Attending Attention

Methodology

Author Note

• Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s Queer Performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 121–158.
26/01/2023

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"What is needed is a starting point for analysis that does not presume that the terms on either side of equivalence relations [between humans and non-humans] are given, but instead takes up the matter of the cuts that produce distinctions between "humans" and "nonhumans"--where the differential constitution of both terms is important, and so are their respective constituitive exclusions--before any such comparisons get off the ground. That is, what is needed is accountability for the cuts that are made and the constituitive entanglements that are effected. In particular, the "posthumanist" point is not to blur the boundaries between human and non human, not to cross out all distinctions and differences, and not to simply invert humanism, but rather to understand the materializing effects of particular ways of drawing boundaries between "humans" and "non-humans." Crucially, then, such an analysis cannot figure cuts as purely a matter of human practices of differentiating, that is, as cutural distinctions. Whatever a "cut" is must not assume some prior notion of the "human." (Barad, 2011, pp. 123-124)

Reflection

• As I dance, I connect to the imporance of the word "iterative" in Barad's "iterative intra-activity." Extending the "iterative" outside of Barad's metaphysical account and towards their urge to recosiderer how cuts are made, I feel incapable to thinking any other way. When I do what I imagine Barad calls for, aka when I attempt to loosen my relation to a variety of conceptions which firmly define notions of the human, I notice that I lose some mannerisms I use to position myself. I feel a little adrift. Sometimes, I don't like the feeling. It makes me a bit shakey, unsure when to speak or not, unsure of my positionality, in the process of loosing some of my habits (like the "three boy rule".. ask me about it). Then, I do imagine that most of the criticality of loosening these cuts lies below the surface of consciousness. When it comes to my learned habits or behavioral rules, I imagine I could also reason my way towards them using posthumanist accounts of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism, etc.
• I wonder why Barad seems to have a strong investment in "casality." Personally, I strongly associate it being a central concern in analytic philosophy. Yet, I also encounter it within my dancing (and also as I am coding this website).
• I am acutely aware of the lack of nonhuman animals in the rehearsal room.
• While I am moving, I don't consciously perceive my colleagues as "humans." Surely, if you asked me about it, I would at all times give you that answer: "they are human." Yet, no one asks. And, I forget. Rather, I see swirls of arms and legs, I hear breathing, I feel the touch of someone rubbing up against me. While none of these thing may be actual--while there may be no "actual" touch--this is notheless what I attune to. While the "human" (or "Man") may permeate all that I am doing, it does so from outside my awareness.

Score

While dancing, once every minute, attend to some other entity in the room.
Make a cut: what is a relevant relation of distinction between you and the other entity.
Can you dance with the identity which you were given in this intra-action?

• Bleeker, M., & van der Tuin, I. (2014). Science in the performance stratum: Hunting for Higgs and nature as performance. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 10(2), 232–245.
23/01/2023

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"Barad’s following statement summarises what we suggest has happened to (the proofing of) the Higgs particle at CERN:

Meaning is not a property of individual words of groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility. (Barad 2007, 149)

This suggests not only that the word ‘Higgs boson’ is carried by the experimental set up of the collider (including nature) and the entire machinery around it (financing, politics, publishing market) but also that the curious object itself plays an active role in the constellation. The proof of the Higgs particle’s existence required not only particular modes of behaving (performing) from the scientists involved, but placed similar demands on the Higgs particle itself and the technology involved. They too have to perform, or else the particle (which had to be assumed for the making of the collider technology) does not exist. In and through its performance, the particle ‘matters’. The Higgs particle thus urges us to understand that the object (ontology the existence of the Higgs particle) and the subject of knowledge (epistemology – the way in which the Higgs particle is captured) are co-constitutive. This also raises the question of in which sense the hunt for Higgs is fundamentally different from other experiments. Is it the scale that makes this experiment stand out? Or is the hunt for Higgs a sort of experimentum crucis with the materiality of meaning; that is, the possibility to detect in material form that which gives meaning to the experimental project and its scientific basis?" (Bleeker and Tuin, 2014, pp. 242-243)

