READING DIARY: JANUARY 2023- TT SESSION 23: Words & Voices
SATURDAY 14 JAN 2023
EXPLORING THE ROLES OF WRITING IN PRACTICE RESEARCH WITH CAROLINA RITO PHD1 PHD2
GD: The large number of quality creative works, and the variety of media (coreographed movement pieces that she video documented, collages, creative writings, drawings, installations, photographs, readymades, etc.) that Marie Fahlin produced for her doctoral thesis Centauring, are stunning. Among the most impressive is Centauring The Book, which elegantly synthesizes, by featuring excerpts and stills, many of the project pieces, i.e.:
Movement Still At the halt the Horse should stand attentive, engaged, motionless, straight and square with the weight evenly distributed over all four (4) legs. The neck should be raised with the poll as the highest point and the noseline slightly in front of the vertical. While remaining “on the bit” and maintaining a light and soft contact with the Athlete’s hand, the Horse may quietly chew the bit and should be ready to move off at the slightest indication of the Athlete. The halt must be shown for at least 3 seconds. The halt should be shown throughout the salute. The halt is obtained by the displacement of the Horse’s weight to the hindquarters by a properly increased action of the seat and legs of the Athlete, driving the Horse towards a softly closed hand, causing an almost instantaneous but not abrupt halt at a previously fixed place. The halt is prepared by a series of half-halts (see transitions). The quality of the paces before and after the halt is an integral part of the assessment.• (Fahlin 44)
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GD: The most impressive aspect of Anne Juren's Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies- A Doctoral Thesis in Artistic Research Introduction is how, simultaneously complex, sophisticated, clear, concise and discernible it is. See segments:
"Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies" is the title of my ongoing and transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that I have developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner.1 Based on my artistic and therapeutic body-oriented work, the research addresses the relationship between the body, language, and the symptomatic within the choreographic realm and beyond it. By drawing on a wider array of fields of knowledge – medicine, psychoanalysis, the clinic, poetry and literature, and somatic practices – the research has expanded choreography towards disparate discourses, practices, and perceptions of the body. I have explored the various ways in which these discourses have not only mapped, fantasised, and (re-)invented the body, but also envisioned ways of treating it. At the core of my practice is an expansion of the Feldenkrais Method® from its initial somato-therapeutic goals into a “po(i)etic” address of the body. In my research, the “poe(i)tic” is both a written form and an activity, poetry and poiesis. Referring to the Ancient Greek poiesis (ποίησις)...
...Bodies are porous surfaces with holes, cuts, marks; perforated and penetrated with openings everywhere. This is the reason I’m turning to the notion of anatomy – as an operation on the body – rather than the body. It is the treatment and clinical notion that matter here, not the definition of the body itself... In terms of theoretical input, my artistic research has been nurtured by a speculative-pragmatic interlocution with Lacanian psychoanalysis, posthuman, feminist, and queer philosophies, and écriture féminine.8 Ultimately, it is these transdisciplinary displacements and expansions that have allowed me to develop Fantasmical Anatomies. (Juren, 11)
GD: Excerpts from Juren's Atlas, and her research catalog include:
Glossary (in process) With this Glossary (in process), I propose another navigation through the texts, concepts, and gestures at work in Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies. The Glossary does not aim at delivering objective clarity or fixed definitions of the terms. It weaves delicate threads between the words I appropriate, use, and manipulate. It dissects my body of work in other ways, allowing for transversal connections to emerge. The terms are those I have researched and feel close to. They are those I invent, write, and speak during the lessons. (Juren , 24)
GD: And on Juren’s researchcatalog.net site, I most resonated with her video:
Chromopoems
In Chromopoems, different writings I did along my research are translated into coloured lights. At MDT, a Fantasmical Anatomies love poem is transformed into 24 theatrical lights.
