Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance 9780822395829

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Always More Than One

Erin Manning

Always More Than One *

Individuation’s Dance

Prelude by Brian MassuMi DukE univErsity PrEss Durham and London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. All images in chapter 8 originally appeared in Oeuvres by Fernand Deligny, edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo © 2007 Editions L’Arachnéen.

To DJ Savarese for leading the way toward fresh thinking

Contents

PrEluDE By Brian MassuMi * ix acknowlEDgMEnts * xxv

1. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self * 1 2. Always More Than One * 16 3. Waltzing the Limit * 41 4. Propositions for the Verge * 74 5. Choreography as Mobile Architecture * 99 6. The Dance of Attention * 133 7. An Ethics of Language in the Making * 149 8. The Shape of Enthusiasm * 184 notEs * 223 BiBliograPhy * 257 inDEx * 267

interlude || When Movement Dances * 13 interlude || Dancing the Virtual * 31

interlude || What Else? * 91 interlude || Fiery, Luminous, Scary * 124

interlude || Love the Anonymous Elements * 172 coda || Another Regard * 204

Brian MassuMi

Prelude

“A thousand smiles, a thousand getting- out- of- chairs, a thousand variations of performance of any and all behaviours.” With these words, tinged with wonder at the richness of the everyday, Daniel Stern underscores the multiplicity of every single act composing our lives (Stern 1985, 56; cited in chapter 1 below). Always More Than One, as the title conveys, is dedicated to that wonder: of the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as one. Any sense of contradiction this wording may be taken to imply is quickly sidelined by observing with A. N. Whitehead, another key theoretical resource for the book, that as an “ultimate notion” for process oriented philosophy “the term ‘one’ does not stand for the ‘integral number one.’” It stands for the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article “a” or “an,” and the definite article “the,” and the demonstratives “this” or “that,” and the relatives “which or what or how.” It stands for the singularity of an event. The term “many” presupposes the term “one,” and the term “one” presupposes the term “many.” (1978, 21) In Always More Than One, Erin Manning starts from the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many. This is what she means when she says, echoing Gilles Deleuze, that she begins in the middle. She does not pause to worry over contradiction. She takes this reciprocal presupposition as a launching pad and dives right in. She does this by approaching the problem from the outset as a question of composition. That what comes as one comes a many loses any sense of a sterile conundrum when it is taken

in this matter- of-fact way: as a coming-together (com-position). A many enter in one coming-together. And comings-together come in many variations on each theme. When it comes to the one and the many, the wonder should attach more to this immediate implication of serial iteration than to any supposed contradiction. No sooner do we dive into composition than composition launches itself into a process of iteration offering a bounty of variations, thousands and thousands, on any and all behaviors or events. Add the notion that the iteration of the process can be inflected, and composition finds the double connotation it has in everyday language: not just a coming-together, but a one (-many) bountifully susceptible to technique. Manning’s diving in, past contradiction straight to composition and with process to technique, gives the writing in Always More Than One a remarkable velocity. It speeds past preliminary considerations as to the nature of the one that many may expect. The most available readymade categories for the one are the subject, the object, and the totality. They make unpropitious starting points. Given the habitual ways we have of speaking and thinking about these categories, to start with them would be to begin with the assumption that the term “one” did in fact stand for the integral number one, in lonely opposition to what counts as many. For the unity of the one not to stand alone, it would have to be opened up to reveal a hidden multiplicity. But the multiplicity, Whitehead insists, isn’t hidden. It comes immediately and manifestly with every one. There are significant disadvantages to taking the subject or object as the starting point even if it is only in order to deconstruct or decenter their counting only for one. The disadvantage is that it activates, as an inaugural gesture, the very habits of thought it is designed to undermine. Once activated, they are difficult, if not impossible, to shake off. The alternative adopted by Manning is neither to deconstruct nor decenter, but to defer. The speed with which she launches into process is designed to hold at bay the issue of the status of the subject and the object until concepts for the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many are sufficiently in place for subject and object to be grasped as a function of process rather than the reverse: process falling under the province of subjects and objects. The concept charged with holding the status of the subject and object in processual suspense is individuation, adapted from Gilbert Simondon. Simondon’s premise is simple: individuals, whether subjects or objects according to the traditional categories, come to be. They are results of an ontogenetic process: they are products. x PrEluDE

It would seem obvious that a process is different in principle from its products, and that this difference calls for concepts tailored specifically to it. One of the most evident ways a process differs from its products is in the span of its activity. A process brings together the factors that go into bringing about a result by drawing on a different, always wider, field of activity than the product once arisen will entertain. Processually speaking, a making is always bigger than the made. The making includes, in germ, the form of what will come to be, as well as the functions its being, once arisen, will afford. In addition, it includes the under-formation and the clinchinginto-operation of the functions-to- come. Formation is more inclusive than form-and-function. The span of a becoming is broader than a being. An individuation is more encompassing than an individual. To understand individuation, this more-than of becoming can never be lost from sight. However obvious it is that a process is different in principle from its products and deserves accordingly different concepts, this is rarely taken to heart. If the concepts of subject and object are not deferred, their forms and functions backcast on process, overshadowing the conceptual complexion of the under-formation. This is what Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari analyze as the “transcendental error” of “stenciling” (décalquer, trace) the empirical characteristics of constituted being onto the formative process of its constitution. Manning’s foregrounding of the notion of individuation is a way of advancing the account of the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many in a way that avoids this transcendental error, never losing sight of the ontogenetic differing of process from its products, of constitution from the constituted. The error of understanding the constitutive process of individuation in the image of its constituted product is actively maintained by the accumulated cultural and philosophical connotations of the term “individual.” Its avoidance requires follow-up and follow-through. Manning will accordingly supplement the Simondonian concept of individuation with terms of her own. One is fielding. When an individual comes to stand out as one from a broader field of activity from which it arises, we can say that it has been formatively fielded. The error of “stenciling” over this broader field of activity is called “transcendental” because what it papers over is precisely that. The formative field is transcendental in the sense that it does not coincide with the being whose becoming it harbors. It outspans it, overspills its limits, extends “beyond” it. It is not beyond in the sense of “outside” and radically “other,” or alternatively in the sense of a deeper inside (a radically Brian MassuMi  xi

intimate other). Either option would make it “transcendent” as opposed to transcendental. The difference is that the notion of the transcendent includes the idea of an a priori totality. Totality was the third figure of the one in need of deferral. Despite the abstractness of the notion of totality, its deferral is the one that comes most easily. The fact that process is always moving on to a further iteration is itself a deferral. Process is process because it is forever deferring its own completion in the dynamic form of more becoming. Process is always in the process of exceeding itself in its own carrying forward. This makes it transcendental not only in relation to its determinate products, but in relation to itself. It is always moving into its own beyond. Process is the transcendental in person. Or, more precisely, in movement. It is what moves across iterations of being, across the subjects and objects that come to be through its movement (and are left in its wake). If process “as a whole” can be characterized, it is as a constitutively open totality: an everything-always-moving- on that wraps itself up into being each of its iterations as it unrolls itself forward through them. Its openness cannot be assigned to an inside or an outside, coming as it does as an always moving-across of becoming. The best word for it is “immanent.” The transcendental field of individuation is immanent not to a subject (Kant, phenomenology) but to its own phasing into and out of being, as becoming. It is nothing less than the world’s “worlding,” its fullness of oneness and manyness, as William James would say, in respects that iteratively vary. Another word Manning uses for the transcendental field is milieu. The word, often qualified by “associated,” is a favorite of both Simondon and Deleuze and Guattari for its double entendre in French. In French milieu means both “middle” and “surroundings.” To put the two meanings together without falling back into an outside/inside division that calls for a subject or object to found or regulate it, you have to conceive of a middle that wraps around, to self-surround, as it phases onward in the direction of the “more” of its formative openness. In a word, you have to give the precept of beginning in the middle a topological twist. All of the concepts that are mobilized to work with individuation, and to work it through, will then have to similarly twist. In Always More Than One the transcendental field of individuation is the philosophical planet in the vicinity of which concepts bend like passing light, creating a refractive pattern that alters the spectrum of even the most familiar terms. No term passes unswerved. But once swerved from their habitual path, any term is free to return, philosophically reoriented, up to and including the strategically deferred subject and object xii PrEluDE

(which return in a splendor of Whiteheadian colors diffused throughout this book). It is the work of the first chapter to initiate the reader to the reorientation of individuation’s swerve, taking off from Daniel Stern’s rethinking of the psychological self and psychoanalytic subject. The writing in this chapter is already at speed, launching into the invention of new concepts specifically tailored to the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many in formative belonging to a shared process of becoming, and plotting the conventional notions with which we are in the habit of thinking into their twisting vicinity. The velocity of the writing and the sheer number of new concepts set in motion may prove at times disorienting for the reader, as a result of swerve fatigue. Received assumptions or previously arrived at conclusions the reader inevitably brings to the reading, concerning the individual, insides/outsides, and subjects/objects, are sure to return at moments of conscious or unconscious need for conceptual repose. These moments are part of the process. If they are selectively focused on, however, they will place the reader at a remove from the text, defaulting them, for example, to a posture of critique. At these moments the movement of the text continues while the reader holds to position. This can lead to a disconnect. Just as Manning herself takes the plunge, so too must the reader be prepared to replunge into the current of the writing. The concern of the book is the more-than of any objective or subjective resting place of process that counts as one. It is only fitting that the writing itself perform a more-than of any one concept upon which the reader’s attention might arrest. Like the process it follows, the writing folds into and out of its own iterations. Conceptual variations unfold from each other to stand out for themselves, then fold back together to express their belonging to the same fielding of thought. This gives a rhythm to the writing as an ongoing process of the individuation of a movement of thought. There are refrains and motifs designed to slip a reader who falls out of step back into the rhythm. The processual nature of the writing as it performs the more-than of any one concept gives it a beauty approaching poetry. But it is not poetry, it is philosophy, “nothing but philosophy,” as Deleuze once said of his own writing, alone and with Guattari. The difference is that in philosophical writing, concepts, however many there are and however fast they turn over on each other, however complex the rhythm of their movement, do crest into an individuation where they are fully determined and rigorously stand out in their individuality from the field of their emergence. In a sense, this Brian MassuMi  xiii

is true of all philosophical writing. What distinguishes process- oriented philosophical writing such as Manning’s from other kinds is that the individuation of the determinate concepts crests into their precision like a wave on a sea of thought. They do not plinth themselves into solitary prominence on a supporting structure of solidly planted first premises. Rather, they rise from a swell of their formative conceptual field, and fold back. They are rigorously composed in the flow of liquid writing, to which they return to recompose, in a continuing tide of conceptual invention. Like poetry, this takes utmost technique, but to different ends. A poem is fully and finally composed. It is an expressive end in itself. It asks to be reread, but not to be rewritten. Processual philosophical writing is also expressive, and also invites rereading. It is fully composed as well, but without the standing claim to finality, instead with a horizontal openness of process that extends an invitation to further. It would like nothing more than for its concepts and their momentum to forward into a different writing process, toward other individuations of thought beyond itself, in new iterations and variations, in rewriting upon writing, in waves of thought, each “one” in company of an iterative “many,” in a kind of processual quilting of thinking-with. This is philosophy practiced as a concept- creative endeavor that performs in writing the larger process it concerns. It gives the gift of a movement of thought, again as Deleuze and Guattari would say, to a “people to come.” It sets going a concept-creative momentum for a coming thought community. A reader bent on holding to position, or to standing rigid in critical remove, will risk missing the boat. Best to read as Bertrand Russell advises: 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) Always More Than One, as an endeavor in creative philosophy, dedicates itself to the invention of new concepts. This is just the half of it. What a reader who enters the text in an attitude of hypothetical sympathy will immediately understand is that in order to dedicate itself to the invention of new concepts, it must compose new kinds of concepts. This is signalled in the opening quote from Whitehead on the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many. xiv PrEluDE

Whitehead says that the process-oriented idea of the one is not the integral number one but a “general idea” that “stands for the singularity of an event.” A general idea standing for a singularity? Again, Whitehead is not being contradictory. He is pointing us in new conceptual directions. What Whitehead means by “general idea” is not what traditionally goes by that name. A general idea in the normal sense is an empty category that subsumes a set of particulars. It is an abstract schema used as a standard for judging the identity of particulars and for assigning them membership in a predefined class. The general idea is a lofty “The” subsuming the ground level “a” of each particular that fulfills the schema. Whitehead turns this traditional logic on its head by pointedly putting the “the” and “a” on the same level. The general idea, he says, “underlies them both alike.” It straddles the definite and the indefinite articles. Even more, it takes into its fold demonstratives like “this” or “that” and the relatives “which” or “what” or “how.” Whitehead’s general idea stretches all the way from “the” to “how.” In other words, it is a span of modal variation, a range of kinds or degrees of definiteness inflected by differences in manner (“how”). Although it is all about definiteness, it is not about mutual exclusion. Without the hierarchy of the “the” over the “a,” there is no a priori way of ensuring noncontradiction. This is a logic of mutual inclusion: a logic for the many’s “underlying” belonging-together. To mark the difference between this kind of “general idea” and the traditional kind, a change of name would help. Call it, for example, the “generic.” In what way is the logic of the generic immediately a logic of singularity? In what way is the genericness and singularity of an event so intimately entwined that it does not even occur to Whitehead in this passage to comment on the transition from one term to the other? Daniel Stern shares this logic, and a comment of his can help explain what is at stake. What is at stake for Whitehead is the very nature of philosophical thinking. For Stern, it’s the richness of everyday experience. For Manning it is both: philosophy, nothing but philosophy, toward the enrichment of life. “When you suck your finger,” Stern observes, “your finger gets sucked— and not just generally sucked” (1985, 80). There is no “the” finger-sucking that isn’t inflected by the “how” of “a” sucking. “Which”? “This” one or “that.” And that’s the “what” of it. “Not generally sucked”: a thousandsuckings- of-fingers. No one suck. Where there is one, there are more to come. A one after another. The point is a serious one, even for finger-weaned adults. It is that events Brian MassuMi  xv

come in populations, and the populating takes the form of a serial iteration. From the point of view of their populating multiplicity, events are generic. But each event is utterly singular. “Each one presents a different vitality affect” (Stern 1985, 56). In other words, there is a life-feeling, a quality of life, upon which each iteration is a unique variation. The uniqueness of the event is not in spite of its belonging to the generic population. It is at least in part because of it. A first suck is a revelation. A fifth suck is a comfort. Suck six is its own satisfying variation on comfort. Depending on exactly how each event transpires and what else is present that may inflect it (a glance at a caregiver’s face, the soft brush of a blanket on the cheek), each sucking in the series will take on its own unique vitality affect. It is this vitality affect that makes “the” event definitively what it will have been. In other words, the definition of the event includes as determining factors both its generic populousness and the irreducible uniqueness that comes with the contingent “what elses” of its occurrence. The generic populousness is a multiplicity of belonging not to a class, but to an event-series. Across the series run any number of variations on the theme. The “what elses” are accidents of place and time. This means that in this processual logic the definition of an event mutually, necessarily, includes as codetermining factors what would in the traditional logic be judgmentally separated out from each other as essential properties and accidental qualities. It replaces this dichotomy with a distinction between a continuing variation (seriation) and its dosing with contingency (accident; the unforeseeable intervening variable). This is not a dichotomy, it’s a co-implication: the iterative variation and the variable intervention of contingency are codetermining. Neither could make sense—or make vitality affect—without the other. Even more radically, time (serial order, but also in this case things like time of day and time between iterations) and place (the matrix of copresence ensuring that any number of “what elses” will have the opportunity to leave their contingent trace) cannot be abstracted away. The singularity of the event is not only logically, but genetically, inseparable from its genericness. They are “one”: the singular-generic. As a “general idea,” the singular-generic includes spatial and temporal coordinates, working together, to bring seriation and contingency together into the unfolding of the event. “The” event cannot be thought apart from the co-implication of space and time: spacetime. A philosophy of experience, then, has to do with singular-generic spacetimes of experience, in relation to which the most relevant questions are not “what” but “what else” brought together “how.” xvi PrEluDE

These are some of the signature concepts of Manning’s original take on process philosophy, as it develops toward Always More Than One from the closely allied earlier volumes, Politics of Touch (2007) and Relationscapes (2009). The qualitative difference of the “how” of an event. The continuum of variation running across iterations of experience. The processual openness of the “what else.” The question of composition of the manner in which codetermining factors are brought together toward a unique mutual inclusion in the event defining the newness of a next iteration: the question of creativity. The impossibility of thinking creativity without factoring in proliferating series of life-forming events and their corresponding spacetimes of experience. Experience: it is significant that Stern underlines that each of the “thousand variations” on a generic life-event carries a different affect, and that he qualifies the affect as a “vitality” affect. But we must be careful here. The words “experience” and “affect” can easily lead back to the conceptual repose of the subject and interiority. This would be to stencil over the singular-generic with the traditional categorical logic again. Stern is clear: none of the thousand-gettings-out-of- chairs of his first example are subsumable under “a specific category of affect” to which an internal state of a subject would correspond (1985, 56). A vitality affect is not a category of affect, and it is not personal. It’s a uniquely generic life-feeling of activity. Each getting- out- of-a- chair and each sucking- of-a-finger comes with “a burst of determination” (Stern 1985, 56). They are incidents of determination; determining occurrences. However small and everyday they may be, in their determination they are still life- defining events. The feeling they come with defines what life has been like. This feeling of vitality, or vitality affect, is not in the subject, and is not just personal (unless accidents and populations can be considered personal). It is in and of the world. It is in and of the world’s serial ongoing and the contingent surprises met along the way. It is in the way in which the ongoing and the surprise come punctually together to determine a burst of life. Process philosophy is how we burst with life, in and of the world. It’s about our worlding. How the world populates us, and we the world, in a reciprocal presupposition of oneness and manyness determining a richness reaching all the way down to the most furtive suck of the finger and rising all the way back up from there to tinge the most generic and regularized events with a feeling of singularity. Manning’s word for the singular-generic burstability of life a-worlding across the scales is “a” life (a term adopted from Deleuze). “A” life does not Brian MassuMi  xvii

exclude the “this” and the “that” and the “which” and the “what” and the “how.” It doesn’t even exclude the “the.” Emphasizing the “a” is a way of saying that the “the” is not the categorical “The” but the potential for definiteness that comes of the processual mutual inclusion of the definite with the indefinite article, the demonstrative, and the relative. Manning’s word for the variation across iterations of singular events generically belonging to the same populating series is speciation. It is as crucial for an understanding of Always More Than One to avoid stenciling species back into a categorical concept as it is to avoid committing this transcendental error with regard to affect. A species is not a set of beings having certain properties generally defining them as members of the same class. A species for Manning, as her term (speciation) implies, is a species of event. A speciation occurs when two or more constituted individuals come back together singular-generically in a way that produces a new vitality affect. The defining trait of the speciation is the uniqueness of the vitality affect arising from the burst of determination of such a coming-together. This is not a property of either of the individuals coming together. It comes between them. It is in the event of their coming-together, at the crossroads where a line of continual variation meets the unforeseeable variable of a what-else. In the thousand-sittings-in- chairs, backside and cushion speciate. In the thousand-suckings-of-a-finger, mouth and finger speciate. The species, in each case, is the vitality affect (comforting). The speciation is the difference each one of the thousands brings to the vitality affect. Speciation rises up in scale to take on broader significance at levels we would term macropolitical, in the bursts of determination of the kind, for example, with which Israelis and Palestinians come together to populate the world with events of their (anything but mutually comforting) betweenness. Even at this level, the events in question determine speciations of vitality affect that are not subsumable under any logic of mutual exclusion, in spite of the conflictual nature of the events. Not: Israeli or Palestinian. Rather: what passes between. “A” life (not excluding many deaths; mutually including the “how” they come about and the asymmetries of all kinds that come with their coming about). What is the politics of “a” life? Chapter 3 of Always More Than One asks that question, with full cognizance of the complexity and sensitivity of reposing the question of the political in these terms, in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The risk of reformulating the question of politics in mutually inclusive terms is one that the philosophy the book dexviii PrEluDE

velops cannot avoid. It is necessarily entailed by the logic it must deploy in order for its writing to be equal to the thinking of process. The force toward mutual exclusion exerted by the traditional-logic categories with which we are accustomed to using is perhaps at its strongest in political thinking. This can even be the case in political approaches dedicated to fighting exclusion, to the extent that they lend themselves to the exercise of moral judgment. What form of political judgment does “a” life imply, as a function of speciation, factoring in the continually varying and contingently variable “one” (-manyness) of the transcendental field of singular-generic events whose cresting from that field compose it? What might an ethics of the singular-generic involve, as against a morality of categorical judgment? For Manning, answering these questions effectively requires unstenciling the transcendental field of becoming of politics. It requires following in that field what outspans, overspills, and extends vitally-affectively beyond the backcast form of constituted groupings. It requires a thinking of group individuation, what Simondon (2005, 293–316) calls collective individuation, in terms specifically tailored to its constitutive movement. In order to accomplish this, Manning generates another topological twist. The transcendental field as earlier described as a middle that wraps around to self-surround flattens itself into a surface—a metaphysical surface doubling the surface of the screen upon which Waltz with Bashir, the film being analyzed, is projected, and from which the vitality affects its movement-images produce stand out. It is essential to remember that the way in which the problem of politics is posed by the project of Always More Than One requires a metaphysical response. Traditional political reasoning, and its habit of stenciling constituted distinctions onto the constitutive movement of their becoming, must be deferred, long enough for its categories to be refracted when they do return—as they inevitably will—through the conceptual force-field of a political metaphysics of becoming. One thing that Manning argues is not involved from her perspective in ethical thought on the political level is the human/subjective face-to-face. She quotes Levinas’s troubled statement following the Sabra and Shatila massacre to the effect that there are some who are not eligible for the ethics of the face-to-face because they are simply “wrong.” This statement, so out of place with the tone of Levinas’s work in general, demonstrates that there is a limit to the ethics of the human face-to-face. There is a point at which it turns its back, reorienting toward a posture of moral judgment justifying exclusion. That limit is when the “other” is no longer greeted as other Brian MassuMi  xix

but looms as inhuman. Manning’s reformulation of the political question is designed to disable this limit in order to preserve a political ethics of engagement. Her process philosophy in fact recognizes no such limit, for the simple reason that the betweenness of human being as it conceives it is not itself human. It is more than human: human plus many- one singular-generic spacetimes of experience; human plus the eventful improvisation of new and emergent vitality affects; human plus contingencies belonging to any number of categories; human plus more than currently human potential, collectively individuating. The more than human of the political and the ethical is a constant concern throughout Always More Than One. It is here that Manning’s thought reaches its most far-reaching, original, and potentially controversial extension. The coda returns to the political and ethical question as it concerns speciation in a different connection. The context is one that might pass as more “natural” as regards the issue of the more than human of the more than one. The individuals between which the event of speciation passes are assignable as two different species in the traditional sense of the word (as categories of being defined by divergent sets of inherent properties). There is a bonobo and a human, in encounter. The danger of transcendental error is extreme here, precisely because the traditional logic would seem so logically called upon for service. Manning’s account of a singular event passing between a bonobo and a human moves the discussion of the more than human onto the kind of territory normally staked out by current discourses of the “nonhuman.” The very term “nonhuman,” which cannot but reverberate with categorical thinking, marks the difference in approach. Manning’s approach here makes much of the fact that the coming-together between the individuals in encounter is oddly triangulated by the question of what constitutes not a human or a bonobo but, surprisingly, a gorilla. The singular-generic field that enters into the constitution is already inhabited by the manyness of the more than one or two. The vitality affect that eventuates is not one-or-the-other of the two, but an unexpected thirdness of both-and bursting with gorilla-like determination. This is because oneand-the-other are not subsumable under their categorical species without remainder. The bonobo is not reducible to the figure of “the” bonobo. In the constitution of his life are factors that from the traditional logic would be considered mere contingencies: domestication, an apprenticeship with language. In Kanzi’s oneness is already a unique manyness. He is a variation on bonoboing. If you wanted to hold to the traditional logic, you would xx PrEluDE

have to say he was a subspecies. But even this would not be enough to grasp “what” he is. He is utterly singular-generic: “a” life serially determined by events. As is the human, Dawn Prince, on the other side of the fence. Prince in this encounter is not “the” human. She also is “a” singular-generic life. It would be reductive and insulting to specify her categorically as a “subspecies” of human: “the” autistic. She is no more “the” autistic than she is “the” human. She is “this” autistic human, only and exactly “how” she comes to that encounter: a primatologist-autist whose seriation of “a” lifemaking events have given her a unique talent for cofactoring with apes. No general ideas about humans and animals and interspecies relations are adequate to grasp the richness and inventiveness of the speciation that transpires between them. Two lives come into encounter across the species barrier of the fence in a zoo, bringing into play the thirdness of a joint event of speciation: “a” life co- composing. Assessing the politics and ethics of such encounters from a processual perspective respectful of how both participants and their coming-together burst with life- determination requires a retooling of the concepts with which we think the “nonhuman” and the variation of the human, and these in the same event: a “more than human” logic of life-making events, immanent to their occurring. Significant portions of Always More Than One concern autism, following on from the final chapter of Relationscapes. To understand the role of the autistic, and the centrality of autism to the philosophy of the book, it is necessary once again to hold categorical judgment at bay. It must be borne in mind that in none of the sections in which it is a question of autism (chapters 1, 7, and 8 and interludes 4 and 5, in addition to the coda) is there a “the” autist. There is the autistic/writer, the autistic/drawer, the autistic/videographer, the autistic/neurodiversity activist, the autistic/facilitated communicator. These are not subspecies of “the” autist, any more than the autistic is a subspecies of “the” human. These are lives living on the “spectrum”: on a generic continuum of variation, ranges of which the conventional category carves out as pathological and in need of “curing.” These are lives determinedly living, each in its singularly variable way, on a generic continuum, including all of us. Manning insists on this: we are all on the autistic spectrum, including “neurotypicals” who do not carry the diagnosis. This is not an empty gesture of lazy solidarity. And it is in no way meant to deny the reality of autism or to disregard the very real challenges and often extreme conditions of social, familial, and health care system oppression many diagnosed auBrian MassuMi  xxi

tistics struggle with. What Manning attempts is to acknowledge the reality and the challenges without surrendering any ground to the pathologization entailed by the conventional category. What if autism were approached not in terms of pathology but from the angle of speciation? That is to say, from the mutually inclusive angle of the more than human in us all, in its continuing variation? From the angle of what cuts eventfully, variably across the barriers? From the angle of the emergent vitality affects, qualities of bursting-with-life- determination associated with different degrees on the spectrum, as well as improvised in encounters-between? Manning argues that there is a mode of perception that attends to the more-than of experience (as always in process philosophy, it’s all about modal distinction, as mentioned earlier). She describes “autistic perception” as a field perception directly apprehending the complex relational patterning of spacetimes of experience, in their teeming with contingencies, and in all their uniqueness: a direct perception of the transcendental field of becoming. The countervailing mode of perception “chunks” experience. It immediately divides it into subject- and object-oriented affordances readymade for the traditional either/or logic and its categorical judgments, primarily in this case of usefulness (form-and-function redux, ready for stenciling duty). We all chunk. We are all categorizers and users. Life’s conventional elements demand that of us. But we are all also transcendental-fielders. After all, a chunk is only a chunk against the contrasting background of the field as singular-generic spacetime of experience. Chunky ones come in serial iteration, against the many-more-than-one of a continuum of variation backgrounded by traditional logic and conventional use. We all chunk, and we all field, but to different degrees, in varying ways. Manning’s assertion is that the direct perception of the singular-generic, of relational spacetimes of experience, predominates over chunking in those who are pathologized as autistic, and this comes as a result of the very same factors that create the challenges and oppressions of their lives. These factors notably concern neurological variations that express themselves in difficulty activating movement in ways that are conventionally useful as based on pre- chunked affordances (basically, an involuntary deferral of stenciling). What Manning calls “autistic perception” is not an inherent property of a subclass of the human category. It is a mode of perception that is a necessary factor in all human experience, but is lived in different ways to different degrees. It is the field perception no one can live without, precisely xxii PrEluDE

because it brings the more than human into experience. The refrain of the more than human: human plus many-one singular-generic spacetimes of experience; human plus the eventful improvisation of new and emergent vitality affects; human plus contingencies belonging to any number of categories; human plus more than currently human potential. What could neurotypicals, we on the spectrum who pass unpathologized, learn from those who field before or more than they chunk? Wouldn’t our lives be enriched by upping the degree of fielding we consciously perceive? Can we learn to bring our experiential differences into creative play across the barriers and run with it? Manning is not interested in judging autism. She is not interested in curing it. She is not interested in charity toward it or pitying those who “have” it. She is interested in co- composing with it, collaboratively, toward the more-than- currently-human-potential that may arise from the encounter. While the neurodiversity movement fights for integration, Manning is suggesting that neurotypicals consider the complementary but inverse move of what might be called reverse integration: living-with, together in creative co- composition. Coming-together in such a way that the “properties” of “logically” mutually exclusive categories of being collude, across their differences and because of them, toward the improvisation of new vitality affects, new burstings with life, toward new speciations, new “a” life-living the one and the many in reciprocal presupposition. In each domain through which it passes, Always More Than One dedicates its writing to the wonder of the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as one, and always more. Everywhere it is a question of invention: relational techniques for performing events of co- composition qualifying as speciations. Everywhere, individuation in the fielding of singular-generic. As for the primacy of movement that it is necessary to posit for thinking individuation, the reader will be left to discover it on their own. How movement moves individuation, and in the process makes that ultimate chunk we call our body an event requiring a verb—bodying—will likewise be deferred. A final observation will suffice: this is unabashedly a philosophy of life. Not, of course, as a category mutually exclusive of nonlife. Rather, as a quality of bursting-with. Life- quality—vitality—affect. The vital affective refrain, repeated in all of Manning’s books, is from Nietzsche: “If this is life, then once more!” Or: if this is life, then more than one already!

