A philosophically informed review of two performances seen in the context of the Drugajanje 2024 festival
In his book Exhausting dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, Andre Lepecki designates movement as »the main emblem of modernity«. He also notes, citing several scholars of political philosophy (among them Peter Sloterdijk, whom he quotes writing that we »must introduce in the diagnostic of our times, a kinetic and kinesthetic dimension«) that modernity is related to, and even defines, a highly specific concept of subjectivity or selfhood.
The cartesian self-enclosed, individualistic subject of modernity dares to think, but not of him or herself as enmeshed into the world: his senses are – what is an event of tragic dimensions, akin to Adam's fall from grace – split from his reason. For the subject of modernity, movement can only be secondary, an after-effect of the mind, an epiphenomenon, an »externalization system«. Either every movement is completely evolutionarily determined, or every movement is preceded by thought. No longer tied to processes of social cohesion, movement becomes a mere representation of progress: a sort of movement-towards-being, where being is construed metaphorically as a flickering light bulb, and subjects as mouses, running on treadmills, tied via electric cables to the bulb which they, little Sisyphus, animate. With their moves, with their excesses. Let there be light.
In this text, I will analyse two dance performances as seen at the Drugajanje festival (11th – 15th November in Celje and Maribor, Slovenia). The festival's core characteristic is (spatial) decentralisation – and as it strives to decentralise performing spaces, we, as dance critics, must also strive to find ways to think about decentralisation in dance; we must strive to find »new relationalities« without falling into the trap of »the kinetic impulse of modernity« (Sloterdijk 2005) as metaphorically described in the first paragraph. Because in modernity movement has often been thought of as a metaphor for energy creation and therefore work (as Andrew Hewitt explores in his book Social Choreography), the art of creating dances – in short, choreography – gives us a perfect opportunity to rethink the modern processes of subjectification.
Two novel ways of thinking our way out of modern processes of subjectification were offered (among others) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (desubjectification through multiplicity and assemblage) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (desubjectification through understanding the body as an open nexus of perception-action relations). But even these concepts (decentralization, multiplicity, nexus of embodied relations) are constantly in danger of getting caught up in vitalistic concepts or the »kinetic impulse of modernity«. To keep these philosophies of subjectivity intact, we need a concept of infinite »intermingling« (Merleau-Ponty) or »wrinkling« (Deleuze), which provide a principle for the subject’s open-ended, but also directed, process of individuation.
In this text, I will focus specifically on two performances from Drugajanje, which I will first analyze separately and then compare (in the final wrap-up): Milan Tomašik's Treatise and Matea Bilosnić's Kata Strofa. The performances are quite different in nature: while Tomašik's piece, based on an avantgarde musical notation (Treatise by Cornelius Cardew, 1967), is choreographed, but not performed by him (it is performed by six dancers from the Krakow Dance Theatre ensemble), Bilosnić is the sole author, choreographer and dancer – well, redoubled several times throughout of performance – of her piece. But this very difference can also help us illustrate the problem of subjecthood and its relation to language in the process of a materialization and presentation of a dance performance. Of course, this problem does not consume the whole difference: other differences (in genre, style, intent) exist, but I will touch on them only briefly, focusing instead on organisational forms, mediated by language.
Let's start off with Treatise. As already mentioned, this performance is based on an avantgarde musical notation by Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) which, instead of communicating fixed sounds via classical music notes, tries to communicate ideas via a set of geometrical shapes (circles, squares, straight and curved lines), surrounded by empty space and »normalised« by a centerline. Empty space is not thought of merely as a container, but as a sign in itself since it signals, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, the limit of meaning or significance, while the centerline signals the norm of meaning or significance. Cardew's project was not so much poetical as political: as many other philosophers and linguists of his time (most notably, the American philosopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce), he strove to find a new way of writing and reading the world, a new way of producing-receiving meaning which could flee the modernist tendency towards systematizing »clear and concise ideas« (Descartes) and instead focus on the very act of infinite interpretation or semiosis. (Meaning, as Merleau-Ponty has often emphasized, is hidden in the interstices between words, not in the words themselves).
Cardew was known to be deeply influenced by John Cage and what we could call logic of »the event« (Badiou). In the performance Treatise, apparently a different logic is used, since the dancers seem to follow a very clear and concise notation from start to finish, which also shows in their bodily disposition (they must be on time). There surely are events, in the form of constructions of shapes bursting in different rhythms and types of embodiments (material, bodily, individual, group), unified by mathematical exactness, but there is no room left for chance events – even if they occur spontaneously, they are immediately pulled back into the whole of choreography. However, this “pull” is not explicitly thematized or problematized in the performance.
At moments, it seems that the shapes taken from Cardew's notation are interpreted too literally. There are two main actions in the show, and both seem to be mimetic in nature: (i) dancers sticking black stage tape into various shapes onto the white dance floor with scientific exactness (extending their arms as if measuring) and (ii) dancers embodying the shapes as if they were exponentially growing (using various choreographic devices, most notably canons). When we first step into the performance hall, we see the dancers sticking the tape (into lines of various widths and breaks) onto »the fourth wall«, immediately implying a separation between us and them (intentionally or unintentionally). But why separation, if Cardew's musical score is so deeply tied to the problem of interpretation, and the gaze automatically takes over the role of the interpretant in even the most meaningless communicative situation? Why is our gaze artificially separated from the dancers’ movements? No clear answer is given.