The resulting light composition directly addresses the body of one person lying down on the Feldenkrais table, like in a one-on-one session. Each written letter, each read sound is translated into a coloured light signal following Piet Devos’ synaesthesia alphabet. Piet Devos is a Brussels-baded writer and literary theorist, whom I met in 2016 while working on my project Blind Gazes. Blind Gazes was part of The Humane Body, a year-long European dance project made for and with blind and visually impaired publics.
In Chromopoems, the designed light acts on its own. Generating a world of sensorial distortions, it allows the person to receive and interpret the poem sensorially through light and rhythm, rather than reading its words. (Juren, researchcatalog)
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GD: Raz Paz Rojo’s The Decline of Choreography and Its Movement: A Body’s (Path)Way’. Stockholm: Stockholm University of the Arts treatment and presentation of collected data in the four "testimonies" by Altube, Llopis, Martinez, and Santana is straightforward and engaging... excerpts from each:
OIHANA ALTUBE (2019) When I practice I am moving and recognising very clearly the kinetic paths that are continuously happening in the body. I acknowledge them because I know them. I know the timing they have, their intensity, where they direct me, what their weight is and what they weigh on me. (Altube, 1)
JAIME LLOPIS (2019) IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO, GO TO THE BODY How does a trained and disciplined body, controlled by a policing subject that enforces "having-to-be in order to count" in the established value system, open up to a liminal state of experience thus enabling other types of virtualities that do not obey the logic of production?… (Llopis, 1)
ARANTXA MARTINEZ (2019) We dance with the motor apparatus. We put that apparatus into motion. There is no secret, need or fairness to reach. You don't have to have a reason to dance. Although there may be many reasons, it is not necessary to have one more than the desire to dance. How to dance then? We dance with what is there, not with what is not. (Martinez, 1)
RICARDO SANTANA (2019) LABORATORY CHRONICLE When and where do you come into contact with this practice? How was your reception of it? What questions arose? I didn't start working with the whole ECLIPSE:MUNDO's team, I started later. Or maybe had I started before? Years ago, Paz organized a working group "the Gerries", in which much of the content began to be drawn. Perhaps they were not so directed to the body of the dancer (the object was out), or to be more precise, the movement was articulated through the action on the objects and on the others, but the trip, the presence, some tools... were already there… (Santana, 1)
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SUNDAY 15 JAN 2023
CONFERENCE, WHY?: ON PREPARING, EDITING & PRESENTING WITH MARC HERBST
FOUCAULT- THE ORDER OF THINGS, PREFACE
GD: What I wonder immediately if "the Same and the Other", not exactly opposites in English, but instead pairs the binaries "the Same and the Different"... which, re: the later, we must acknowledge, thanks to Foucault, as "diff-er-ence" (the French, 3 syllablic way). At least academically, we equate the two: Otherness= Diff-er-rence...
“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." (Foucault)
GD: I appreciate Foucault's setting up for a discussion of "otherness", and recognize his discussion of how/where it asserts itself. That is, by "filling in a blank" or "empty space", which he does in the 2nd paragraph...
