Hi all and J'aimeYour post seems like a call for strategies of survival of being cyborgs and zombies. It reflects "the confession of all the humanoids, of beings half flesh/half metal, who, speaking from within the closed, liquid textuality of technology, ruminate longingly, and romantically, on a past in their telematic future." Arthur Kroker Deleuze and Guattari: Two Meditations - The Posessed Individual. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CYBORGS AND ZOMBIES: we have never been fully in control ofourselves...What we need to pay much attention to are the implicit mechanisms of control, the technologies that are defined with the purpose of making us into zombies at the service ofmarket driven forces whilst we believe in free will and autonomous agency.
The posthuman-postself-postchoreographic, is perhaps an attempt to do away with the fiction of the subject as an entity in selfcontrol, it is an attempt to make explicit all the implicit structures and technologies of power that make us into zombies before we have the possibility to realise it... in order to open up the possibilities to redefine "ourselves" as bodies beyond the naturalised assumption of subjectivity and aware of the fact that we are never under definitive control of anything whatsoever in "ourselves".
Or perhaps we should adopt the practice of Psychogeography ie. to explore their environment without preconceptions, to understand our location, and therefore our existence. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. (Sourced from Wikipedia). He was a self confessed flâneur and as such participated in the derive. Benjamin thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.The flâneur's tendency then is toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation.
So if we see the site of postchoreograpy as a new landscape within which to perform we need to observe and participate at the same time whilst not feeling being "leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism." (Georg Simmel "The Metropolis and Mental Life")
Or perhaps we should "recognize as well the deep affinity between feminism and the rhizomatic perspective of Deleuze and Guattari. For what has feminist theory always been about if not a refusal of the grand metaphysics of Being, of the unitary male subject, of the phallocentric order of the Subject, Species, and Membership; in favor a world of "multiplicities," of a dancing materiality of lines of flight and departure; of a world reenchanted by the language of desire? Not the old boring world of phallocentric oppositions, but liquid doublings where the body finally speaks, where alchemy is the rule, and where the terrestrial kingdom of grounded consciousness - the vegetative spatiality of the rhizomatic network - finally usurps abstract univocal perspective." Kroker
best jeannnette----- Original Message ----- From: "Jaime del Val" <jaimedelval@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <dance-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 3:45 PMSubject: [dance-tech] There is no dancer behind the dance__We have always been zombies and cyborgs
Hi all, Johannes,communication" ? but surely in interactive and emergent virtual scenariosJaime, do you see dance as primarily a form of "non-verbalhow do you separate the dancer from the dance, and what is the"choreographic" in the extended sense of sensorial flows and projected flowswe sought to imagine? <<<is the "choreographic" not the kind of "object" you deconstructed, Jaime?... a non object, a non structure, an already-reproducible mutation.<<< Choreography can be analysed as a form of non verbal communication (I am careful in saying "can be analysed", rather than "is" for the issue in not to generate new ontologies but to locate our subjects of concern within contingent frameworls of analysis that are necessary in so far as they are useful tools to any of us.) Choreography can also be anlysed as part of the humanist project for a hegemonic subject, and therefore implies a subject-dancer, capable of repeating discreticized and intelligible entities, and a subject choreographer that generates them. Choreography is thus an attempt to tame and reduce the continuum of thenon-verbal and of movement and of embodied experience in terms of repeatableand controllable agency, that points or gets near the fictions ofuniversality of language within western thinking, ignoring the uncotrollableand unrepeatable within it or categorizing it as an error. Choreography, as a form of écriture of the body, is a form of discretisation, based upon a number of naturalised assumptions about whatthe body is and can and should be, what is intelligible and acceptable as abody, it is therefore a tool to draw the line between the intelligible andthe unintelligible, the sovereign and the abject, within contingent contextsof culture and power. But Choreography is also a sedimentation of bodies' improvisations, of its lines of escape, of digressions from norm, in which the lines of the intelligible fluctuate over time. However choreography is based upon the assumption of repeatability, which always necessitates discrete forms to operate, and stresses the repeatablevs. the irreducible, it must perforce leave out whatever here and now is not reducible and repeatable. Certainly what is reducible and repeatable changesover time as the metaformative processes that conforms culture as field ofpotential meanings and discretionalities, evolves through multiplicities ofbodies' interactions. The dancer as a subject is only there in so far as we want to reestablish the humanist (or other) notion of the subject within specific regimes of discourse and culture. But going back to Jeannette's quote from Nietzsche,some would argue that, like "there is no doer behind the deed", THERE IS NODANCER BEHIND THE DANCE: we need not look for a subject-substrate in the dancing body unless we want to reproduce the fiction of the subject as acoherent whole that accounts for the settling of the boundaries between thespeakable and the abject. Note the difference between dance and choregraphy: choreography needs thesubject dancer, whereas postchoreography and dance attempt to get away withit: COREOGRAPHY IS TO DANCE WHAT THE ORGANISM IS TO THE BODY AND THE BwO (Body without Organs): the body defies reduction to organicity in its intensive capacity for transformation, as a field of forces rather than fixed materiality. So does dance defy reduction to choreography. What this implies in the end is that both concepts: dance and choreography are under constant transformation, redefining the boundaries of the discreetable.I like what Zizek wrote about the melancholia of the choreographers. Weare not too sure about the virtualization of reality... "but it also opensup the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which runs thecyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of the control over it, so that one no longer relates to one's body as to 'one's own.' What one encounters here is the constitutive ambiguity of the notionof mediatization." The theft of the body may present a very likely trauma tocontemporary dance. <<< Indeed this makes me think of Stelarc's absent bodies. When he was with us in Madrid in December it struck me how insistently he referred to his work in terms of choreography: choreographies of the absent body controlled by remote agents, choreography of the robot arm, choreographies of split physicalities, choreography of the third arm controlled by his stomach muscles... and of course underlying a project for new anatomicalarchitechtures of the body in which there is not much room for subjectivityand split physicality, phantom bodies and zombies are seen as an extrusion of awareness which implies no subjectivity. Indeed, quoting him: WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CYBORGS AND ZOMBIES: we have never been fully in control ofourselves, we have always been acting according to forces that drive us, wehave always been construed as subjects that behind the fake appearance of being whole and independent act according to norms that we embody and naturallise.If this is the case then maybe the new forms of being a zombie in cyberspacewill not represent such a risk of our falling appart, though the nostalgiawill inevitably arise in so far as the "theft" is made explicit, theft of a fiction of the subject in which we tend to believe. What we need to pay muchattention to are th implicit mechanisms of control, the technologies that are defined with the purpose of making us into zombies at the service of market driven forces whilst we believe in free will and autonomous agency. What we need to counteract are the increasingly implicit and hidden technologies of the self that we are embodying at every moment in latecapitalist circles. The posthuman-postself-postchoreographic, is perhaps an attempt to do away with the fiction of the subject as an entity in selfcontrol, it is an attempt to make explicit all the implicit structures and technologies of power that make us into zombies before we have the possibility to realise it... in order to open up the possibilities to redefine "ourselves" as bodies beyond the naturalised assumption of subjectivity and aware of the fact that we are never under definitive control of anything whatsoever in "ourselves". best jaime