Brian MassuMi  xxiii

Acknowledgments

Thinking-with is a practice difficult to cite. For it happens in the between of writing, at the thresholds where the work takes on new direction, breathes into consistency, falters. Where the writing thinks beyond where it has been able to think before. It is with this practice of collective thinking that a book begins to take form. Thank you to those who are often invisible in the writing but everywhere felt in the process. Andrew Murphie, for the ethos that is at the core of your practice—be it writing, or thinking, or organizing, or publishing. This project was moved by the force of thought you embody. Lone Bertelsen, for your work on wonder, a concept that, though not foregrounded here, is at the core of what I think life can do. For wonder is before the subject, beyond the form, in the interstices where life-living is at its most intensive and its most ineffable. Bill Connolly, for always bringing Nietzsche back and inviting his refrain—“Was that life? Well then! Once more!”—to frame the question of the political. Tom Lamarre, for your true infradisciplinarity, that insatiable curiosity that takes you far afield into other peoples’ thinking. Pia Ednie-Brown, for being of the middling, and for crafting from that environment of the more-than. Yours is an ethos of research- creation. Sher Doruff, for your inventive practice of diagrammatic thinking. And, in the spirit of diagramming, for always keeping the conversation going. William Forsythe, Elizabeth Waterhouse, and Christopher Roman, for

informing my work on movement, and for showing the world that philosophy and movement dance together. Catherine de Zegher, for intuitively knowing that curating is a kind of choreographic thinking. And for knowing that art’s intervention takes form in the field of relation. Ralph Savarese, for the writing, the talking, the jumping, the singing, all in the name of neurodiversity. And for honoring the voices of the poets. Mireille Painchaud, for a long-standing commitment to experimentation with relational movement. And for being my best friend. Steven Shaviro, for always taking the time for philosophy. Yours is truly a practice of thinking-with. Isabelle Stengers, for answering my muddled question, years ago, about Whitehead’s concept of the proposition. I have not stopped thinking about it since. The SenseLab—Nasrin Himada for pushing me harder on questions of violence and politics; Christoph Brunner for insatiably inventing techniques for research- creation; Leslie Plumb for living and designing the transversal; Mazi Javidiani for your quietly insistent curiosity, and that laugh; Bianca Scliar for always knowing how to activate things and keep them moving; Felix Rebolledo for taking on the task and making something of it; Andreia Oliveira for making the link between art and philosophy felt; Charlotte Farrell for enlivening, and for tending; Andrew Goodman for caring for relations in the making (and making sure we are fed); Jondi Keane for understanding the force of practice for thought in the crafting; Mike Hornblow for sustained experiments on how movement diagrams; Paul Gazzola for being a free radical; Jonas Fritsch for thinking between the lines and designing beyond the object; Sean Smith for always knowing how to make a game out of it; Philipa Rothfield for making movement the philosophical question; Derek McCormack for attending to how space moves; Jaime DelVal for always being willing to take risks; Nathaniel Stern for composing with the event; Luciana Parisi for being the most speculative thinker I know; Stamatia Portanova for taunting me with the idea that there is movement without a body; Anna Munster for not taking for granted that we know what a network can do; Thomas Jellis for having the intuition that labs are experiments in the making; Iain Kerr and Petia Morosov for the next collective experiment; Ronald Simon for giving me back my work from a new angle; Alanna Thain for the care you give to the relation; Toni Pape for the artistry

xxvi acknowlEDgMEnts

you bring to all tasks; and Troy Rhoades for making the imperceptible perceptible (and for never being too old to play). Brian Massumi—you are everywhere here, cited and uncited, with my thinking and across it, between the words, as Amanda Baggs would say. To think in such a collective moreness is what this book is about. A project I could never have carried out without you, and without the thinking that becomes us.

acknowlEDgMEnts  xxvii

onE

Toward a Leaky Sense of Self

In Esther Bick’s psychoanalytic theory, the infant’s relation to the world is mediated by the skin’s capacity to serve as a container for experience: “In its most primitive form, the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding force amongst themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that is experienced by them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary” (1987, 114). Before there can be introjection or projection,1 Bick argues that the infant must become “able to hold himself together in his own ‘skin’ in the absence of the external holding object, without spilling out and falling to bits” (2002, 209). As the infant develops, containment increasingly expresses cohesion of self, as fostered by the continued interaction with the caretaker: “if the caregiver is meaningfully present, then the infant’s mind will likely be experienced as integrated—as bound and held together, while if the caregiver is meaningfully absent, then the infant’s mind will likely be experienced as unintegrated—as broken and falling to pieces” (Lafrance 2009, 7). Through an emphasis on particular forms of interaction—forms that specifically involve skin-to-skin touch2—an infant is given the receptacle necessary for eventual interactive self-sufficiency. With the skin closed by a sense of self- containment, the infant will not later risk the deterritorialization caused by leakage, a deterritorialization that, in true psychoanalytic form, will come with myriad symptoms associated with the necessity of creating “second skins.”3 What if the skin were not a container? What if the skin were not a limit at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between differ-

ent milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides? Following psychoanalytic theory such as that posited by Bick, skin- as- container reinforces feelings of aliveness and existence,4 whereas the lack of containment fosters a state of incoherence associated with anxiety and annihilation. Without self-containment, “the infant fears that its self will dissolve and, ultimately, leak into a limitless space” (Lafrance 2009, 9). To posit skin-as- container as the starting point for the notion of interactive selfsufficiency is to begin with the idea that the well- contained human is one who can actively (and protectively) take part in self-self interactions. Selfself interactions depend on a strict boundary between inside and outside.5 They occur within the realm of clearly bounded selves, including the clear boundedness of objects. Interaction is understood here as the encounter between two self- contained entities (human-to-human or human-to- object). What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience? Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense,6 is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making. This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them.7 Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts. Finally, what if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward.8 Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world.9 This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual.10 A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world. In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body. Bodyworlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope. It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus. It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milieus that fold in, on, and through one another. For the associated milieu is never “between” constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders. Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self—always toward con2 chaPtEr onE

tinued individuation.11 “To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity” (Simondon 1995, 23). Self is a modality— a singularity on the plane of individuation—always on the way toward new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already- contained, but co- constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of immanent expressibility. Daniel Stern’s account of infancy expresses this in psychological terms. For Stern, relation is always the first principle of worlding: “How we experience ourselves in relation to others provides a basic organizing perspective for all interpersonal events” (1985, 6). Stern’s argument makes relation primary, constituting the relational as the very core through which any kind of sense of self is constituted. While Bick’s and later Ogden’s psychoanalytic theories make interaction a necessity, their matrix is not relational: it always presupposes a constituted, bounded self and other (or self and self ). Stern, on the other hand, treats the relation as the node of creative interpersonal potential, shifting, I would argue, from a self-self model of interaction (where the relation is posited as passive between active subjects) toward a radically empirical notion of immanent relationality where relation is considered as “real” as the terms in the relation. Stern begins in the preverbal realm, suggesting that “several senses of the self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language” (1985, 6). With the assertion that there are “several senses of self,” Stern emphasizes that tendencies outlined in early infancy do not build toward a contained view of self, but rather lead toward the creation of a multiplicity of strata, each of them differently expressive under variable conditions.12 For Stern, a core sense of self involves a non-self-reflexive awareness (1985, 6). Preverbal awareness is linked by Stern to direct experience. Direct experience is of the order of the event. Similar to William James’s concept of “pure experience,” defined as the virtual (nonconscious) edge to all lived experience, direct experience is a form of immanent fielding (Stern calls this organization) through which events become experienced as such. Direct experience takes place not in the subject or in the object, but in the relation itself.13 The associated milieu is active with tendencies, tunings, incipient agitations, each of which are felt before they are known as such, contributing to a sense of the how of the event in its unfolding. According to Stern, events in early infancy lead toward the creation of modes of orgatowarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  3

nization. These modes of organization do not preexist experience—they are immanent to it. Through the fielding of relations (in the associated milieu of organization), the infant develops. Contrary to psychoanalytic theory, development for Stern does not come in discrete stages: “development occurs in leaps and bounds; qualitative shifts may be one of its most obvious features” (1985, 8). Quantum leaps of development occur in a fractal mode of relation where events build on events, each of them affecting at once the infant and the environment, altering what Stern calls the “social feel” of the infant. In a direct critique of a system that would seek to contain experience and development, Stern writes: “I question the entire notion of phases of development devoted to specific clinical issues such as orality, attachment, autonomy, independence, and trust. . . . The quantum shifts in the social ‘presence’ and ‘feel’ of the infant can . . . no longer be attributed to the departure from one specific developmental task-phase and the entrance into the next” (1985, 10). New senses of self are key to Stern’s model of development. Unlike the idea that the self rests in a containment of skin, Stern proposes that selves build onto and through one another in intimate relation with a changing environment. These senses of self are defined as the emergent, core, subjective, and verbal selves, none of which is strictly successive. Stern’s senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces composed of interweaving strata. “Once formed, each sense of self remains fully functioning and active throughout life. All continue to grow and coexist” (Stern 1985, 22). No stratum is ever completely disarticulated from another in the creation of emergent senses of self. Rather, strata veer through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive fielding. As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of being a coherent, willful, physical entity—foregrounding strata phasing toward organization—may intermesh with the frustration of not being able to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the tending toward coherence—foregrounding the strata phasing toward the virtual or immanence. Every becoming is tinted with this double articulation. There is no stable pre- and postverbal state. There is no stable identity that emerges once and for all. Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration. This is not a containment toward a stable self. It is a momentary cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweav4 chaPtEr onE

ing of forces that both direct and destabilize the “self ’s” proto-unification into an “I.” With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment. For double articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutterable, the ineffable—the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility—within language. There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively oriented toward individuation. Affect is central to Stern’s analysis of how senses of self develop. Seeking to move beyond the limiting realm of the sensory-motor schema, which proposes direct linkages between organs and objects, Stern develops the idea of “vitality affects.” More than any other aspect of his work on preverbal senses of self and emergent individuations, it is the concept of “vitality affect” that undoes the notion of self as containment. Affect in this context can be understood as the preacceleration of experience as it acts on the becoming-body. Preacceleration refers to what has not yet been constituted but has an effect on actualization.14 In the context of a movement, it is the virtual experience of a welling into movement that precedes the actual displacement. Affect moves, constituting the event that, in many cases, becomes-body. Vitality affects are a range of affect “elicited by changes in motivational states, appetites, and tensions” (Stern 1985, 54). To understand vitality affects and the role they play in emergent infant processes, Stern’s concept of amodality is key. In a departure from the idea of sense-presentation— where a sense is located on the skin, associated directly to touch, for instance—Stern foregrounds the research that shows that newborns operate by cross-modal transfer. Cross-modal transfer—the feeling of touch that occurs in the seeing, for example—happens without a discrete learning curve. “No learning is needed initially, and subsequent learning about relations across modalities can be built upon this innate base” (Stern 1985, 48). Cross-modal correspondence, and, even more so, amodality (the idea that perception does not locate itself in a sense modality but courses between in rhythms that build correspondences rather than rely on already-occurring sites for sensation), Stern argues, transcends the sense “channel.” This causes a shift toward a supra-modal in-betweenness where sense- events take form that are neither directly associated to an organ nor to an object. Amodality foregrounds not the sense itself but its relational potential. “It is towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  5

not, then, a simple issue of a direct translation across modalities. Rather, it involves an encoding into a still mysterious amodal representation, which can then be recognized in any of the sensory modes” (Stern 1985, 51). Amodality makes apparent that the infant functions comfortably in the abstract concreteness of the radically empirical: the relation. The infant is not a passive slate (or a proto- container) into or onto which the world can be written. The infant is itself an emergent experience (an experiment in emergence), an individuation of interweaving strata active in the creation of ontogenetic worldings. These worldings are affective. They meet the infant halfway, transforming, at each level of the coconstitutive strata of experience, being and worlding as they come together. This coming-together is not based on cognitive confirmation. It is preconscious, situated in a pure experience of proto-awareness. It is an immanent becoming-present of experience in experience, the feeling of a “déjà-vu” in a nowness without, as yet, a past or a future. In preconscious pure experience of ontogenetic worlding, we have not yet succumbed to the promise of linear time, living instead in the active topology of spacetimes of experience that many adults spend their lifetimes resisting. At the heart of these experiential topologies is vitality affect. Affect can be thought of as supra-modal. It operates across registers: “an affect experience is not bound to any one modality of perception” (Stern 1985, 53). Preconscious, affects alter the force of the event, shaping it beyond its actual constitution. Affects exceed the realm of the modal, tending toward the edge of experience where amodality takes shape. Think of vitality affect as a species of affect, an affective tuning that operates as a kind of virtual event across myriad actualizations, creating dephasings in experience. If, for Stern’s core sense of self, the organizational stratum is the dominant mode toward which direct experience unfolds, vitality affect can be understood as a co- constitutive qualitative infrastratum that provides a tending-toward immanent feeling in the constitution of the event. Organization is therefore always also experiential and affective—a fielding of relations. According to Suzanne Langer, this quality of life-living accompanies us through “all the vital processes of life, such as breathing, getting hungry . . . , eliminating, falling asleep . . . , or feeling the coming and going of emotions and thoughts” (qtd. in Stern 1985, 54). We are never without the presence of vitality affects. The associated milieu where the force of lifeliving agitates is first of all a fielding of affective incipiencies. From its birth, the infant is immersed in feelings of vitality that trans6 chaPtEr onE

duce into vitality affects (Stern 1985, 54). These feelings double-articulate the relation between content and expression. They make palpable that content and expression are two aspects of the same stratum, “expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 44). Vitality affects express, shading into and out from content. Experience is, from the beginning, infested with this double articulation. Vitality affects are infinitely multiplicitous. They cannot be pinned down or associated with any finality to the content of an act. Stern speaks of “a thousand smiles, a thousand getting- out-ofchairs, a thousand variations of performance of any and all behaviors . . . each one present[ing] a different vitality affect” (1985, 56). Vitality affects function in the associated milieu of relation: they merge with experience’s tendings-toward feeling and emerge as the feeling of the event. Stern writes: “The social world experienced by the infant is primarily one of vitality affects before it is a world of formal acts” (1985, 57). Vitality affects color immanent events. Not yet experienced as such, immanent events are the nexus through which experience begins to form. Stern’s core sense of self is based on how these experiences veer the becoming-self toward new forms of relation. These new forms of relation in turn feed the process through which the infant becomes differentiated. Difference does not occur through the stratification of self and other or inside and outside. Difference emboldens processual shiftings between strata that foreground and background modes of experience, each of them affected by incipient reachings-toward, a reaching-toward not of the subject, but of experience itself. Senses of coherence emerge that unfold as feelings of warmth, intensity, texture, anguish. Coherence in the realm of the constitutive event. The event, fed by vitality affects, prompted by amodal relays, and rerouted by senses of coherence (affective tonalities dephasing), takes the form not of discrete “things seen, heard or touched” but of “qualities of shape, number, intensity level” (Stern 1985, 57). Preconscious experience is pure and direct in the sense that it fields virtual events at the cusp of their becoming-actual. In this entwinement with the qualitative, a living of feeling creates a taking-form of expression. This taking-form of expression is the dynamic of becoming-selves. For Stern affective attunement is key to interpersonal becoming. Affective attunement is another mode of immanent relation where the relation radically precedes the purported unity of the self. Attunement is a mergingwith of vitality affects across experiences toward emergent events. Not a towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  7

feeling- of but a feeling-with. In affective attunement, a relational merging occurs that creates a dephasing of vitality affects around new affective contours. This dephasing is as much a shift in process as a shift in level. It activates what Simondon calls a transduction, a redistribution of processes in the making. This experience is not reducible to the poles of the event, mother and child. It happens in their interval and is co- constitutive of a becoming that always exceeds their “selves.” In early infancy, Stern argues, “interpersonal relatedness does not yet exist as distinct from relatedness to things” (1985, 63). An infant is not poised to respond to a human more than she is to respond to the quality and texture of light or to the touch of sound. This does not mean that the infant is necessarily on the autistic continuum, as suggested—pejoratively— by Ogden.15 In the early period of a child’s life, relational potential is at its most extreme. This hyperrelationality has not yet found the means to subtract singularities from the virtual web of the associated milieu, a subtraction that will later allow a foregrounding of discrete events to be separated out from the complex relational bombardment of their backgrounds. For the infant, experience is always first a qualitative merging of edge and contour, intensity and affect. “The infant is asocial, but by virtue of being indiscriminate, not by virtue of being unresponsive, as suggested by psychoanalytic formulations of a stimulus barrier that protects the infant for the first few months of life” (Stern 1985, 63). This asociality is not against the social. It is a suprasociality, a relationality activated at the very interval of relation itself, not yet having landed on individualization. This is relationality at its most intensive, an opening to the complex fielding of multiplicity as yet undifferentiated. To posit this quality of relationality as “autistic” is both to radically misrepresent suprasociality (by negating its relational force) and to simplify autism (by assuming that autism and the asocial are one and the same). Understanding how this suprasociality works will allow us to better understand the relationship between vitality affects, affective tonality, and affective attunement. This will in turn lead to a better understanding of autism. Intensive relationality—a lived experience of affective attunement at its preconscious limit—gets backgrounded in most adults. This results in a more limited capacity to feel the force of preacceleration, to hear and engage with the betweenness of prearticulation, with the more-than of experience in the making. As this book will seek to demonstrate, autistics, 8 chaPtEr onE

on the other hand, do not lose this quality. In her video In My Language,16 Amanda Baggs (2007) emphasizes this fundamental difference. In this twopart video Baggs first creates a sounding-sensing environment by moving through space while activating and being-activated by the welling environmentality of the milieu. She moves slowly and carefully, touching, smelling, sounding the environment. Then, in part two, she challenges the notion that by “translating” this experience into spoken language she will make it more “complex” or more “real.” Through the juxtaposition of two ways of engaging the environment, Baggs foregrounds the inadequacy of concepts that apply hierarchical dichotomies to experience (like language versus sensation, cognition versus the preconscious). In My Language does not reject language outright. What it does is use first movement and sensation and then language to inquire into our tendency to place language as the determinant of experience. Why would we assume that language can touch every aspect of experience, and why are other ways of sensing or expressing the environment sidelined? Through an intense dance of the environment in its co- composing of a body, the video shows the emergence of an associated milieu that cannot solely be addressed in verbal language. The milieu is hyperrelational, every act calling forth a dephasing, a transduction, a welling of an environmentality that constitutively challenges the oneness of the self separated from the milieu of interaction, its skin intact. Her hands moving through running water, Baggs (2007) explains: “It is about being in a conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings.” There is no standard interaction or containment here, no privileging of the word over the activity, no sense of subject and object, body and milieu, or self and self. It is not, as Baggs (2007) emphasizes, about symbolizing experience: “In this part of the video the water doesn’t symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me.” In My Language is about foregrounding the rich field of relation activated through multiple interweaving strata in a continuous double articulation of content and expression. In much of the literature, autism is associated with a developmental incapacity to create meaningful (empathetic) relations.17 In My Language counters this claim with a strong political statement. Too often, Baggs says, personhood is directly associated to verbal interaction, which is then posited as relationality. Proposing a different model entirely, backed by an ethics of difference, Baggs’s video forecasts a milieu of the most intense relationality, towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  9

one of sound and light, smell and touch, active not simply for the human but in a withness of body-worlding that challenges the very notion that the human is at the center of (relational) experience. Baggs moves through the environment and it moves through her, feeling-with its forms and forces, expressing it as it expresses her. With and without language,18 Baggs is at pains to demonstrate that relation is the how of the world’s co- emergence. There is nothing but relation. It is precisely this intensive relationality, the video suggests, that often makes it difficult for autistics to interact with others. For autistics do not as easily subtract containment from the experience of relation. They do not tend to first and foremost abstract themselves—their “self ”—from the emergent environment. This is precisely a neurotypical tendency, as proponents of neurodiversity would say.19 When containment is no longer the endpoint (and the starting point) of experience, subtraction from the hyperrelation of synesthetic and crossmodal experience lags behind. The unified verbal self is no longer the first to emerge. Baggs (2007) explains, citing a social context where she would be assumed to be “nonrelational”: “I mean that when I am around a group of people, their voices may turn into the sound of water, their movements may all sort of blend together, but in their movements I see patterns not only of individuals but of the people interacting within a group, and the individual’s place within the group, and their effect on the group and the group’s effect on them, and on each other. I see this particularly well when not trying to understand what they’re saying to each other.”20 The complexity of vitality affects and how they create fields of intensity is apparent in Baggs’s statement about the challenge of facing social environments. As she makes clear, it is not that she “withdraws” or that she can’t engage. It is that the feeling of the event—its vitality affect—takes over to such a degree that she cannot extricate a “contained self ” for interaction from the event’s dynamic emergence. Amanda Baggs directly experiences the event’s vitality, the force of its taking-form. This experience shapes her bodying, calling forth a field of relation through which she emerges as a multiplicity rather than a static, interactive self. To interact in a selfcontained verbal way would involve parsing this multiple taking-form into a single activity of form-taking. For Baggs, it would mean parsing one very minute aspect of actual experience from the wider and richer realm of pure experience. Infants bathe in pure experience. This state of quasi- consciousness is of the edge, not the center. It is only of the skin if the skin is considered in 10 chaPtEr onE

its topological foldings with and through the associated milieu that is the world’s becoming. Pure experience is a relational, amodal state. It reachestoward experience in the making. In this state, worlding is perceived directly. Qualities are foregrounded, and through the double articulation of content and expression, individuating senses of self begin to emerge. Feeling-vectors predominate, not cognitions, actions, or perceptions as such. These feelings are co- constitutive of being and worlding, invested, always, in the milieu and its associations, never deliberately linear or causal. “The elements that make up these emergent organizations are simply different subjective units from those of adults who, most of the time, believe that they subjectively experience units such as thoughts, perceptions, actions, and so on, because they must translate experience into these terms in order to encode it verbally” (Stern 1985, 67). The infant-world relation affectively tunes to the force-field of events informing. Affective attunement is a preconscious tuning-with that sparks a new set of relations that in turn affect how singular events express themselves in the time of the event. Subtle and ongoing, affective attunements “give much of the impression of the quality of the relationship” (Stern 1985, 141). Affective attunement makes felt the activation contours of experience, the intensity, as Suzanne Langer would say, of virtual feeling.21 This links affective attunement to affective tonality rather than either to empathy or to the matching of behavior. Stern defines this as a matching of feeling. If feeling is not secondary to experience but is the very activity of relation that makes up experience, affective attunement need not be solely located on a human scale. If conceived beyond human interaction, affective attunement might well describe the relational environment co- created by movement and sound in Amanda Baggs’s video In My Language. Affective attunement: an open field of differentiation out of which a singularity of feeling emerges and merges. A tuning not of content but of expression-with. Singularities such as emergent selves are co- constituted in a field of experience. They reach-toward in a worlding that becomes them. This worlding is intensified by vitality affects that themselves tune to the world, calling forth landing sites.22 These landing sites are less a specific node of spacetime than the conditions for the propelling of the event’s actualization. In Baggs’s In My Language, we feel the emergent landing sites every time a contour begins to sound, taking-form in the event of its expressibility. A threepart scene makes this felt. The scene begins with Baggs facing the window, her back to us. A tonal sounding accompanies the movement of her hands towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  11

fluttering at her sides as she rocks back and forth. We are lulled by the movement, which then shifts quite seamlessly to the movement of a metal implement scraping against a surface. This scraping continues to move with the rhythm of the tonal singing, adding to it, but on another plane of experience. Now, we see only the hand, the implement and its shadow on the wall: a tonal rhythm in scraping movement. Then, another shift, this time to fingers moving along a computer keyboard, creating a softer, plushier sound, aligned, still, with the sound of the voice. There is no cut here: the video continues this way. This three-part transition makes felt how the landing occurs. It’s not that these are discrete sites—they are continuities in the sounding through which certain qualities of shift of resonance are foregrounded. Each contour stands out for itself as a remarkable point precisely because of the movement carrying-across. These remarkable points are landings, but landings only in the sense that they activate the force of transition that is the carrying-across. Landing sites are force-fields tending toward relational form. Through the eventness of force taking form, landings site the environment bodying such that it coalesces into a singularity to which we can attach content. This becoming-event of worlding or landing is first and foremost a feeling, a way of relating, a mode of engagement. Subtracted into an actual occasion, the event folds the infinity of potential landings into a singular iteration, an iteration poised, always, to individuate again, under different and new conditions. Individuation happens at the surface, not of the skin, but through a surfacing multiplicity, “a smooth, amorphous space . . . constituted by an accumulation of proximities, . . . each accumulation [defining] a zone of indiscernability proper to ‘becoming’ (more than a line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 488). When the skin becomes not a container but a multidimensioned topological surface that folds in, through, and across spacetimes of experience, what emerges is not a self but the dynamic form of a worlding that refuses categorization. Beyond the human, beyond the sense of touch or vision, beyond the object, what emerges is relation.

12 chaPtEr onE

interlude

When Movement Dances

In the beginning was movement. There was no rest because there was no cessation of movement. Rest was only an image that was too vast of what moved, an infinitely tired image that slowed movement down. In order to rest, we enlarged ourselves, we confused the issue, gathered up space, and unified time into a present that seemed to be everywhere, forever, at once. We breathed a sigh of relief, thinking we’d attained immobility. Finally we saw ourselves within a soothing image of self and world but this was forgetting the movement that continued silently, deep within our bodies. Microscopically. For how would it be possible to pass from rest to movement if movement did not already exist within rest? At the beginning, therefore, there was no beginning.

*  José gil

Movement is everywhere, always, at all scales, speeds, and slownesses. Total movement, as José Gil would say. Or absolute movement, in Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary. Which means: in order to have a metric movement, one that is added or subtracted in a measurable way, we must cut the total movement, crack the duration that, otherwise, flows unimpeded through all expressions of the world. In this cracking, new durations will

create new processes. There is never stability. And there can never be nonmovement—even in what appears to be complete stillness there is quality of movement-moving, force of form. For Deleuze and Guattari, absolute movement is a vibration, a resonance that precedes all form or structure. Absolute movement is without a subject—it passes through, it flows, but it does not yet cut: “there are only relations of movement and rest, speed, and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages” (1987, 266). This singular displacement, this occasion of experience—these are cuts from total movement. They land total movement, dimensionalizing it, opening total movement to an actualizing in concert with the now of time in the making. Total movement is felt in the now when the incongruity between the force of an infinity of potential and the limit- cut of the actual work together to activate the resonant shadow of a movement-moving that, while it never quite actualizes, continues to move through the actual movement such that movement-moving co- composes with what is actually experienced in time. Everyday movement tends to background this quality, but this does not mean the force of movement-moving isn’t always active, contributory. Despite appearances, movement is not of a body. It cuts across, cocomposing with different velocities of movement-moving. It bodies. The body-as-such is an extraction that appears in the collision of movementmoving and actual movement, a momentary collusion of tendencies that seem to make up a whole. Form in its bare actuality is a mirage. With total movement always coursing through it, form is infinitely more-than. Extrude the body, as William Forsythe would say, to find this movement in the more-than, to find the movement-moving coursing through actual movement. There are an infinity of ways of touching on the more-than that is movement-moving. Dance is one example. What dance gives us are techniques for distilling from the weave of total movement a quality that composes a bodying in motion. This quality is a vibration that exists as a movement of thought. Not a thinking that is outside, beyond movement-moving, but a thinking that composes-with movement, with-body-in-the-making. A thinking that defines its own terms, in the moving, that touches on the realm of absolute movement as it co-composes with actual movement. A 14 interlude

thinking that activates the more-than of the physical form, of the body precomposed, thinking it into act. A thinking that activates not only the morethan of this movement’s potential, but also the more-than of this or that body. A thinking because the doing resonates with thought. To move is to think-with a bodying in act. To move thought is to compose with the extrusion of form, to create a body from the oversaturation of what is recognized as this or that displacement. This is what dance makes clear: it is not the displacement as such that makes the difference, but the quality of becoming of the micromovements and microperceptions that pass through not just the composing body but also the vibrating space of thought. Because in order for the more-than to be felt it must make the body vibratory, it must make the body a force for thought in the moving, unfastening the body from what we perceive as its integrity. It must create a differentiation, an involution, a fold, a setting-torhythm not only of this or that body, but of an ecology in co- composition, an ecology that is not only a recomposition of spacetimes bodying, but also a thinking in act, a movement of thought. When movement dances in the dancing, what we experience is a lived extraction from the plane of immanence that is total movement, leaving us in the vibration of what is beyond the predetermined body, in the realm of movement-thinking. And it is here, in the thinking in act of movementmoving, that movement begins to compose (us).

When Movement Dances 15

t wo

Always More Than One

The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what comes to pass.

