–5 (1975).
11 See also in Ramsay Burt, “Dance, History, and Political Relevance”, Maska
82–83 (2003).
188
The third and last mode of the politicality of dance in its current terms
is the result of an intersection of post-Operaist theories and bio-politics
on the one hand and cultural-activist initiatives connected to digital
technologies, particularly the Internet, on the other. In these frame-
works the problematics of work become one of the crucial political
questions of contemporary Western societies. As they represent societ-
ies shaped by a growing domination of post-industrial economy and
immaterial labour, as already mentioned above, art, culture, and cre-
ative industries become central theoretical concerns, even though they
are (mis)recognized as the avant-garde or the places of “silent revolu-
tion” of society.13 Furthermore, from free software and open source
through Hacktivism to Copy Left and creative commons licenses,
digital and Internet cultures generate many new-leftist practices that
invite artists to pay political attention to the conditions, protocols, and
procedures of their working processes.
12 See André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement
(London, New York: Routledge, 2006).
13 See Lazzarato’s own re-thinking in “Conversation with Maurizio Lazzarato”, TkH
17 & Le Journal des Laboratoires: “Exhausting Immaterial Labour in Performance”
(2010), pp. 12–17.
189
190
191
The cover of the December 2011 issue of the US magazine Time1 fea-
tured a face veiled by a golden cloth. Underneath the title: The Protester.
The magazine had declared this persona, the anonymous protester, to
be their personality of the year. In doing so, Time magazine wished
to honor those, who have committed themselves to the protest move-
ments and claimed the streets as a new site of a democratic culture of
participation: from the protests taking place in the Arabic world, to the
demonstrations against the budget cutbacks of European governments,
against nuclear energy, right up to the Occupy Movement in New York.
“There is this contagion of protest”, says Times’ editor-in-chief Richard
Stengel. “These people who risked their lives … I think it is changing
the world for the better.”2
In these protest movements a new globalized political culture of par-
ticipation is emerging and operating on a local level in urban spaces.
The protesters are demanding a more democratic culture or – in the
already established democracies, which I will concentrate on in this
text – new forms of participation and involvement3 that go beyond
the processes of authorization and legitimization already inherent to
representative democracy.
Taking place almost parallel to the emergence of these new public
manifestations of a political culture of participation, performers and
choreographers, but also established institutions of culture and educa-
tion, as well as local politicians have (again) been developing a grow-
ing interest in participatory performance and choreographic projects in
the public sphere since the 1990’s. Artistic distrust of the established
institutions of art, such as museums, operas or theaters, has drawn
193
194
195
196
197
13 William Forsythe in: Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Move: Choreographing you. Art
and dance since the 1960s (London: Hayward Publishing, 2010), p. 105.
14 Compare Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography. Ideology as Performance in Dance
and Everyday Movement (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005).
198
15 Compare Katharina Rost, Stephanie Schwarz & Rainer Simon, “Turning In/
Out. Auditory participation in contemporary music and theatre performances,”
Performance Research 16 (3) (2011): pp. 67–75.
199
16 Compare footnote 3.
17 Compare: William Forsythe: http://www.williamforsythe.de/publications.html,
accessed on January 7, 2012.
18 William Forsythe: www.zeit.de/lebensart/2010–08/huepfen-deichtorhallen,
accessed on December 17, 2011.
200
3. Participation as Involvement
201
20 In Berlin, “Emergence Room” took place in the summer of 2011 on the grounds
of the Uferstudios in a circle of construction trailers surrounded by screens so that
it was impossible to look in from outside.
202
203
22 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).
23 Paolo Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation (Semiotext(e) Foreign
Agents) (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 2007).
24 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Cultural
Memory in the Present) (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009).
25 Robin Celikates, “Communitas-Immunitas-Bios. Roberto Espositos Politik der
Gemeinschaft” (Communitas-Immunitas-Bios. Roberto Esposito’s Politics of Com-
munity) in: Janine Böckelmann & Claas Morgenroth, eds., Politik der Gemeinschaft:
Zur Konstitution des Politischen in der Gegenwart (Politics of Community: On the
constitution of the Political in the present) (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), pp. 49–68,
here: 51. Translator’s translation.
204
205
206
29 Maria Muhle’s foreword in: Jacques Rancière, Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen
(Berlin: b_books Verlag, 2006), p. 9. Translator’s Translation.