Reflection

• I was standing on the rehearsal floor, surrounded. The lighting grid.. The sound system.. The laptops.. Phones.. Coffee makers.. A mass of electronic appliances to direct energy. Not unlike at CERN, there is an entire machinery built to facilitate the coming into being of a sought-after object. Our dance piece could not exist without the contraption that is the theater.
• I wonder about the sentence "The Higgs particle thus urges us to understand that the object (ontology the existence of the Higgs particle) and the subject of knowledge (epistemology – the way in which the Higgs particle is captured) are co-constitutive." I am reminded of Diana Taylor's seminal text The Archive and the Repetoire (2003) words this onto-epistemological claim of performance (and performance studies) as the "is/as of performance." (p. 3 --- if I am not mistaken...), referincing Richard Schechner. For Taylor, this onto-epistemic conditions is a starting point, mentioned in the introduction of her book. For Bleeker and van der Tuin, it is instead a concluding point of their essay. I wonder why. If I had to speculate, I would suggest that Taylor can arrive at this pemise in the introduction because she considers a topic which is more ordinarily accepted as "performance": human performances (and mostly cultural performances too). Most of the subsequent work for Taylor is to explicitly analyze the politcal ramification of the onto-epistemological status of performance. I miss this in Bleeker and van der Tuin's essay. Though, obviously, it is tricky to compare an essay and book.
• In addition to (Higgs particle -- CERN), which other (object -- intra-active ?network?*) relations come to mind?
  • (dance piece -- theater)
  • (good time -- party)
  • (man -- society)
  • (illness -- medical system)
  • (fire -- Aristotelian physics)
  • (fire -- modern physics)
  As I list various things which come to mind, I notice the different types of "objects" which I include. They are facts of differnent kinds: social, natural, etc. Additionally, I wonder about the varying scales at whcih to consider different types of agential intra-actions. For example, I could choose to conisder either (Higgs particle -- CERN) or (Higgs particle -- modern physics). If there is an active effort to consider intra-active ?networks?* at different scales? If so, this reminds me of Goffman's frame analysis. What do Barad and others write about this?
  *I am writing "?network?" because I don't even know whether Barad would want to specify "at what level" intra-active relations are being considered. Perhaps they consider agential intra-action to be fractal-like, which might imply that speaking of a specific "network" is of little philosophical merit because of an underlying assumption that everything is intra-related. The effort to speficy a "network," then, might still be of practical/political importance, yet without philosophical imporance when considered within Barad theoretical framework.

Score

Look around.
Look at the direction of things (people, objects, architecture, etc.)
Where do most things direct to?
Relocate to this place.
Matterialize whatever wants to matterialize there (and can feasibly be accomplished through bodily action).
Has anything redirected in the room?
If so, re-start this this score.
If not, then continue to matterialize, and keep recurrently asking this question.

• Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
02/02/2023 (Covid)

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"We need to become the sorts of subjects who actively desire to reinvent subjectivity as a set of mutant values and to draw our pleasure from that, not from the perpetuation of familiar regimes. The work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1972) is a great source of inspiration in redesigning this type o fenvironmentally bound post-anthropocentric and non-Kantian ethics of codetermination between self and other. The notion of codependence replaces that of recognition, much as the ethics of sustainability replaces the moral philosophy of rights. This reiterates the importance of grounded, situated and very specific and hence accountable perspectives in a move that I call zoe-centered egalitarianism. In his analysis of the 'collective existential mutations' (1995: 2) currently taking place, Felix Guattari refers to Varela's distinction between autopoietic (self-organizing) and allopoietic systems. Guattari moves beyond the distinction proposed by Varela by extending the principle of autopoeiesis (which for Varela is reserved for the biological organisms) to cover also the machines or technological others. Another name for subjectivity, according to Guattari, is autopoietic subjectivation, or self-styling, and it accounts both for living organisms, humans as self-organizing systems, and also for inorganic matter, the machines." (Braidotti, 2013, pp. 93-94)

"The key notion is the transversality of relations, for a postanthropocentric and posthuman subject that traces transversal connections among material and symbolic, concrete and discursive, line of relation or forces. Transversality actualizes zoe-centred egalitarianism as an ethics and also as a method to accoutn for forms of alternative, posthuman subjectivity. An ethics based on the primacy of the relation, of interdependence, values zoe in itself. I also refer to these practices of becoming-machine as 'radical neo-materialism' (Braidotti, 1991, or as 'matter-realism' (Fraser et al., 2006). These ideas are supported by and intersect with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter itself (De Landa, 2002; Bennett, 2010), under the impact of contemporary bio-genetics and information technologies. The Spinozist switch to a monistic political ontology stsresses process, sital politics and non-deterministic evolutionary theories. Politically, the emphasis falls accordingly on the micro-politics of relations, as a posthumanist ethics that traces transversal connections among material and symbolic,concrete and discursive, lines or forces. The focus is on the force and autonomy of affect and the logistics of its actualization (Massumi, 2002). Transversality actualizes an ethics based on the primacy of the relation, of interdependence, which values non-human or a-personal Life. This is what I call posthuman politics (Braidotti, 2006)." (Braidotti, 2013, p. 95)