*   gillEs DElEuzE

Individuation “The body” is a misnomer. Nothing so stable, so certain of itself ever survives the complexity of worlding. And yet we inevitably use the concept as shorthand—how else to talk about issues of agency, of identity, of territoriality? Relation is the quick answer, with “the body” as a certain version of an endpoint, or, better said, a transition point. The body, here defined, is what comes-to-be under specific and singular conditions. It is the amalgamation of a series of tendencies and proclivities, the cohesive point at which a multiplicity of potentialities resolves as this or that event of experience.1 If the body isn’t the starting point, what is? According to Gilbert Simondon, the body is a relative fact, a phase of being. Every phase of being is coconstituted by two commingling dimensions of process: individuation and the preindividual. Individuation and the preindividual cannot be thought separately—they are two sides of the same coin. Individuation is process in its unfolding through a multiplicity of phases. The preindividual is the phaseless excess—the more-than—that envelops yet exceeds the nowness of the process in its unfolding. The preindividual is the germ of potential in every activity. It can be thought as the force of becoming akin to the pull of

the Deleuzo-Guattarian virtual where it combines with the actual. The preindividual is real and it is felt, but only in its effects. Later, I will pair it with the Deleuzian concept of a life, which is similarly conceived as the force of life that exceeds this life yet cannot be experienced without it. Every resolution of a process—every actual occasion—carries within itself the more-than of its taking-form. Force is everywhere active, on timelines that intersect with the occasion at hand, and on transversal lines that extend beyond it or circle through it. The force of the preindividual reminds us that life is neither in the individual nor outside it but in what surpasses it while accompanying it. This means that all resolutions—as body, as individual, as object—are more-than the forms they inhabit. A body is always more than one: it is a processual field of relation and the limit at which that field expresses itself as such.2 A body is black, gendered, sexed, you might say, adding that these are irrefutable givens that situate the body within the realm of fixed form. Irrefutable, yes, but only as the limit of a constellation of processes that collude to foreground one measure of how the body expresses. Identity is less a form than the pinnacle of a relational field tuning to a certain constellation. The question is not “how is the body not black or gendered or sexed?” but “how is the body more-than the classification this singular constellation foregrounds?” The question here cannot be limited to the body “itself ” as though the body weren’t active in co-constituting the ecology at hand. If that ecology tunes to categories such as color or gender, these aspects of the field will continue to be foregrounded. The issue is not to deny this but to ask how these ecologies come to co-constitute a body in this or that way. The point is not that there is no form-taking, no identity. The point is that all form-takings are complexes of a process ecological in nature. A body is the how of its emergence, not the what of its form. The issue is one of engendering:3 how does this singular taking-form happen given the complex collusions of speeds and slownesses, of organic and inorganic tendings, of activities and movements, that resolve into this or that body-event? Collusions Individuation happens through what Simondon calls dephasing. Individuation is not a linear, continuous process. In the vocabulary of Simondon, a phase is not a temporal moment that is simply replaced by another. There is never just one phase or one individuation, but overlapping phasings hapalways MorE than onE  17

pening in nonlinear time. Dephasing can be seen as the instance where the complex nodes of incipient relation tune toward what can be singled out as a discrete iteration: toward a remarkable point. Dephasing is both this, the activity of a momentary culmination of a multifaceted process, and its ongoing transformation. The transformation spurred by the dephasing is what Simondon calls transduction, defined as a shift in level from individuation to individual, which is at the same time a shift that activates a new process or a new phase of a continuing process. Dephasings, seen from the point of view of the transduction they call forth, are at once how force takes form and how the rift in the continuity of an ongoing process is felt. Dephasing is about the activity of phases commingling to the degree that they generate a turning point that resolves, momentarily, into this or that singular event or discrete occasion of experience—a remarkable point that shifts how an occasion continues to become. Dephasing is what activates what Whitehead calls the becoming of continuity. In Eric Alliez’s words, “far from being the opposite of continuity, the break or interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity” (Alliez and Goffey 2010, 10). A body becomes “it-self ” in the break of dephasing. A body, as such, is therefore extremely short-lived: the body cannot be seen as that which holds together across space and time in a kind of beyondness of the event. Body is event, known as such only in the collusions of a process shifting. Think collusion here as the force of agreement (or disagreement) between processes or within a process. A complicity. An attunement. Collusion brings a field of individuation to a certain resolve. Through individuation- dephasing-transduction, where formative force becomes form to become force once more, the singular event of a formtaking can never be fully abstracted from the processes from which it has emerged. Dephasing activates a strange commingling between the thisness of a process culminating and its continued relational potential as regards other processes. What we know as “a body” is the relational node that culminates as a unity and as the difference of a complex process’s contemporary phasings. A body is continuity and emergent discontinuity—a remarkable point in the becoming of continuity. We know it as such for how it has not persisted in the complex of processes of which it is part. What is known as such is primarily how experience differs. Only when individuation is interrupted by the dephasing does a process reveal itself as this or that. Since this dephasing is so short-lived, and since the transduc18 chaPtEr two

tion the dephasing occasions catapults the becoming-body into a new complex of process, the definition of a body cannot be reduced to its momentary taking-form. More-than its taking-form, “body” is an ecology of processes (and practices, as Isabelle Stengers might say) always in co- constellation with the environmentality of which it is part. A body is a node of relational process, not a form per se. A body is a complex activated through phases in collision and collusion, phasings in and out of processes of individuation that are transformed—transduced—to create new iterations not of what a body is but of what a body can do. What we tend to call “body” and what is experienced as the wholeness of a form is simply one remarkable point, one instance of a collusion materializing as this or that. This is why Simondon rejects hylomorphism: hylomorphism’s claim that there is a hierarchy of form over matter discredits both the processual and the becoming of continuity. The nowness of an individuation momentarily resolving itself into this or that is only a fleeting point within a larger process of individuation that has not yet claimed a stable relationship between matter and form. A body in the extended sense is the complexity of a multiplicity of the phasings that co-constitutes it, a society in motion, a resonant materiality, a metastable field. Continuity and discontinuity commingling to activate the singular in a field of difference. A Life This is the contribution Gilbert Simondon makes to the body: he liberates it from the presupposition of a form, demonstrating how a body is alive across interphasings. Deleuze has a term for the force that is activated across these differential processes. He calls it a life, signaling a concept of life that extends beyond the specifically organic to touch on the force of becoming that accompanies all processes, all phases. A life is another term for the preindividual. It is what accompanies, what remains unresolved, in the taking of form, what defies the hierarchy of the organic with respect to the inorganic in the organization of what we commonly understand as “life.” The field of experience is alive with bodyings, each of which are nodes of relation—ecologies—actively co- composing with the force of the impersonal a life that courses through them. The body as more-than is vitalist only in the sense that it never exists in the negative; it is productive, infinitely, of more life. “Do you know what Life is to me? A monster of energy . . . that always MorE than onE  19

does not expend itself but only transforms itself. . . . A play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many . . . ; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing” (Nietzsche 1967, entry 1067).4 The process of bodying is, as Simondon would say, a continuous case of in-formation: “information is that by which the incompatibility of a nonresolved system becomes an organizational dimension in its resolution: information supposes a change in the phase of a system, since it supposes a first preindividual state that individuates according to the discovered organization” (1989, 22). Information has little to do with a communicational process and even less with a linear one. Information activates a singular form-taking. Information: “internal resonance of a system in the process of individuating, the power radiating from one domain of individuation to another” (Combes 1999, 105). Information activates the coupling of force and form. The individual, or what I am here calling a body, is a process of information, composite and compositional, that singularly resolves but only long enough to activate new phasings. Think the individual as the remarkable point (as Deleuze would say) and the bodying as the complex process continuously informed and informing by the effect of this singularization. Information does not presuppose an already-existing matter-form. Information creates the potential for an immanent organization that activates the body’s coming to be this or that and its de-forming into a field of relation, an ecology of a body-becoming. Becoming is not pure continuity. It is continuous dephasing, carrying a process across thresholds. The process is nonlinear, its field the topological surface of life always in co- composition with the forces of a life. A body does not evolve according to a past becoming present becoming future, nor does it evolve in a pure philogeny. Force of life creates blocks of becoming—uneasy alliances: “There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 238). Life in-formed is life in-forming, coursing through the “between-times,” the “betweenmoments” of its bursts into coupling, in collusion (Deleuze 2007, 391). Feeling A life does not come once and for all on the scene of the actual. It resonates on the cusp of the living, affective in tone. A life is experienced as the feeling of life welling across its dephasings. Think feeling here in the Whiteheadian sense, as propulsor to experience, always in the realm of the impersonal. 20 chaPtEr two

This is not human feeling or emotion. It is affective tonality. It is the generative force, singular to this event, that moves the event toward its resolution. Each occasion has a tone, a singular expressivity, an enjoyment, as Whitehead would say. A life is how the preindividual returns as feeling onto life’s topological surface of becoming. Whitehead’s notion of feeling is allied to the Spinozean/DeleuzoGuattarian notion of affect, both of which are intimately connected to the concept of a life and to the preindividual. What I like about the concept of feeling is that it reminds us not to place affect within a schema of linear phases and already-formed bodies. Feeling is not attached to a form already-taken, nor is it an afterthought to a preexisting process. Feeling is how an occasion enjoys its coming into what Whitehead calls “subjective form.” Feeling is the force that moves an event to reach its concrescence. Feeling is also what outlives it, always still resonating. This suggests that any process that occasions this or that experience must be motivated by a certain affective quality. This affective quality is a feelingwith that colors experience in the making. There is no body- emergent separate from the quality of its emergence. Life Life as here defined is not limited to the organic. Life is relation. Propelled by the force of in-formation, life is the tendings and habits and attunements, the appetition, that activate the singularity of this or that unfolding process. The question is how life as a field of resonance buoyed by appetition—the enjoyment of a process, the desire for the more-than—is allied to the event in its actuality. This remains an unresolvable tension in experience. On the one hand, there is the thisness of an occasion’s resolution. This resolution (or concrescence) depends on an event singling itself out from the larger field of experience. Yet this singularity cannot tell the whole story. This is why Whitehead emphasizes that while the atomistic quality of the event must be kept in mind, we are here talking about a half second or less of experience. The how of the in-act is the more interesting and complex issue. For it is what consistently outlives the actual as defined by this or that singular expression of composition that touches on how a life courses through this life. Life is always about a double- capture—on the one hand, it is the force of life-living that exceeds this or that life, and on the other, it is the monadic always MorE than onE  21

event of a singular set of conditions in momentary collusion. Life is always between. Too often, life is conceived as that which frames the alreadyconstituted—life as human, life as organic. Life as defined here in no way privileges the human. Nor is it constituted as an envelope for experience. Life is life-living, in act, replete with the indefinable force of a life coursing through it. Life is a complex of feeling, an ecology not reducible to its data, to its content or its form-takings. Life is the plurality of becoming as felt, a plurality not of many parts—this would place the plural below the category of being—but a plurality at the very level of becoming, a multiplicity in act. Life as such—this life—is known through the dephasings of processes of individuation. Yet each dephasing also activates a germ of force, a remains, a more-than of this life. Every life-welling carries within itself both the activity of its emergence in the now of experience and the seeds of its having-been many-phased: “an actual particle has its virtual double, which barely diverges from it at all” (Deleuze 1997, 150)—a collusion of the remarkable point with the associated milieu of relation. Life—a hunger for difference, an appetite for the more-than. Body as Society For Whitehead, a body is a society—a body is a complex of feeling in cocomposition with life-living. On the nexus of being and becoming, a body is more expressivity than form. This is the complexity of Whiteheadian thought, that while it insists that an occasion marks the finality, the atomicity of a singular process, it continuously reminds us that the occasion is so short-lived that it is ultimately the multiplicity of transductions activated by its dephasings that defines experience. In Whiteheadian vocabulary, “each actual entity, although complete so far as concerns its microscopic process, is yet incomplete by reason of its objective inclusion of the macroscopic process. It really experiences a future which must be actual, although the completed actualities of that future are undetermined” (1978, 215). Each foray into worlding involves the generating of a field that is coconstituted by all the pastnesses and futurities that compose it. The question is not simply “what is the body” but “how will the bodying persist.” The bodying persists in its self-enjoyment as process: “organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self- enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many’” (Whitehead 1978, 145). Bodying persists as the more-than that strives to 22 chaPtEr two

activate the forces of difference within its generative potential. In this regard, bodying is a lure to feeling. Lures for feeling call forth new immanent associations and new assemblages, bringing these constellations to life in the complex intersection between this life and a life. “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here” (Whitehead 1978, 87). The lure for feeling that activates time’s differential makes felt the multiplicity of each now. Bodying does not happen once and for all on a linear timeline. There is no question that it resolves as an occasion of experience, and that this resolution has a specific date and time, but as a lure for feeling bodying is less a stable rendering of metric time than a collusion of durations. Because every resolution activates a transduction, new processes are continuously under way. A body is a durational multiplicity, a becoming of continuity, not a continuity of becoming. Lures for feeling do not achieve form per se. They generate attunements, tendencies, force of form. This is why Whitehead speaks of “subjective form” more than of form itself. What an occasion ultimately achieves is strictly speaking not a form but a tending, a mobile ecology. An occasion is less an object or a body than a node of relation expressing itself momentarily as this or that—an edging into object, a swerving into body. The how or the expressivity of this relational node is the occasion’s subjective form. “[T]here are many species of subjective forms, such as emotions, valuations, purposes, adversions, aversions, consciousness, etc.” (Whitehead 1978, 24). The subjective form of an event is how an occasion of experience has come to feel itself in the culmination of this or that process. While the culmination of a process into this or that subjective form has a definite endpoint, the affective tonality of the now perishing occasion will continue to color the process of the occasion shifting from its determinate nature to its perishing on the nexus of experience. From appetite to event back to appetite. The nexus in Whitehead is the immanent field where the force of eventness can be felt. It is contributory rather than known or experienced as such. What is contributed from the nexus into subsequent occasions is not a given form. The form of the occasion has perished. What remains is the appetition, the force of form. If what drives life is the creative advance always active in the constellation of occasions that make up experience, and experience is always to some degree co-constituted by the nexus of past and contemporary occasions, the nexus can be thought as the relational field always MorE than onE  23

that contributes a more-than to each taking-form. What is reactivated from the nexus into a given occasion is not the form the past occasion took. It is the lure for feeling, the lure for the creativity generated at the heart of difference. For each occasion, as stated above, only emerges as such as the difference in a multiphasing process of individuation. To have emerged as this or that constellation is to have colluded into a dephasing that activated a differential between what was and what will have come to be. Whitehead’s notion of the “creative advance” rests on the understanding that experience is not continuous but composed of differentials and integrations—once more, the becoming of continuity. The creative advance is not novelty in the sense of the “never before” in the capitalist sense of the “newest new.” It is the capacity of an event to activate certain vectors otherwise backgrounded, thereby generating an uneasy field of difference. This field of difference is complex in that it does not deny what it cannot include. To the contrary, it celebrates exactly this fissure, engendering the new out of a resonance of background/foreground. Novelty: less event in-itself than differential of the event in its coming-to-form. Transindividuation What is known as such, it bears repeating, is not the preindividual, not the nexus, or a life, but the forces of collusion that bring a multiphasing process of individuation to an individualization. But what is also known, albeit in a different register than conscious knowing, I want to argue here, is the excess, the more-than of this process. The in-act always involves a tensile weave of the actual and the virtual, of the preindividual and individuation, of a life and this life. This is why each actual occasion is more-than what it seems. It is more-than because it carries in its dephasing a quality of a surplus that cannot be contained by the occasion. The occasion is implicitly multiple—collective—in the sense that its emergence involves not only its definiteness as this or that, but its complexity as a field of relation that co- combines with the nexus of which it has been/will have been part. An occasion cannot undo itself of the tensile weave of which it is made. Any occasion is at once the absoluteness of it-self in the moment of its concrescence and the will-have-become of its tendencies, attunements, and appetitions, both past and future. Take the event of a ray of sunlight that alters the color of the kitchen wall

24 chaPtEr two

on a sunny early morning. Usually, the wall is light yellow. But this morning the wall is luminous, lighting up the kitchen in a way that exceeds this or that definite color. It is still yellow, but it is also more-than yellow—how to define it? A yellowness? This musing on color is instantaneous. It is not a reflection on color but an immediate feeling activated by the event of the light. Certainly, it can later be reflected upon, and the experience can subsequently shift, but what will result from this reflection will always have been another occasion of experience. The specific and singular first experience of luminousness cannot be altered. Once felt it cannot become what it wasn’t. This is the paradox: the occasion is absolute in its singularity and infinitely contributory, as quality or haecceity, in the excess of what it will have been. What will have been felt as this singular event of color-light-feeling will now forever exist in the perceptual field it has cogenerated. And yet this quality of yellowness, say, will, in its perishing onto the nexus of experience, already and immediately have co-composed with all previous and subsequent feelings of luminosity. There will never be an experience of luminosity—or any experience of light, of color, of joy, of warmth, or of the terrible unease of another day lost to depression despite the season’s shift— that will not have the capacity to connect to the feeling generated by this event. In its reemergence in a next event, however, the yellowness may feed a completely different process, even to the extent that the subjective form of the occasion in question may be far removed from the earlier experience of luminosity as a joyful tending to yellow. To call this yellowness a “thing” would be to underestimate the complexity of its ecology and the field of feeling it calls forth both in the present and in its futurity. The luminosity is less object than field of relation. It is less color as such than compositional force. The yellowness is a transindividuation. Transindividuations remind us that every event is a node of activity that is intensively relational. This color, this kitchen scenario—these are but passing points of contact, expressive culminations in a wider process of transindividuation: in the complex phasings and dephasings of life-living, yellow is a node passing through and across, an expression of a nowness always already traversed by forces that exceed it. An event never fully actualizes. Or, better said, the actual is never fully actual: it is in act. What is in act is not the body as such or the event’s time-

always MorE than onE  25

line but its force of life-living. This force of life is the problematization at the heart of each transductive process, a problematization that incites adaptation, modification. This is not adaptation or modification after the fact: it is modification in the process of becoming, a multiphasing of potential operative on the strata of co- constitutive individuations. Affect Milieu is not the neutral in-between. A body is not separate from its milieu. Milieu, or the associated milieu, as Simondon calls it, is a relational field activated by the event in-forming. No event occurs in a vacuum—event and milieu are always cogenerative. This means that the milieu cannot be understood in spatial terms. It is an affective attunement more than a space, a field more than a form. Affect, understood along the lines of Whitehead’s concept of feeling, is a transductive force that propels being to become across the phases of its individuation. Affect is of the milieu: it resituates the body as force of form within what Isabelle Stengers (2010) calls an “ecology of practices.”5 Affect activates the very connectibility of experience. It is the force, the lure, through which a certain constellation comes to expression. Take the example of a snake in the context of a phobia. Wandering through the desert, everything is felt as the force of snakeness. There is no rustling that does not elicit fear. But this is fear even before it can be defined. It is in the edginess of pace, the tenseness of posture. It alters how each step is taken. Every quick movement—lizard, wind, fly—activates a certain bodying that attends, intensively, to an environment in the making. A body is in-forming, a bodying more fear than form, taut with a foreboding as yet undefined yet all- consuming. Since bodying cannot be thought without milieu, it is not simply the body that is tense but the field of the event itself that is poised. An emergent ecology is forming—one of jitteriness, of hyperattention, of sensory acuity. An intensive feltness of the jarring contrasts of the desert is perhaps how this ecology expresses itself perceptually, coupled with the hyperattentive peripheral vision that sounds each micromovement. A slight shift can make all the affective difference, however. A move toward the water that flows at the bottom of the desert canyon— where snakes don’t wander—immediately retunes the body-event. A different ecology soon emerges. This ecology is marked by a new field of affect.

26 chaPtEr two

A calm—unimaginable before—perhaps now activates the beauty of the desert’s intense colors, with the play of shade and light now tuning to the smell of the late afternoon while the flow of water around the many rocks of the canyon bed moves the walking. For the nonphobic, for whom this hypervigilance is not necessary, there will likely have been all along an enjoyment of the breeze, an attunement to bird calls, resulting in a lightness in the posture afforded by the capacity to attend to more than the rustling grasses. The point is that the same macroevent creates different bodyings in different ecologies co-constituted by different emergent milieus. Not only that: these different contemporary bodyings also create potential resonances, sharing not the content of experience per se, but the quality of how the ecologies unfold in the futurity of their collective iteration. How a bodying evolves in this desert-event will always have been completely linked to how the milieu evolves and how it in turn affects the becoming-bodies in its midst. The ecology or associated milieu of the event will have been inseparable from its affect. Affect is the feeling-vector of individuation’s process as it tunes to its dephasing. It is transformative. And it is collective. It is collective because it is always coincident with the forces that bring it into being and which it activates. It is collective in that it continuously folds individuation into the preindividual, making the force of a life felt in this life. It is collective in that it connects to an ecology before it selects for an individual. Affect is collective because it tunes to a multiplicity of forces already phasing, because it is itself a force of attunement. The collective understood here is not the many parts of the multiplication of discrete bodies. The collective is the multiplicity of a life welling across the topological surfaces of being where the many become one (and are increased by one). Collective Individuation There is no body that isn’t always already collective, always already active in the relational interweaving of more than one tending, more than one phase, more than one ecology in the making. “[T]he different faces of affect create insertions at the level of the becoming of life itself, not at the level of individual becoming” (Simondon 1989, 120). Affect’s transductive potential cuts across individuality, moving the bodying toward the collective agitation of its preindividual potential. In its cutting-across, affect does not dis-

always MorE than onE  27

mantle the body (the body is not yet): it multiplies it. Affective transduction is invention: it creates new processes for life in its creative advance. Affect never locates itself once and for all on an individual body. Affect courses across, grouping into tendential relation not individual feelings but preindividual feeling-tendencies. As a collective force, it brings into welling formation the individual and the preindividual at the limit of their coexistence. For it is as emergent collective forces that these two tendencies coincide. When life’s process seeks to resolve itself in individuals by individuals and for individuals, the force of the collective gives way to the personal and the project of a life gives way to the bounded notion of this life. From the spiral of eternal return to the hierarchies of many-headed liberal humanisms, individuation of and for the individual alone brings about the death of the collective as a project for life and, with it, the imminent undoing of the force of a life coursing through individuation. The Outside Affect does not hold onto being; it activates the threshold that disperses it, always anew. To “threshold” is to create a new field, to propel a dephasing. In its dispersal of being, affect does not undermine the possibility of being. It multiplies it at its collective limit where there is never “one single possible state of being’s achievement” (Simondon 1989, 215). In the collective, it bears repeating, there is no predetermining “I.” Activity keeps the “I” at bay. This does not mean that affect cannot give way to an occasion that resolves into the specificity of an “I,” but that the “I” is the afterthought of a complex affective process that will always nonetheless, to some degree, retain the collectivity at the heart of its having come-to-be. This having come-to-be can never be completely abstracted from the intensive mixtures of the process out of which it emerged and into which it will feed. It is important to think affect not linearly as that which only spurs the process toward a dephasing on one end of the spectrum. Affect is also that which is left over from the subtraction of a field of potential. You can think of affect in the broadest sense as what remains of life potential after each or every thing a body says or does—as a perpetual bodily remainder. Looked at from a different angle, this perpetual remainder is an excess. It’s like a reserve of potential or newness or creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning 28 chaPtEr two

in language or in any performance of a useful function—vaguely but directly experienced, as something more, a more to come—a life overspilling as it gathers itself up to move on. (Massumi 2011a) Affect is always and only force. Think affect, as Deleuze (1988b) would say, as the force of the outside. The outside is here not juxtaposed to an inside—it is not about containment. The outside is the limit where life as force of form resonates. “There is first of all the outside which exists as an unformed element of forces: the latter come from and remain attached to the outside, which stirs up their relations and draws out their diagrams” (1988b, 43). When Deleuze speaks of the diagram here he is not speaking of a fixed form. He is speaking of a set of tendencies in resonance. In Deleuzian terms, we could think life as the diagram the outside calls forth. This diagram is full of permutations and potentials—it is the force of a coming-to-form that generates a shaping of experience. This definition of life pairs it with a life: life as the irreducible outside that has no ultimate form, no final measure. Life-living as always coupled with a life is the diagrammatic force that activates the collective individuation through which transindividuations emerge. For here the body is always already collective, transversed with the force of the preindividual as transindividuation. The outside is a fold on the topological surface of a becoming-body. New compositions emerge on this surface through the bursts of the singular becomings dephasings call forth. Bursts because dephasings involve a bringing-to-life of new processes, new fields of feeling. “[T]here must be a more-than-being, a new individuation, so that sensations can coordinate into perceptions; there also has to be a more-than-being of the subject so that affections become affective world” (Simondon 1989, 116). The Body The body is a multiphased relation that defines itself through coefficients of transversality expressive in the practice of becoming. Its project is to move life to its limit and at this limit, where the outside folds in, to express, again, differently. The body is infinitely variable, not subject but verb. And as verb it persists, infinitely. What is infinite is the body’s appetition, not its form. “It is possible that something of the individual be eternal, and that it reincorporate itself, in some way, in the world with respect to the individual” (Simondon 1989, always MorE than onE  29

102). What lives on, what is immanent to life as expressive potential, exceeds this or that body. Simondon calls it “holes of individuality,” which he defines as “veritable negatives of individuals composed of a core of affectivity and emotivity” (1989, 102). What lives on is never the subject, never the individual. What lives on is affective resonance. Affect is what returns. Affect returns as the force of becoming that incessantly creates collectivities in the making, collectivities tuning toward an outside where the mutations of difference are most forcefully creative. For affect is never exhausted: it modulates across metastable fields of experience in the making, amplifying matter in its in-forming, incorporeal potential. Affect promises nothing. It creates across and beyond good and evil. It activates. It does not conserve. It creates life, but not solely among the living. Collectivizing, it propulses individuation at the between where all projects are most volatile, where societies falter, where the actually living intersect with the already-undead of life’s immanent surface. Always more than one, affect activates the holes of individuality that animate a life. The Body (Reprise) The body, a haecceity: the thisness of experience active as a singularity in the dephased now. Not individual but individuation. Not subject but collectivity, differential on the edge where the force of life meets life itself. Not the body after the subject. Not the body caught in the trap of hylomorphism where the individual is considered as created by “the meeting of a form and a matter” (Simondon 1989, 9, 11).6 But the body before the subject, in advance and always toward subjectivity (rarely there), the body as transindividuation, the body as resonant materiality, the body as the metastable field before the taking-form of this or that. The body, always more than one, replete with the force of life, “life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good or evil, since only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things made it good or bad” (Deleuze 2007, 391). The body, more assemblage than form, more associated milieu than Being.

30 chaPtEr two

interlude

Dancing the Virtual

Think the body as an ecology of operations that straddles the flesh of its matter and the environmentality of its multiple takings-form. From such an environmentality retain the idea of technique. Think technique not as an add-on to a preexisting body-form but as a process of bodying. Think technique as an in-forming of a mutating body. And then think that body as a field of relations rather than a stability, a force taking-form rather than simply a form. See technique as the mode through which a body can express, aligning into this expression qualities of its bodying (aspects of its motor tendencies, aspects of its existing experiential matrix). Make it, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a body without organs. Make it more-than its biological organization. Cleave the notion of the body beyond the human. Connect it to all that co- combines with it to create a movement of thought. Keep the movement of thought in the world (instead of putting it back in the body) and see what it can do. Consider this image: you are in the garden, your knees covered in mud, hands deep in the earth for an early spring planting. Instead of seeing the earth as a quality apart from the knee attached to a preexisting human form, see the knee-hand-earth as a worlding, a force of form, an operative ecology. See this ecology as an active technique for creating, for the bodying, a taste of spring. Instead of thinking the body as separate from the earth, as separate from the arrival of spring, see the ecology knee-hand-earth in a spring planting as a technique for tuning the season. Notice that the more the knee-hand-earth constellation becomes its own

intensive entity, the more the feeling of spring beckons even though the air is still winter-cool. Were this November in Montreal, there would definitely be no such feeling of incipient warmth: the gardening assemblage in that season tunes more toward closing things in than opening them up. What is different between these two scenarios? In the spring, the knee-hand- earth assemblage is tuning beyond its novembering technique to encompass a quality of tuning-toward: this is a gardening with an anticipation of the feeling of spring. Incipient smells, the quality of a breeze, the texture of the earth, all of these tune the technique of gardening toward what it can call forth here and now, what its assemblage can become in this day in May. This is not just about sewing a seed, it is about reconstituting the relation climate-body-environment. It is about becoming co- constituted by an environmentality in the making. The technique of gardening for spring has transduced into an incipient call for the season to blossom. Now that there is a sense of how the body evolves as an assemblage in this gardening scenario, consider the role of the object or “matter”—the garden spade, the earth, the tulip bulb—keeping in mind that, like the body, an object is a milieu of relations that are activated through vectors of association in the aliveness of a singular event. And yet, an object is also different from a body in the sense that it attunes toward roles activated by the implicit forces not only in its objectness but of the environment of which it becomes a relational part. An object is as much how it does as what it does. Think this object in relation to this multiplicity, in its competing orders of magnitude, as a speciation that is never disconnected from the event of its coming-to-be (blade- density-resistance, rhythm-handle-forearm).1 Think the object not as this or that preconstructed iteration but as that which calls forth implicit forces that affect not only the objects themselves but the environmentalities of which they are part. And think these implicit forces as the conduit, the vector or force of matter’s inherent capacity to become more-than. Think the object not ontologically but processually. Objects in-forming are exactingly co-imbricated with the implicit forces of their potential to become in an ecology of practices. This is their technicity. Technicity is the modality for creating out of a system of techniques the more-than of system. In the gardening example, technicity is the how of the ecology—the metal push of spade that calls forth the taste of a breeze that is felt as the leaving-behind of the impassability of winter, an ecology that activates, in a kind of future presenting, the coming spring. Technique and technicity coexist. Where technique engages the repeti32 interlude

tive practices that form a composing body—be it organic or inorganic— technicity is a set of enabling conditions that exact from technique the potential of the new for co- composition. Think the new not as a denial of the past but as the quality of the more-than of the past tuning toward the future. The new is a qualitative difference, already felt in the will-have-been. Time loops. The past now carries a potentiality that was always there but was backgrounded. Its implicit forces are coming to expression in a mutability that will in-form future relational constellations, eventually transducing into technique that which will be reiterable, repeatable. But beyond the technique something else can take place. A setting into eventness of implicit forces creates an opportunity for the coming event’s technicity to express itself. Think technicity as the process that stretches out from technique, creating brief interludes for the more-than of technique, gathering from the implicit the force of form. Think technicity as that which marks the difference in the event of gardening, an event that, on the surface, uses the same techniques whether in November or in May. Think technicity as the field where movement begins to dance. Technicity: the art of the event. Technique comes out of practice as much as it is what goes into practice. In this regard, techniques are hard to come by—they demand the patient exploration of how a practice best comes into itself. Technicity is the dephasing of technique—it is the experience of technique reaching the more-than of its initial application. Technicity is a craft—it is how the field of techniques touches its potential. From technique to technicity we have a transduction. Technicity is a shift of level that activates a shift in process. This is how techniques evolve. Without transduction we would have only mimicry, translation. The copying of forms. Technicity in-gathers form toward its implicit potentiality and squeezes from it the drops of the excess of its actualizations. Technicity captures the affective tonality of a process, a tendency, and catapults it toward new expression. There are techniques for hoeing, for standing at a bus stop, for reading a philosophical text, for taking a seat in a restaurant, for being in line at a grocery store. In each case, the technique is both singular and general. There are cultural differences between modes of waiting in line, but all standing in line carries a certain number of general identifiers such as an implicit understanding that only one person can be served at one time. There are of course also techniques in a seed’s germination, in the shift of the Earth’s axis toward the Sun, and in the process of photosynthesis. And there are techniques that build on techniques—techniques for bowing the violin inDancing the Virtual 33