30 André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
207
208
Mobilizing Dance
Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
1 Of course this tension between dance’s particularity and its universalism runs
through the historical and ethnological impulses that had constituted the conventional
approaches to the study of dance until dance studies undertook a more philosophical
and theoretical turn. See, for example, John Martin, The Modern Dance (Brooklyn,
Dance Horizons 1965 [1933]); Judith Lynne Hanna, To Dance Is Human: A Theory
of Non-verbal Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and for
the text of the break in dance studies, Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies
and Subjects in Contemporary American Dancing (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986).
2 This question has informed my previous work on dance. See, Randy Martin,
Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and
209
Garvey, 1998; and Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998).
3 For a recent effort to examine the intersections between logics of networks and
organizations see Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks: Media theory, Creative labour,
New institutions (Rotterdam: NAi Press, 2006).
4 The literature on the financial crisis itself looks to be a genre out of control with
new titles appearing daily. Yet the tropes of missed regulatory opportunity, of excess
by a few outliers, or insufficient cash reserves often miss the normalization of dis-
equilibration that continues after the fall. For some representative accounts see, Paul
Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (London: Verso, 2010) or Gillian Tett,
Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted
its Bold Dream and Created A Financial Catastrophe (New York, London, Toronto,
Sidney: Free Press, 2009) which contains a chapter entitled “Dancing Around the
Regulators,” a hint at the kind of suspect politics associated with dance.
210
5 For accounts of derivatives beyond their technical financial aspect see, Dick Bryan
and Mike Rafferty, Capitalism With Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial
Derivatives, Capital and Class (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Ben Lee and
Edward Lipuma, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006); Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002).
6 For a conception of the political grounded in a nuanced understanding of mutual
indebtedness see, Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common
Good (New York: Verso, 2011).
211
7 See, Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial
Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
8 Curiously, the notion of fundamental value as opposed to its representations that
lead to speculation hand over much of the discipline termed economics especially
its neoliberal formulation, an antinomy that Philip Mirowski has effectively
disclosed recently in his edited collection with Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont
Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009). The transposition between what Marx called fictitious
capital (disintermediated financial transactions between firms) and a false realm
of finance tout court is a temptation of some recent Marxist political economy.
See, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and
Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
9 This affective subsidy of artistic labor is what Andrew Ross has called the “cultural
discount.” See, Andrew Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem,” Social Text 63 (2000):
pp. 1–32. For a trenchant critique of creative class appeals see, Matteo Pasquinelli,
“Creative Sabotage in the Factory of Culture: Art, Gentrification and the Metropolis,”
Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Press, 2009).
212
Derivative Doubles
10 The link between the rise of finance and the proliferation of imperialist war was
made by Rudolf Hilferding in his seminal formulation, Finance Capital: A Study of
213
the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London: Routledge, 1981 [1910]). The
specificity of the U.S. turn is contextualized by Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth
Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).
11 The notional value of exchange based and over-the-counter derivatives are
tracked by the Bank for International Settlements. The quadrillion dollar figure
comes from adding up the two kinds of derivatives for June, 2008 ($672 billion
for OTC and $428 billion for exchange-based). See, “Statistics on Exchange Traded
Derivatives”, http://www.bis.org/statistics/extderiv.htm; and “Semi-annual OTC
derivatives statistics,” http://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm.
214
12 See, Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape
Markets (Cambridge: MIT, 2006).
215
216
14 For a representative recent account see, Robert Elson, Governing global finance:
the evolution and reform of the international financial architecture (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
15 The spatial and temporal multiplicity of the notion of kinestheme may go
farther in realizing Michel Foucault’s own critique of continuous time and space as
developed in his Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
217
16 The dance accounts here are clearly telescopic. See, for elaboration, Mark Franko,
Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); Martha Graham, The Notebooks of Martha Graham (New York: Harcourt
Brace Javanovich, 1973); Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater,
1962–1964 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).
218
Dancing Derivatives
17 For video documentation of these dances see, Trisha Brown: Early Works, 1966–
1979 (Artpix, 2004)
18 See Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), and Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier:
Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1996).
219
19 See, Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Riz-
zoli, 1977).
20 For audio-visual documentation of these forms see, Style Wars (Tony Silver,
Public Art Films, 1983).
220
Generative Risk
221
222
23 For a critical look at the advent of self-help, see, Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.:
Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford, 2006).