"The most striking feature of the current scientific redefinition of 'matter' is the dislocation of difference from binaries to rhizomatics; from sex/gender or nature/culture to processes of sexualization/racialization/naturalization that take Life itself, or the vitality of matter as the main target. ... The political line of questioning has to start from this firm location to raise some key questions about subjectivity. For instance, Katherine Hayles argues, 'What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg?' (Hayles, 199: xii). ... Let us trust women, gays, lesbians and other alternative forces, with their historically 'leaky bodies' (Grosz, 1994) and not fully human rights, to both reassert the powers and enhance the potentiality of the posthuman organism as generative 'wetware'." (Braidotti, 2013, p. 96)

"This posthuman approach moves beyond 'high' cyber studies (Haraway, 1985; Hayles, 1999) into post-cyber materialism (Braidotti, 2002) and posthuman theory (Braidotti, 2006). ... As Deleuze and Guattari teach us, thinking is about the invention of new concepts and new productive ethical relations. In this respect, theory is a form of organized estrangement from dominant values. More clinical than critical, posthuman theory cuts to the core of classical visions of subjectivity and works towards an expanded vision of vitalist, transversal relatinal subjects. Theory today is about coming to terms with unprecedented changes and transformations of the basic unit of reference for what counts as human. This affirmative, unprogrammed mutation can help actualize neew concepts, affects and planetary subject formations. Just as we do not know what posthuman bodeesi can do, we cannot even begin to guess what postanthropocentric embodied brains will actually be able to think up." (Braidotti, 2013. p. 104)

"I think the Humanities can and will survive and prosper to the that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation in the direction of the posthuman. To be worthy of our times, we need to be pragmatic: we need schemes of thought and figurations that enable us to account in empowering terms for the changes and transformations currently on the way. We already live in permanent states of transition, hybridization and nomadic mobility, in emancipated (post-feminist), multi-ethnic societies with high degrees of technological intervention. These are neither simple, nor linear events, but rather multi-layered and internally contradictory phenomena. They combine elements of ultra-modernity with splinters of neo-archaism: high-tech advances and neo-primitivism, which defy the logic of the excluded middle." (Braidotti, 2013, p. 184)

"Science itself is socially inscribed and ecologically integrated not along the nationalistic axis but in a nomadic web of posthuman earth-wide connections. Becoming-posthuman consequently is a process of redefining one's sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social, psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it enacts the transformation of one's sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self. This is in fact a moveable assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or a cluster. For posthuman theory, the subject is a transversal entity." (Braidotti, 2013, p. 193)

• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Viking Press.
  Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
01/02/2023 (Covid)

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"Clerambault is the Feuerbach of psychiatry, in the sense in which Marx remarks: 'Whenever Feuerbach looks at things as a materialist, there is no history in his works, and whenever he takes history into account, he no longer is a materialist.' A truly materialist psychiatry can be defined, on the contrary, by the twofold task it sets itself: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into desire." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 22)

"The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon burried beneath a new brand of idealism. ... Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, increadibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 24)

"If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p.26)

"There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. ... As long as we are content to establish a perfect parallel between money, gold, capital, and the capitalist triangle on the one hand, and the libido, the anus, the phallus, and the family triangle on the other, we are engaging in an enjoyable pastime, but the mechanisms of money remain totally unaffected by the anal projections of those who manipulate money. The Marx-Freud parallelism between the two remains utterly sterile and insignificant as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections or projections of each other. ... The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. ... That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, pp. 28-29)

"When subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests--when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat--it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure. ... Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby to show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression--whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere. All this happens, not in ideology, but well beneath it." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 105)

"Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9)

"Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 55)

• Grosz, E. A. (2011). Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Duke University Press.
  Grosz, E. A. (2017). The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Columbia University Press.
30/01/2023