"It would not even be present at all in this classification had it not insinuated itself into the empty space, the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another. It is not the ‘fabulous’ animals that are impossible, since they are designated as such, but the narrowness of the distance separating them from (and juxtaposing them to) the stray dogs, or the animals that from a long way off look like flies. What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of those categories to all the others." (Foucault)
GD: And significantly, also in the 2nd paragraph, above, MF's unequivocal distinctions between: 'fabulous' animals = the Same stray dogs, or the animals that from a long way off look like flies = the Different
“...Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.” (Foucault)
GD: Of note in the above passage is MF's discussion of herterotopias, which later he codifies:
“Six Principles of Foucauldian Heterotopia… 1. Heterotopia of Crisis and Deviation- The first principle classifies heterotopia into two groups: a. Crisis heterotopia is a reserved space for members of a society who may be in a state of crisis (Foucault, 1987). Art has universally been serving as a heterotopia of crisis for those who are able to see its full potential as a space without judgment for the cause behind the state of crisis (whatever that cause may be). b. Heterotopia of deviation is meant for people whose behavior is deviant from the accepted/dominant norms. 2. Heterotopia of Emplacement and Displacement- Foucault gives the example of changing positions of cemeteries from the homes to churchyards to graveyards outside the city. He highlights that it is because the world is leaning more toward atheism now that cemeteries are becoming more important (Foucault, 1987, p. 5). 3. Heterotopia of Juxtaposition- According to the third principle of heterotopia, multiple places that are otherwise incompatible are brought together. Foucault’s examples of this are the ancient Persian lawns whose four corners were supposed to represent the four corners of the world (Foucault, 1987, p. 6). It was supposed to represent a kind of microcosm. This too applies to art as in a painting or a novel or a poem; the artist or the writer can formulate a microcosm bringing different aspects of our world together and juxtaposing them against each other. Although calligraphy already juxtaposes word and image, the secret book juxtaposes Eastern and Western elements of art. The novel also juxtaposes multiple viewpoint not only that of narrators but also of the interpreters of the religion, whose interpretations may be altogether different from the true spirit of the religion. 4. Heterotopia of Time- Heterotopia, as Foucault points out is often connected with “slices in time” (Foucault, 1987, p. 6). Heterotopias are considered to be functioning at their maximum capacity when people break away from traditional time. Art being a timeless entity fits this criterion well. Time may be passing outside of the art piece but the contents of the piece (like a Grecian urn) will always represent one time and one situation that may, even at the time of its creation, have never existed in reality. The painter can also draw from anywhere in time and a painting can be a break from traditional time for the spectators. 5. Heterotopia of Opening and Closing- The fifth principle of heterotopia pertains to the initiation of people into the third space. Foucault states that heterotopias are spaces that open and close, meaning they are not simply available for anyone to enter or exit as they please. Foucault points out that either people will be made to enter such a space, as is the case with prisons or they will have to “submit to the rites and purifications” (Foucault, 1987, p. 7). This principle implies that a heterotopia should not be easily accessible to the masses... 6. Heterotopia of Illusion and Compensation- The heterotopia of illusion exposes the real spaces wherein human life is partitioned. So this is a kind of heterotopia that takes a real site and makes it more intense in its nature so that it may represent one aspect purely, and that aspect is usually of a deviant nature—something that cannot be practiced with equal intensity in a public space.” (Sajjad & Perveen, 2019)
GD: My first and second take on MF’s description of “certain aphasiacs" sorting, un-sorting processes, strike me as remarkably similar to my own "creative processes"... haha, but pretty exactly true... I.e., My most recent piece is felted from six or seven different "flesh-tone" dyed wool skeins. Before I constructed it, I sorted, unsorted, and re-sorted just as MF describes:
“It appears that certain aphasiacs, when shown various differently coloured skeins of wool on a table top, are consistently unable to arrange them into any coherent pattern; as though that simple rectangle were unable to serve in their case as a homogeneous and neutral space in which things could be placed so as to display at then same time the continuous order of their identities or differences as well as the semantic field of their denomination. Within this simple space in which things are normally arranged and given names, the aphasiac will create a multiplicity of tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets; in one corner, they will place the lightest-coloured skeins, in another the red ones, somewhere else those that are softest in texture, in yet another place the longest, or those that have a tinge of purple or those that have been wound up into a ball. But no sooner have they been adumbrated than all these groupings dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.” (Foucault)
GD: Likely this passage of MF's preface is the heart of the book. While reading it, really, throughout my reading of the entire preface, I was peripherally thinking that he may have identified as "the Other" due to his identifying as gay.