24 The notion of moral panic was developed in British cultural studies of youth
culture and crime, and has morphed into a generalized trope of war on domestic
populations. The seminal study is Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State
and Law and Order (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978) and the updated reflection
223
224
225
PROLOGUE:
227
Which means that in its second year, the performance was gradually
canceled through its regression. Every time I was invited to perform it
I performed less and less of the live event, replacing its parts with their
video documentation.
In Dance, Politics, and Co-Immunity I/we will perform “My private bio-
politics” performance in its 3rd phase that I will reveal to you during
the performance.
Now, it is very important to me not only to perform for you but also to
prepare the video material that I will send to producers, programmers,
directors of different festivals that present contemporary dance
projects.
I would need your help to prepare it!
228
I got your e-mail address from Julia Wocke, Tanzwerkstatt Berlin. I’m
writing from “brut”, a new international coproduction-house for per-
formance, dance and theatre in Vienna. Our artistic directors Heiko
Pfost and Thomas Frank are very interested in your work and would
be pleased if you could send us a video from your performance My
own private biopolitics.
Is that possible?
Just send it to the address below,
He is closing his lap-top and putting it in the left front corner of the
“boxing ring”.
He is taking his clothes off, putting them in the right front corner.
He is now only in his underwear with a fake animal or maybe Balkan-
macho fur on the shoulders, chest, and back.
He is pouring blue pounce on his hair, making the shape of a small
hat, and adding a red spot just above his forehead.
He is making an altar in the left back corner – putting an Orthodox
icon on top, and adding real whistle around the neck of the saint.
He is giving a sign for start.
229
The performer is taking off the fake animal or maybe Balkan-macho fur
from his shoulders, chest, and back.
He is putting on Adidas shorts and an athlete T-shirt.
So, in the next years I started to take acting classes with kids until the
time I was 16.
I was 16. I was in acting class and I had to go out on stage and
to make my scene but I didn’t learn the text. Yeah, I was very lazy.
You’ve got it from the beginning. Even at 8 I was already lazy.
And then the teacher – I think he was, he couldn’t stand it anymore
and he said: ok – go away. I don’t want you in the class anymore and
you? he won’t make performance!
I was very, very shocked!
But it was in the cultural centre and in this room after the acting class
there was a dance class. So, I decided to stay in the room. He said: go
out, I said: no – and I stayed in the room, and I stayed in the room for
the dance class. So, the dancers came and the teacher came and I took
the dance class.
Everybody was ok. A new student … I’ve started to do exercises.
Warm up.
He is doing exercises.
230
In the performance Pichet Klunchun and myself Jérôme Bel gave this
answer to the question of why did he, Jerome Bel, become a dancer?
231
He announces:
And, now it’s time for a digression. I apologize for interrupting the
spectacle. Please be patient, in just a few minutes the performance
will continue to run.
With this digression we want to open up the possibility for the work
itself to be transformed into its own archeology. Together with other
colleagues from other contexts we want to discover or to reveal its
multiple layers without an artistic aura that could seduce our gaze.
So, please consider this performance only as its own possible demon-
stration or actualization, and as a part of an open research platform
that includes also talks, methodological games, discussions, etc.
232
He is taking the letter from the floor, reading it aloud or rather re-telling
it.
233
NOTA BENE:
234
Is the only right that is left for us – is the right to be:
exotic (showing the ring),
amateurish (showing himself),
old-fashioned (showing the materials),
because we do not have the right to contemporaneity?
Is the only right that is left for us – the right to a non-articulated
body,
still absent,
confused, a bit awkward, too bodily, too romantic, a narrative
body,
235
To the technicians:
Please, in the next few minutes give me the lights of all the perfor-
mances that have been performed here in this space!!!
The performer is standing on the very back of the scene, behind the
squares.
The lights are changing arbitrarily, making points where there are no
points, and re-reading the scene strangely … maybe annoyingly …
236
He is isolating it, as well as all the others he finds, with the tape.
Blackout!
However, what is important for marking dance and its more lasting
traces are not only the dance traces themselves but also other sur-
rounding practices.
237
Or, all that I am saying and presenting to you here has nothing to do
with it!
What if it is only a matter of geo-politics?
Then all my materials that I’ve prepared for tonight are meaning-
less!!!
The performer is taking a paper from the left square, and reading in
Serbian the decision of the Department for Culture of the City of Novi
Sad.