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Darwin’s argument, in brief, is that the differences between man and other animal species are differences of degree, not diferences in kind, and that the diferences between the races and cultures of mankind are likewise differences of degree and not kind:

We must . . . admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this immense interval is filled up by numberless gradations. . . . [Differences,] between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and develop into each other. (The Descent of Man, 1:35)

The idea of ‘numberless gradations,’ of the ‘finest gradations,’ of ‘no fundamental difference’ (ibid.), anticipates one of the most profound and motivating of concepts in twentieth-century thought and beyond: the idea of difference, of differences without the central organizing principle of identity—not a difference between given things, a comparison, but a difference which differentiates itself without having clear-cut or separable terms." (Grosz, 2011, pp. 16-17)

Reviewing and renewing the value of the arts, sciences, and other human practices can move us forward, as individuals and as a species, in developing a new morality, a new understanding of how to live in accordance with a nature that is neither benevolent nor only lawlike. Nietzsche continues, in the manner of the nineteenth century, that is, in the wake of Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, to affirm, with Spinoza, a life as pure immanence. He provides us with an updated and transformed immanence, a single ever recurring, continually changing universe with nothing else beyond it and thus also nothing new in it, while, paradoxically, each being must create itself and live up to its fate as artfully as it can." (Grosz, 2017, p. 96)

Reflection

• There is an immediate similarity between Grosz' description of Darwinian difference and the ways in which we are working with "performance" in this process. We are working within blurry differences between media and practices. More than anything, perhaps, we are forming this murky liminality by anecdotally drawing in past experiences. We're not necessarily interrogating the "nature" of our particular media directly.
• There is a veritable difference between the experiences of each of us. I would relate this to 'the Other' or 'alterity.' Is there a rub between 'numberless gradations' and the swooping distance of 'alterity'? I wonder where and for what/whom fine gradations are (dis)allowed and where distance is (dis)allowed. This feels situational and political (I think of Edward Saïd).
• Axis Syllabus--an anatomical movement practice I am intimately familiar with--often utilizes physical anthropology and its variuos accounts for humans' (pre)historical uses of thier bodies to find efficient models for moving in the present. Most of the workshops I have followed also stress the particularities of every individual body. Even over the span of a lifetime, the human body may develop remarkably differently depending on physical habits and uses of the body.

Score

Perform a dance.
Perform the most closely related dance, which is undeniably different.
Iterate.

• Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press.
  Hayles, N. K. (2007). Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes. Profession, 187–199.
06/02/2023 (No rehearsal)

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"The posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a smallsubsystem runningits program ofselfconstruction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems. Butthe posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the endofa certainconception ofthe human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had thewealth, power, and leisure to conceptualizethemselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self." (Hayles, 1999, pp. 286-287)

"Whereas in performative utterances saying is doing because the action performed is symbolic in nature and does not require physical action in the world, at the basic level of computation doing is saying because physical actions also have a symbolic dimension that corresponds directly with computation." (Hayles, 1999, p. 275)

"Networked and programmable media are part of a rapidly developing me diascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with one another, and--perhaps most significant--think. This essay explores the hypothesis that we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities. [...] The shift in cognitive styles can be seen in the contrast between deep attention and hyper attention. [...] Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a noninteractive object." (Hayles, 2007, p. 188)

• Ingold, T. (2021). Correspondences. Polity Press.
  Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. Routledge.
03/02/2023 (Covid)

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"It would seem that there are two varieties of rigour, virtually the opposite of each other: one that demands accuracy in the recording, measurement and integration of an unyielding world of objective facts; the other that calls for practised care and attentiveness in an ongoing relation between conscious awareness and lively materials. In the latter, and not the former, lies the rigour of correspondence. And this is where precision comes in. For it should not be confused with accuracy. Dancers, for example, are precise rather than accurate in the observations that allow them to attune their movements to one another. Here, precision rests on the capacity to flex in response to others' movements. The same goes for any kind of craft, where the skill of the practitioner lies in an ability to attune the movements of the sensing body to tools and materials in a way that calls forth relations of line, surface, scale and proportion. The dancer and the artisan are amateurs. They are amateurs because their dance, their craft, proceeds along a way of life. Their practice is careful, attentive, rigorous, ut its rigour is of the second kind. Let's call it amateur rigour, a rigour that is flexible and in love with life, by contrast ot he professional rigour that induces rigidity and paralysis." (Ingold, 2021, p. 14)