clude implicit modes of standing as well as techniques for arm movement or wrist inflection; techniques for painting include implicit modes of seeing as well as techniques for manipulating light or texture; techniques for dance include implicit understandings of equilibrium as well as techniques for locating and moving rhythm and extension. William Forsythe shows his dancers that, for instance, you can lift an arm across the body by using the extension of the limb, creating a standard épaulement. Building technique on technique, however, he then shows that the amplitude of this movement’s qualitative force is fundamentally altered through a movement of the rib cage. Instead of pulling the arm, push the rib cage and the body becomes a diagonal force, a torque, hip-shoulder syncing with an elasticity that dances almost without effort. The first option is a movement from the pretense of a stability. The second is a movementmoving. This is technique building on technique. Something else is happening here as well. A technicity is developing that draws on the diagonal force of a moving body. Suddenly ribs become fingers, and shoulders become articulate. Forsythe explains: “When you move your shoulder, you can move it as expressively as the hand—the shoulder is the second most expressive part after the hand—the muscles over the rib are the serratus—they are like the finger ligaments going up the hand. Articulate your shoulder from the serratus.”2 When shoulder becomes quality of hand, organ becomes expression. The body acts in implicit relation with a movement that tunes to a different constellation of articulation. Body becomes bodying, and in this transduction, a series of new potentialities for movement are born. Think technique as that which perfects a system and technicity as that through which a process is born that composes the morethan that is the body’s movement ecology. Technicity is the associated milieu of technique. If technique is the learning of a certain kind of reach, a certain kind of pull or turn or spiral, if technique is the sounding of a voice or the rhythmic assertion of a step, technicity is the operational field of its expressivity. This field is co-imbricating. It is a lively interval, energized with all of the forces of movement-moving. The role of technique in the field of technicity is to create the potential for a singularity of forms to mutate toward a generative process. Technique is key because of its rigorous method of experimentation and repetition, a method that allays any passivity in the passage from the form of experimentation to its force. Technicity—the associated milieu where form once more becomes force, where individual gesture becomes individuation—is 34 interlude

the process through which the implicit is acted upon to generate something as yet unthought. The associated milieu of technicity is never given in advance, never conditioned before a process is under way. It is the event’s process, never its mediation. Technicity is the field of incorporation in the making of technique’s insistent difference and repetition. “The taking-form does not accomplish itself visibly in a single instant, but in a number of successive operations. We cannot strictly distinguish the taking-form from the qualitative transformation” (Simondon 2005, 57). Technicity sets the conditions for successive operations, each of which incorporates the implicit, creating an opening toward an ecology of experimentation. It multiplies the form that “is but a fabricated intention, with a flighty disposition, [that] can neither grow old or become” toward an intensity that will always resist capture, but that will nonetheless leave its trace. Technicity is an open field for structured improvisation. It in-forms a process of taking-form, gathering from that process the myriad levels of information. In doing so, it reminds us that form is in-formation, at once a complex tending-toward that momentarily resolves as this or that, and the incipient nextness of a futurepastness. Improvisation is not born of technicity, however. Technique is its grounding. It is born, paradoxically, through the repetition of a certain form-taking. Without the rigor and precision that comes of repeated, habitual activity, improvisation’s potential vocabulary is too narrow, its implicit force too backgrounded to be functionally emergent. To create the new it is vital to have experimented with the outer limits of a vocabulary that is highly technical, and from there, but transversally, to invent. This invention takes place in the associated milieu—it is not I who invent but the bodying process itself, across the activity of movement-moving. Remember that the associated milieu is the environmentality of the technique in its dephasing, the field where technique and technicity meet. In the realm of the political, the question of technicity extends to the how of collective enunciation. How is a collaborative event orchestrated? What modes of process are created to ensure that difference can be heard without succumbing to the endgame of debate? How to tweak collective individuation to give the group a voice that allows something to be said that is more-than individual, that carries within it the germs of a multiplicitous individuality? How to operate at the level of collective invention in the tense of the not-yet, at the very edges where thought and practice meet? How to Dancing the Virtual 35

orchestrate a collective bodying—a society, in the Whiteheadian sense— that crafts its process from the very ecology that constitutes it, that merges technique with the more-than of its potential, finding within technique the implicit force that propels technique toward the excess of form or position? Take the 2009 SenseLab event, Society of Molecules.3 The goal of Society of Molecules was to find techniques that would allow a large group (between sixty and one hundred people) from multiple countries to connect in the creation of an aesthetico-political event. This event was to occur in many countries at once and so would have to work without a gathering in the form of a face-to-face encounter. The problem was how to distribute selforganizing creative energies while operatively interconnecting them at a distance. How to connect not simply at the level of content but also at the level of process? This event had a lead-up of a year, during which “molecules” were created across the world. Molecules were defined as a group of seven to ten people who would take on a collective project. This collective project was defined as a local event that would creatively address a politico- aesthetic issue felt by local participants to affect the quality of their lives. The politicoaesthetic interventions would last between three hours and seven days and take place during the first week of May 2009. The early stages of the event were steeped in practices from earlier collective organizing: we read assigned texts, we created an Internet hub for concept invention, we collectively thought about the relation between art and politics, and we worked locally to develop ideas for our own molecular projects. Then we began to conceive of specific techniques for the larger distributed event, always with a focus on developing affective strategies that would allow us to connect at the level of our processes rather than focusing exclusively on content and thereby falling into the trap of “reporting.” Three techniques were invented. The first was the technique of the “emissary.” Each molecule was invited to choose an emissary as well as to name a host. The emissary of each local grouping was paired with the host of another group. Sometime in the five months preceding the main event, the emissary would travel to the host group (virtual voyages were a possibility where resources did not allow physical travel). The role of the emissary was to make “first contact” with the other local (molecular) culture. To facilitate the unannounced meeting, “movement profiles” were compiled and distributed to the emissaries. The movement profiles described the designated host’s habitual daily move36 interlude

ments through the city, so that if the emissary so desired first contact could be made in a performative fashion taking advantage of the element of surprise.4 Emissaries were encouraged to use standard forms of communication like mobile phones and addresses sparsely, focusing instead being guided by the movement profile. Upon meeting, the host’s job was to gather the molecule together and treat the emissary to a “relational soup.” The second technique involved collectively composing a recipe for the relational soup that would then be brought back to the “home” molecule. The relational soup could be anything at all. The enabling constraint was that whatever form it took, it should give the emissary a taste of that group’s process. The third technique took the form of a “process seed” brought by the emissary and left with the host group. The seed was sealed and was to be opened only after the event. It could be an object around which a future group activity could be organized or a set of procedures to be followed collectively. The hope was that the techniques would activate a technicity that might orient the process in ways previously unimaginable. While there was a definite moment of aesthetico-political intervention (May 1–7, 2009), the emphasis of these techniques concerned both the specificity of the local events and what could be generated over time that might continue to feed a growing political process. Because the force of technicity is not measurable, there can be no “result” to such an event. How thoughts continue to resonate, how aesthetico-political practices created for local constituencies continue to evolve both actually and virtually—these are questions of technicity, and as such they remain open. What can be said with certainty is that it is possible to create an environment that tends to the political in creative and unforeseen ways, and it is possible for techniques to breed into technicities that far outlive their local enunciations. Collective individuation in the realm of the aesthetico-political takes careful crafting, but it can have important effects on the field of the political. Paired with the careful crafting of technique, improvisation can play an important role as an emergent procedure for the creation of new associated milieus of relation, milieus that subvert the linear time of if-then. What improvisation can do is texture technique to flesh out its potential. It does so by making “if ” an open question, a time-loop, a folding proposition for the moving. From habit to invention, from technique to improvisation, the form becomes a folding-through of time in the making. The time of the if Dancing the Virtual 37

becomes an if . . . if . . . that lands only long enough to transduce, to ingather the potential of the coming individuation toward the force of its already passing future becoming. Technique remains here as the tool for the crafting of the movement’s excessive share, of the more-than of form it continuously leaves behind. At this juncture of invention, technique, improvisation, and technicity are at close quarters—each builds on the other. In the SenseLab’s Society of Molecules, the technique may have been to collectively make a relational soup. And perhaps the decision was to follow conventions and buy vegetables at the market to actually make a soup. But once at the market there may be the sense that the newly formed group (molecule + emissary) is somehow already in the process of crafting this relational intervention. Perhaps it’s best not to cut this process by going home and beginning to cook? Perhaps a picnic on the sidewalk is a better option? And then, in retrospect, perhaps the relational soup wasn’t even the picnic but the movement improvisation that momentarily came to life in the market-gathering? Perhaps the recipe is not a meal at all but an urban intervention? The point is that this intervention did not come out of nowhere. The technique was the spark that set it into motion. Improvisation then opened the movement to what it could become, unmoored. If the event was successful, it will have generated a more-than of its technique. This will have been its technicity. It’s not about designing the “never experienced before” but about creating an opening within the event for the outdoing of form. This involves a process of folding-through that activates a resonant fielding of different layers of dimensionalizing already in potentia. There is no reproducibility of technicity—it can never be generalized. Techniques, on the other hand, must to some degree be replicable—this very capacity for reproduction is what gives them their rigor. Now think this in terms of a dancing body and consider José Gil’s concept of overarticulation, which can be defined at the felt experience of the form outdoing itself. In rehearsal, William Forsythe asks his dancers to think about “what it was about the position that made it motion?”5 Overarticulation is one way the technicity of movement-moving—movement beyond position—makes itself felt. The dancing body overarticulates not by bringing content to form or form to content, but by foregrounding the virtual share of technicity coursing through and across its movements in the making. Overarticulation is steeped in technique, but to make itself felt it can38 interlude

not remain on the stratum of the technical. Forsythe calls it “looking for a chain of sensations rather than a chain of positions.” Without ever referring to overarticulation as such, Forsythe speaks of refraining from “holding the sensation hostage to your expertise,” of making the experiential felt: “you’re dancing in order to have sensations—you’re looking for where that sensation is in your whole spectrum of dancing.” Dance from the vectors of position where position is already becoming motion, ask “how you might get the most from that closed set of permissible positions: how can I take that movement as far as it can go?”6 Overarticulation is the surging forth of the potential of a movement’s unfolding. It is the post of its preacceleration. It is the excess of the displacement, the making-felt of the expressive micromovements that populate all movements in the making. Think of the spiral as an example. A spiral as such cannot be danced. It is more duration than form. To spiral is to dance the future of a movement spiraling, to dance the overarticulation of the present passing. Each spiraling thus touches on the force of technicity, a technicity that can be amplified by emphasizing this tendency and composing with it. Take the spiral, diagonalize and torque it, “follow the curves of the body—send the curve out from the hip to the arm raising and curving overhead, and note the hip is still moving when the arm is finished. Note the feeling of cross-attenuation (tendu)—find the cross patterns of the stretch—go for the feeling of the skin, the skin will tell you how to do it. Now add rotation: like an octopus who can do ballet.”7 Seek not to locate the body in the afterposition of its having spiralingly diagonalized: feel its octopus. Dwell in the octopus and move it, leaving even this multiplying bodying-form behind. Move and exfoliate, as José Gil would say (1985).8 The virtual share of movement—its technicity, its overarticulation—is not added on to the spiraling body. Technicity is made tangible by the felt experience of duration within the movement itself. When a movement becomes habitual, its durational force is backgrounded to make space for its capitalizable economy in the time of the now. Get to the bus stop, to the coffee shop, to the store. Endpoint is everything. Everyday movements are reduced, compacted, overarticulations muted by overarching directionality and predimensionalizing. A dancing body, on the other hand, learns to stretch out the force of duration, to express incipience, making palpable the force of form that is movement’s procedural intensity. In the dancing, movement actualizes at the very limit of this intensity, making felt the activation of its in-formation as event. Dancing the Virtual 39

To have moved is to have overarticulated in germ. Dancing is simply one example that brings to the fore the technicity of the body’s overarticulating potential. To dance the virtual is to move while keeping alive the intervals that are the very compositions of an overarticulation that cannot be recognized or reproduced as such but that will feed every subsequent movement. Its mantra is “Already go to what you think is the limit, and then go further.”9 Overarticulation, as the vibratory resonance of movement’s excess—the felt surplus of its actualization—creates a field for durational movement that coexists with the timed event of movement-moving. The more precise the technicity, the more complex the field movement leaves behind and casts forth. Technicity embeds margins of indetermination across systems of technique, activating the associated milieu of emergence itself. It is the practice that invents at the very edges of composition where the composition seems to have already come to its limit. To dance the virtual is to have been overarticulated as a mutating ecology that continuously moves beyond position. To dance the virtual is to have straddled the interval between technique and technicity, to have danced the immanent futurity of movement in the making.

40 interlude

thrEE

Waltzing the Limit

The scene returns three times. In hues of amber and gray-black, three animated figures emerge from the sea.1 We see the first figure from behind, a standing naked male body holding a gun, walking out of the water toward an amber-gray shelled-out cityscape. Two more figures lie on their backs in the water. Then the face, a face that will haunt us with its detached familiarity, fills the screen, looking off slightly to the right. A body framed by water, rippling black-amber, rises, shells brightening the amber-hued night sky (see figure 1). The image pulls back, the cityscape now framed by two feet peeking out of the water. And then we are close once more, facing the rising bodies, accompanying them as they walk out of the sea toward the city. Two bodies, and finally a third, have now made their way out of the water. Bombs fall on the scene of destruction but we don’t hear them, the audioscape carried by the music that will haunt this scene, and with it, the film from beginning to end. In amber light we watch the bodies dress. The tone shifting from amber to gray, we accompany their climb into the city, where, still fastening their clothing, they weave into the streets, streets with posters of Bashir’s face, streets full of mute, anguished women, women whose voices we won’t hear until the very last scene. And then, as the camera turns, turning its back on the women, we are faced, again and once more, with the face, a full-screen close-up of the soldier’s impassive face.2 Twice more we will see the stark amber sky and the soldiers dressing, but never again will we see this scene from beginning to end. And yet, as we watch it, we will feel as though it repeats itself frame for frame: each

1. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

time we will once more have the experience of following the soldiers walking up the stairs into the city, under the posters of Bashir, into the crowds of mourning women, a repetition framed, always, by the face. The repeated scene of the bodies rising out of the water begins as a promise: it looks like a flashback. As with all flashbacks, we are lulled into the feeling that there will be a denouement, that the scene will grow into its content rather than withdraw, again and again, into the expressionless face. Coming as it does soon after the first scene—the dreamscape of ambergray-black dogs barking, of violence on the cusp of playing itself out, the city caught in a web of fear—we assume that this scene of bodies emerging from water will hold the key to the missing facts that memory holds at bay. We are almost certain the scene will provide the clues to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, that the rising bodies moving into the amber-gray night of war will let us know how the repressed returns.3 But the repressed does not return.4 We are witnesses not to the victims of truths now uncovered, but to sheets of experience exposing at once the singular horror of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the impossibility of containing it within an explanatory narrative. What returns is not the past but the future, the ineffable more-than. And toward this future is the figure of the face, the face we can never fall into, the face that resists affective recognition, the face that leads us incessantly across, onto the surface of an imagescape that folds, twists, undoes and re- creates itself at the complex intersection where life-living comes to expression. 42 chaPtEr thrEE

Despite how haunted we are by the face and its reappearance—especially when we realize that it is the face of Ari Folman, the soldier, filmmaker, memory- driver of the film—the face never sticks. The face does not produce the interiority for the film, does not become the center as the affective image around which the narration turns. It appears and disappears, remaining flat, an impersonal surface that marks the passage from now to now, from singularity to singularity, in a deferred rhythm without preconceived connection, without attachment to time-as-such, without territorializing on a “personal” body. The face resists catharsis.5 Yet, at first we cannot know this, and so we are almost certain the scene of the rising bodies will provide the clues to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, that the face staring into the amber-gray night of war will let us know how the repressed returns. What we find instead is that we are witnesses to what Deleuze calls “the power of the false,” that which “replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts” (1989, 131). The manyness of expressibility in all of its entangled unfoldings is what is at stake here. This is why, despite appearances to the contrary, it is soon revealed that this is not a film “about” the Sabra and Shatila massacre, not a film that attempts to “return” to the past to resolve the massacre’s fascistic unfolding. It is a film, rather, that surfaces the complexity of time to make felt what cannot be straightforwardly resolved, a film that asks experience in the making to encounter its own uneasiness, its own ineffability in the face of the incompossibility of truth. Waltz with Bashir (2008) is an animated film about living memory, about life’s opening onto memory as forgetting, about the impossibility of memory’s causal narration, about the ineffability of violence’s containment within the frame. It is a drama of amber and gray-black that leaks onto all memory-surfaces, until it ends, finally, on the blues and grays of archival documentation with one startling image of orange, a dead girl’s body on the sandy road of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. Waltz with Bashir is a film replete with singularities that do not add up, that cross over into sheets of experience that cannot ever manage to tell the whole story, once and for all, the story of how memory and war coincide.

waltzing thE liMit  43

The Face Waltz with Bashir is about how the virtual plane—what Deleuze (1990) calls the metaphysical surface—of the film brings life back not as a human face, not as a past converted into a present, but as a movement across. By presenting the face in its withdrawing from the imagescape, Waltz with Bashir creates a tight circuit between what presents itself and what remains virtual, returning us to the image’s own movement, to the affective tonality of the imagescape’s haunting amber-black-gray, creating an opening for what Deleuze calls a life, the barely active stirrings of life at the limit. To bring a life to the fore, the human face must remain deterritorialized, collective: when territorialized on a “personal” body of the individual, the face too strongly proposes a territory, an interiority. In Waltz with Bashir, the face that returns, the impassive face of the soldier/filmmaker, is felt as the surface of its own collectively transient becoming. It does not overcome. It is a life, affective resonance in the intensive passage between surfaces of experience. A life, Deleuze reminds us, happens not through transcendence but on the transcendental field itself. “Whenever immanence is attributed to subject and object, which themselves fall outside the plane [of immanence], the subject being taken as universal, and the object as any object whatsoever, we witness a denaturing of the transcendental. . . . And we witness a distortion of immanence, which is now contained in the transcendent” (2007, 389). A life is immanence felt in the stirrings of actualization. Force of potential, force of life. The characters in Waltz with Bashir are faces, but faces as flat surfaces, as markers for the force of fabulation, a telling poised at the limit of articulation, a telling, as one character explains, of a past “not in my system.” Fabulation is about the event, the event of time: fabulation is not the telling of a narrative in the form of the “what was,” but the expression of “the act of legending.” This act creates not a truth but an opening onto the aberrant movement of time where the surface of the film itself begins to “fiction,” to “legend” or fabulate, where the character (the surface) begins to “fabulate without ever being fictional” and where the filmmaker cannot but “‘intercede himself ’ from the real characters who wholly replace his own fiction through their own fabulations” (Deleuze 1989, 150; translation modified). What emerges via the face in Waltz with Bashir are stories fabulating themselves, creating themselves in the merging of events that do not constitute a clear continuity, events replete with fantasy and dream, reconstruction 44 chaPtEr thrEE

and confusion.6 “Do you recognize this picture?” the filmmaker asks. “No,” the impassive face responds. “Was I always there?” he asks another. “Yes.” The impassivity of the faces of the characters as they relay their selective memories tinged with forgetting invites a moving-across into the texture of memory itself. The telling does not sink into the myth of an attainable past. It moves through events in the making, creating a collective surface for the telling. In the fabulation that ensues, the face resists empathy at any personal, individual level. For the face here is not the locus of human expression. The face is the metaphysical surface through which events pass. The movement of the events of the film bubbles at its impassive surface, inviting us to move across into the collective event that is the imagescape itself. We cannot get inside the faces, so we move across their surfaces into the texture of the becoming-image, the becoming-image of a forgetting that is all but a past uncovered. Shards of meaning coincide, but no ultimate meaning is revealed. Waltz with Bashir is a web of futures in the making more than a depth of remembrance, once and for all. What we see is not the past bubbling to the surface but life itself active in the immanence of the future-arising, a life on the verge of appearance at the very intersection where immanence transcends itself and merges with the actuality of the ineffable. A life is how the drama of the political expresses itself in Waltz with Bashir. It is Nietzsche’s (1967, 157) “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” and Massumi’s (2010a, 2011b) “bare activity.” It is the force of agitation that pushes the virtual to the limit, the dark precursor that propels the doubling of transcendence and immanence into the pure experience of the now.7 It is the activity of the metaphysical surface, and, as such, it is the force of expression of the transcendental field. The concept of the transcendental field radically challenges standard notions of transcendence. Where transcendence relies on the alreadyexistent platform of spacetimes of experience in order to overcome them, the transcendental field is a preindividual topological surface that spurs aberrant movements out of which spacetimes are created anew, aberrant because there can never be a preimposed path for how life can and will emerge.8 A transcendental field can never be known as such. But it can be felt through the singular series—the lives—that bring it momentarily into appearance: “Singularities are the real transcendent events, and Ferlinghetti calls them ‘the fourth person singular.’ . . . Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and preindividual singularities, waltzing thE liMit  45

opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental” (Deleuze 1990, 103). Waltz with Bashir’s relentless imagescape of amber-gray-black steers us into an uneasy realm. It does not give us anything to hold onto. It pushes us across. It forces us to think, as Deleuze would say, pushing thought to the beyond where it is no longer about content but about the creation of movements of thought. Thought in its bare activity, thought at the cusp where it merges with feeling. Forcing thought to its limit where the thinking and the feeling are one, Waltz with Bashir activates a protopolitics that merges, uncertainly, with the politics the film can never get beyond, pushing the political to its limit, a limit from which it returns—if it returns—as the dramatic image of its own bare activity, broken into shards of light, amber-gray. There is no face to latch onto, no expression to empathize with, and so we keep moving. Waltz with Bashir proposes more than it provides, offering affective tonality before content, providing color and force of form before it gives us a figure, a body as such. Waltz with Bashir thus propels us across the infrahuman topological surface of the image, forcing us to think not simply what but how—what surfaces is also how it surfaces. What—as allied to Being—is the question of transcendence, the question of interiority and depth, while how—as allied to process, or becoming—is the question of the transcendental field. There are no questions that cannot be dangerous in their own right, that are protected from returning to habits of thought, but there are few starting points as lethal as the totalitarianism of Being: “I” is a habit, and where it leads is toward the supremacy of the human.9 Being and the human-as-supreme cannot be disengaged, and with the human at the center, the frame is unequivocably in place for the eclipsing of the complexity of other ecologies, of other surfaces of experience. Foregrounding the metaphysical surface as the how of experience in the making opens the way for a different proposition. For how does not delimit a field according to preexisting parameters: it opens it to its outside, to the outside as it curves back in on the topological surface that never quite contains it. How brings us back to the protopolitical and the dark precursor that is its movement of thought, to politics at the very cusp of its appearance, at the bare edge of its agitation. How does not guarantee against the return of fascism or the microfascist tendencies the political can and does call forth. But it at least offers an opening onto the potential of a forking, onto a life welling at the winding surface that is the singular limit between now and now.10 46 chaPtEr thrEE

The Ineffable And, to the physics of surfaces a metaphysical surface necessarily corresponds. Metaphysical surface (transcendental field) is the name that will be given to the frontier established, on the one hand, between bodies taken together as a whole and inside the limits which envelop them. And on the other, propositions in general. This frontier implies, as we shall see, certain properties of sound in relation to the surface, making possible thereby a distinct distribution of language and bodies, or of the corporeal depth and the sonorous continuum. In all these respects, the surface is the transcendental field itself, and the locus of sense and expression. (Deleuze 1990, 125)

The transcendental field filters into experience as the virtual agitation of life welling. It is not yet delineated into subject or object: it moves intensively across, preindividually, aberrantly creating remarkable points that emerge, eventually, as the subjects and objects of the next now. It resonates with these singular events of becoming, propelling series into actualities that carry with them the germ of its intensive surface. The transcendental field in Waltz with Bashir expresses itself as the emergent surface that is the repeated and varied contrast of amber-gray-black. This contrast is felt as a field of resonance where color becomes sonorous continuum—its surface the rhythm for the seeing-hearing of a life coursing through. While the amber-gray-black returns, always, in moments of recollection, it is not the content of the scenes that feeds forward from the transcendental field but the quality, the rhythm, the resonance, of the imagescape itself. The imagescape pulses through, pushing forward and across, moving us with it, resonating with the unseen, the ineffable, the forgetting at the heart of memory, the forgetting at whose limit life begins to bubble to the surface. Never conscious of itself, the transcendental field is the qualitative duration of the without-me of relation, of life-living. Radically empirical, it emerges, barely, at the interval of feeling and felt. When we feel it, what we feel is the cut of the interval, the between of its singular appearance here and now. In Waltz with Bashir we feel this quality of the active interstice in the intensive surfacing of amber-gray-black, we feel it in the resonant field created by the contrast of the bright and the dull, we feel it as the intersection where the impossibility of strategically coupling then and now expresses itself. Throughout Waltz with Bashir, we are never really out of this interval— waltzing thE liMit  47

we never rest in the amber-gray-black. Its stark contrast moves us each time anew, reminding us that the past cannot be doubled onto the present, that what emerges appears in the multiple now of life in the making, of life fabulating. Sheets of the present move at various rhythms, creating different sonorous continuums and affective tonalities, and with them come different resonant fields. Take the scene between the filmmaker and Ori, the friendtherapist.11 In stark departure from the gray-amber-black tones of the earlier scenes of the film, this scene, in which Ori describes a memory experiment, is in greens and pinks. The experiment is as follows: people are shown pictures from their childhood. They figure as children in these pictures and the events are real—they actually happened. Then, the experimenters give them a false image. This image still has them as the protagonist but the environment is invented. They were never really there. As Ori relates the experiment to the filmmaker, the scene shifts to a child in an amusement park, the child like a cutout in a field of clowns and Ferris wheels, all this in bright candy colors (figure 2). This is one such “not really real” image: the amusement park is not one the child ever actually visited. Eighty percent of the people who take this experiment, Ori explains, claim to have really been there when they see themselves in the picture. The remaining 20 percent—those who are unsure of whether they were really there—are invited to go home and think about it. When they return, and upon seeing the picture of “themselves” in the amusement park once again, they “remember” the amusement park. As Ori says, “memory is dynamic, it’s alive.” This scene briefly takes us “out” of the story of war. An aside on memory, it feels like a film within the film. We relax in the assumption that we are pausing outside the atrocities of war while we are being taught a lesson about the slippery quality of memory so that when we return to the “real” film, we will expect less from the “truth” of recollection. But just when we are certain that this is simply an academic exercise into the inevitability of memory’s failures, and that this scene is cast apart from the real events of the film, the scene itself begins to fabulate: a washed- out version of the amusement park scene briefly becomes the backdrop to Ori and the filmmaker’s conversation, the Ferris wheel and the hot air balloon appearing in the window behind the filmmaker’s back (figure 3). The amusement park has made its way onto the surface of the now, into the story of how war and memory can never strictly coincide. Memory has already begun working its

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2. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

3. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

sly tricks. The force of fabulation has once more infiltrated the transcendental field of the film. This short washed- out amusement park scene haunts the film. We see it, but they don’t—the filmmaker and Ori continue to speak about memory as though nothing had happened, as though their discussion hadn’t already changed the imagescape’s course. The appearance of the amusement park behind the filmmaker’s shoulder cuts into the past/future circuit he is working so desperately to unravel, bringing a new surface to a com-

waltzing thE liMit  49

plex topological field of recollections of the forgotten past and dreams of the unimagined future. And then, a few seconds later, the semblance of the amusement park gives way once more to the dreary backdrop of an outside garden, things back “as they should be.” This instance of memory’s intrusion into the future-present will continue to resonate at the edges of the film’s metaphysical surface. But, like the dogs of the first amber-gray-black scene, it never returns as such. Never again do we even see its colours—the bright pinks and greens of the clowns and the balloons. Nonetheless, this scene has altered the field, multiplying time’s supposed linearity. “[T]here is no other crime than time itself,” writes Deleuze (1989, 37). The amusement park image marks time/memory as aberrant movement. “What aberrant movement reveals is time as everything, as ‘infinite opening,’ as anteriority over all normal movement” (37). The transcendental field does not transcend time. It fields time’s creation in the event. To transcend time would be to posit linear time in order to redraw time’s passage as an inside and outside of experience that moves seamlessly from past to present to future. This would assume an omnipresent (human) body, documenting, remembering, orchestrating, witnessing. This is transcendence, operative always on the molar stratum of experience where life appears as predefined. The metaphysical surface, on the other hand, has no preconstituted spacetime. It has virtual circuits, impossible flows, ineffable becomings, washouts, active always on the molecular stratum where life is still in the making. Events as they come to expression merge with this metaphysical surface in infinitely dynamic ways. Dynamic events are full of holes, or better, of folds. They propel subjects and objects into the world, but they are not presupposed by them. Actively emergent from the transcendental field of experience, events do not create form once and for all, they create openings for the force of a taking-form. This is memory: the dynamic force of life-living in the uneasy forming. Transcendence builds memory from without, feeding the past “fullyformed” into the container of the present. To transcend spacetime is to move outside spacetime to force a mode of life on living. Transcendence cleaves morally, separating fields of experience into representations of good and evil. It is a back-gridding procedure that creates a totality, a totalitarian, tautological experience.12 The transcendental field, by contrast, has no direction except toward the event,and no form in itself—it folds into the event forming.