In the decision, they politely inform him that they decided not to
support the project “Indigo Dance”, because its content, although inter
esting, is not a subject matter of the Department (i.e. a matter of cul
ture).
These were some of the materials!
As you can see there are more, but of course I am not going to pres-
ent them all now.
I don’t have time!
I have to prepare the video of this performance!
I would need your help to do it and I can’t hold you here for the
whole day or night.
I have to act fast!!!
What to do with all of them?
Each of them presents the local “specificum” which, in fact, neither
we ourselves nor I suppose the International co-production house
Brut in Vienna want to know about, where they expect me to present
contemporary dance and new dance tendencies.
238
One is this upper part of a track suit that suits me perfectly; together
with this second hand trousers and second hand T-shirt it gives me a
“Berliner second hand look”!
With no doubt I am now recognizable as a contemporary dancer,
and I’m totally into the new dance tendencies!
And the second element is the light for contemporary dance!
Slowly we are getting closer to the moment when we will finish the
video of this performance!
If you have been listening to me at the beginning while I was reading
the e-mail you could hear that they asked me to send a video of my
performance.
From now on it will be the part of the performance that I will actually
send to the artistic directors of Brut centre in Vienna.
Because it will be pure dance, uninterrupted flow of movement, with
all the necessary elements of contemporary dance!
239
He is taking the camera from the left square and inviting one of you to
record. You or if not you then some other good willing visitor or reader
is taking the camera.
The camera is on (you can use the camera on your mobile phone as
well).
Dance
Dance
The performer is singing and dancing “The Last Tango” all over the
stage.
He is performing a series of dance sequences, from his own or the oth
ers’ performances. They seem familiar to you. The changes are very fast.
All kinds of movement and dance styles are included. It is something
like a dance nightmare.
While a strange music (you can only recognize words: Je ne sais
pas …) is running he slowly dances on the confetti path, from the front
stage, turning his back to you.
The fire protection metal “curtain” is opening.
You can see the Main stage behind.
While dancing, the performer is leaving the Hinterbühne and entering
the Main stage of the Serbian National Theatre. The spot light is on.
He is dancing on the Main stage!
In a found set.
In front of the empty auditorium.
Music stops.
240
EPILOGUE:
241
If all these assumptions are correct then I can only apologize to all of
you for not fulfilling your expectations, being aware that my critical
performance became just one more piece at these festivals!
It’s not my personal fault, and it’s not your or their personal fault.
That is how the art, dance system operates.
…
It’s time to turn the page.
242
243
247
248
249
The Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU) was founded in
Manchester in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, the widow of a promi-
nent Independent Labour Party activist and lawyer. The WSPU broke
away from the approach of older Suffragist organisations, believing
that militant actions were the only way to force politicians to give votes
to women. Between 1905 and 1914, the WSPU campaigned against
the Liberals (who as a party were opposed to giving votes to women)
at two general elections and intervening bye-elections, and heckled
Liberal politicians at public meetings. They called temporary truces
250
10 Cited in Katrina Rolley, ‘Fashion, femininity and the fight for the vote’, Art
History 13(1) (March 1990), p. 64.
251
[She] had her hair cut and plastered down like Deborah [who I assume was
a family servant]. She told her hairdresser a long yarn about going on a
journey and hating the dust, and asked him if he could bleach it. Then she
bought some pince-nez, and specs to put in her pocket. […] This, combined
with an 8/6d serge coat and an awful hat, made her look such a guy that all
the boys in the street hooted at her, which she found a real trial.12
11 Michelle Myall, ‘Leigh , Mary (b. 1885, d. in or after 1965)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/
view/article/56240, accessed 18 May 2010].
12 Lady Constance Lytton, Lady Constance Lytton, Letters selected and arranged by
Betty Balfour (London, Heinemann, 1925), p. 189.
252
253
Today Jack the Ripper works free-handed from the honourable places of
government: he sits on the Front Bench at St Stephen’s or in those vast
public sepulchres of conscience in Whitehall, and works not in secret but
through Home Office orders and scarlet-robed judges. Scotland Yard is at his
service; the medical profession, up to the President of the Royal College of
Surgeons, places its skills at his disposal, that his mutilations may be more
ingenious. And for his victims he no longer seeks the shameful women of
mean streets. To him, before the dull eyes of the unprotesting world, fall the
finest women of the land.17
254
Dance historians attribute the initial idea for Sacre to the composer Igor
Stravinsky or to Nicholai Roehrich the painter who designed its set
and costumes. The ballet is generally seen as a collaboration between
the two of them which Nijinsky then choreographed. Nijinsky initially
worked closely with his sister Bronislava Nijinska, who subsequently
became an important choreographer. Diaghilev hired Marie Rambert,
a teacher at Jaques-Dalcroze’s Hellerau school to dance in the ballet
and assist Nijinsky. She helped the dancers learn the complex irregular
rhythms of Stravinsky’s music. Subsequently settling in London, she
founded her influential company Ballet Rambert in the late 1920s.