"This essay--originally commissioned by the Gagosian, New York, for a retrospective review of Penone's forty-year artistic career, and reproduced here in an abridged version--has not been easy to write. Indeed, my efforts seem threadbare by comparison to the works with which they correspond. The scholar's verbal impulse to explicate continually threatens to unravel the dense weave of experience. But that, of course, is precisely the point. It is why there can be no subsitute for art. Do not, then, then an explanation or interpretation, or that I should put the art in its social, cultural or historical context. I will have none of that. My purpose is to think with it." (Ingold, 2021, p.34)

"Using, meaning, saying and telling are ways we have of bringing others close, of drawing them into our life and custom. But to utilize, signify, articulate or explicate is to hold them at arm's length, adjuring contact. It is to maintain at least a semblance of objectivity. Yet, objectivity stops us in our tracks, forbidding us from allowing things or persons in our presence, so that we might answer to them. It blocks correspondence. If we are really to study with the world, then words--and particularly written words--must be liberated fom the cordon sanitaire the academy has thrown around them." (Ingold, 2021, p. 198)

"Creation, then, is not an outward expression of creativity but harbours its own impulse of growth and renewal. In a word, it is crescent. Imagining thus has its source in the habitation of a world that, in its very mode of existence, is crescent rather than created. A crescent world, however, demands continued attention, and this is the second term of my inquiry. Attention is another word for what I referred to earlier as the stretch of human life. This, indeed, is implied in its very derivation, from the Latin compound ad- ('towards') plus tendere ('to stretch'). My argument is that in attention, human life is stretched not between mind and body, but between knowing and being, reason and emotion, intelligence and instinct, or any of the other antinomies bequeathed by modern throught, but between sedentism and flight. On the one hand, it is unceasingly fugitive, running ahead of itself as if swept up in the wave of creation. But on the other hand, the need to keep a grip in a world heavy with materials, with their own intertia, forever holds it back. We all experience this tension, even as we walk, tumbling forward with every step, only to prevent ourselves from falling by settling the next foot on solid ground. As this example shows, there are two sides to the coin of attention. One side connotes the perceptual attunement that allows the skilled or masterful practitioner to pick up information speciftying salient features of the environment--such as firm ground for the walker--and to adjust his movement to them. But the other side connotes a stance not of mastery but of submission, of exposure to a world that is not yet settled in its dispositions. Here, to attend means to wait (in French, attendre). It is to submit to the befalling of things (Ingold 2015: 138). Thus if, in one sense, the world is ready and waiting for the practitioner, in the other the practitioner is obliged to wait upon the world. In both senses, however, attention opens a way for imagination that does not oppose but reaches into, and join with, the real." (Ingold, 2022, p. 6)

• Latour, B. (2007). Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please? Isis, 98(1), 138–142.
24/01/2023

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"Whereas res extensa is a way to draw technical parts side by side, those parts themselves do not assemble or gather or survive as if they were 'in' res extensa or 'made of' matter. Or, rather, we are now faced with two different definitions of 'matter': one (the idealist one) in which the reproduction of the parts through geometry is confused with the reproduction of the parts themselves, and another in which those two pathways are clearly distinct. The first gives way to objects, the description of which is always thin; the second gives way to things, which are the topics, as Ken Alder says in his introduction, of thick description. Thin objects, on one hand, with an ideal definition of matter; thick things, on the other, with a material definition of matter: this seems to me the choice offered to the reader of the pieces in this Focus section. This does not mean that reproduction through geometry is 'abstract,' 'cold,' and 'dead' while reproduction through steel, brass, or wood is 'concrete,' 'warm,' and 'alive,' but simply that geometry is what allows engineers to draw and know the parts, while the parts themselves go their own ways and follow, so to speak, their own directions. [...] Perhaps this is where we meet the limit of the 'thick description of things.' We know how to provide a 'thin description' of an entity’s idealized material aspects; as these essays show, we are finally starting to learn how to give a post hoc narrative thick description of what should have been visible in the gathering that brings a thing together (similarly, after the shuttle’s explosion a tough inquiry was pursued)." (Latour, 2007, p. 140)