Secondly, there are no rhythmical pauses in the performance: there is movement and there is music almost constantly from start to finish. While breaks are present in the information schema separating us from the dancers (between individual pieces of stage tape, there are geometrically arranged spaces), they seem absent from the event itself. The shorter breaks signalling the rhythmical outline of the notation (or the interpretation of it) are present, but longer breaks at the level of the event are missing. No blanks are left to fill; no event can emerge, since nothing is underlain by emptiness. Therefore, both emptiness (as the potentiality of shape) and the midline (as a normative standard) lose their function: the former because nothing stays in potentia for long, the latter because the interpretative norm is not needed if everything has already been decided upon.
It might be easier to understand this particular inscenation in a naturalist framework: in this reading, the stage literally functions as a piece of paper, while the bodies function as multilayered imprints of the ink (multi-layered because they are desubjectivized into shapes, rhythmic breaks and intensities), fleetingly imprinted into it in real time. The stage is covered with white dance floor and the dancers are dressed in black and white unisex costumes, repeatedly exchanging two half-missing black and white vests, which are covering only one side of their body. These seem to represent the nexus of interpretation; the markers of the emphasised aspects of the forming constellations; or the centerline, pulling other shapes and forces towards itself. But again: the centreline and the emptiness seem represented, not thematized or problematized. The act of imprinting itself or being imprinted upon is multi-faceted and meaningful in so many different senses: the imprinting of society into individual, of discourse into our words, of words onto a page. However, what seems to be missing from the performance is the reference to the original author himself, to his ideology, to the belief that language (even the “inner” language of the individual) can continually reinvent itself and thus subvert rigid systems of social identification.
Avantgarde art seems in a lot of ways a reaction to the classical modern concept of subjectivity. As Jan de Vos writes in his book Psychologization and the subject of late modernity, one of the first to invent the modern psychological subject was the French enlightenment philosopher Julien Offrey de La Mettrie (1709–1751), who materialised or somatised the cartesian cogito by considering »all aspects of the soul /…/ aspects of the res extensa [eg. physical and neurophysical materiality] « (de Vos, 23). As the modern embodied neurosciences, la Mettrie too »considered it but a matter of time before our knowledge and technical abilities would be refined enough to prove scientifically that the soul is but a function of the body« (ibid.)
The problem of reducing res cogitans to res extensa is, according to de Vos, not only in losing the criteria for the relevance of various quantitative data in neuropsychology (the categories must be in a way transcendent of the data; it is questionable if the data itself can ever progressively constitute the categories), but also in the »redoubling of the subject«. Because the metasubject (the certainty of cogito ergo sum or »I think therefore I am«) is no longer tied to the transcendental realm (through the concept of God), but resides in the body here-and-now, it gets redoubled as »the objective gaze« (de Vos, 24) or »the zero-level of subjectivity« (Žižek 2008). With La Mettrie, human subjects become phenomenologically idealized: »the soul is integrated into the res extensa and God is replaced by a new Big Other in the form of Science«.
La Mettrie’s materialism, which was supposed to be a solution, becomes a problem in its own right as the ethically good loses its criteria and becomes »organic, automatic happiness«. There is no more ethics, just self-reflective enjoyment in the process of voluptuous becoming. The supposed »natural states of our bodies«, normalized by naturalist objectivity, become the best, or the only, indicator of truth. We become psychologically fixated on our bodies. That's why so many philosophers, among them Žižek, insist that modern culture is so self-obsessed and perverse. Because of the redoubling of the subject, an ideal copy of myself, the basis of certainty, is created which, like the cartesian cogito, dictates the procedures of my self-interpretation, only now it is locked into the body. We are stuck with an inner voice constantly disciplining ourselves through the reference points set and reset by »psy-scientific« institutions; as de Vos continues, it is not a long path from here to the de Sadean subject who finds pleasure in disciplining himself or others in various more or less gruesome ways.
Firmly locked into our own bodies, human beings become (mere) »symbolic machines«. La Mettrie entitled his treatise on human psychology Machine man and machine man (or woman) is precisely the image that Matea Bilosnić's performance Kata Strofa evokes. Strumming along the likes of Laurie Anderson, Bilosnić endlessly redoubles herself through linguistic devices. What first seems a mere intro (Bilosnić greeting us »Hello!«) turns into a spiralling repetition, an endless multiplication of the layers of the self. The same repetition happens when the performer tries to settle on the stage and set up her equipment (“Now, I am walking in circles! I am walking towards you!”). The performer seems to be overly occupied with the way she is saying her words and performing her gestures in front of our careful gazes, echoing the enlightenment's preoccupation with the difference between habit gestures and free gestures or rhetorical gesticulation. Whenever she commits to an action, she sabotages it by becoming too self-aware. The action then abruptly stops, or gets fragmented and echoingly merges with other almost-actions.