Nijinsky created Sacre’s sacrificial solo with Nijinska and then used it as
a stylistic template for the rest of the choreography. This solo required
all the clarity and precision that is at the heart of good ballet dancing
while fragmenting and deconstructing its forms and conventions to
reveal previously unknown potentials for creating emotional intensity.
Both Rambert and Nijinska record in their memoirs Nijinsky’s furious
reaction when he learnt of his sister’s pregnancy and realised she
would not be able to dance the role of the Chosen One in his ballet.
This role was taken over by the promising young but largely unknown
ballerina Maria Piltz. Nijinska and Rambert in their autobiographies,
and Piltz in interviews with the ballet historian Vera Krasovskaya all
attested to Sacre’s importance at a time when Nijinsky’s choreography
had been dismissed as an idiotic failure.
Dance Historian Tim Scholl notes similarities between Sacre’s story
and two other ballets that stage death scenes: the 1841 Romantic ballet
Giselle and Anna Pavlova’s famous 1905 solo The Dying Swan. He argues
that whereas these sentimentalised death in a romantic way, Sacre’s
fragmented choreography disrupted the ballet tradition and “dealt an
anarchic death blow to the nineteenth-century academic ballet”.18
Scholl explores correlations between the ballet’s anarchic theme and
similar concerns in early twentieth-century Russian literature. In terms
of gender representation, a ballet devised by men about the sacrifice
18 Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization
of Ballet, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 77.
255
19 Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs, (London & Boston, Faber and Faber, 1982),
p. 450.
20 Adolphe Julien, “Théâtre”, Journal des débats, June 8, 1913, pp. 1–2. “Le plus
fâcheux, dans le Sacre du Printemps, n’est pas qu’il ait composé en scenario et
réglé une chorégraphie d’une pauvreté désespérante, c’est que cette monotonie et
cette insignifiance si prétentieuse, aient entrainé M. Stravinsky à vouloir lutter de
bizarrerie avec son collaborateur.“
21 Richard Capell, “Cannibal music: Amazing production of Russian Ballet,” The
Daily Mail, July 12, 1913, p. 5.
22 “The fusion of music and dancing: ‘Le sacre du printemps’,” The Times, July 26,
1913, p. 8.
23 Cited in Macdonald, Nesta, Diaghilev Observed by Critics in London and the
United States 1911–1929, (New York: Dance Horizons and London: Dance Books,
1975), p. 97.
256
24 “Russian Ballet. ‘Le Sacre de Printemps’,” The Daily Telegraph, July 12, 1913,
n.p.
25 Teresa Billington-Grieg, “Suffragist Tactics Past and Present” [1912], Marie
Roberts and Tamae Mizuta eds. Perspectives On The History Of British Feminism.
The Militants: Suffragette Activism, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–14.
26 “The Russian ballet”, The Daily Telegraph July 26, 1913, n.p.
257
258
1 Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen. Elemente einer politischen Theorie (Zürich:
Diaphanes, 2011). More figures of the immune can be conceptualized.
259
260
261
Juridical Immunity
10 Roberto Esposito and Krystian Woznicki, “Grenzen der Immunität. Ein Dia-
log über die Möglichkeit einer globalen Gemeinschaft”, trans. Georgine Schmiech,
Springerin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst 3 (2009): p. 30–35, here p. 34.
11 Roberto Esposito, “Vom Unpolitischen zur Biopolitik”, Das Politische und die
Politik, ed. Thomas Bedorf and Kurt Röttgers (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), p. 89–101,
here p. 100.
12 Esposito, “Vom Unpolitischen zur Biopolitik”, p. 100–101. See also Esposito,
Immunitas, p. 169–171; Esposito, Bíos. Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. and int.
Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
13 Esposito, “Vom Unpolitischen zur Biopolitik”, p. 101.
14 Ibid., p. 100.
262
15 Christian Gizewski, “Immunitas”, Der neue Pauly. Enzyklopädie der Antike, ed.
Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, vol. 5 (1998): c. 951–952; item immunitas,
The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, 3rd
ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 749 f.
16 See also Esposito, Immunitas, pp. 21–27.
17 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Power of Mourning and Violence (London,
New York: Verso, 2004); Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is life Griefable?
(London, New York: Verso, 2009).
18 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2008).
263
Biopolitical Immunization
19 See Tacitus, Annals (Tac. Ann. 11,19); and item Immunio, Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae, vol. VII (Leipzig: Teubner, 1979), p. 503.
20 See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans.
Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Group, 1998).
264
265
Constituent Immunization
266
26 See also Antonio Negri, Insurgencies. Constituent Power and Modern State, trans.
Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
27 See also Isabell Lorey, “Attempt to Think the Plebeian. Exodus and Constituting
as Critique”, trans. Aileen Derieg, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing
Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: MayFlybooks, 2009),
pp. 131–140. For the whole reinterpretation of the struggles between plebeians and
patricians see Lorey, Figuren des Immunen.
267
28 See also Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti and
James Cascaito (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).
29 The movements of leaving and returning do neither lead to nor come from an
outside, but happen immanently. The exodus as radical disobedience is a refusal, a
flight in the Foucaultian and Deleuzian sense, a condition for constituting and the
‘return’ to the conditions of domination that have been escaped, to struggle.
268
269
Which with for the many? Which form can the concatenation of
singularities assume without melting into one? Which terminology is
suitable for this specific form of concatenation that insists on separation
and sharing without presenting the sad figure of a sacrifice? Finally,
how do these social and conceptual singularities concatenate without
being degraded into smoothing lubricants for the transformations of
capitalist modes of production?
There is no perfect and meta-historical solution for these questions,
even if concepts like that of community seem to promise it – even in the
form of an affronted, unavowable, inoperative or coming community.
The problems with the etymologies of community and related concepts
are already there before and beyond their allusions to totalitarian com-
munities like the Volksgemeinschaft or the problematic dichotomy of
individual and community: on the one hand they adhere to uncritical,
identitarian, sometimes even totalitarian forms of composition, on the
other they remain bound to the mode of reduction, subtraction, con-
tribution. And even where both aspects are dialectically linked – such
as in the writings of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito – they
remain stuck on this side of communion. The conceptual branch of
the common, the commune, the community, the communal, even of
communism itself, thus becomes just as questionable as the Marxist
terminology of the political composition (as opposed to the technical
composition of capital) or collectivity.
271
1 For Gilbert’s bio- and bibliography see Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissen
schaftstheorie 1, p. 775; Lexikon des Mittelalters IV, p. 1449 f. For a detailed intro-
duction see Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A
Study of Gilbert Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrine of
the Incarnation during the Period 1130–1180 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), especially p. 25
ff.; consider here also the term participatio (p. 48) and the three different modes of
conjunction: appositio – compositio – commixtio (p. 53.).
2 August Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche, Vol.
10 (Gotha: Perthes, 1845): p. 899.
272
First, I would like to concentrate on the last part of the last sen-
tence: the sequence individuum […] dissimilitudo seems sufficiently
clear, dissimilarity correlates with the individual. Here – long before
the alleged invention of the individual in the Renaissance – the notion
of an individual is presented, which is internally indivisible and exter-
nally dissimilar, distinct from all other individuals. It is the further
development of the Greek a-tomos (atom), for an indivisible single
being, which was not yet limited to the human personality in the
understanding of Antiquity. The individual is a whole, a one, some-
thing not randomly composed. It is something of its own; it has – as
Gilbert emphasizes – the characteristic of evincing no similarity. It is,
in a sense, incomparable.
For our question, however, it is the first part of the sentence that is
interesting: “If similarity makes the dividual, then consequently dis-
similarity makes the individual.” Gilbert introduces a concept here that
is probably his invention: the dividual. Even though the individual
for us seems to be the conceptual starting point for the development
of the dividual, logically and ontologically the dividual precedes the
individual.