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Desiring Surfaces Let’s return to the first scene of the film. The only dream in the film, this first scene is strangely disconnected from every other event, and yet its surface quality imbues all future imagescapes. This scene creates the mood of the film, its contrast, color, and affective tone. For two minutes we move to the threatening rhythm of twenty-six dogs, their growls and panting in tandem with the synthesized sound of drums mixed with aggressive barking, the image finally centering on an amber sky, a gray building, a lone, distant face at a window looking out onto the street.13 Moving alongside the dogs, our gait is one of horizontality, a threatening movement across, relentless, from now to now to now.14 Never is there a clear sense of the status of this now. The now is always moving. The movement is before, behind, and across, and we move with it, horizontalizing the topological surface of pure experience. The dogs surround us on this horizontalizing plane even as we move with them, following them in their fight to the death. In this terrifying moving surround, we see amber eyes as placeholders of certain versions of events; we experience the mobilization of discrete singularities, and yet nothing stays still as we at once participate in and fear the mobile surface, the abstract surface of the amber-gray-black that continuously moves across (see figure 4).15 As the opening scene gives way to future amber-gray-black scenes of memory and forgetting, we become somewhat distanced from the horror of the dogs. But the dogs have set the tone and we cannot but feel that, in the end, there is no distance, no break in the movement-across, only the semblance of a strange, detached calm.16 This uneasy movement between surfacings, topological and horizontal, between affective tonalities, lull and anguish, between calm and agitation, terror and beauty, is active, always, in the contrast, amber-gray-black. The amber-gray-black is a backdrop that is never strictly a background, forcing the viewer into a continued seeing-feeling across strata: we are drawn into a backgrounding-foregrounding resonance, we are lulled by the warmth of the amber but cannot tear ourselves away from the nightmare of the inky black, the threatening night sky, the destroyed world of gray asphalt. And so with each return of the amber-gray-black, a version of the dogs returns, their eyes amber, their fur gray, the sky amber, the streets gray, their sound amber-gray-black, the sonorous continuum resonant on the mobile surface of the imagescape. waltzing thE liMit  51

4. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

The amber-gray-black is the fourth person singular, as Ferlinghetti calls it. It is the desiring machine that moves us across the surface of the image, not so much feeding the narrative as fuelling the intensive absence of a linear reminiscence. It promises no mimicry of itself, no representation, no absolute recognition, no ultimate tying of loose ends. It keeps us poised at the limit, that edge where terror haunts the image. This edge is never transcended. It remains the affective tonality of what cannot be expressed: the transcendental field of a micropolitics in the making. The fourth person singular is not “I.” It is a desiring machine that cuts across: “desire, by its very nature, always has the tendency to ‘leave the subject’ and to drift” (Guattari 1977a, 49; my translation). A desiring machine is a machine in the sense that it cuts, assembles, produces. It creates desire, and more desire, pushing the surface to the limits of its desiring potential. In Waltz with Bashir the desiring machine of the film creates an opening for transversal linkages without giving the fabulation moral standing, for desiring machines are “machinic montages that bring into conjunctions semiotic chains and an intercrossing of material and social fluxes” (Guattari 1977a, 54; my translation), never situating them strictly on the side of good or evil. Desiring machines only propel: they promise nothing. They create openings, intervals, fluxes of potential relation. They propose. They risk. And they move. The fourth person singular is the protagonist of Waltz with Bashir, a protagonist that flirts with microfascisms of pure reminiscence as much as 52 chaPtEr thrEE

with the impossibility of activating the past in the present, a protagonist that cannot be resolved or recognized as such. Like all topological surfaces, the fourth person singular does not promise resolution. It desires folds. It assembles singularities. It is nomadic. “What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness” (Deleuze 1990, 102). The dogs are an example of a desiring machine. They are a multiplicity that moves across experience in the making. They drive the film: they are relentless impetus, movement-across at the topological surface of memory and dreams. As such, they are markers, remarkable points not for the transcendence of the past—the unraveling of memory, the locating of its source—but for the future anterior, the becoming of the “it was” of the “not yet.” They are desiring machines for a potential to come. We never know what they can do. Waltz with Bashir thus begins off-kilter, the amber-gray of the dogs moving into the ineffable event of memory’s desire. Memory crashes along the surface. It gallops, its claws scratching into the dark gray parchment to reveal not the surface’s depth but its present scarring. Yet memory can create new forms. The metastable quality of its movement-across is replete with its urge for transcendence. Desire can go both ways. This is the danger: that memory will fight to the death for recognition of itself as pure past, that it will create its own vortex of transcendence, that it will seek the hole of putrid history, creating new microfascisms in the making with the frenzy of vicious dogs out for revenge. This is totalitarianism at work. It stops thought.17 Anything that flirts with transcendence risks totalitarianism. And while fascism and totalitarianism do not strictly collude, fascism is seduced by the aura of transcendent truth that is situated in the myth of a past, fully formed. Fascism produces singularities that retell stories of belonging, that create regressive attachments. It tells dark stories as though they happened in the light of day and repeats these stories, creating doctrines from them. Fascism predicts the ending and moves toward it, suicidally. The quest is regressively circular. The search for the past that never was cannot but create the self- destruction of presents in the making. Waltz with Bashir flirts with each of these tendencies but in the end I think it resists them. Uneasily, out waltzing thE liMit  53

of joint, it proposes something quite different from the microfascisms that lure it: an uncertain field, a memory that leads nowhere but to its dynamic futurity.18 At the Limit: Folding Surfaces “The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit” (Simondon qtd. in Deleuze 1990, 104). The impassive face that culminates the scene of the men rising out of the water marks a limit. This limit is not a boundary. It is a cleavage, an interval that opens back onto the surface of the film’s imagescape. The face that creates no interiority haunts this surface. Because we cannot hold onto this surface, because its affect does not easily translate to emotion, into a circumscribed entity, enveloping recognition into itself, because we cannot sink into it, we instead feel-with its resonant contrast, its backgrounding-foregrounding, its movement-with the limit of memory expressing itself not as content but as tonality. We feel not for the life of this human body, but for the force that cuts across it, for a life, the burgeoning of activity across surfaces of life-living. We don’t feel empathy.19 For the impassive face calls forth a protopolitics not of personal identification but of co- constitution where what is staged is less a face-to-face encounter than an encounter with the beyond of the face, a beyond that calls everything into question including the place of the human in experience. A life is not strictly of the human. A life is not interiority. It is pure surface. It cannot be lived as such. It moves across, its volumetric surface folding. It is pure experience, pure opening onto potential. It promises nothing. A life is felt in Waltz with Bashir as the activity of memory’s deformation in the event’s coming to itself. It is wholly impersonal, yet singular. The dogs move through it but never come to rest in it. “It’s a haecceity, that is no longer individuation, but singularization: life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject that was incarnated in its midst made it good or bad” (Deleuze 1990, 361). Absolute movement. Aberrant movement. “The entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living . . . to belong to interiority does not mean only to be ‘be inside’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit. . . . At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another” (Simondon qtd. in Deleuze 1990, 104). Aberrant because it does not evolve in any linear sense. It changes. The surface senses not the past but its presenting, its making future of the in54 chaPtEr thrEE

terior/exterior fold, the expression of its limit as singularity. “Singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field as topological events to which no direction is attached” (Deleuze 1990, 104). How singularities resolve into the present-passing has to do with the interval between memory and forgetting, “the memorandum which is at the same time afflicted with an essential forgetting, in accordance with that law of transcendental exercise which insists that what can only be recalled should also be empirically impossible to recall” (Deleuze 1994, 140). The problem: “solutions are engendered at precisely the same time that the problem determines itself ” (Deleuze 1990, 121). Waltz with Bashir takes us far away from empirical memory. It creates memories out of lived relations, in the relation itself. Radically empirical, memory in Waltz with Bashir moves with the forgetting that is essential for the creation of a problem worth having, a problem that forces thought to the surface, across the surface. Between the Scenes Between the scenes, in the stark contrast of nows, Waltz with Bashir introduces a serial interlude: a music video. In each case, music overlays the scene, a scene imbued with paradoxes of and in time. The first of these “music videos” takes place on the “love boat”: “Then the war started and they put us on that damned ‘loveboat,’” Carmi recalls. oMD play and we are transported into the ’80s with the reminiscent tune of “Enola Gay.”23 We watch as men dance on the boat, drinking. The scene happens in a beyond of description, images unfolding without explanation for forty-five seconds. Forty-five seconds to pan in from a remote distance to a close-up of the partying on the boat. Forty-five seconds until the love boat explodes and the water turns from black to red. Forty-five seconds until Carmi speaks again: “I saw my best friends go up in flames before my eyes.” But even as we hear the voice and we see the red water, even as we attempt to situate ourselves in the between of the living room in Holland where the discussion takes place and the capsizing boat, what we actually feel is not the explosion. We feel a strange sonorous blue quiet: we watch Carmi being taken away from the scene onto the body of an immense blue water-woman, we watch as they drift together away from the love boat, their coupled bodies as blue as the blue water, the blue sky, the blue boat. And it is from this vantage point, from Carmi’s perspective, lying on the woman’s larger-than-life swimming body, that we see the exploding boat at last, that we see war planes drop waltzing thE liMit  55

bombs, as though for the second time. And it is through his eyes (his head turned away from us) that we watch what at first we only heard, the scene turning blood-orange, bodies, boat, ocean colored by the event. With the world once more turned amber, we watch with him, his face resting on her stomach in the ocean, looking into the distance, impassive. The music videos that appear sporadically in Waltz with Bashir are a mode of accessing the strange interval between remembering and forgetting. We feel this interval sonorously, in a strange betweenness of color and sound, in the discordant rhythm of the feeling-telling. These music videos create an eerie fissure in time, transporting us through sonorous events into the tight circuit of the virtually actual, leading us, as music can, into the affect of a recollection that is also of our own making. Until the voiceover returns—and it always does—we waver in the between that music can call forth, a between that places us fully in the feeling of the past, in the present. In the music video scenes this sonorous continuum overlays the film’s surface, multiplying the strata. The music videos play with audio-vision at the limit where the pure experience of the time- circuit vibrates, inviting us to feel the forgetting as it happens: “Transcendental memory . . . grasps that which from the outset can only be recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past, but the being of the past as such and the past of every time. In this manner, the forgotten thing appears in person to the memory which essentially apprehends it. It does not address memory without addressing the forgetting within memory” (Deleuze 1994, 140). Forgetting is memory’s sonorous continuum, a sonorous continuum created through sheets of repetition—the music video, the amber-gray-black, the bodies rising out of the water—each of which is imbued with a persistent refrain. These are differential refrains that play on repetition with a difference: Bach’s Piano Concerto no. 5 repeats three times, Schubert’s sonata is replayed in different versions throughout the film, the amber-gray-black returns again and again, yet each is interpolated with the surfacing imagescapes such that they are never exactly the same twice. The sonorous continuum resonates in the circuit of time folding in on itself. Memory as forgetting poses a problem that cannot be worked out in a linear fashion, a problem that is not so much its content than its persistent refrain, its persistent difference. The problem of memory is its affect, the way affect resides both here and there, in the play of sensation of time’s shifting surface. To remember we have to forget the what of memory and shift to the how of its strange vibrating surface. To remember, as Nietzsche reminds 56 chaPtEr thrEE

us, we must forget. Otherwise we fall into the clutches of the transcendent traps of nostalgia, guilt, and resentment that is memory’s “what,” memory’s tight grasp on the containment of a unique capsule that promises to move through time unchanged. This is not how Waltz with Bashir plays with memory. Through the music video, Waltz with Bashir brings memory to life in the resonance of the sonorous now of forgetting. It tells a story in sheets of affect, a story that never quite fits together, where events are more like hyperlinks than continuities in linear time. In Waltz with Bashir, to remember is to activate an interval for forgetting that folds across the metaphysical surface at the limit where the future-passing unravels. Memory thus tunes toward actuality, making felt forgetting’s sonorous continuum, “the locus of sense and expression,” sonorous in the sense that it is a direct experience of time as rhythm, a pure rhythmic image of sensation (Deleuze 1990, 125). This limit where forgetting meets the event is where sense “doubles up,” creating “the production of surfaces, their multiplication and their consolidation” (125). If memory is trapped in an air-tight cell of linear narrative, its consolidation will create black holes, traps of depth where resentment colludes with the nostalgia and guilt of the “if only.” In Waltz with Bashir the music video interrupts this tendency, pushing us into forgetting’s divergent strata, distracting us as the amusement park did, feeding the imagescape forward toward more, more-than. Deleuze calls forgetting the “nth power of memory” (1994, 140). Forgetting is how memory expresses itself in the event of the now. Without the nth power, without forgetting as the dark precursor of memory in the making, memory risks falling into transcendence, into the infinitely regressive search for meaning. This brings with it a nihilist will to power that holds to preimposed associations and recognitions, making superficial links between a preconstructed then and now, bridging regression into a linear flow. Such nihilism holds onto the past as though it could be transported fully-formed into the present, as though it could be known as such, and re- creates the present in its image. Then, it polices this image, holding it to its unchanging self. The Being of the what. The music video in Waltz with Bashir subverts this tendency. The love boat fades into the impossibility of remembering, drifting into the amber-gray foreground of the ineffable as it moves across the shifting surface of the future-passing. The second music video begins with a man walking onto the beach holding a gun. Looking straight at the camera, the sun rising, the soldier takes waltzing thE liMit  57

his gun and uses it to play air guitar to the tune of Cake’s “Beirut,” the words altered from its original “I Bombed Korea.”21 This scene as it unfolds is a provocative replay of the beginning of Apocalypse Now. In this, the most obvious of the music video series, the no-time of military downtime is foregrounded, making the crystal of time felt, riffing as it does on the unassignable limit where the virtual and the actual coincide, “each playing the role of the other” (Deleuze 2007, 149; translation modified). We are thirtysix minutes into the film and have just taken part in the telling of an event replete with the terror of war and watched as a lone soldier swims to safety under the threat of air raids. “I didn’t do enough,” he says. “I wasn’t the hero type who carries weapons and saves everyone’s life.” And after that, music, and the image of planes crashing, boys surfing. No obvious connection to the previous dark black-amber scene of the soldier’s almost- drowning, of the broken soldier who will never have done enough. Instead, blue-green water, gray-yellow sky and sand, plans being made for the massacre of Sabra and Shatila by commanders eating breakfast while talking on the phone, games of beach badminton being played in the distance. “I bombed Sidon today,” the music croons as bombs fall like stars from the sky and a soldier makes sunny-side-up eggs on a hot metal remnant of a bombed- out car. Half-naked men surf. “I almost went home in a coffin,” the music continues, the soldiers’ arms raised up in a dance of victory or renunciation as they run into the star-studded sky. And then, as quickly as it emerged, the music video fades back into the piecing together of forgetting, back to the voiceover and the impassive face. The surface moves again. The next music video is of a completely different order. It is subtle and graceful, with Bach’s Concerto no. 5 overlaying a surreal scene of soldiers walking in slow motion through a forest, their fatigues melding into the dappled green of the leaves, their faces impassive in a tense atmosphere of fear. Juxtaposed to the previous music video of macho images of men surfing and killing to rock music, this music video plays on the uneasy silence where beauty and terror coincide. For one minute, we watch as soldiers move very slowly, their guns poised, their bodies tense, while in the background, juxtaposed to the slowness of the soldiers’ movement, we catch a quick glimpse of two children crouching under trees, running from one hideout to another, looking for the perfect aim. And then, still in slow motion, one of the children launches a missile and we watch as it moves slowly, slowly, through the two straight lines of soldiers walking toward us, targeting the tank behind them. The missile inches in flight between them, Bach’s 58 chaPtEr thrEE

5. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

concerto playing uninterrupted, the missile’s sudden hit causing the soldiers to fall forward in a collective choreography of bodies lowering, their faces still impassive (see figure 5). Then, in unison, the soldiers raise their faces and continue to move forward, crouching along the ground, crawling off into the distance.22 This music video is yet another fissure in the surface of the film, the transcendental field now imbued with a new sense of danger—the danger of the unthinkable limit between silence, beauty, and death as it moves not in the soldiers’ individual bodies but across the shifting surfaces of their collective becoming-body. Despite appearances, this is not an aestheticization of death, not a microfascist tendency to “let art flourish—and the world pass away” (Benjamin 2002 [1936], 122).23 For such an aestheticization would privilege the individual, the One. Death is everywhere here, but in the morethan: it is felt in the tense attention of the killing field, in the shadows of the forest becoming cemetery, in the collective becoming-body of the biogrammatic surface of the transcendental field where memory and forgetting, movement and rest, beauty and terror coincide. The music video is not an aestheticization of death but the calling forth of the uncanny between out of which the then-now of experience emerges. It is active in the relation, in the movement of sound and color, its bodying choreographed as collective, its protopolitics felt as the very edge where the terror of war is most ineffable and the memory of its violence most ungraspable. It is in this relation, in the collective movement of the transcendental surface, that the waltzing thE liMit  59

welling of the political at its bare-active limit makes itself felt and becomes thinkable. Becoming-Body Intensity of feeling in Waltz with Bashir emerges on the volumetric surface of the becoming-body, the sensing body in movement, of the film itself. This becoming-body resists the quintessential sensitive surface by refusing to territorialize on the human face, except, perhaps, at the last scene, where the animation gives way to documentary footage. In this amodal field of experience, the becoming-body as surface is its own intensive multiple movement-across. It resists moving into a body, a personalized human body. It remains instead a biogram on the transcendental field’s topological surface. That the film moves between bodies in becoming, shaping the emergence of a life not as body but as biogram,24 does not suggest that it disregards the body. Quite the contrary. The biogram of the film makes Waltz with Bashir all about the body, all about the intensity of life welling. What Waltz with Bashir resists is the subjectification of this body, the stultification of this personal experience as mapped through the recognition of the face as the quintessential affective image. At the limit of the now of events diverging where sense and memory coincide in an active forgetting, the becomingbody is an attractor for the creation of nodes of resonance, of sonorous continuums where a face has not yet congealed. This is why the face in Waltz with Bashir eludes us. It is not yet fully-formed. Until the last scene. The biogram of Waltz with Bashir is a moving of preindividual life across the folds of the surface of experience in the making. The becoming-body as biogram plays at the interstice of individuation and singularity, trembling on the resonant circuit of the virtual/actual now of pure experience, appearing as a tonal difference that pushes the narrative along: the body not as content but as crystal of potential. The biogram constitutes not a unique body, but a body- emergent across series, the force of life that can never return to the body as One. Force of life: where life is not yet individual or person but collective individuation. Here, where the actual and the virtual coincide in a tight circuit, there is no morality, there is only life-living, a life. Morality belongs to the discourse of individualized politics where perpetrators and victims are identified not as bodies in the making but as fully-

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formed nodes of a politics already constituted, a politics that transcends the now of experience. “Bare activity” is the term Brian Massumi gives to the politics-in-germ of the becoming-body. Politics-in-germ bubbles on the preindividual level as the singularly-felt edging into life-living of the body-becoming. Bare activity is not biopower. It is the biogrammatic tendency of an edging into bodyness, of the surface welling into a singularity across series. “Biopower’s ‘field of application’ according to Foucault is a territory, grasped from the angle of its actually providing liveable conditions for an existing biological being. [Bare activity] operates on a proto-territory tensed with a compelling excess of potential which renders it strictly unliveable” (Massumi 2009a, 167). On the edge of the liveable: a life. A life percolates. Unlike some of Waltz with Bashir’s critics, we must not mistake “a life” with the life of the filmmaker, overlaying it with Ari Folman or with a generalized version of the Israeli or the Palestinian body. This is not what churns at the edges of the film. A life is the bare activity of the surface folding, of the background foregrounding. A life pushes through the plane of immanence, always on the verge of appearing, making itself felt, but never “as such.” Beyond good and evil. Protopolitical, preindividual, a life shapes the sensing surface. We are caught by it, but only peripherally, for it has always already moved beyond in a welling of a new proto-territory. It is activation on the edge “at [the] intensive limit of life” (Massumi 2009a, 170). It is the waltz in Waltz with Bashir. The waltz: Two men crouched on the edge of a road in a gray, shelled cityscape fight over a gun in the midst of heavy artillery. Imminent danger all around: soldiers shoot wildly, their anguish palpable. The sky is amber against the gray of the buildings and the dusty asphalt. We see fire in the distance. The soldier rises, the gun he has now managed to get a hold of at his side. We watch, tense, as the soldier moves into the suicidal path of bombs and bullets. The sound of a Chopin waltz playing in the background intensifies. The soldier begins to cross the street to the rhythm of the music in a three-step all the while firing the gun into the air. Five seconds, ten seconds, the image focused on his feet, one-two-three, one-two-three, the bullet casings falling around him as he continues to shoot into the sky. We hear a gunshot whizzing by but the soldier’s seemingly invincible body is the only one the image cares about, the imagescape dancing with him amid the gun-flame amber in the gray-light surround. As the waltz gains in speed,

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the casings continue to pollute the earth around him and the image turns and turns, waltzing with the soldier as the sky darkens, its amber shadows intensifying in step with the image’s focus in on the soldier’s tight circle, one-two-three, one-two-three. Twenty seconds. And then the voiceover returns to address what is happening. But, similarly to the earlier music videos, this scene cannot be explained, cannot be comprehended. And so our attention remains focused on the soldier’s movement, his becoming-body dancing, a life quivering to the surface (see figure 6). As the soldier’s dance comes to an end, the image is taken over by the larger-than-life poster of Bashir’s face, gazing offscreen, pockmarked with bullet holes. We sense a shift: from the micropolitics of the waltz to the macropolitics of everything Bashir represents as the recently elected president, as the murdered Phalangist leader, as the dark precursor to a war already in the making. Bashir’s face, larger than life, takes over the screen until we are looking straight at him, another face that eludes us, that will not look at us. But this is less an impassive face than a face uninterested in us: Bashir’s gaze is turned away, turned to the prelude, perhaps, of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, a massacre we will not fully see, directly connect to, or ever fully comprehend. Sixteen seconds with Bashir’s face looking away, a nonmerging with its extensive surface, the macropolitical surface of the Lebanon war. What is the status of Bashir’s face, filling the screen? How does this face that refuses to face us coincide with the incessant return of the impassive face that looks straight at us? What kind of circuit does Bashir’s face superimposed on the anguished waltz of the mad soldier create? Bashir’s face is not unexpressive, but nor is it engaged. It looks off into a distance that cannot be fathomed—we cannot see what he sees. Here is a proposition: Bashir’s face creates the initial delimitation of a territory.25 This territory is where the massacre will take place: it is a specific place with a date and a history and an aftermath. Bashir gazes toward the macropolitical, his gaze directed toward the transcendent unity that is the State, the unity from which he derives the power to make decisions such as who is included and excluded from the realm of the political. And yet his face is not there—it is here, here in the dance, here in the vertigo where the macro and the micro coincide, where the affective tonality of a life coursing through this life makes itself felt. Bashir’s face marks the passage from the abstract plane of experience 62 chaPtEr thrEE

6. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

where memory and war collide without coinciding (the soldier’s face) to the plane of organization where war proliferates as the actual violence of destruction. The soldier and Bashir’s face: an uneasy pairing of bare activity and representation dancing at the limits where the micro and the macro coincide, at the dangerous limit where the micropolitical potentially territorializes into fascisms in the making.26 For “fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to point. . . . There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 214).27 Waltz with Bashir gives life to the bare activity of the political bubbling to the surface of the transcendental field at the same time that it warns that surfaces are not purveyors of moral truths. In the immensity of Bashir’s face filling the screen and dwarfing the soldier, we sense that protopolitics are always potentially fascist politics, and yet we also feel the uncanny surplus of the waltz’s movement undermining the straightforward narrative of political predetermination. From the waltz to Bashir, from the soldier’s face lost in the reverie of his mad movement to the calm certainty of Bashir’s distant gaze, a political drama is set forth that creates a tight circuit of molecular potentials and micropolitical captures. As Ari Folman was creating Waltz with Bashir, microfascisms were playing themselves out in different ways across political constituencies, as they have a tendency to wherever there is a transcendent capture, be it liberal or neoliberal, conservative or neoconservative. At the liberal edge of the spectrum “we” insist on a politics of recognition based on a benevolent responsibility for the other that builds on dichotomies of inclusion/exclusion, perpetrator/victim, and reifies the human in the name of race, identity, gender. Not necessarily fascism but certainly a tending-toward fascism in the name of a universal figure of the human. As Guattari underscores, the universal as a tendency activates forms of microfascism in the name of desire to have the final word on the moral and the immoral, right and wrong, and this tending toward universalizing is with us, always. “Fascism happened and it never ceases happening. It travels through the finest weaves; it is in constant evolution. It seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy in the heart of each of our desires” (Guattari 1977a, 62; my translation). Fascisms are war machines that fill the holes and gaps of potential, sedimenting the open topological surface of the transcendental field. Fascisms are a strange interplay of rigidity and suppleness—rigid disciplinings that reek of totalitarianism, supple choreographies of surface- cells in the making. Waltz with 64 chaPtEr thrEE

Bashir does not protect us from the microfascist edges of politics. Indeed, it takes us again and again to their limit. What Waltz with Bashir does is refuse to know in advance how the consequences of the undeniable horror of the massacre play out, and where the ongoing fascisms of politics in the making are located. In so doing, it makes felt how fascisms never reign simply on the macropolitical surface of experience—they crawl between, across strata of experience, resurging in forms and forces less obvious than those in the macropolitical realm but no less insidious. This is what Waltz with Bashir does: it complexifies the stakes by resisting the settling of fascism within one or another of the camps; it resists personalizing the political. Go back to the waltz scene, the scene of bullets flying and a soldier dancing, and see once more how the impassive face of Bashir is superimposed onto the agitations of a life. And note how, by superimposing Bashir’s face, enormous and compelling, onto the backdrop of a mad dance of a soldier’s undoing, Waltz with Bashir activates and makes felt the originary difference at the heart of all dephasings. How it makes felt that there is much more at stake than simply one surface of experience. How it makes felt that what surfaces is also how it surfaces. The Drama of the Political For eighty-eight of Waltz with Bashir’s ninety minutes the face remains impassive, resists empathy, undoes recognition. Or it looks away. This is the brilliance of the film, that it waits, creating sheet upon sheet of experience, surface upon surface of feeling, contrast after contrast, dephasing after dephasing, amber-gray-black upon amber-gray-black, pushing us across the limits of the sonorous continuum, before it brings us face to face with the documentary footage of the last two minutes. It is this, the intensive passage between abstraction and recognition merging in the recognizable face of horror, that makes the final scene of the film with the flesh-and-blood face of the wailing Palestinian woman so powerful, so terrible. The final scene leading up to the documentary footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre takes thirty minutes to unfold, beginning with the long, slow, close-up of Bashir’s bullet hole–infested face which frames the dancing soldier’s incessant one-two-three. For thirty minutes a back and forth in time from a lawn in Holland to a couch in Israel. And then, finally, we arrive at the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. When we arrive, the scene is set: fascism beckons. “You know that picwaltzing thE liMit  65

ture from the Warsaw ghetto? The one with the kid holding his hands in the air? That’s just like the long line of women, old people and children looked.” The victims are walking toward us, their bodies black against the amber night sky. We are looking straight toward the child’s face—the child who reminds us of the child from the Warsaw ghetto—his hands up in the air. The child walks slowly toward us, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten seconds, but though we recognize his gesture, his slow walk reaching-toward a memory in the making, we cannot quite see him, we cannot quite make him come to life, to our life. His face remains shadowed by the amber-black. Color-light before face, surface before content. And yet we know the content and it haunts us: we are there, back at the camps, in the fascisms of our memories. We enter the camp, this camp, its surfaces almost completely amber, the air like an amber gauze of sand and light, and we walk behind the women, the women we’ve seen three times before in the scene of the bodies rising from the water, but this time the women are walking away from us, screaming, wailing, clutching their bodies, holding their heads (figure 8). We cannot see their faces (see figure 7). Moving through them, we find ourselves beside their anguish, our pace now a little in advance of their movements. We dread what we are about to see. In the distance we see him, facing them, the soldier-filmmaker, his face filling the screen, his previously impassive face slowly falling apart (figure 9). As we approach, as the face beckons larger and larger, we see that the face is no longer pure surface: it is leaking, breathing, chest heaving up and down, mouth slightly open, eyes roving. We feel the face’s breakdown, the loss of its contours, and through this intensive folding we feel the whole metaphysical surface of the film folding into expression. But it is not expression of content: we do not see what he sees, our backs still to the women. What he sees: the ineffable, the ungraspable, the horror. And then we do see. We see with our own eyes. We see the wailing Palestinian women through the documentary footage taken in 1982. One Palestinian woman’s face fills the screen, growing larger than life, larger even than the space of the frame (figure 10). Then the face moves away from us, into the devastation of the massacre. Now another face looks straight at us, screaming, wailing into the eye of the camera in a language so many of us will never fully comprehend. And in a rush we feel everything, we feel the amplitude of the transcendental surface now active on the surface of life, this life: we feel the terror, the empathy, the guilt, the shame, the horror. Yet 66 chaPtEr thrEE