What complicates the multiplying situation even more is the presence of several microphones on the stage. In Kata Strofa, the La Mettrian machine man gets extended through technology. Bilosnić as a machine woman is equally a machine and a human being of the La Mettrian sort: we cannot tell if her endless redoubling is a consequence of naturalist social conventions or a glitch in the computer system. On the one hand, she seems to be pre-programmed, but on the other, all of her acts are social in nature and therefore must be left open-ended. The performer seems to be responding to our own responses; at some points she even seems to be preoccupied by them. She seems to really want to make us feel very comfortable. While she does, to a certain extent, succeed in creating a welcoming atmosphere, this welcoming atmosphere slowly turns eerie as it gets overshadowed by the self-reflexive nature of her utterances and the pettiness of her repetitive acts.
Natural morality, which de Vos names »somatic ethics«, is legitimized by the idea that our moral claims are synonymous with certain (highly complex) claims in the natural sciences. This is how morality turns into naturalized psychology. While this seems like a neutral change, it has many implications for how we understand ourselves as human beings and societies. Whimster (2006, in de Vos, 39) argues that all of the main branches of modern psychology (cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, behaviour ecology, evolutionary game theory) stem from the La Mettrian stance »in assuming that individuals and social outcomes are shaped by material causes beyond our immediate direct control«. Because the true nature of (moral) behaviour is considered to be synaptical and biochemical, conventions cease to have any meaning: they become transposable from one cultural domain to another (cultural assimilation), as if they had never had any history, but can be »loaded« into the flesh at any point of time. The human is thus left without any social criteria: the »glitch« computer metaphor for the coincidences and mishaps of human life is simultaneous, if not synonymous, with the downfall of reliable moral criteria. The »perverse core of the psy-sciences« as de Vos names it, amounts to the complete annihilation of any spontaneity: life becomes a bunch of scenarios (not even narratives, but bundles of information atoms) that we keep on practicing even when no one's around. In this way, life also becomes a series of guilt trips. The Greek Epicurean ideal of an enjoying body gets translated into scientific discourse where it gets its dark, perverse double. And we can barely escape it.
To conclude a bit abruptly, even if there is no real basis for the comparison of the two performances, one being a more classic dance performance and the other an experimental technologically mediated vocal-dance performance, both seem to touch on the problem of interpretation and indirectly, subjectivity. Treatise by accepting the initial challenge of interpreting Cornelius Cardew's criptic score and Kata Strofa by portraying the initialisation of a modern human social machine as an endlessly self-interpreting program with no possibility of transcendence of conventions (cartesian cogito locked into the body). In Treatise, the choreographer is not present, but »translated« by six dancers, while in Kata Strofa the choreographer is present, but constantly sabotaged by her redoubling selves. In the former, we are witnessing a one-way interpretation, in the latter, a complete fragmentation of selves.
If we focus on the relation between the process of making dances (communication) and the final product, which is more or less open, we can draw a few conclusions about the two performances. While Treatise is inspired by the score of an avant-garde musician, it fails to capture the open spirit of the avant-garde: even if it references some of Cardew’s technical and poetical devices, it doesn’t integrate them into the whole of Cardew’s striving. It communicates only in one direction: choreographer – dancers – viewers. We might justify this decision by saying that interpreting a cryptic score is troublesome as it is and cross-interpretation would have been too complex of a task. However, the main problem persists: the viewers are left in a vacuum, literally and metaphorically separated from the performance. There is a lot of good dancing, which generates different shapes and gestalts; however, the shapes and the gestalts keep on growing and multiplying, seemingly without referring to any immanent criteria or principle that would keep them interpretable. The “kinetic impulse” is there, but it is not played around with.
Kata Strofa, on the other hand, not only engages with the viewers, but also explicitly thematizes its specific type of engagement (through the use of irony). It depicts an initialization of a modern human program; a fragmentation of the self. The kinetic impulse is there: the performer strives to create more and more copies of herself, more and more potential situations. The performance lets us linger in the echoes; it makes visible the reduplication machine, created by the modern subject’s self-doubt. In the penultimate scene of Kata Strofa, all the sound devices get stuck repeating various utterances recorded at various points of the performance, while the performer looks at us trying to establish some connection, figuratively and literally. In the end, she does transcend, but only by fleeing the room through the front door onto Celje’s main square, fleetingly waving us goodbye as if fearing her own predictability.
Literature:
De Vos, Jan (2013). Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hewitt, Andrew (2005). Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Duke University Press.
Lepecki, Andre (2006). Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge.
(*) Forrest, J. (2019). Treatise: »A Visual Symphony of Information Design«. Dostopno na: https://medium.com/nightingale/treatise-a-visual-symphony-of-information-design-2ced33ef01a0
Pujadas, M. (2018). »Philosophy of Music: Wittgenstein and Cardew«. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia. Dostopno na: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26563363
Žižek, Slavoj (2008). »Descartes and the Post-traumatic subject«. Filozofski vestnik 29/2, Filozofski inštitut ZRC SAZU.