As the first sentence of the Latin quotation describes, singularities
(as numerically different) share their forms with other singularities in
terms of several things through which they exist. unum dividuum is
then both: that which is, and that through which this being – Gilbert
would write: this subsistens – “conforms”, i.e. shares its form. Here it
becomes clear that dividual is not to be understood as a universal, as
might be conjectured in the context of the dispute of universals in the
12th and 13th century. The dividual is not one-sidedly opposite the
individual as something universal, but is one of Gilbert’s terms that
thwarts the dichotomy of that which is individual and that which is
universal, introducing a new dimension, in which that which some-
thing is and that through which it is are related to one another.
Gilbert writes that similarity correlates with the dividual, that indeed
similarity produces the dividual. The dividual thus has one or more
3 Quoted from Klaus Jacobi, “Einzelnes, Individuum, Person”, eds. Jan Aertsen,
Andreas Speer, Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter (Berlin, New York: de
Gruyter, 1996): p. 13.
273
4 “Distinguamus […] quod alicuius proprietas alia ratione ‘singularis’, alia ‘indi-
vidua’, alia ‘personalis’ vocatur. Quamvis quicquid est individuum, est singulare –
et quicquid est persona, est singulare et individuum – non tamen omne singulare
est individuum. Nec omne singulare vel individuum est persona.” – Quoted from
Jacobi, Einzelnes, Individuum, Person, p. 12.
5 Ibid., p. 146
274
275
Yet I could also tell the story quite differently, something like this: in
discussions with friends and colleagues9, recently we have more and
more frequently run into the limitations of the concept of community
and traces of the etymological genealogy of the com-munitas: the
common munus implies either an identitary figure of protection or a
figure of tribute and sacrifice. Against the background of this deep-
rooted problem, I thought about conceptual alternatives that express
both components as well, separation and sharing, like the French term
partage or the German term Teilen, but express them explicitly.
Around the same time, I translated a few smaller texts by the Italian
philosopher Paolo Virno from Italian into German. In several places
I ran into a word that was initially unfamiliar to me. By tripping this
way in the translation process, I became aware of the conceptual
components, an insight that would probably not have been accessible
to me without this tripping in a foreign language: condivisione is not
a particularly strong word; in everyday Italian it stands for shared
use and relationship. Yet its components, as I quickly realized, were
almost exactly those that I had been revolving around for some time.
Con-divisione means both, and it expresses both explicitly and with
8 Ibid., p. 42.
9 Initial impulses were primarily Isabell Lorey’s post-doctoral dissertation Figuren
des Immunen (Zürich: diaphanes, 2011) and the research projects and events of the
Zurich Institute for Theory on the topic of community, most recently the conference
“Community – perhaps?” with Jean-Luc Nancy and many others, 12–14 March
2010.
276
But the second part of the word con-divisione also sparked a conceptual
memory. In his “Postscript on Control Societies” in 1990, Gilles Deleuze
described the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of
control, among other things, with this sentence: “Individuals become
‘dividuals’.”10 Disciplinary societies are marked by forms of enclosure
with relatively clear boundaries, whereas societies of control are
characterized by constantly deforming forms. Whereas disciplinary
societies distinguish themselves by counting individual bodies, the
signature of the society of control is “numbered bodies of coded
‘dividual’ matter to be controlled”.11 Instead of the disciplining of
bodies, this involves “a gas” that “sets individuals against one another
and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself”.12 In
other words, this is obviously where the Nietzschean “self-division”
returns. “Individuals become ‘dividuals’, and masses become samples,
data, markets, or ‘banks’.”13
What becomes evident here is possibly also a contemporary
foundation for the insight that the dividual has led a shadow existence
over the course of centuries in the history of philosophy and is now
coming more into the light. The ephemeral notes from Novalis and
Nietzsche could be interpreted as a glimpse, an early indication of an
imminent actualization of the dividual. Without wishing to uncritically
accept the somewhat schematic Deleuzian representation of the
transition from disciplinary to control regimes14, it can still be assumed
that indications of dividualization have been significantly increasing
with post-fordist modes of production since the late 20th century. With
the background of Gilbert’s concept of the dividual, perhaps we could
even go so far as to regard the statement “individuals have become
dividuals” not as a linear development, but rather as an accumulation of
modes of governing. Individuals no longer function only as individuals
modularized by disciplinary regimes, but also function at the same
277
278
Yet the dividual inhabits not only the hetero-cosmoses of art, the
anthropological investigations of Melanesian cultures or the schizo-
analyses of multiple personalities. It permeates the fields of economy
and sociality as well. It is a matter of situativity, which perspective one
assumes with respect to the dangerous proliferations of the dividual –
whether the concept of the dividual is used as a description of the most
recent capitalist transformations or as components of social struggles,
which – depending on political and theoretical preferences – precede
capitalist modes of production or engage them in hand-to-hand fight-
ing.