Reflection

• I wonder about the "aim(s)" for a thick desciption of things. When I've written thick desciptions for performance studies research, it's often been in order to descibe easily overlooked conditions for social behavior. In particular, the aim was to descibe the conditions of a social harm. After making these conditions evident, a socio-political call typically follows. In the case of a thick description of things, I wonder whether the aim may be analogous: to describe the conditions of a material harm. If so, after making these conditions evident, a eco-political call might follow. This justification for "thick description of things" would be in line with the aspiration for posthumanities to be particularly concerned (and able) with working to avoid climate catastrophe, for example.
• When dancing, I am confronted with the labor required by thick descriptions. When improvising, I do not (often) have the time to reflect on my observations in a systematic way. Yet, there might be a role to play for thick description when reflecting after the dance, or when feedbacking. I wonder about using thick descriptions as component in a feedback-method, and using it to generate "tactics" or "intuitions" which can subsequently be accessed in the moment of improvisation itself.
• There are many thin description based dance methodologies which I typically deploy while dancing, e.g. Laban, Axis Syllabus, ballet, dynamic anatomy. The ones I mentioned are all movement practices with a corresponding (dance) notation system. I start to question when thin description may be more helpful (e.g. injury prevention, movement notation, class exercise generation, cleaning/quick choreographic feedback) and when they may less helpful (e.g. inspired improvisation, dance criticism, detailed choreographic feedback, dramaturgy).
• It is more difficult for me to write a "thick description of things" than a more conventional ethnographic thick description. When describing materials situations, I feel at a loss for words. Many of the ways I would describe things are (veiled) thin desciptions. For example, I descibe an imagined anatomy or blueprint. I wonder about the triangulation of thin descriptions: do triangulated thin descriptions amount to a thick description? (Or, perhaps I just need more practice writing thick desciptions..).

Score

Make a schematic picture of your own body, either on paper or in your mind's eye. Can you make your body cohere with this picture? Find the dance in the places where your body does not cohere. What does your body do there?

• Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.
  Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.
  Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (4th print). Duke University Press.
31/01/2023 (Covid)

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The challenge, as Bergson underscores, involves crafting the conditions not to solve problems, or to resolve questions, but to illuminate regions of thought through which problems-without-solutions can be intuited. [...] We must be careful, though, in doing so, not to create false problems. “False problems are of two sorts, ‘nonexistent problems,’ defined as problems whose very terms contain a confusion of the ‘more’ and the ‘less’; and ‘badly stated’ questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analyzed composites” (Deleuze 1988: 17). [...] False problems and badly stated questions maintain the status quo. Academic critique and debate are too often played out at the level of false problems and badly stated questions. (Manning, 2016, p. 10)

What mobilizes the rigor of a speculative pragmatism therefore cannot be a method imposed on the process from without. The rigor must emerge from within the occasion of experience, from the event’s own stakes in its coming-to-be. Technique is necessary. In philosophy, one technique is close reading. This proposition of Bertrand Russell’s is key: 'In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held' (1996: 47)." (Manning, 2016, p. 38)

Honing the interval is a technique that is capable of altering the flow of movement-moving. I call this choreographic thinking. Choreography at its best is not about aligning bodies to precomposed shapes. It is about generating modes of moving that make felt the complex ecology of incipient movement, to make felt what I have elsewhere called movement’s preacceleration and its elasticity of the almost.14 It is about composing techniques for experiencing the more-than of form. To choreograph the interval is to attend, in the event, to how movement’s force-form is elastic, to sense the shift activated by the inflection and to fashion ways of cueing and aligning that keep the field of activity alive to the virtual effects of total movement. Think the interval not only as the force of form in the context of a simple movement. Think it also in its potential as an opening onto agencement, as opposed to agency. (Manning, 2016, pp. 122-123)

The experience is then all movement-texture, complexly patterned, full of change and transition, teemingly differentiated. You're surfing the crowd even as the crowd is surfing you. Despite the rush, this is not without joy. You revel in the fluidity of your trajectory, without focusing on it as a feeling-tone separate from the movement. You have performed an integral dance of attention, seemingly without thinking. 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 activity was your thinking. You entered a mode of environmental awareness 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 storytelling, poetic or not, with no immediate need for language, satisfying itself at a level with the body's movemens: expression a-body. [...] For both neurotypicals and autistics, and all along the spectrum of neurodiversity, it is only beyond the moment, with memory, and with the retellings memory makes possible, that objects will stand out clearly, sagely observing the boundary between experience and imagining. In the moment, they are fused with field effects that are moving and ephemeral and at the threshold." (Manning & Massumi, 2014, pp. 10-11)