"The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse. It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself: it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation..." (Foucault)
GD: Then I read that he came to the US to teach at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s, and died of AIDS in 1984, which I didn't know...and I read a contemporary Slate article called "Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand “Social Construct” Sexuality". It may be germane to the discussion:
"...For Foucault, the obsession with figuring out the truth of our sexualities is a trap. After all, how do we know when to stop? Who can tell us when we’ve peeled back the final layer of social constraints and discovered our truest, most authentic selves? Foucault—who, by the way, identified as gay—knew that knowledge can never really be separated from power. Sometimes knowledge can be empowering, like when we take the language that was once used to diagnose us and turn it into a political rallying cry. But that knowledge can also be wielded against us, often with very concrete and painful results. Thinking and talking endlessly about our sexualities doesn’t really get us closer to figuring out who we “really are.” It does, however, generate plenty of evidence that can be used to monitor, control, and discipline us when we deviate from the norm. This is why Foucault, who spent his life studying criminals, so-called sexual deviants, and the mentally ill, never tried to analyze these people the way a doctor or psychologist might. He wasn’t interested in figuring out what environmental or genetic factors caused them to turn out like they did. In fact, he refused to ask or answer those kinds of questions at all. When an interviewer inquired whether he thought homosexuality was an “innate predisposition” or the result of “social conditioning,” Foucault replied, “On this question I have absolutely nothing to say. No comment.” Pressed for details, he explained that he would not use his position of authority to “traffic in opinions.” In the end, Foucault wasn’t interested in settling the question of whether sexual orientation was biologically determined or, indeed, socially constructed. What he wanted to understand was how sexuality came to be the question—the one thing we believe we have to answer before we can move on to anything else."... (Egan, 2014)
...And if one considers that disease is at one and the same time disorder – the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very heart of life – and a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types, one can see what scope there would be for an archaeology of the medical point of view. From the limit-experience of the Other to the constituent forms of medical knowledge, and from the latter to the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge, or rather the threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our modernity. It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared and revealed a space proper to the human sciences. In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet. (Egan, 2014)
GD: Startling but resonant is MF's inherent concluding reality that I outline in the following linguistic equation, which I think underlies the process of "othering":
If disease = disorder = Other(ness), then health = order = Same(ness)
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GD: Reading MF's preface to The Order of Things inspired me to read summations of the book, which I did... here are some highlights of a Gutting & Oksala piece that summarizes it:
G&O: 3.2 The Order of Things
The book that made Foucault famous, Les mots et les choses (translated into English under the title The Order of Things), is in many ways an odd interpolation into the development of his thought. Its subtitle, “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences”, suggests an expansion of the earlier critical histories of psychiatry and clinical medicine into other modern disciplines such as economics, biology, and philology. And indeed there is an extensive account of the various “empirical disciplines” of the Renaissance and the Classical Age that precede these modern human sciences. But there is little or nothing of the implicit social critique found in the History of Madness or even The Birth of the Clinic. Instead, Foucault offers an analysis of what knowledge meant—and how this meaning changed—in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present. At the heart of his account is the notion of representation. Here we focus on his treatment of representation in philosophical thought, where we find Foucault’s most direct engagement with traditional philosophical questions.
3.2.1 Classical Representation
Foucault argues that from Descartes up to Kant (during what he calls the Classical Age) representation was simply assimilated to thought: to think was to employ ideas to represent the object of thought. But, he says, we need to be clear about what it meant for an idea to represent an object. This was not, first of all, any sort of relation of resemblance: there were no features (properties) of the idea that themselves constituted the representation of the object. (Saying this, however, does not require that the idea itself have no properties or even that these properties are not relevant to the idea’s representation of the object.) By contrast, during the Renaissance, knowledge was understood as a matter of resemblance between things...
We see, then, that for Foucault the key to Classical knowing is the idea, that is, mental representation... Language could be nothing more than a higher-order instrument of thought: a physical representation of ideas, having no meaning except in relation to them.
3.2.2 Kant’s Critique of Classical Representation
Foucault maintains that the great “turn” in modern philosophy occurs with Kant (though presumably he is merely an example of something much broader and deeper). Kant raises the question of whether ideas do in fact represent their objects and, if so, how (in virtue of what) they do so. In other words, ideas are no longer taken as the unproblematic vehicles of knowledge; it is now possible to think that knowledge might be (or have roots in) something other than representation. This did not mean that representation had nothing at all to do with knowledge. Perhaps some (or even all) knowledge still essentially involved ideas’ representing objects. But, Foucault insists, the thought that was only now (with Kant) possible was that representation itself (and the ideas that represented) could have an origin in something other than representation.