Particularly in this ambivalent rising tide of dividualism between
new forms of (self-) subjugation/machinic enslavement and the
search for new weapons, the question of an offensive concatenation
and its terminology appears all the more urgent. This means that my
proposed neologism, condivision, becomes a term for a concatenation
of singularities, which not only names their exchange, their mutual
reference, their association with one another, but also impels it. In
condivision, the dividual component, the division, does not indicate
a tribute, a reduction, a sacrifice, but rather the possibility of an
addition, an AND. Singularities and their concatenations become in
condivision. It is not necessary for a community to emerge first, in
order to achieve the recomposition of previously separated individuals,
but instead the concatenation and the singularities are co-emergent as
the condividuality of condividuals.
20 Ibid.
279
Saša Asentić studied Agriculture and Pedagogy at University in Novi Sad, Serbia.
He has autodidactic informal education in the field of performing arts (since
1998). He took part in ex.e.r.ce 2008 program in Centre choregraphique national
Montpellier, 6m1L extenssion project in 2009 in Performig Arts Forum and sev-
eral other reseach and education projects: IWBWWMI project – Lisbon 2007,
Mobile Academy – Warsaw 2006, City Stage – Novi Sad 2004 – 2005, Bauhaus
Stage Workshop – Dessau 2004, New Dance Forum – Novi Sad 2002–2005, Sum
mer Academy of Performing Arts – Sofia 1999 & 2001. Since 2000, his work was
presented in different festivals and art centers in Europe and abroad. He col-
laborates with Ana Vujanović, Xavier Le Roy, Eszter Salamon, Bojana Cvejić,
Olivera Kova²ević-Crnjanski and others. He is initiator and program director of
Per.Art – an organization that deals with production and promotion of perform-
ing arts in Serbia (2005) and he is the author and leader of the program Arts
and Inclusion for mentally disabled people (since 1999). He was director of bian-
nual dance festival Balkan Dance Platform 2009 and Nov.ples – contemporary
dance festival in 2010 and 2011 in Novi Sad and co-curator of IN-presentable
2009 festival in Madrid. Asentić is a fellow artist of Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart in 2011/2013.
281
Mark Franko is Professor of Dance and Director of the Center for Visual and
Performance Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and editor
of Dance Research Journal. He is recipient of a National Endowment for the
282
Gabriele Klein is Professor for Sociology of Movement and Dance at the Univer-
sity of Hamburg and Director of Performance Studies/Hamburg. Main areas of
research: contemporary dance and choreography, social choreography, transna-
tionalisation of dance cultures, popular cultures. Recent book publications a.o.:
Dance [and] Theory (2013, with G. Brandstetter), Emerging Bodies (2011, with
S. Noeth), Tango in Translation (2009), Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft (Meth-
ods of Dance Studies) (2007, with G. Brandstetter), Stadt-Szenen. Künstlerische
Produktionen und theoretische Positionen (City-Scenes. Artistic Productions and
Theoretical Positions) (2005), Hip Hop (2004, 5. Edition 2011), Performance
(2005, with W. Sting), Electronic Vibration (1999, 2. Edition 2004). See: http://
www.performance.uni-hamburg.de and http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/ gklein
283
284
Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy
in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is
also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores
the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the
sensing body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting, fabric
and sculpture. Together with Brian Massumi she founded the journal INFLeXions:
A Journal of Research-Creation and co-organizes a series of events and activities
under the title Technologies of Lived Abstraction dedicated to the collective explo-
ration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into mutually
beneficial interaction. Her writing addresses the senses, philosophy and politics,
articulating the relation between experience, thought and politics in a transdis-
ciplinary framework moving between dance and new technology, the political
and micropolitics of sensation, performance art, and the current convergence of
cinema, animation and new media. Her book publications include Relationscapes.
Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.
Randy Martin is professor and chair of the department of art and public policy
at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University where he directs the
graduate programme in arts politics. He is author of Performance as Political
Act: The Embodied Self. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990. Socialist Ensembles:
Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1994.
Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,
2002. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. An Empire
of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management.
Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Under New Management: Universities, Administrative
Labor and the Professional Turn. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2011.
285
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