7–9. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

10. Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, 2008

we feel it not solely in their name, but in the fullness of our taking part. We feel it as our own movement across the surface of the ineffability of experience. This shift from animation to documentary footage shakes our relation to the image. We feel-see the horror. In two minutes, the metaphysical surface of the film has completely shifted. Everything has come undone. But this is not the film’s first undoing. The series of undoings that occur throughout the film keeps the circuit tight between affect and emotion, holding us to the now of experience in the making. These undoings are what keep us from taking the stance of the dispassionate observer, that keep us from falling into our selves. We watch-with, we feel-with the terror of a life fleeting, consumed, subsumed by the horrors of war. And so we become responsible before the event, in the face of it, in its incessant coming-to-act, as Deleuze would say. For what Waltz with Bashir has instantiated with its roving imagescape and its relentless sonorous continuum is emphatically not a responsibility for the event, as though the event could be captured and circumscribed.33 This is not to say that the coupling with fascisms in the making is not always there, at the ready, as are the risks of becoming responsible for, of taking a universalizing stance from beyond the event of a life’s unfolding. The spectre of the boy with his hands raised, the recall of Warsaw, looms large. A rigid segmentarity. But still the film resists, I believe, and it is this resistance that is most haunting. The documentary footage barely lasts one minute, its blues and grays 68 chaPtEr thrEE

pausing in the end on an image of orange, a dead girl’s body, before we are taken back to black screen of the animated film, back to the amber credits, back to the Schubert that has returned more than once, differently each time, activating the sonorous continuum of our experience in the watching. But before the credits, the screen remains black, a blackness that lasts an eternity of twelve seconds. We do not know where we stand.34 The ground trembles with the responsibility before life. We cannot comprehend the imagescape. It washes over us, black, a surface alive with the haunting sonorous continuum of a horror uncharted, a surfacing that now gives time for the re- creation of a circuiting back to each and every amber-gray-black image of the film. We are back, rising out of the water, walking into a city at dawn, terrified and deadened by the difference of repetition. We are back, rising out of the water, dressing on the edge of the sea, holding our hands up in the nightmare of Warsaw, lost in an image that refuses to situate us. Waltz with Bashir resists the resolve of a dogmatic political stance, leaving us instead at the very heart of the drama of the political barely-active. “Everything changes when the dynamisms are posited no longer as schemata of concepts but as dramas of ideas” (Deleuze, 1994, 218). How is the dramatic question. In its departure from the transcendental what, the differential how is what Waltz with Bashir is concerned with. How: how to conceive of relations of force over and above a power structure that puts the individual at the center? Relations of force are relations in their incipiency. They are tendencies in the making. Their will to power is a fight to the death between the metaphysical surface and transcendence. Transcendence often wins, because in the end it is easier to give up on the amber-gray of the face-as-surface, to turn away from the ineffable, to make the individual both the starting point and the endpoint, to background the uncertainty of relations still informing, to place blame, to live in resentment, to be a victim, to be guilty, to be innocent.30 Yet to make the personal political—to opt for transcendence—is to radically underestimate the power of fascism and its unique ability to morph into folds of experience as yet unthought. There is no question: responsibility must be taken, consequences must be faced. The macropolitical cannot be ignored. But the edge, the differential where the molar and the molecular meet is equally vital. For it is here, where the bare-active forces of the political agitate beyond the realm of the personal or the individual, that difference is felt at its most acute. Waltz with Bashir is a political drama whose strength is that it plays itself waltzing thE liMit  69

out at the uneasy intersection of a life effervescing and politics’ potential reterritorialization on the face of fascism.31 Waltz with Bashir refutes an easy solution. There is no promise here, nor even the certainty that it isn’t fascism that rears its ugly head as the film comes to a close. Yet it is also here, it seems to me, in the uncertainty, that the potential looms for something yet to come that has not yet found its name, its face: a politics-in-the-making. In providing us with the opportunity to think the how of protopolitics, Waltz with Bashir calls forth the future, but not a readymade one. An uncertain one. In doing so, it resists territory’s refrain, creating the opportunity for an ongoing conversation across surfaces of war and violence, an ongoing conversation not only about past wars or ongoing massacres, not only about the ineffability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its micro- and macrofascist tendencies, but also about the danger of “new forms of microfascisms: the simmering of familialism, at school, in racism, in ghettos of all kinds” (Guattari 1977, 62; my translation). Waltz with Bashir does this by taking a protopolitical stance: we must be wary of identifying too strongly with the face, for the face is a dangerous proposition—either we recognize it as our own, or we turn away from it in horror.32 The face must remain a topological surface equal to all other surfacings: it must not territorialize too quickly onto an identity, onto an individual, onto the Jew or the Palestinian. Because if it does, we will have positioned ourselves in advance, and we will already have succumbed to the most potentially racist of subject-object positions. Beyond the face is where the politics of the more-than can begin. But we must walk the tightrope carefully, remembering all the while, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, that there are no micropolitical experiments impervious to capture by macropolitical tendencies and vice versa: “everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics” (1987, 213). Beyond the Human On the dangers of macropolitical capture, we can learn, perhaps, from the troubling about-turn of Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethical philosophy is constructed on the ineffability of the face but for whom, as a Zionist Jew, the face of the Palestinian was, in the end, too much to face. Levinas’s ethical philosophy is constructed around the concept of the face-to-face encounter where “the face is present in its refusal to be con70 chaPtEr thrEE

tained” (1961, 194). His ethics underscore the idea that the face cannot be comprehended or encompassed, and he is clear that the face must not be thought as “content”—that it ultimately cannot be grasped or touched as such. The face is always the face of the Other, it is that which underscores “the incomprehensible nature of the presence of the Other” as the first revelation of the absolute difference of the Other, a relation that is “maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity” (1961, 195, 197). So far, the face as Levinas conceptualizes it is very reminiscent of the face in Waltz with Bashir. It refuses to be contained and operates as the topological surface of difference. But where the film significantly diverges from Levinas is in its emphasis on the infrahuman and on the question of response/ responsibility. In Levinas, the absolute alterity of the face, that “puts me in a relation with being,” calls forth a need for a response, and there is no question that this is a response directed at another human (1961, 212). Relations abound and encounters multiply in Waltz with Bashir, but these encounters are between abstract surfaces—face- color, face-sound, facedance, each of them operational in the tight circuit where the virtual and the actual coincide and differential relations play themselves out. Were Waltz with Bashir to demand “a response,” a human-to-human encounter before all else, it would risk falling right back into the transcendence of political pre-positionings. In order to create an opening onto the drama of the political where relations of force are what is at stake, and not individual power, Waltz with Bashir must do everything to avoid making the precomposed, prenarrated body of the human the center of life-living. This is the topic of the conversation that takes place between Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut, and Shlomo Malka in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The discussion begins with the question of response and responsibility, underscoring, as far as I am concerned, the dangers of an ethical philosophy that humanizes experience and seeks to comprehend it in a gesture of recognition of its humanity. Shlomo Malka begins the conversation by quoting a talk of Alain Finkielkraut’s where Finkielkraut says, “We are all split between a feeling of innocence and a feeling of responsibility, both of which are anchored in our traditions and our ordeals. I do not yet know which of the two, innocence or responsibility, we will choose as Jews. But I believe that our decision will determine the meaning that we give to the ordeal of genocide” (Levinas, Finkielkraut, and Malka 1989, 290). Taking this quote as a starting point, Malka asks: “Levinas, you are the waltzing thE liMit  71

philosopher of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?” Levinas responds: “Prior to any act, I am concerned with the Other, and I can never be absolved from this responsibility.” Continuing on the subject of responsibility toward “those ‘who have done nothing,’” and focusing on the concept of an “original responsibility of man for the other person,” Levinas underscores the fact that “my self . . . is never absolved from responsibility toward the Other” (Levinas, Finkielkraut, and Malka 1989, 290–91). Levinas’s statement turns the stakes of the discussion toward the specific question of the Jew and the Palestinian and the responsibility of Zionism in the face of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Is it a responsibility for or a responsibility before? And, can there be any question of innocence? Levinas responds: “in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong” (Levinas, Finkielkraut, and Malka 1989, 294). From the thinker for whom responsibility is always the question of the response elicited by the face of the other yet who claimed that the face must always remain without content, do we not experience here the stark reterritorialization on the face against which Deleuze and Guattari warn in their work on faciality?33 Isn’t the question of responsibility once again a question of whose face? Is it not the face of the other whom we now see as wrong? This is precisely what Waltz with Bashir resists: nowhere in the film is there a reterritorialization on the face of the other. By the time the Palestinian women’s faces appear, it can no longer be a question of territory, the surfaces far too intermeshed. Waltz with Bashir thus resists the two tendencies at play here in the bringing together of ethics and politics: the staging of the politico-ethical solely in the body of the human and its responsibility for the other it faces. Responsibility for reeks of benevolence, a dangerous kind of liberal humanist “generosity” that maintains the other as either victim or perpetrator, keeping the strata rigid. Being responsible before is a different proposition. To be responsible before is to engage at the nonhuman limit of the barely active where a life is restlessly agitating. On the cusp where the surfaces of life-living resonate, on the sonorous continuum of the ineffable, responsibility before means that we cannot already have positioned ourselves, that we are indeed, as Deleuze suggests, sorcerers creating life, and more life.34 72 chaPtEr thrEE

To create more life is to produce difference. It is to resituate memory in the act of the telling that opens life-living to the pure experience of the welling now. “Recollection introduces difference into the present in the sense that recollection constitutes, each subsequent moment, something new” (Deleuze 2004, 45; translation modified). The drama of politics at the heart of Waltz with Bashir is the recursive now, the terrible now of the tense, war-infested street where the soldier erupts from his war-self into a dance, the eerie now of the love boat’s dance exploding into blood-red ocean, the strangely quiescent now of Bach dancing in the forest. This drama of time, in time, is not theatrical. Waltz with Bashir does not represent war or memory or suffering. It does not express it on a stage that is separate from its happening. It lives it, on the very edge of life where life takes on the resonant political drama of a life.

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f our

Propositions for the Verge

A politics without promise, as chapter 3 emphasizes, is a politics in movement. It is a politics in the making, an activist philosophy, as Brian Massumi might say. Activist philosophy is concerned with “coincident differences in manner of activity between which things happen [where] the comingtogether of the differences as such—with no equalization or erasure of their differential—constitutes a formative force” (Massumi 2011b, 5). Activist philosophy is not a politics yet. It is about the force of the political in its activation. Activist philosophy “begins as a principle of co- composition between coincident manners of occurring” and is allied to the claim in Whitehead’s process philosophy and James’s radical empiricism that relation, or the inact of an ecology of experience, precedes form (Massumi 2011b, 5). What is radical about activist philosophy is that it always begins in movement and never stops moving. It is, as I will emphasize throughout this chapter and in the following interlude, more objectile than object, more potential than form. “Neither potential nor activity is object-like. They are more energetic than object-like (provided that no presuppositions are made as to the physicality of ‘energy’ or the modes of causality involved in the energizing of events). For the basic category they suggest is just that: occurrence. Neither object nor subject: event” (Massumi 2011b, 6). This chapter takes on the call of activist philosophy to ask how a choreographic practice challenges the presupposition that movement is secondary to form, subjective or objective. The choreographic, as developed here, is a

technique that assists us in rethinking how a creative process activates conditions for its emergence as event. Whether and how this emergent event ties into a politics in the making is an open question. But one thing is certain: a politics in the making depends on generating a movement constellation that activates a singular modality of encounter. And each such event involves, in some sense, a choreographic practice. It Starts from Any Point Choreograph (v.): to arrange relations between bodies in time and space Choreography (v.): act of framing relations between bodies; “a way of seeing the world” Choreography (n.): result of any of these actions Choreography (n.): a dynamic constellation of any kind, consciously created or not, self- organising or super-imposed Choreography (n.): order observed . . . , exchange of forces; a process that has an observable or observed embodied order Choreograph (v.): to recognize such an order Choreography (v.): act of interfering with or negotiating such an order (Klien, Valk, and Gormley 2008)

While allied to dance, choreography is not dance per se. A cursory exploration of the term on Google Scholar produces hundreds of entries that have little to do with dance—in fact, in the search for the term “choreography,” dance appears in relation to it in a consistent manner only after twentytwo webpages. What I find instead are papers with titles like “Choreography of the Dna Damage Response” (Lisby, Barlow, Burgess, and Rothstein 2004), “Chromosome Choreography: The Meiotic Ballet” (Page and Hawley 2003), “Choreography and Orchestration: A Synergetic Approach for System Design” (Busi, Gorrieri, Guidi, Lucchi, and Zavattaro 2005), and “Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies” (Thompson 2005). This is not to make light of the practice of choreography but to emphasize, as William Forsythe does, that “choreography and dancing are two distinct and very different practices” (2008, 5).1 As this chapter proceeds and bleeds into subsequent chapters that explore and activate choreographic thinking, it will be important to recall this warning of Forsythe’s that choreography and dance are divergent practices and that movement does not begin and end with the human body. While I often draw ProPositions for thE vErgE  75

from the field of dance, my intention, alongside choreographers and thinkers such as Forsythe, Valk, Klien, and Gormley,2 is to think choreography not as the organizing principle of precomposed bodies but as a technique for bringing to expression the patterning of incipient activity toward the definition of a movement event. Activist philosophy. In its most common definition, as Klien, Valk, and Gormley (2008) state, choreography is a verb—the activity of arranging relations “between bodies.” Pushed to its limit, this statement suggests that what is crafted choreographically are not bodies as such but relations. Choreography less as that which is generated by the human for the human than a practice that foregrounds how the event itself attunes to a relational milieu that exceeds the human or wherein the human is more ecological than individual. Choreography as a practice that asks, as Deborah Hay does, how each cell attends to the encounter movement proposes.3 Choreography as a practice that attends to the immanent field of relation that is part and parcel of environments in-forming. For choreography is, in Guattari’s terminology, a heteropoeisis, a self-generating practice of difference. It is at once, as Klien, Valk, and Gormley suggest, “a dynamic constellation,” “an exchange of forces,” and “the act of interfering and negotiating the [emergent] order” (2008, 17). Choreography: the act that sets into motion a milieu. Choreography: the milieu’s self-generation into event. Choreography as Proposition “Choreography starts from any point,” writes William Forsythe (qtd. in Caspersen 2000, 33). Choreography cleaves an occasion, activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. It asks the event how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving. It does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event—choreography can never be separated out from its coming into itself as event. Choreography as event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a coconstitutive environment. It develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred by tendencies that waver between the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. For an event to tune itself choreographically, many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks or they can be self-generating. 76 chaPtEr four

Either way, choreography as a generative practice must ask how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more-than the enabling constraints that set it into motion. The proposition, for Whitehead, works as an inflection that affects how a given occasion comes to expression: propositions elicit action in an environment of change. The proposition is a lure. It is a force that cuts into the incipient event to alter its experiential vectorization. The proposition, however, is never added on to an occasion. It is of and with the occasion—its immanent cleaving. This cleaving activates the force of contrast within the occasion, opening the occasion to its difference. Contrast is here understood as the force of difference that activates the dephasing through which the occasion is felt as such. As emphasized in chapter 3, contrast is not a difference between an external set of givens. The event itself is a field of contrast. Contrast is the force of difference directly felt in the event as well as the modality through which an event comes to expression in its absolute difference from all other events. Each proposition activates contrast. When Forsythe proposes “drop a curve,” for instance, what he means is not “reconfigure the habit” but “move through contrast.” If you tend to drop through your side, creating a curve from hip to shoulder, begin there. But go elsewhere with it—let it take you elsewhere. Feel the movement’s differential and move with its inflection in the event, letting it move the you you are becoming. You might mistake the proposition for a simple demand. Do this! Do that! This is not the case. Whitehead emphasizes that the proposition, while it can operate linguistically, does not depend on language. “Spoken language,” Whitehead warns, “is merely a series of squeaks” (1978, 264). Language by itself means little. “The vagueness of verbal statement is such that the same form of words is taken to represent a whole set of allied propositions of various grades of abstractness” (1978, 193). When language moves us, it is because it operates in the associated milieu of relation, becomingpropositional. A proposition can unfold in language but not as an additive to an already-stable matrix of denotation. Propositions intensify, attenuate, inhibit, transmute not meaning only but the affective force of the time-slip of experience in the making. How a task or technique becomes propositional is a key question. Drop a curve is a task insofar as it creates a field for the questioning of how movement is generated in the image of a curve dropping. It is propositional when ProPositions for thE vErgE  77

it activates a tonality that alters the way a body-ecology can move. In the Forsythe Company, many propositions begin as tasks, and, as such, they cannot be abstracted from the many hours of technique that feed the company’s complex movement lexicon. The necessity of technique should not be underestimated: technique is what allows the ecology of movement to open itself to its generative potential. But technique is not enough. Drop a curve becomes propositional precisely when it becomes capable of activating the beyond of technique. It becomes a proposition when it begins to exceed the technical, making operable a kind of bodying that is unforeseen (unpracticed) but available from within the register of the movement that will have preceded and followed it. Drop a curve reaches its propositional potential when contrast is activated such that the becoming-body fields the curving of spacetime in a new way, itself co- constituted by this newness. If this happens, what is experienced is the creation of a previously unfelt sensation that now permeates the welling occasion. In the doing, there is a direct experience of the occasion’s transindividuation. This direct experience of the event as transindividuating—as more-than—is more important—and longer lived—than the form the bodying has momentarily taken. This is what makes the movementevent propositional. Form is fugitive. It is the more-than that persists. Drop a curve is propositional not when a body has been defined but when the force of movement-moving activates a field of relation that alters the affective and compositional ecology of the larger event of movement-moving. From technique to technicity. What a Feeling Has Felt Whitehead writes: “the proposition constitutes what the feeling has felt” (1978, 186). Feeling is not a reflective act (after the fact). It is the force of the in-act experienced in the now of an event’s becoming. Say you’re experimenting with drop a curve on stage, performing Eidos: Telos (Ballet Frankfurt, 1995). Many hours of technique have preceded this event. The task is now in you: you move the movement as it comes, drawn in by choreographic principles, folding through technique. Suddenly the movement curves you in a way that elicits surprise—drop a curve appears in the moving in a way never experienced before. At the same time it is strangely reminiscent of a movement you have been striving to feel all along. You experience an uncanny “déjà-felt”—or déjà-unfelt—a 78 chaPtEr four

direct experience of difference felt in the act. Difference because there are many movements that are akin to what moved you, yet the how of this singular movement-event has startled the original task, opening it up toward its more-than. This sensation of the more-than in the moving is likely extremely subtle and probably quite imperceptible to others, except in its qualitative force (which can make all the difference to the self-generating choreographic field). This déjà-felt is not a return to the past—for it is clear that this feeling has not quite been felt before until its “beforeness” was acutely felt, just now. What is directly felt is a time-loop of movement-moving, movement moving the you you are now becoming. You are dancing two spacetimes at once, as they are dancing you. Drop the curve has become a proposition for dancing the interval of experience in the moving. The force of a proposition is that it creates the conditions for tapping into this intensive felt interval of the between. It inflects the occasion, creating a relational matrix that transforms the singular elements into a network of potential, generating an appetite for difference in the associated milieu that is the event unfolding. From Time to Time “Time is the exquisite product of the dancing body” (Forsythe 2008, 111). A choreographic process must become cognizant of the ways in which time is constructed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to make felt the play of time’s double movement. Quantifiable time is grasped always from the outside. It is the has-been of an event, measured in retrospect. Event-time, on the other hand, is the feltness of experience in the making. One is measured after the fact, one is felt in the now of movement-moving. Choreography works with both. Quantifying the time of a movement allows for repetition and the setting into sequence of a measurable component of movement technique. Eventtime activates the technicity that opens technique to its more-than. The paradox: the repetition is also to a large degree mired in the qualitative, for repetition will always be a re- creation in time. Each repetition of a movement sequence will requalify the time of the event: the repetition will activate a new time signature for the movement’s duration. Every return to the same will be a return to difference, a spiraling deviation into the multiplying time-slip of event-time. To move is always to activate the time of the event, ProPositions for thE vErgE  79

to feel-with the varying velocities of time’s multiple rhythms. Time, moving us, moving time. No choreography can truly be made to measure. When time itself becomes the focus of a choreographic proposition, what results is the realization that time is unsustainable. Forsythe explains: “I am inclined to believe that because we are bodies and possess perceptive mechanisms we also have time. I suspect our ability to construct time is predicated on the manner in which the body integrates its perceptions and upon the action necessary to generate these perceptions. The characteristic I would most associate with bodily time is the unsustainable. Nothing in the body can be sustained indefinitely” (2008). What is unsustainable is the experience of time in-itself. To manage this unsustainability, we tend to approach event-time as though it could be parceled out in manageable quantities of distinct presents, pasts, or futures. But despite our best efforts, event-time remains uncountable. Event-time is a miring in the multiplicity of nows—the now that has passed, the now that is passing, and the now that will have been, each phase of nowness contributing to the occasion at hand in a time-loop that resists the organization of experience into a linear continuum. To be in-time is to experience the uncanniness of being with the past in the future toward the present. Time as duration is unmeasurable, unknowable as such, unsustainable in experience. Experiential time is always the time of the event. When an event takes form, the signature of an actualizing event-time emerges that sets time-asnow in motion.4 By foregrounding the singular time of the event, choreographic propositions make felt the time for experimentation. Nik Haffner, a former dancer for the Ballet Frankfurt,5 discusses the overlapping use of metric and durational time in Forsythe’s choreographic process. What strikes Haffner is that despite the use of instruments for quantifiable measure (clocks, metronomes), Forsythe’s interest seems to lie less in the measurability of time (and the body’s coordination to that measure) than in “events that are, given their timely complexity, unreproducible” (2004, 135). Rather than treating quantified time as the organizing node for choreography’s expression, Forsythe urges his dancers to become flexible in the time of the emergent event such that what is felt, in the moving, is “how measure and duration coexist in the activity of creating bodies of time” (Haffner 2004, 136). Choreography as propositional works with coexistent tendencies overlapping toward the creation of new vectors. It activates a diagrammatic force that exceeds the description or the representation of a process. In so 80 chaPtEr four

doing it creates a transduction, a jump in register that incites a new process—from a thought of movement to a movement of thought, from time measured to time felt. The choreographic proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation but to create a diagram that captures, in a fleeting moment, the qualities of movement expressibility such that their force of form can felt.6 Choreography here is concerned with the way movement co- composes with time-felt to create complex ecologies in the register of the more than human. What emerges is less a body moving in time than what I will call a mobile architecture in chapter 5—an architecting of spacetimes of experience coemergent with bodies in the making. The choreographic field is a complex of experience that in itself cannot be mapped. “The resulting structure has a time complexity that . . . could not have been created by any one person, the many simple parts having recombined in unforeseeable ways because of innumerable decisions made by the many involved” (Caspersen 2000, 34). What emerges choreographically is less an organization of bodies than a cartography of incipient tendencies, of force of form. This force of form is not activated by decisions in the standard sense of being willed by the individual.7 Decision here is of the event: it is an activating cut immanent to the process of making movement, a vectoring into contrast by the proposition. Decision in the moving—like thought in the moving—is the event of tendencies colliding such that they coalesce in the time-slip of the new, spurred into invention by the ecology of the dance itself. The Speed of Movement Nik Haffner describes a practice session with Forsythe. Haffner is experimenting with a jump he feels isn’t working. He thinks he has the timing wrong. After watching for a while, Forsythe reminds him that it “isn’t the speed of the movement itself, but its stopping, the arrival, the reaching of the new position” that is at stake. Still, the jump continues to be missing something. Forsythe tries a different tack, explaining that “the end of the movement is not a real stopping,” suggesting to Haffner that to execute the movement successfully, he should continue “to think the movement ProPositions for thE vErgE  81

after the so-called Stop, that [he] should let the movement slowly endlessly grow” (Haffner 2004, 138). Movement never stops. Every movement resonates with its preacceleration and its overarticulation, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses. A “first” movement is not “the beginning.” It is the activation of a differing velocity. Go back to the jump. The question is how to activate the time signature this singular jump requires, poised as it is within a larger field of movement-moving. This activation precedes the actual jumping—it is the event’s preacceleration. Despite the fact that nothing “visible” has happened yet, the jump’s force of form is very much in attendance. This force of form carries in itself not only the force of the preacceleration, but also the movement’s growing into its overarticulation. All of this before you’ve even left the ground. The actual jump can be thought as the event’s decisive turn. For it is the actual jump that creates the rift in time that marks position, albeit a position that is less a site than the marking of the movement’s continuance, an evolution of site that immanently alters the quality of the taking off. The jump is less a jump-as-such than a dynamic coexperiencing of varying velocities in preacceleration, extension, and overarticulation. To jump successfully is to jump-through the singularity of this singular interweaving of preacceleration and overarticulation. It is to invite the thinking-feeling Forsythe emphasizes—the thought of the movement endlessly growing after it ends—into the movement even before the displacement through space has taken place. To jump well is to move-through velocities too quick to know, but not too quick to feel. It is to move-with the durational process of the time of movement as felt event. The jump-as-such, however, never represents the totality of our experience. We live the jumpevent. From incipient movement to incipient movement with the experience of velocity in between, the jump cannot be known in metric time, but it can be thought-felt in the verge where time is elastic. “[Forsythe] spends a lot of training time teaching us about the quality of different speeds and instructing us on the change of tempo as felt in our bodies” (Haffner 2004, 139). To feel time exceeds any standard notion of timing. It is to move in the more-than of back-griddable time, to activate and exploit the transitions between micromovements in the making and movement taking form. Among the techniques for making these transitions felt is the sounding of movement: “When [Forsythe] himself dances during practice, he often translates the movement vocally into a kind of word82 chaPtEr four

less singing, in order to assist us not only in visually showing the smallest change in tempo and movement dynamic through his body, but also underscoring it acoustically” (Haffner 2004, 140). Forsythe sings the rhythm of movement taking form, making experiential the folds of what cannot be perceived as such. These folds of micromovements are virtual contributions on the edge of actual movement. No actual taking form of movement could occur without the infinity of micromovements active in the displacement’s preacceleration. Micromovements are akin to the unsustainable— impossible to grasp and maintain—yet absolutely key to how movement resolves into a taking-form. When he sings movement, what Forsythe is sounding is not a body creating a particular form, but the speed of lived folding that is movement in the making. How a movement develops depends on the how of lived folding. Take a line: elbow-shoulder. This line could be drawn as a vector or could be conceived as a curve inflected toward an inclination. Different speeds, different micromovements, different microperceptions. And, of course, different forms. The question is: how to push movement constellations “beyond the turn, to the point where [they go] beyond our own experience” (Deleuze 1988a, 27). When we move beyond our own experience, when we get disoriented in the sound of the in-between, it is the movement that takes over. Here, in the unsustainable arena where micromovements multiply to create microperception, new decisive turns emerge. The decisive turn is not about a personal decision—it is about the beyond of self, “beyond our own experience.” This beyond is not transcendental—it is generated in the event, immanent to it, activated not by a will imposed onto movement from the outside but through the event’s orchestration of a collusion of micromovements toward a singularity that tunes to the more-than of this or that preestablished form. The conditions have to be right for this to occur. In the elbow-shoulder example, this might occur when the elbow-shoulder line takes on velocity such that a newness of experience activated through the contrast of habit and difference takes hold. When the body is no longer a container for movement but a force for the transduction of movement-moving, we will have gone beyond our own experience. As an audience, the same shift to the beyond of experience can be felt. When the piece is truly propositional, when it activates a mobile architecture that is inherently diagrammatic in its force, we experience movement’s contrast more than its taking-form. We feel the resonance of the microProPositions for thE vErgE  83

expressions of movement in the creation of difference. This experience of contrast is felt through the perception of how the echo of a remainder that is the incipience of the movement passes into the singularity of the next event. At dancing’s best, this verging on the new is felt intensively, transforming a series of steps into an ecology of experience. If captivated by the resonance machine, we become participants in event-time. In Moving Memory Living in time means activating, in the moving, the déjà-felt in all of its uncanniness. Memory, for Bergson, is not something stored and subsequently recollected. As apparent in Waltz with Bashir, memory in the making is the activation of the power of the false that re- creates the present through a complex remix of fabulation and pastness beyond any notion of the “true.” In the context of a choreographic practice, memory straddles technique and technicity, giving the event its durational quality, creating a platform for a body to become an ecology of a multitude of durational times interwoven. Memory and perception are of a different order yet inextricably linked, “always interpenetrat[ing] each other, . . . always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis” (Bergson 1939, 67). When a dancer moves, the movement is implicit in her perception of it, which is itself part memory. When we watch a dancer move, the movement perceived is similarly already imbricated in the memory of the previous movement coursing through it (and through us). Each movement is alive with a memory that activates the becoming-body, including that of the spectator.8 This activation is not the recall of an actual movement: we wouldn’t have time to consciously perceive and remember and move a movement at the same time. The memory is always living, a force of activation ensconced in the futurepresentness of discovering the feeling of movement again for the first time. This is also the case in everyday movement. Take the walk. The walk’s unfolding as horizontality depends on finding within its quality of movement the doubleness of its point of virtual departure and arrival. This bi- directional betweenness is what gives the movement its horizontalizing consistency. It is through the virtual interval of the walk’s preacceleration that walking is transformed from a step into a movement.9

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An incipient tendency toward taking a step is felt as a walking when the divergent metastabilities congeal into a singularity such that the step takes the decisive turn toward the movement-moving of a walking. The flow of the walk now feels less like a stepping than a moving horizontality despite the fact that, like the steps themselves, the horizontalizing remains composed of an infinity of microtendencies toward verticality, the most obvious being the verticality of the body itself in relation to the horizontal ground across which it moves. To walk is to move with the infinite complexity of micromovements— preacceleration’s activation of a million instabilities, overarticulation’s generative rightings and productive destabilizings. Without the interweaving of the future-past in the present through memory’s active role as movementgenerator in-the-moving, coupled with the tight interplay of microperception and micromovement, we couldn’t simply get up and walk.10 When we walk, each step is already virtually imbued with all previous walkings, all previous proprioceptive tendings toward a verticality that moves horizontally, all kinaesthetic sensings of a balancing in the between of multiple equilibriums. But it is also poised toward the future. We walk in a future-pastness whose virtual plenitude of experience and experimentation assures a metastability of balance. It’s not exactly that we remember how the ground touches the foot and the weight shifts as the body transfers from step to step. It’s that the stepping recalls itself in the act. Futurepastness. The memory of having-walked is in the walking. This is a memory on the edge of perception, a memory in-act that activates in the moving the multiple metastabilities that make this singular choreographed movement possible. Even when apparently passive, memory remains active, active in the folds of the future-presentness of perception, its time signature specious. It is this passive-active memory of the metastabilities garnered from a lifetime of walking in the walking that saves us from a fall when the snowy ground suddenly turns to ice or when we almost-trip over the edge of the sidewalk. Movement cannot be abstracted from the active recall of micromovement as it meets microperception—the intertwining of proprioception and kinesthesia, of past horizontalizings and future unbalancings. When proprioception is challenged,11 or when an accident has caused us to have to relearn to walk, it is this combination—the living memory of the walk walking itself in the walking—that deserts us. A sore ankle can similarly take the