"For the present is lost with the missing half sec­ond, passing too quickly to be perceived, too quickly, actually, to have happened. This requires a reworking of how we think about the body. Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is vitual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futuricy combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life). The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experi­enced cannot but be felt-albeit reduced and contained." (Massumi, 2002, p. 30)

• Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press.
25/01/2023

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"We must venture past the perimeters of bare life and biopolitics discourse and the juridical history of habeas corpus, because neither sufficiently addresses how deeply anchored racialization is in the somatic field of the human. Where bare life and biopolitics discourse aspires to transcend racialization via recourse to absolute biological matter that no longer allows for portioning of humanity or locating certain forms of racism in an unidentified elsewhere, habeas corpus, and the law in general, at least when it is not administering racial distinctions, tends to recognize the humanity of racialized subjects only in the restricted idiom of personhoodas-ownership. Bare life and biopolitics discourse not only misconstrues how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human, it also overlooks or perfunctorily writes off theorizations of race, subjection, and humanity found in black and ethnic studies, allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological substance anterior to racialization." (Weheliye, 2014, p. 4)

"In one of the few passages in which Deleuze and Guattari explicitly address racial difference, they contend the “race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race,” which intimates the rudiments of a political theory of racialization in its honing in on race as an assemblage of hierarchy and the deracination of the majoritarian. In the end, however, this theory flounders on Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of racial impurity: “A race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixedblood are the true names of race” (Plateaus, 379). By asking neither how racialized impurity is articulated within a given sociohistorical totality (or what counts as racial hybridity and what does not) nor whose interests are served by the adjudication of racial categories, Deleuze and Guattari foreclose the conceptual reflection of the ways racialization and different axes of domination cooperate in founding racializing assemblages. The one-drop rule, the Nuremberg laws, or the blood quantum laws have exposed how the juridico-political territorialization of racial hybridity frequently serves to solidify the ordering of humans along racial lines rather than heralding the suspension of racializing assemblages. The idea of racial admixture assumes the reality of distinctive races that are sublated in Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialized “mixed-race bastard.” For, in contrast to Glissant’s notion of relation, which I discussed earlier and which takes as its point of departure the constitutive relatedness of the world, Deleuze and Guattari’s exhalation of impurity must inevitably presuppose an erstwhile racial pureness, which territorializes the very notion of racial difference. Besides underscoring the necessity for ideology and articulation to be introduced into a theory of assemblages, the privileging of racial hybridity points to the limits of the Deleuzo-Guattarian model. If not, then Deleuze and Guattari’s supposition of the actuality of races and their failure to explore how and why the impure represents the real faciality of race would go unchecked. As a result, Deleuze and Guattari conjure a “self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed,” only in this context the racially subjugated subject emerges as pristine via its hybridity. [...] With regard to the category of race, racializing assemblages ascribe “incorporeal transformations . . . to bodies,” etching abstract forces of power onto human physiology and flesh in order to create the appearance of a naturally expressive relationship between phenotype and sociopolitical status: the hieroglyphics of the flesh (Plateaus, 98) [...] Race, however, should be viewed not as ideology or the erroneous ascription of social meaning to existent biological classifications, as Deleuze and Guattari do by giving preference to the hybrid. [...] The flesh, although not synonymous with racialization in toto, represents one such racializing assemblage within the world of Man, and, consequently, it represents both a subject and an object of knowledge within black studies’s intellectual topographies." (Weheliye, 2014, pp. 49-51)