This thought, according to Foucault, led to some important and distinctively modern possibilities. The first was developed by Kant himself, who thought that representations (thoughts or ideas) were themselves the product of (“constituted” by) the human mind... In other words, even when modern thought made knowledge essentially historical, it had to retain some functional equivalent of Kant’s transcendental realm to guarantee the normative validity of knowledge.
3.2.3 Language and “Man”
At this point, The Order of Things introduces the two central features of thought after Kant: the return of language and the “birth of man.” Our discussion above readily explains why Foucault talks of a return of language: it now has an independent and essential role that it did not have in the Classical view. But the return is not a monolithic phenomenon. Language is related to knowledge in diverse ways, each of which corresponds to a distinctive sort of “return.” So, for example, the history of natural languages has introduced ambiguities that we can try to eliminate through techniques of formalization. On the other hand, this same history may have deposited fundamental truths in our languages that we can unearth only by the methods of hermeneutic interpretation...In contrast to the Renaissance, however, there is no divine Word underlying and giving unique truth to the words of language. Literature is literally nothing but language—or rather many languages, expressing their own meanings.
Even more important than language is the figure of man. The most important point about “man” is that it is an epistemological concept. Man, Foucault says, did not exist during the Classical age (or before). This is not because there was no idea of human beings as a species or of human nature as a psychological, moral, or political reality. Rather, “there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such” (The Order of Things, [1970: 309])...
Foucault illustrates his point through a striking discussion of Descartes’ cogito, showing why it is an indubitable certitude within the classical episteme, but not within the modern episteme...
3.2.4 The Analytic of Finitude
At the very heart of man is his finitude: the fact that, as described by the modern empirical sciences, he is limited by the various historical forces (organic, economic, linguistic) operating on him. This finitude is a philosophical problem because man as a historically limited empirical being must somehow also be the source of the representations whereby we know the empirical world, including ourselves as empirical beings. I (my consciousness) must, as Kant put it, be both an empirical object of representation and the transcendental source of representations. How is this possible? Foucault’s view is that, in the end, it is not—and that the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse of the modern episteme. What Foucault calls the “analytic of finitude” sketches the historical case for this conclusion, examining the major efforts (together making up the heart of modern philosophy) to understand man as “empirico-transcendental.”
The question—and the basic strategy for answering it—go back, of course, to Kant, who put forward the following crucial idea: that the very factors that make us finite (our subjection to space, time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary for the possibility of empirical knowledge. Our finitude is, therefore, simultaneously founded and founding (positive and fundamental, as Foucault puts it). The project of modern (Kantian and post-Kantian) philosophy—the analytic of finitude—is to show how this is possible.
...It might seem that Husserl’s phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing man as object and as subject by radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the transcendental subject. The problem, however, is that, as Foucault sees it, the modern notion of man excludes Descartes’ idea of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure consciousness...Foucault contends that phenomenology, like all modern thought, must accept the unthought as the ineliminable “other” of man. Nor are the existential phenomenologists (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) able to solve the problem. Foucault recognizes that they avoid positing a transcendental ego and instead focus on the concrete reality of man-in-the world. But this, Foucault claims, is just a more subtle way of reducing the transcendental to the empirical.
Finally, Foucault argues that some philosophers (Hegel and Marx in one way, Nietzsche and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve the problem of man’s dual status by treating him as a historical reality. ...Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that the modern pursuit of the question of origins has provided us with a deeper sense of the ontological significance of time, particularly in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who reject Hegel’s and Marx’s view of the return to our origin as a redemptive fullness of being, and instead see it as a confrontation with the nothingness of our existence (1966 [1970: 334). (Gutting & Oksala, 2022)