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habit out of the walk, as can an onset of vertigo. If this happens, we find we not only have to tweak the metastabilities of our incipient movement toward new angles of comfort, we also have to relearn the feeling of walking. We have to relearn the walking of the walk. Memory in the making. Memory is like having a vision in the future-past. Forsythe (2003) writes: “One of our methodologies had to do with identically remembering another person’s variation, or sprays rather [. . .] and building a kind of architecture of movement around it, but you [have] to keep seeing this other person dancing in order to perform it, so it [becomes] a way of having a vision.” Memory is visionary in the sense of foresight: a seeing-with-before in the now of movement-moving. Moving someone else’s moving while you’re watching them move is like feeling future movement. You are moving with the incipient future (the always nextness of movement) in the present passing. This is recall at work. Forsythe calls the experimentation with this recall-in-the-moving dancing with “a cloud of form” and describes it as a proprioceptive gathering of tendencies not actually reproduced but reactivated such that they can take form in relation to their already having taken place. Recall produces future memory, creating visions for movement in the making. Lived experience is the experience of fielding this visionary quality, be it in the walk or in the experimenting with new forms of movement. Becoming visionary: to experience movement’s singular capacity to generate decisive turns. One or More Rhythms? The taking-form of movement is rhythmic. Rhythm is another way of evoking the multiplicity of time-slips of experience in any given occasion. Rhythm is not added to movement from outside its taking-form. Rhythm is what gives time to incipient movement, characterizing that movement’s singular in-timeness as it verges into event. This in-timeness is not strictly a beat or a measure. Despite appearances, rhythm is qualitative more than quantitative, a field of resonance that is coterminous with the incipiency of the movement’s preacceleration and the elasticity of its unfolding.12 It is qualitative in part because it challenges the pre-setting of movement into time: rhythm cuts across measure, bringing into collusion the how of movement-moving in the now of its unfolding. This how of movementmoving in the timeliness of the qualitative now of its unfolding is what I

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am calling movement’s time signature. When Forsythe sounds movement he is not simply marking time’s measure. He is activating the rhythm of the breath as time signature in direct co- composition with movement-moving. Sound and movement are one. Rhythm is what makes felt, in the moving, the interplay between the microperceptual and micromovements, activating for experience the force of movement’s time.13 Choreography’s ecology is rhythmic. It is composed of an infinity of varying velocities, vibrations, sensations. These individuating tendings of movement in the moving activate environmentalities that in turn inflect how bodies move with and through the world. The time of rhythm or movement’s time signature is therefore always more-than (more-than actual, more-than human). Rhythm is how the future of movement-moving makes itself felt. Rhythm is how we know duration, a duration that is always more than one: “In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being. To conceive of durations of different tensions is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind, because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, an homogeneous and independent time” (Bergson 1911, 275). The Becoming of Continuity Proposition: Execute a standard épaulement, then activate the more-than of this épaulement by re- creating its feeling in a movement that does not necessarily resemble it.14 Note how the torso twists before you even quite begin to move. Note the accompanying prefeeling of vertigo. Move into this feeling of vertigo-induced twisting. Experience how the proposition’s diagrammatic force moves you, connecting your movement to the preacceleration of a welling nextness. Overarticulate position. Note the way process and form interact. When the épaulement realizes itself, it momentarily stops becoming. This position is now what it is, and will always remain what it was. A form has unfolded. We are still talking in half-seconds. In Whitehead’s terms, this singular movement—this occasion of experience—has achieved its satisfaction. There is no way to take back exactly this experience of the

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épaulement and change it. The point is not that there can’t and won’t be an infinity of position-takings and processual becomings in the épaulement’s future, but simply that there can be no continuity of becoming once an event has taken form since the event’s culmination is by definition the end of an episode. As Whitehead states, “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming” (1978, 35). Activating the becoming of continuity might look like this: go back to the épaulement. Note that the form the movement has taken has a quality that exceeds, escapes, or precedes it. Think of this quality as the movement’s interval. Recall that the interval is the latent relationality of form-taking— what connects actual movement to the virtual realm of movement-moving. Think the interval as the durational node that, while not yet actualized, holds the moreness of movement in-forming.15 Activate the interval without necessarily moving or altering the form. By activating this virtual share of movement, note that the actual movement opens itself to its more-than. The movement’s potentiality for the occasioning of its nextness is crafted by the incursion into its position of the interval as differential. When the interval is activated, what is danced in the nextness of movement-moving is the force of form instead of simply the position the form has taken. The activated interval becomes the carrier for a continuity in the making. The interval is not added to the movement. It is the force or the processual quality within the form’s time signature. Even when unactivated, it is always there, a key aspect of the relation between the event’s potential for continuity and its concrescence into form. The interval is felt in the ways in which it contributes to the experience in act. In its contribution, what it does is not to instantiate an open-ended becoming. It stimulates and intensifies tendings already in germ in the event’s concrescence. The interval cannot be separated out from the in- act. Yet, while it is never known as such, there is no denying it has a lived effect. It makes a difference. The becoming of continuity can never be separated out from the idea of contrast, for it is contrast that ultimately creates resonances not only in but also between actual occasions. The becoming of continuity might therefore also be called the becoming of difference. It involves moving with the differential of the occasion’s time signature, keeping the difference in the moving, creating a continuity out of movements’ dephasings, while never discounting the important tension between form and fold, form and force.

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Pure process is outside experience. For experience to be lived, it is necessary for there to be a cut or a decisive turn that brings contrast to duration. Yet, thanks to the force of form the interval activates, each form-taking is infected by the processual force of the more-than. There can be no becoming of continuity without this more-than. The challenge is to at once acknowledge the atomicity of the event and concede that there is a force of form that accompanies the expression of a process’s culmination. The event’s time signature is allied to this force of form, and yet it also exceeds it, for time, as Forsythe emphasizes, is unsustainable. Think the force of time as rhythm. Rhythm is always more-than. It is both the setting in time of the occasion in the now of its contemporary iteration and the pulse in the moving that marks the passage from one occasion to another. For rhythm is never of the form itself. It activates the event’s durational complexity both across its becoming and in its culmination as discrete occasion. To make this clear the schism has to be maintained between movementmoving and discrete movements even while acknowledging that there are mechanisms that fold these two planes of experience if not into one another then across one another. This folding has effects. It gives resonance to form. It gives elasticity to time. Recall Bergson’s statement that duration has more than one rhythm. The becoming of continuity is the resonant continuum through which the nexus of intervals makes felt its quality of relation across the differentials of time. The event is a rhythmic ecology: it partakes of the infinite potential of all the durations that might have gathered into its particular expression of singularity while it continues to carry in its taking-form the unrealized expressions of all the times of its making. It carries them not as decisions to exclude, but as propositions for the verge. Propositions for the Verge Choreography is a proposition to movement-moving that asks how the plane of experience composes, how it remembers, how it becomes, and how it takes form, all in the register of the more than human. The focus is not on the body per se. For what moves choreographically is not first and foremost a body. It is rhythm, a cut in duration, a field of resonance, an interval. A choreographic proposition is always about the in-act, about the verge,

ProPositions for thE vErgE  89

the force of form that generates position but always, to some degree, exceeds it. It is about the interval, the differential across which a multiplicity of rhythms make up event-time. “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?” (Bateson 2002, 8).

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interlude

What Else?

Choreography asks: What else? What else can the event do? Choreography happens everywhere, all the time. The setting up of a room for the enjoyment of a household involves the creation of a movement constellation. It crafts opportunities for moving-through, creates invitations for sitting-with, provides incentive for getting-there-first. It forecasts an ideal place-taking: the perfect chair, the best view, the closest comfort. And it creates opportunities for difference: you can walk around the chair, dance on the couch, sleep under the television. Chances are, though, that your movements will take the space-as-is for granted, that you will return to the comfort of the position you prefer, that in time you will realize there are whole areas of the room you never really attend to. Habits set in. Even the cat is always in the same place. Such everyday choreographies highlight autonomous expressions of movement in the making but are not necessarily creative of new opportunities. In a habitual environment, contrast is generally understated: the status quo tends to delimit the range of potential experience. Creative autonomous opportunities are more likely to happen when an event alters how you experience space. You may decide to paint the room, taking out the furniture, only to realize that the orientation you’ve always taken in the space is not the most interesting one. It’s not its objects that have kept you from attending to spacetimes of creation in this particular environment. It’s that you forgot that objects have a life, that they create space. And that how the space moves you is synonymous with the eventness of its objects. In redecorating the room, perhaps you begin to pay more attention to how

the objects create space, not simply how they configure the pattern of an already existing spacetime of experience. Objects are not stable: they forecast the time of the event. From Object to Objectile Forsythe asks, “Is it possible for choreography to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic object, without the body?” (2008, 5). The choreographic object, “a model of potential transition from one state to another in any space imaginable,” is less about the object as such than about the object’s capacity to generate event-time (Forsythe 2008, 6). When an object becomes the attractor for an event, it in-gathers the incipient event toward the object’s dynamic capacity for reconfiguring spacetimes of composition. This is what Forsythe’s choreographic objects are about—creating an emergent constellation for movement experimentation that opens the choreographic to the beyond of dance. Forsythe’s choreographic objects tend to find their point of departure in the form of an everyday object: a balloon, a piece of cardboard, a mirror. That they are everyday objects allows for a certain ease in the encounter with them—they are recognizable, malleable within our habitual movement practices, already available to our imaginations: we think we know what they can do. And yet, just as the objects have lured us into certain presuppositions, we find that these objects are more than what they appear to be at first glance: in the setting of a choreographic encounter, they present themselves as part of an evolving ecosystem. They extend beyond their objectness to become ecologies for complex environments that propose dynamic constellations of space, time, and movement. These “objects” are in fact propositions co- constituted by the environments they make possible. They urge participation. Through the objects, spacetime takes on a resonance, a singularity: it becomes bouncy, it floats, it shadows. The object becomes a missile for experience that inflects a given spacetime with a spirit of experimentation. We could call these objects “choreographic objectiles” to bring to them the sense of incipient movement their dynamic participation within the relational environment calls forth.1 The objectile is like a cue for the resolution of an experience. It is what drives the experience to its final form. For this to happen, Forsythe cannot use just any object. The object has to be immanent to the event and active in its unfolding. It has to call forth participation in a way that is at once 92 interlude

11. William Forsythe, White Bouncy Castle. Photo by Julian Gabriel Richter.

enticing and unthreatening. It has to give the object to the experience in a way that is slightly off from what we might expect. The object cannot act in a fully predictable manner in the environment and yet has to be familiar enough to draw us in. Choreographic objects are an affordance that provoke a singular taking-form: they are the conjunctive force for the activity of relation. Here-and-Now Choreographic objects activate an environment for movement experimentation. The idea is to create an atmosphere that slightly tweaks the time of everyday movement, inviting it to tend toward the time of the event. Participants who enter White Bouncy Castle (see figure 11) are not only transformed into “bouncing balls,” generating a playfulness that inflects the environment.2 They also become participants in time of a different order: a time of experimentation. Experimentation calls forth the time of the event. The participants move because they are moved to do so, their attention aroused, their awareness What Else? 93

tweaked, their engagement with the spacetime of the event already altering the atmosphere of the space. White Bouncy Castle is more than a large platform for jumping: it effects a microperceptible change in the feeling of time, shifting the everydayness of time toward the durational time of play. Choreographic objects provoke this time-slip in large part because they bring to the fore the role objects play in everyday experience. Everyday objects resonate with pastness. They exist in an ecology of experience from which they cannot be abstracted. Encountering a familiar object stimulates this experience of pastness even as it activates, in play, a refielding of ecologies at once familiar and disjointed. When we directly perceive the past in the present of an occasion’s unfolding, Whitehead calls it nonsensuous perception. By nonsensuous perception, Whitehead is referring to the complex rhythm of memory—a time-slip of experience that fields our current perceptions.3 In the fielding of experience, Whitehead suggests, we perceive not first and foremost from sense to sense but from relation to relation. “The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity which is the continued life of the immediate past within the immediacy of the present” (1933, 181). It is not the past as such or the object as such we perceive in the then-now. It is the activity of relation between different thresholds of spacetime. It is the object from the past in the configuration of the present. The then-with. This is how the choreographic object works. Think of entering a room replete with mirrors that reflect an entrancing kaleidoscopic array that refuses to contain us (The Defenders, Part 2, 2008; see figure 12).4 We are attracted to the mirrors yet perplexed, for we are accustomed to mirrors refracting us. This activates a movement—we find ourselves experimenting with our own reflection, bending, swerving, jostling to be seen. And in so doing we become more and more aware not only of our own approach to the nonreflective reflecting surfaces but to a collective grappling with the way the mirror is refusing to behave as a mirror. The piece has created a movement, a circling in on itself, a beckoning to a kaleidoscopic landscape that is not of us and yet somehow draws us in. Or, as in the case of the piece when it premiered in Holland, what might have taken over is the collective desire to reorient, to alter space, to create with the conditions of the objects such that they metamorphose. The collective resistance to the injunction “do not touch” in that instance created a repositioning of the field such that the quality of play was activated less in the not-seeing of oneself than in the repositioning of the object in relation 94 interlude

12. William Forsythe, The Defenders, Part 2. Photo by Julian Gabriel Richter.

to the mobile gaze.5 Either way, there was a lived experience of a choreographic proposition. The choreographic object activates experimentation and play by bringing together the pastness of experience (the object as we know it) and its futurity (the object- ecology in its novel unfolding). When an object no longer seems to be quite what you thought it was, and the you you thought you were begins to collectively individuate, and the experience of time no longer feels as linear, it’s because the event is beginning to take over. No longer as concerned with your “self,” you are now experiencing the potential of the future mixed with the resonance of the past: a futurity of pastness in the present. Event-time. This experience is specious: it takes us into the time-slip of the event. This speciousness has a quality of fabulation: it enervates us toward the doubleness of time and incites us to invent with time.6 Choreographic objects draw us into this speciousness by infiltrating our experience with the verge of this doubling of time on itself. They also alert us to the processuality of objects. For objects are, like bodyings, more force than form. They are not preorchestrated constellations ready to be taken up into procesWhat Else? 95

sual experience. They are themselves processes, lures: edgings, tendings, shadowings. They are, as Lygia Clark well knew, relational.7 If these were merely stable objects inhabiting already-constituted space, they wouldn’t have such a hold on us. Objects exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, inciting co- constellations of movement-moving. In the between of eventness there is a strange schism, a disjunction between experience and the consciousness of experience. What we experience as now is already being infested with a new “now,” this new now already slightly altering the experience of the last experience of now. Choreographic objects draw out this paradox of the linearity of measured time versus the duration of experiential time. “The practically cognized present is no knifeedge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time” (James 1890, 609). The time-slip the choreographic object makes felt calls forth the additive and the subtractive aspect of experience such that the time of the event is experienced as more than what was before even as it is less than what it could have been. Future and past entwined in a fabulous experience of the not-quite-now. In this strange time-loop, what is lived is less the encounter with space pre-formed or objects preexistent than a direct experience of relation. A Lure for Feeling Like his choreographies, Forsythe’s choreographic objects are created with very precise conditions for movement experimentation: they insist on the precision of parameters for movement (technique) without divesting the movement of its potential for eventness (technicity). They are carefully crafted toward generating certain kinds of participation and yet unforeseeable in their effects. They are objectiles thrown into the world, and invitations to move-with. Forsythe speaks of seeking physical solutions to dramaturgic propositions.8 Choreographic objects are designed to provoke movement- events that can be diverted toward a recomposition of habit and, vice versa, compositions of habit that tweak the perceived stable form of objects. This recomposition calls forth a choreography of difference, difference that emerges relationally, activated by propositions embedded into the choreographic object’s potential deployment. The becoming of continuity. Choreographic objects act not on individual will: they move the relation. 96 interlude

13. William Forsythe, Scattered Crowd. Photo by Julian Gabriel Richter.

Forsythe is more interested in the folding of space than the form-taking of bodies (Forsythe qtd. in Forsythe and Sigmund 2000). His choreographic propositions begin with this folding, activating a creative tension between the virtual extensity of a durational rhythm and the actual intensity of a moving in-time. From creating environmental conditions for performance to creating propositions for relational movement, Forsythe’s work remains an activity that folds forward into a complex ecological nexus. As a choreographer of missiles of movement, Forsythe’s work thus makes felt the “what else” of choreography—its capacity to craft an associated milieu of relation that extends far beyond the stage. What else is an associated milieu but a force-field for the crafting of the as yet unthought where the microperceptual and the micropolitical meet to create new movements in the making? “You don’t need a choreographer to dance” (Forsythe qtd. in Forsythe and Sigmund 2001). What you need is a choreographic proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic: they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. Forsythe’s choreographic objects are propositions in just this sense. What Else? 97

Take Scattered Crowd (2002; see figure 13).9 This choreographic object involves four thousand white balloons suspended in a wash of sound. The balloons themselves are not the proposition. Scattered Crowd is about moving-through-quality—whiteness, airiness, lightness—such that the co- constituting spacetime of experience becomes a moving-with: relational environment invites relational movement creates ecology of event. When the balloons float in a relatively small space, this movement quality is generated by an instruction to move through the space without touching the balloons. A choreography of uneasy closeness, a choreography of sensual proximity. A scenario: a crowd-movement, the balloons strangely still in a field of tentative moving bodies alert to one another. In another context, when the room is much larger and the balloons more numerous, the instruction might be to create space with the balloons without tangling their strings. A scenario: space moving, bodies in co- composition with strings, balloons bobbing in a time of a collective slithering. The work depends on how it comes to collective iteration. In Scattered Crowd, how the room’s volume evolves is synonymous with the quality of event-time created in the moving. The changing of the affective tone of spacetime is not willed by individual participants. It happens in a relational becoming: the room moves the participants to alter the composition of the event’s unfolding in experiential time. Here we see precision of proposition meeting unpredictability of event. To achieve a singularity of experience, the enabling constraints immanent to the proposition have to be both concise and open- ended. When the work works and Scattered Crowd collectivizes around the proposition, the event becomes atmospheric, more ecological than human- or object-oriented, moved in all of its cellular complexity. Scattered Crowd is an indoor weather system. Volumes of air in the moving move an environmentality itself in the making. A shift in ground results, a shift in the very idea of what collective movement can feel like when it becomes a lived practice of attunement. Movement as weather exceeds the objects, the subjects in its midst. Choreographic object: a proposition for the “what else” of choreographic thought, a proposition that moves the milieu, the associated milieu of relation.

98 interlude

fi vE

Choreography as Mobile Architecture

The world is astir with cues. Every situation swarms with primes. A situation is made of primes, nothing but primes.

*  Brian MassuMi

Part 1: Choreographic Ensembles “At the beginning,” says graphics research specialist Matthew Lewis, William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced was “all a bit, ‘what is this about?’” Unfazed by Lewis’s confusion, William Forsythe suggested that Lewis think of “what else” the dance could look like. This “what else” is the project of Synchronous Objects—a web-based platform for the visualization of the choreographic as it expresses itself through Forsythe’s staged performance One Flat Thing, reproduced (see figure 14). A joint project with Norah Zuniga Shaw (of Ohio State University’s Department of Dance) and with Maria Palazzi (of the university’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design), Synchronous Objects creates visualizations of a series of screen-based “objects” that actively explore what else One Flat Thing, reproduced could look like. The resulting synchronous objects for the visualization of choreographic data reveal the patterns and complex interlocking systems of action and organization at the heart of Forsythe’s choreographic process. This opens the dance toward a “what else” of the choreographic, targeting a cross- disciplinary audience that departs from the strict arena of dance studies to include mathematicians, architects, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, to name a few. “Our goal

14. Synchronous Objects Web Platform

in creating these objects,” the team explains, “is to engage a broad public, explore cross- disciplinary research, and spur creative discovery for specialists and non-specialists alike.”1 As demonstrated by Forsythe’s work on choreographic objects, the what else of the choreographic can be activated in an infinity of constellations. From an eddy to a flock of Canada geese to movement propositions such as Scattered Crowd to the constellation of a social movement, the what else of choreography emphasizes that choreography is a proposition not for the body itself but for the relational force of movement-moving in an ecology of life-living. In this chapter, I propose the concept of “mobile architectures” as another way of conceiving the choreographic when it becomes an event not for the individual body but for the ontogenetic architecting of environments in the moving. A mobile architecture is one way of naming the event of choreography’s self-generative force. It is what can be felt when the choreographed event generates a more-than that touches on its propositional nature. A mobile architecture is the direct experience of the more-than in its field effect. It is

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“what makes a work stand on its own”—what makes a work work. Deleuze and Guattari write: The artist creates blocs of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand on its own [doit tenir tout seul]. The artist’s greatest difficulty is to make it stand up on its own. Sometimes this requires what is, from the viewpoint of an implicit model, from the viewpoint of lived perceptions and affections, great geometrical improbability, physical imperfection, and organic abnormality. But these sublime errors accede to the necessity of art if they are internal means of standing up (or sitting or lying). . . . On the other hand, many works that claim to be art do not stand up for an instant. Standing up alone does not mean having a top and a bottom or being upright (for even houses are drunk and askew); it is only the act by which the compound of created sensations is preserved in itself—a monument, but one that may be contained in a few marks or a few lines, like a poem by Emily Dickinson. (1994, 164–65; translation modified) The question of what makes a work work, it seems to me, is the question of how an artwork evolves to exceed its form, to create from its force- ofform a more-than that can be felt, if not easily described. With the concept of mobile architecture, I am suggesting that a choreographic work “stands up” when human movement evolves to include its associated milieu such that the milieu’s ecologies of relation themselves can be felt. This happens when the choreographic begins to shift toward a wider fielding of movement where spacetime itself begins to vibrate with movement expression. From choreographic stagecraft there evolves a sensation that the dancing is happening with and across bodies rather than on them. Bodies dance in an ecology of movement expression that in turn dances them. Choreography becomes a field for movement expression when the body becomes an intensive participant with the evolving milieu rather than simply the instigator of the action. This occurs when the choreographic begins to make felt the coming-into- eventness of the field of relation, which happens when the bodies begin to move the relation, dancing in concert with movement-moving, with space-timing. When the field of relation itself becomes mobile, what begins to erupt from its intensive spatialization of time is an architecting of mobility, a mobile architecture that does not stabilize form but extracts from form the intensive traces of its reemergence as field

chorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  101

effect. A mobile architecture is less a structure than an agile surfacing that makes felt the force of incipient form: it is, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, a bloc of movement sensation—when you experience it you can’t quite say where it began or ended, but you can recognize it as a rare example of a work outdoing itself. The work continues to move you beyond its staged iteration—you can’t say exactly why but it haunts you, it occupies you, evolving beyond its form-taking to create resonances that incite you to want to experience it again. It’s not the form of the work that stays with you, it’s the how of its capacity to dislodge the you that you thought you were. It’s the how of the work’s capacity to shift the ground that moves you, from technique to technicity. Mobile architectures are one way of addressing what choreography can do when this shift occurs. I call them architectures only because there is a sense that something fleetingly collective has taken form, almost a structure but not quite. Or: that there has been a collective orchestration for a certain kind of constructing. The paradox of mobile architectures: the work works when the constructing is felt not as a form in itself, but as the force of form—when the form or the structure is always already destructuring. Mobile architectures have the potential to surface in an infinity of ways across various movement practices, yet they are rare to behold. This chapter suggests that One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) is one such instance. The strength of the Synchronous Objects platform, it seems to me, is that through its foregrounding of the cueing/aligning/counterpoint in One Flat Thing, reproduced, it makes visible how the “what else” of the choreographic can unfold, making felt the way movement moves across multiphased surfacings of experience to create a mobile architecture in the making. Forsythe describes One Flat Thing, reproduced as a “baroque machinery,” defining the baroque as “the apogee of counterpoint.” For Forsythe, counterpoint refers to “a field of action in which the intermittent and irregular coincidence of attributes between organizational elements produces an ordered interplay.”2 Counterpoint is not a mimicry of positions. It is a folding-through of points of inflection. These points of inflection are less positions than swerves in the movement. Counterpoint catches these tendencies in the making and folds through them, fashioning the beginnings of a distributed relational field. This field in turn folds through coming counterpoints, the dance increasingly dancing itself. This, in Forsythe’s terms, is a baroque machinery, a machine for creating intensive folds of movement continuously moving-through but ultimately escaping posi102 chaPtEr fivE

tion. Deleuze writes: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait [trait]. It is always making folds. It does not invent the fold: there are folds from the East, Greek folds, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical. . . . Yet the Baroque twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, fold after fold. The Baroque trait is the fold that goes to infinity” (1993, 3; translation modified). One Flat Thing, reproduced is baroque in its emphasis on counterpoint’s capacity to create tendencies for aligning and cueing that create folds, not just bodies folding but spacetime folding. Counterpoint is visualized in two ways on the Synchronous Objects platform. It is explicitly foregrounded in the “object” called “The Dance,” which clearly demarcates the system of cues and alignments in One Flat Thing, reproduced. Here, you find a movement score that demonstrates how the danced movements engage with and respond to one another. Simultaneously, counterpoint is offered up as a transversal mechanism for experiencing the “what else” of this particular dance through the creation of a series of other “objects.” These “synchronous objects” are conceived less as objects than as objectiles: temporary delimitations of activity in germ. They are visualizable opportunities on the platform for fielding the choreographic experience: graphs (Statistical Counterpoint), architectural animations (the Data Fan, the Furniture System), and tools (the Cue Visualizer, the Cue Abstraction Tool). Emphasizing the objects’ generative potential—both for visualizing One Flat Thing, reproduced ’s architecting of potential and for use in the creation of new work, Norah Zuniga Shaw writes: “Because we focused on the dance as a choreographic resource—rather than scoring it for the purposes of preservation—we were empowered to take this rigorous process of data collection into new creative spaces . . . to generate new possibilities for ongoing creativity and research, both in the studio and in the lab.”3 The Synchronous Objects project is replete with what Forsythe calls “choreographic thinking.”4 Choreographic thinking is the activation, in the moving, of a movement of thought. It expresses itself not in language per se but as the pulses across embodiments and rhythms, the durations and spatializations that create a “contrapuntal composition of complex relationships, patterns, and trends.”5 This contrapuntal force is active not strictly in the mind or in the body but across a bodying-with that activates spacetimes of composition. “The biggest difficulty . . . is not consciously shaping your body, it is actually letting your body fold . . . to develop a more reactive and many-timed body as opposed to a shaped body.”6 What stands chorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  103

out in One Flat Thing, reproduced is not the shape of this or that individual body but the velocity with which an emergent field appears in contrapuntal alignment with thought in the doing. Thought in the doing is a movement in the feeling. This is not thought abstracted from movement. It is thought in movement, activated not solely in the body, but across the machinery itself—in the folds of the evolving architecture. The Dance * One Flat Thing, reproduced is a volumetrics in the structuring. It is a force that moves the choreographic surface into a multidimensionality that alters the very notion of surface-as-ground, intercalating movement and volume into an architectural surfacing, architectural because it composes with space in complex durations of experience. To appreciate the intensive passage from choreographed stage-space to mobile architecture in One Flat Thing, reproduced, you have to think the choreography as the setting into place of future iterations of complex movement propositions active in a collective individuation of spacetimes of experience. Look at the tables moving to the front of the cavernous space and see them as their own incipient movement configurations. See the tables pushing the dancers as much as the dancers pushing them. Note that the choreography is already distributed, intensively fielding body- object recompositions. See the topological choreographic surface of the dance as co- constitutive of past-future movement events cueing to create a collective individuation for the deformation of the same yet divergent multidimensional supple surface. See One Flat Thing, reproduced less as a stable tableconfiguration with mobile dancers than as a field-surface of mobility, replete with different velocities, including those of the objects. Note that the objects are always already morphing into propositions for movement experimentation. Note that the tables are dancing, reconfiguring, moving movement as it “persons.” See the choreographic environment or stagespace not as a floor holding objects in place but as a dimensionalizing mobile surface moving tabled bodies, a folding event-space calling forth series of dephasings inflecting space, extracting figures, for the event of architecting mobility. Forsythe’s choreography is replete with actual and virtual cues. He defines the cue as “an aural or visual signal that triggers an event.” Cues do “person,” as Arakawa and Gins might say, but they need not move through an individual body to have effect. The cue is an enabling constraint for structured improvisation opening onto the collective individuation not of an 104 chaPtEr fivE

individual movement but of the body of the dance as a whole—what Arakawa and Gins would call an architectural body. More than personing, cues move the surface of the choreographic field, opening it to the complexity of infra-alignments and cues not taken. “When you stop, create silence. Do not stop individually,” Forsythe warns.7 To move is to move as a collective. As one dancer explains, “You get to know other people’s choreography so that if you miss a cue, you move on to your next sequence, or you look at someone else waiting for that same cue and follow them.”8 Cues transform the movement of the collective into a collective individuation, making felt the relational weave of the dancing surface as it unfolds. Too often, cues and primes are associated with a stable notion of recall. In Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, despite the emphasis of timed cueings and alignings associated with specific dancing bodies, there is no such simplistic notion of a repetition of the already-formed. The “reproduced” of One Flat Thing, reproduced connotes the repetition with a difference that is at the heart of each of Forsythe’s stage-based choreographies. The cue functions not as a simple tool for the memory of a rehearsed past, but as a call toward the future. Responding to cue is at once realigning and priming to future realignments. Think of the event of cooking. You are standing at the sink, washing the lettuce, while your partner reaches into the refrigerator to get the cucumbers, reaching back at the same time to turn off the stove. With one hand, she gives you the cucumber and despite the fact that you move across to reach for the grater at the same moment as she moves to pick up a fork, you somehow do not bump into each other. It’s not just that you’ve cooked together hundreds of times. It’s that the cueing is continuously rejigging the now of movement-moving. You are both dancing the interval of the decisions as they realign your cooking bodies. Moving through cue is landing decision. This is not a decision-fromwithout. As suggested in chapter 4, decision’s cut is the more than human force that repositions the field in the event of an occasion taking form: decision is how experience singles itself out as this or that. In the cut of decision, we know not the cue as such but only the nextness of its result: movement aligning. This nextness of movement-moving recalibrates the cueing bodies even as it recomposes the environment, event-fully poising the event for future priming. In this priming, the event is not poised for the repetition of the same. It is poised for difference. As Massumi warns: “If the cue were merely recognized, and the action triggered a simple repetition, its funcchorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  105

tioning would be downright maladaptive” (Massumi, 2011c, 71). Think of cooking together in a different kitchen and imagine the mess! As the cue primes the choreographic surface for the event of difference, it is setting up the conditions for event-time. Event-time is the time of decision, the time of the cut that dephases the field toward transductive recomposition. Cues make event-time felt by subverting linear clock-time. With every cue-alignment constellation comes the uncanny meeting of the memorial in the futuristic, the time-slip of a loop where “the present is tightly woven out of a dynamic line of pastness energetically entwined with a thread of futurity” (Massumi, 2011c, 71). Event-time is durationally multiphased. Every response to cue activates the future as it courses through the no-time of the decision in the present passing. No-time because the decision is immanent to the event’s recomposition. The event-surface becomes thick with time signatures. Dancers cueing through alignment move with the time of the cue’s making and all the preexisting and future-forming time signatures in the making, all in the no-time of decision. The no-time of decision coupled with the making-time of movement-moving brings the durational surface of the event to the fore, opening the sender-receiver relation to the collective individuation of a distributed relational movement. While cues in preparation for One Flat Thing, reproduced are rehearsed, in the doing they land the dance in an infinity of ways in a shifting landscape of infinite catalyzed reconfiguring. Cues thus open the choreography to a making-time that occasions the coming into expression of a making-place, their complex orchestration across collective strata landing the dance in a time always configured anew. Landing sites, as Arakawa and Gins (2002) define them, don’t need to actually either land or site. They can travel as immanent configurations of possible worlds, tweaking the affective tonality of an event while remaining virtual. Negatively prehended, as Whitehead would say—they can be felt as virtual tendencies that have the potential to act on future reconfigurations without ever coming to the fore as actual occasions.9 Cues also work like this. They propel tendencies that may or may not reach the surface of their articulated expression in the field of the actual. They float at the threshold of perception, they field surroundings, landing narrowly and widely, affecting, imaging, dimensionalizing. And they create paths of resistance and cohesion, propelling incipient actions even as they recast spacetimes of