Reflections

• I found it possible to access today's paragraph by attuning to my somatics training. As I practiced different somatic techniques--which afford different ways of experiencing and comprehending sensorial stimuli--I tried to attend to a change in/of my body. I felt like my body changed. In fact, my flesh felt unstable. As my sensations combined and recombined--with adjustments to the salience of skin, muscles, fascia, bones, etc.--it felt my flesh was trembling.
• This was surely a difficult prompt to dance with. This is not because of its thematic, race and racism. Race is a part of every dance, after all. Yet, rather, this may be the issue. It is a part of every dance. It felt overwhelming at times. I found it difficult to to find a footing. In the rehearsal room where is am, the flesh--always already racialized and racializing--is nonetheless presupposed to exists in/as "erstwhile racial pureness." (p. 50) It is exaggerated, if anything. In my years in contemporary ballet concert dance worlds, oft repeated origin stories figure dance as a priviledged art form capable of reveiling the nakedness of human flesh in motion. It invents (and subsequently locates, or better put: territorializes.. I am still unsteady using Deleuzian vocabulary) a transcendent aesthetics of flesh.
• It was a great intoduction text to Deleuzian scholarship for me. I much appreciated it. In particular, I appreciated the "methodological breather" on the second page of the chapter (pp. 47-48). I recommend anyone to check it out. In general, the (very short) chapter could be a good teaching text.
• As I was biking home from rehearsal, I felt a shift in my relationship to matter. Success!! I think.. I have some more thoughs.. but, as I write them now, the words don't quite seem to suffice.. My few attempts of putting it to words don't satifsy me.. It's something about being humbled by the world (and its profound unknowability) and a simultanous excitement about finding poetics through which to attempt worldly connection. Anyways.. I think the ending of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation may do a better job wording it:
  "If the imaginary carries us from thinking about this world to thinking about the universe, we can conceive that aesthetics, by means of which we make our imaginary concrete, with the opposite intention, always brigs us back from the infinities of the universe to the definable poetics of our world. This is the world from which all norms are eliminated, and also it is this world that serves as our inspiratoin to approach the reality of our time and our place. Thus, we go the open circle of our relayed aesthetics, our unflagging politics. We leave the matrix abyss and the immeasurable abyss for this other one in which we wander without becoming lost." (Glissant, 1997, p. 203)

Score

What is my fleshy skin?
What is your fleshy skin?
How am I attending to the fleshiness of your skin?

• Wynter, S. (1994). “No Humans Involved”: An Open Letter to My Colleagues. Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1).
27/01/2023

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"Supraculturalism mistakes our present 'local' culture's representation-of-the-human-as-a-natural organism as if it were the human-in-itself, mistakes the representation for the reality, the map for the territory. For whilst the human species is bio-evolutionarily programmed to be human on the basis of the unique nature of its capacity for speech, it realizes itself as human only by coming to regulate its behaviours, no longer primarily, by the genetic programs specific to its genome, but by means of its narratively instituted conceptions of itself; and therefore by the culture-specific discursive programs, to which these conceptions give rise." (Wynter, 1994, p. 5)

Reflection

• Wynter's priviledging of "speech" as a "unique nature" of humans appears outdated, yet argument still follows in nonhuman entities are also extended the possibility of "speech," of some kind. In other words, it does not need to commit to speech being "unqiue."
• It is very palpable to think through the various histories of dance education and physical therapy theory which profoundly shape the bodies of my colleagues and I. In a poignantly physical way, our bodies are shaped by those discursive programs.
• There are a variety of stories about "what dance does" which profoundly shape how we are in the room. While I am more familiar with a materialist analysis of the theater as a machine which affords certain affects, I wonder anbout the benefits of first attuning to the narratives "about" dance which shape what dance is.
• The quore which is selected does not do justice to Wynter's critical contribution to academia, since it does not include an analysis of race. Yet, I know what the text says, and I know to connect it there. I wonder about the various race-related (read: racist) conception of how to be human define my actions in this room. For example, I think about the ways in which my postural manners, which surely relate to race, have worn grooves into my physical body. Also, I wonder such physical impact on one's own body could be related to (generational) traumas.
• This is the first time I have thought about transposing Wynter's argument to gender, which Wynter less fequently less frequently. Wynter's argument seems to also address the gender binary, for example. Within our current room, this may be the more immediately productive reading of Wynter's argument.

Score

What story am I carrying with me now? How can I sink into this story? How am I already sinking into this story?

Research Aims

Arresting Attention

Having been trained in analytic philosophy--which heavily focussed on philosophy of language, logic and philosophy of math--I desired to reconnect with text which rather try to approach "thought in the act." What are the material consequences of thinking and thinking structures?

Pedagogy

Having a keen interest in teaching, I wanted to experiment with different techniques of approaching texts. Why not experiment on my own body?

Practice-Based, Dance-Oriented

My research has by and large been through traditional methods of the humanities and social sciences. Given the nature of my education (rMA Artistic Research at Universiteit van Amsterdam), I felt compelled to develop practice-based approaches. Hopefully, then, this also allows me to further enmesh my dance practice in my academic research.

Themes

A Note on Presentation

Flat writing

This research project is formatted as a website with the hopes of facilitating non-linear (read: planar, across your screen) reading.