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recombination. Active virtually and actually, cues move movement, and, in doing so, they catalyze event-time. Each landing is a cue in motion. Each cue in motion is a dancing. Each such iteration of counterpoint in the dancing—the activation of a field of action that creates a coincidence of attributes generating an infinity of folds—is a proto-architecture. And each proto-architecting of choreographic thinking is an impetus for a mobile architecture in the making. This mobile architecture is never a simple iteration-as-structure of a past configuration or idea. It is created in the moving, moved by the enabling constraints proposed not only by the rehearsed cues that propel the organization of the dance, but also by the folding surfaces of the landings that never quite find their sites. The mobile architecture is itself a proposition for landing. It is less a figure than a diagrammatic praxis that marks the durational field of the dance in its eventful unfolding. For Forsythe, the durational field of the dance is propositional: it is configuring more than configured. This despite the long hours of rehearsal and the complex movement vocabularies for cueing and aligning invented and studied by his excellent dancers. The choreography is configuring rather than simply configured because the choreographic field is itself continuously evolving through the cueing/aligning process. We experience the complexity of this evolution when we approach One Flat Thing, reproduced as an open field of distributed relational movement that operates with but also in excess of the human body: the cue lands nonlocally, meeting the dancer in the between of movements-moving. The dancer cues or aligns not by stopping the movement but by engaging directly with the nonlocal interval of the cue as it meets movement-moving. The resulting movement moves the relation between cueing and aligning in the mode, always, of the alreadymobile. The dancer does not watch, think, count, decide, and then move. The cue moves the dance, and in the choreographic field’s subsequent realigning, dancers land position, continuously moving through relational posture. The protagonist? Attention. Attention is another name for the fielding of the cue and the moving into its resulting alignment. The field is attentive. Attention is the enabling constraint of the structured improvisation that cues movement-moving. It is the nonlocal intensive node around which constellations of movement-aligning collectively regroup. Practice and technique are key to the creation of a dance of attention. The

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readiness to align of the attentive dance is what spurs the choreographic surface to come alive collectively. To cue to complex alignment in a practice of counterpoint: a body must be open to landing in more ways than one. It must attend to its tendency toward habit in order to evolve toward openness-to-invention: from technique to technicity. It must learn to respond not only to actual landings but to the virtual forces of cues that don’t land. And it must learn to move in attention with the complexity of the cue’s incipient multiplicity, landing position in the associated milieu of movement-moving where the body is always more than one. The dancer’s ability to align to cue with more than habitual responses to forms of cueing allows her to dance into the cue in a recalibrating of collective movement. The dancer dances this recalibration, dancing not simply her own movement but the very mobility of the choreographic surface. This proposes a renewal of movement expressibility within the stream of movement-moving. Movement expressibility calls forth a dance of attention that moves in open circuits, looping across nonlocal tendencies, feeding-forward into the multiphasing surfaces of movement aligning. Dancing attention is dancing-with the environment cueing. It is less being attentive-to than becoming in attention-with: the dance of attention is alive with the tendencies of a mobility that can only express itself through the future-forming interval of event-time. Attending to the dance in the event-time of structured improvisation is dancing the incipient mobile architecture of distributed relational movement. Like its dance of attention, distributed relational movement is a concept that begins to touch the nonhuman that is at the heart of movementmoving. At the interval where movement aligns to cueing, where the choreographic surfaces as collective individuation, the body never acts alone. The field’s proprioceptive surface is agitated by incipient relationality. Relational movement’s preacceleration is always already coursing through the welling event. Since there is no before and after of total movement, the movement’s relational distribution is what is at stake. How the redistributing relation moves between cues affects what will emerge as the resonant territory on the topological surface of the dance dancing itself. Some of the dance’s movement is in and of the human body, certainly, but the force of its redistributive dephasing exceeds the bounds of the human, active in the nonlocal, nonhuman relation priming for collective alignment. In these com108 chaPtEr fivE

plex dephasings, what moves the relation is as much the virtual as it is the actual. This is why even as complex an iteration as Synchronous Objects— with its many representations of what One Flat Thing, reproduced can look like—cannot fully map the complexity of choreography as mobile architecture. Representations function at the level of actuality. At their best, they can only peripherally deal with the push-pull of virtual potential that is part and parcel of choreography’s incipient “what else.” The Synchronous Objects Platform attempts to do this by foregrounding in an inventive manner the divergent modalities of Forsythe’s choreographic practice as it reemerges through a variety of synchronous spatial constellations. But no representation can, in the end, adequately attend to the durational force that makes mobile architectures come to expression. This is why it tends to be “The Dance” that stands out most on the Synchronous Objects website. For “The Dance” not only creates a visualization of a form, it makes felt how mobility is architected. At its best, architecture is a diagrammatic praxis that brings to the fore the force taking form of what Spuybroek calls “an original curve” and defines as the surface of action that is always also the surface of perception (2004, 7). Cues as they actualize in alignment are an example of the bringing into confluence of perception and action. The cue affects the field of action in a perceptual synchronization that moves the body. It catalyzes alignments that themselves create new priming opportunities at the interval where action and perception are one. These alignments return in varied iterations as refrains of activity that territorialize certain systems of perception. In aligning to cue,10 what catalyzes is the original curve of relational attention. This dance of attention is a collective enunciation of a tendency toward relational resonances rather than individual positioning. Aligning creates resonant territories not only of bodies but of volumes, diagrammatic surfaces in the making, enabling constraints for collective becoming. The body’s position in the field of relational alignment is more than a preconstituted posture. It is the proto-architectural, the diagrammatic how of the then-now of movement-moving. It is always collective and, as such, relationally distributed, proto-architectural because already mobilizing into the force of a volumetric taking form. You don’t strictly align to a rehearsed position, you don’t align to a person, you align to the mobility of the architecture of the dance dancing you. You dance its volume, the quality of its coming into itself, as much or more than you dance its position or chorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  109

form. You align to the relational complexity of cues as they dance the environment reconfiguring. You move-with the topological surface of experience, moving the environment that persons, activating the relation. The choreography of One Flat Thing, reproduced proposes modes of entry into the collective movement of a dancing surface that is inherently compositional. The dancers co- compose an event that in turn postures them. Their bodies are primed. But in this future-past vectorization of the surface welling toward a mobile architecture, it is not only the dancing body that is primed. The whole spacetime of distributed relational movement is at the ready, already reconfiguring in a tending-toward- cueing. The thightabletop, the table-spine, poised for recomposition. What is composing is the very between, the interval that activates each of these becomingassemblages. What is composing is event-time, not time as separate from moving bodies, but time as collectively embodied duration, rhythmically attending to the dance. Part 2: Participatory Ecologies To move from a choreography of collective orchestration for a reiterative event such as One Flat Thing, reproduced to the choreographing of a participatory environment in the context of art involves the deployment of a new set of concepts as well as a tweaking of what choreography can do. In an orchestrated choreographic event for multiple iterations such as One Flat Thing, reproduced, movement is moved from within the performance itself, architecting a field of collective mobility that proposes an incipient architecting of a force of form that exceeds the bounds of the actual choreographic event. The question is how or whether participatory events for movement composition such as art installations activated by choreographic objects are also capable of producing mobile architectures. When the event moves out of the theater into the arena of the participatory with the idea of activating collective movement, a choreographic object is often necessary. As described in the interlude “What Else?,” the object here functions not as a thing-in-itself but as a force of form that generates complex patterns in an ecology that touches on the everyday while moving beyond it into the time of the event. With the objectile as the lure, the welling event tunes toward its capacity to generate the conditions for a tweaking of attention that activates the spectator. This poses a choreographic chal-

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lenge, for these events cannot be choreographed in advance. They rely on a generative choreographing in the doing spurred by an emergent collectivity. In 2004 I began work on a movement experiment/art installation entitled Folds to Infinity, a two-phased fabric-based exploration of how textiles move us (see figure 15). Phase 1, Slow Clothes, is composed of cut and serged fabric based on pattern designs that lend themselves to all kinds of garments when connected to each other. Each piece is singular both in its cut and in the placement of buttons, buttonholes, magnets, hooks and eyes, and can be attached to or paired with any other piece to create garments or environments of the participant’s making. Phase 1 tends toward surface folds, layerings that are thin and sedimentlike, though the magnets’ inherent attraction to multiple stickings does create a complexity of folding that already tends toward volumetric bunching. Phase 2, Volumetrics (see figure 16), connects to Phase 1 but is based more specifically on the idea of volumes, generating foldings that are thick and bunched. Where Phase 1 plays with color, the fabrics chosen for their chromatic weaves, Phase 2 is black, the emphasis on textural subtleties. Another difference is that Volumetrics is not cut from preconceived patterns that, in their shape, already call forth garment-potential. Phase 2 is thought as a supplement to Phase 1 that thickens the sediment, building out from under its interweaving layers. Each piece of Volumetrics is more or less a rectangle, has multiple buttonholes through which elasticized string can be pulled to create shapes, folds and bunchings, toggles for adjustment of the strings, and magnets, snaps, and zippers. To play with Volumetrics, toggles are pulled or loosened along the elasticized string or gotten rid of altogether; zippers are opened or closed; snaps are multiply connected on a single piece of fabric or across pieces. In this fabric collection, the flatness of the body-surface is put into question, as is the idea that a garment layers directly on the human frame. The emphasis in Phase 2 is on the ontogenetic qualities of shaping: volumetrics is conceived as a machine for creating volumes. Slow Clothes and Volumetrics could be seen as choreographic objects for the exploration of what a body can do at the productive interval between dressing and architecting. To activate a mobile architecture depends on a series of enabling constraints. An enabling constraint is a setting in place of a series of conditions that foster a limiting of the field of experience even while they allow the incipient event to remain open to invention. Another name for structured improvisation, enabling constraints enable precision of technique in

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15. Erin Manning, Folds to Infinity, 2006. Photo by Bianca Scliar.

16. Erin Manning, Volumetrics, 2009. Photo by Ronald T. Simon.

an open field of experimentation. Enabling constraints for mobile architectures include inventing techniques for collective alignments that evolve beyond pure movement habituation. These techniques can begin with an object but must find creative ways of transducing the object into a proposition for the collective individuation of a distributed relational movement. Once again, technique must become technicity. In Folds to Infinity, the objectness itself—the fabric’s texture and color, the shape of the buttons, the geometries of the patterns, the elasticity of the cords, the surprise of the magnets—is the first constraint. The choreographic object activates a limit, becoming an attractor for a certain kind of collective approach. This can happen through color: the diversity of bright color and luminous texture in the Slow Clothes collection immediately tends to attract a certain kind of enthusiasm in the participant, especially in children. This effect is backgrounded with the black Volumetrics collection, where the effect tends to be more environmental and the proposition more architectural, leading to a more tentative approach. In both collections, however, there is the draw of the magnets, inciting a playful excitement that, under propicious conditions, can undo the participant of the habitual selfchorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  113

consciousness participatory art events can foster. As attractors, the magnets in Slow Clothes and Volumetrics are examples of little machinic assemblages that turn the fabrics into objectiles. They assist in tuning the Folds to Infinity object toward its propositional nature, emphasizing that this is less an “artwork” than a choreographic invitation for the activation of a collective dance of attention. Participatory ecologies such as Folds to Infinity propose to make felt the mobility of the concept of choreography beyond the collective body of the dancer. For a mobile architecture to emerge out of the process, the proposition, as mentioned above, has to exceed both the object-in-itself and the body-in-itself. Seen as two instances of the same conceptual grouping, the object and the body are anathema to mobile architectures precisely because they delimit the event according to preconstituted interiorities. It is therefore incumbent on the event as it unfolds that all preconstituted constituents be transformed into propositions. In Folds to Infinity, a key enabling constraint to open the object toward its propositional force or prime involves creating modes of access or entry that best incite a collective individuation. If a collective individuation emerges, what can result is the dephasing of the art event into an experimentation with collaboration. In such instances where a transduction occurs that brings art into the field of individuation, what follows is the creation of an incipient choreography. This incipient choreography is inherently collective.11 Key is to maintain the balance between the active constraints built into the singular event proposition and the open system of its deployment. Mobile architectures never result from a posture of “anything goes,” but nor do they emerge from strict replayings of individual or object- oriented scenarios dedicated to predictable outcomes. To turn the object into a choreographic proposition, the object must become diagrammatic. This means that the object has to form a series with the distributed relational movement of the event, opening itself to the event’s vacuoles of potential. Take two different Slow Clothes events. The first (shown in figure 17) took place in March 2008 at the Society for Art and Technology (sat) in Montreal. The setup was complex: a magnetic assemblage of plastic tubes and fabric constellations covering approximately nine hundred square feet. The environment was set up through groupings of tonalities of color to create a forestlike setting of fabric composition.12 In addition to choreographing the actual compositions such that the fabric could easily be touched and 114 chaPtEr fivE

moved, much thought was given to the way participants would enter and move through the wider event-space of the gallery. The wager was that how people entered would affect how they would continue to move through the installation and create with it. With this in mind, we set up a single initial entry point into the large space so that all participants would be funneled toward the far left of the installation where the darker colors—greens and browns—congregated on and around sculptures beckoning to the wider constellation.13 Upon entering into this secondary arena, participants had three options. They could move into the space in the most direct manner, which would siphon them toward the greens, from whence they would likely wander into the far side of the room where tones of orange gave way to a large orange velvet couch where they could comfortably sit and view the unfolding of the event from a safe but still enfolding distance. Alternately, they might be attracted to the open center of the space where all colors came together. A move in this direction, however, rather than giving immediate access to the central space of the installation, landed the participant in front of a warped transparent screen hanging at eye level. This screen was conceived as a velocity-prime, affecting not only the speed of entry into the event but the very appearing of the installation. We suspected that rather than simply ducking under this space-undulating screen, some participants might pause in front of it, taken aback by a certain vertiginous realigning of the event-space. Participants entering this way might find the posture of their engagement altered. The third option was to walk toward the right of the installation in a beeline toward the wine. Moving this way, the participant would likely not even notice the screen (or the dark greens on the far left), focused as they would be on the refreshment-attractor, the reds and browns at the far-right end of the installation appearing only at the threshold of their perception, if at all. Each of these modes of entry, conceived as enabling constraints toward affective tunings of the event in the moving, were techniques conceived not only to alter how the installation emerged for participants but also to explore how a decisional cut changes the experience of participation. As the participant moved through the “forest” and began to play with the fabric, or as the fabric magnetically caught the participants’ belt or metallic buttons and attached itself, connecting them to its structure, the work began to unfold into its generative architecting. For the magnetic surround from whence the collection was hung was itself an architecture, but not one chorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  115

(above and opposite) 17. Erin Manning, Slow Clothes, Society for Art and Technology, 2008. Photos by Sandra Bélanger.

that was meant to hold in place: the suppleness of the architecture and its magnetic attractors were conceived to facilitate the architecting of a relational environment. By the end of the event, a relational architecture had indeed begun to appear, in the form of an enormous spiderweb. The event had created its own choreography—replete with dancing human-textile sculptures in the midst of the growing spiderweb—tuning the choreographic object toward a mobile architecture. Folds to Infinity had morphed in a way that would affect the devising of future enabling constraints for architecting movement in my practice of event-based participatory art. Another Kind of Play * Second event: November 2008, McCord Museum, Montreal (shown in figures 18 and 19). In an effort to create a new magnetic architecture for the textiles that wouldn’t depend on hanging wire from the ceiling (the museum forbade any kind of hanging setup) a very different installation was created this time. Rather than hanging from fragile plastic tubing and metal wire, the fabric was draped over industrial-looking steel racks, creating almost anthropomorphic chromatic shapes. 116 chaPtEr fivE

18. Erin Manning, Slow Clothes, McCord Museum, 2008. Photo by Ronald T. Simon.

The installation was pristine, the color combinations startling, and the shapes seductive. What I didn’t immediately realize, however, was that the museum was having its effect: the collection looked more polished, the racks lending it a professional aspect, but the architecture as a whole was far less supple. The collection looked contained by preexisting space. I worried about how to get the participants going since I had little control over the participants’ modes of entry into the event-space and since the collection looked so much like an art object. I needn’t have been concerned. Before I knew it, the participants had taken possession of the fabric, their rich and varied experience with textiles—this was part of a wider textile exhibition and therefore attracted many participants with extensive backgrounds in fibres and design—an obvious entry point into the concept at work in Folds to Infinity. They were immediately engaged but on a different level from what I had experienced at the first Slow Clothes exhibition, wanting to know more about the craft of the work—about the buttons, about the cuts, the patterns, the provenance of the fabric—than about how to make it move. I found myself enthusiastically involved in the object qua object: dressing and undressing, we talked about the difference between Indian and Chinese silk, between the plastics used to make buttons of the early 1920s compared to

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those of the 1950s, about pattern cuts and the intensive passage between shapes and volumes. More than in other Slow Clothes events—in Brazil, in Berlin, and in Montreal—these were participants for whom the cut of the cloth was already a familiar affordance for the creation of certain specific shapes—they saw shirts and dresses and pants in the making. Where earlier participants might not, upon seeing the pieces, immediately see how they could be transformed from their two- dimensional cut into a three- dimensional piece of clothing, this was a group for whom the textiles—their cuts, their qualities, the placing of the buttons, magnets, and hooks—carried meaning. The object itself was replete with information. The result: they moved through the fabric with a strong sense of technique. They knew, for instance, how to pair pieces, how to invent modes of fastening with the magnetic jewelry I had fashioned (composed of wires, magnets, and buttons). And so they turned to the composition with a strong sense of what the fabric proposition could do. Unlike earlier exhibitions, they also took more time with each piece of fabric, examining the constellations of buttons, admiring the finishing, discussing among themselves how a single cut could create more than one garment or could fashion the garment in more than one way. And then, in contemplative slowness, they began to invent, turning the magnetic jewelry into corsets for the creation of hanging fabric designs, playing with the forms the folds could take, pairing pieces of fabric to create complex garments. More than anywhere else the collection has toured, they experimented with how a body expresses itself in the dressing. They took literally the proposition that this is a textile collection for the dressing of all bodies, even bodies yet to be invented. And they made exquisite configurations. But they barely moved. They mostly worked in pairs, carefully designing, placing piece against piece, playing with color. They wanted to know what their garments looked like and they were extremely interested in the idea that someday this collection would be presented as a proposition for the making of actual pieces of clothing.14 They took Slow Clothes at its word, engaging in a slow dance of still-moving dressing bodies. This was a successful event—if participation and enjoyment are markers for success—but it remained at the level of the object. I left this exhibition with a renewed sense of what the object could do but without a sense of having been able to activate an incipient choreography that exceeded the object. The push-pull of a mobile architecture in the making was missing.

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(opposite and above) 19. Erin Manning, Slow Clothes, McCord Museum, 2008. Photos by Ronald T. Simon.

And so I began work on Volumetrics, Phase 2 of Folds to Infinity. And as I did so, I realized that at the McCord Museum I fell into my own trap: I created a structure. And the very same structure remained at the end, denuded but not transformed. We must never underestimate the power of existing structures to predetermine the proto-architectural field. Choreography as mobile architecture is anathema to any kind of setting into place of ideal conditions that transcend event-time, be they those of structure, of object, or of individual. Choreography as mobile architecture emerges instead with the diagrammatic force of ideas in the materializing. It has to do with force taking form. All incipient architecting of mobility is already a volumetrics, an intercalating of surfaces and tendencies. As mobile architecture, choreography activates the volumes, turning the surface onto itself, making felt the coming into appearance of the event’s own vertiginous movements, incipient movements that stay with us long after the particular occasion of their coming to expression has unraveled. Techniques for the Everyday * While movement techniques for the stage might seem to be primarily focused on the body outside of the everyday, and chorEograPhy as MoBilE architEcturE  121

techniques for participatory installations might seem to emphasize a group body (the subway, the sidewalk, the classroom), in fact both build on the associated milieu of relation. There is no arabesque that does not immediately and significantly entail the enveloping of a milieu into the movement: the air, the time of day, the quality of the space, the last arabesque, all of these shape this arabesque. Every movement is a relational movement. Whether choreographing for the stage or for participatory movement events, what must be honed is therefore a distributed relational body. One of the ways of becoming attuned to distributed relational movement is to become sensitized to the collective attunements activated by cues and alignings in everyday movement, thus learning to work with the array of decisions in that wider field of movement, human and nonhuman. This involves working with a modality of attention that lurks below reflective consciousness. For it is impossible, even in the most organized choreographic process, to map out every possible alignment. A choreographer for the proscenium of the theater, let alone a choreographer of participatory ecologies, cannot predict how the environment will mutate. Much can be gleaned from participating in moving sidewalks. As with the cooking example, it is striking how rarely rapidly moving bodies run into one another or into open doors, garbage cans, or bus stops as they walk on busy streets. In preparation for a participatory choreographic event, time on the sidewalk is key. Tentative Constructings Toward a Holding in Place * When an event architects a mobility that outdoes it, the relationship between body and spacetime has fundamentally shifted. No longer do we have the human at the center. Instead, we have priming-for-movement, cues, alignments, inflections, vacuoles of expression. We have an architecture that persons and a moving that choreographs. This is not to discount the human dancing body. It is to open the body to its relational potential as a participatory node in the milieu of movement. It is to emphasize that there is no outside of movement, that movement already moves and that we are moved by it and move it on the topological surface of its deformation. Movement is already an architecting. It is already landing, already making space, making time. Configuring, it individuates bodies-in-movement that express a collectivity of alignment that resolves, often, on a singular body, but also moves, always and incessantly, across the distributed milieu that is choreography’s architecting of relational movement. Mobile architectures: “tentative constructings toward a holding in place” 122 chaPtEr fivE

(Arakawa and Gins 2002, 47). Architectures, in the words of Arakawa and Gins, that come into their own with the “ever- on-the-move body” in the tense of the tendentially indeterminate. Only nomads, Arakawa and Gins argue, have taken such architecture seriously. Perhaps not. Perhaps choreographers have been inventing modes of architecting all along, creating out of everyday movements to make felt how the collective individuation of participatory ecologies is always already architecturally inflected. Perhaps they have always already sensed that landing sites are dispersive, tangential, productive, and forceful, and must not be confined to preexisting or finalized structures of repetition. Perhaps choreographers have always already known that difference erupts no matter how often you rehearse, how often you practice counterpoint, how often you step onto the stage or the sidewalk. In the aligning of choreography to mobile architecture we have an opening toward the notion that “space is the result of the surface’s operation” (Semper qtd. in Benjamin 2004, 345). The surface’s operation: the original curve where the mobile topology of collective individuation attends to the tangential volumetrics of an environment for architecting.

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interlude

Fiery, Luminous, Scary

A call for a participatory art event often entails the invitation to touch. This may involve an actual direct touching (“touch this lever, this button and it will cause a change in the environment”), or it may involve a more elusive call to touch that includes being moved by a work in transformation. Either way, the call to touch is a demand: it asks the participant to relate, in this time of interaction, to the unfolding of the work. It asks the participant to be open to a certain unknowability, and to a certain risk. Here I want to suggest that despite calls made toward open- endedness and process (understood as positive effects of a generative event) the call to touch is never straightforward. For it is a call, and like all calls it asks that it be listened to in certain ways, that it elicit behavior considered manageable under the conditions of the work. This is the risk any artist takes: that the call to touch will expose itself as an all-or-nothing proposition, that the participant will feel burdened by the event rather than excited by it, that instead of setting new conditions for experimentation, a failure will be experienced from the outset, a failure to have known in advance what it means to touch. This is because a call to touch is always bounded to some extent within certain predefined expectations: touch depends on a certain preunderstanding of what are considered its acceptable limits. Touch, but touch this way! No matter how carefully crafted, no participatory art event is ever completely exempt from this imbrication of touch with the expectations that accompany it. For touch, as Jacques Derrida (2005) has shown, can never be completely disentwined from tact. This strange intertwining of touch with tact, of touch’s inherent injunction to be “hands- on” and its elusive

demand to know in advance what participation means in each instance, is the complex challenge of any art practice that asks of the spectator to be involved in the carrying-through of the work. I have elsewhere called this activation of the sensing body an instance of a “politics of touch” (Manning 2007), emphasizing that within the realm of touch lies both tact- driven behavior that orients to premapped and preordained notions of participation and the opportunity to rearticulate the political toward a thinking in movement that emphasizes the gesture of a reaching-toward that can activate a co- composing relational field. With participatory art, I believe a politics of touch is always at stake—a politics that trembles between touch-as-tact and touch as the activity through which new constellations for the bodying are created (and where the line between body and environment is smudged). The role participatory art plays in activating and rethinking a politics of touch was made particularly apparent to me in July 2010 when DJ Savarese and I began a collaborative project involving my artwork Folds to Infinity. Our plan was to generate ideas for how to bring participatory art to the autistic community: we had been invited by autcoM,1 a conference organized by and for autistics, to create an installation of the work. In the context of a project such as Folds to Infinity, participation means many things: it means to walk among the fabrics and enjoy their texture, to touch or wear the fabrics, to reposition or compose with them architecturally, to assist an other who is trying to compose clothing but can’t quite manage on their own, to be inadvertently connected to the magnets interspersed in the collection (your belt buckle or purse magnet may pull the fabric off someone else’s body or shift the shape of the installation). The invitation is broad: touch, move, be moved. But as was made clear when DJ first entered the installation space, participation with the work also means understanding the limits of touch in the singular context of each of the artwork’s iterations. This, I believe, is what initially held DJ back in the context of our collaborative work at the SenseLab. For even before he had quite extended his hand to the mobile architecture that held Folds to Infinity, even before he had quite begun to engage with the work, he heard the unspoken injunction: get it right! DJ quickly retracted his hand and moved across the participatory environment to sit on an orange couch and wait for further instructions. The initial promise of intuitive co- composition had passed and been replaced by a distancing posture of reflection. Not in the least surprising: no one wants to play when it seems as though the rules of the game are laid out in advance. Fiery, Luminous, Scary 125

Relational art’s call to touch, to play, to encounter an environment in its unfolding, risks failure if its politics of touch are not immanent to the event. Any expectation of touch will always risk including a predetermined understanding of what it means to engage the work. Such a notion of touch will never be able to completely divest itself of its doubling of touch! with do not touch! or touch this way! The challenge is immense: a participatory work that is successful cannot depend on the mantra of “anything goes” as this will only produce (in the best of all cases) chaos or (in the worst-case scenario) nothing. For a work to be successful, as suggested in the preceding chapter, enabling constraints must be embedded within its conceptual design, and these constraints must to some degree immanently direct the work toward its unfolding. But these constraints must also be capable of remaining flexible enough to refrain from the preposturing of the work (touch it, but get it right!). To do its work, participatory art must therefore reflect on how it creates the constellations for its unfolding, how it places within the work the expectations that may ultimately close down the very potential the work was meant to unleash. This was not all immediately clear to me. What I knew at the outset was that DJ had sensed an expectation I had inadvertently built into the event, despite the sustained thought I had given to how the conditions of a participatory event are crafted. And so it became our job, our collective effort, for the next three days (and the months to follow), to better understand how touch came to embody the injunction I wanted to leave behind. Our work: how to conceive of a way of reentering the field of participation such that the politics of touch are no longer confined to the realm of tactful touch but are instead inflected toward the relational ecology a singular iteration of the piece calls forth when it is set into motion. The first issue that needed to be addressed was how the artwork itself crafts the problem. What is Folds to Infinity’s implicit call? Does the fabric, the installation, the magnetic architecture, depend on the laying of hands? And if so, does it ask for a certain kind of touch? Does the fabric collection require a physical handling, a local encounter with this or that kind of visible or tangible interactivity? Is there within the ethos of the piece an opening that invites participatory techniques that tune toward the morethan of a local response?2 Folds to Infinity is not a neutral materiality that is added onto the performative. The fabric, the magnets, the architecture—each of these activates 126 interlude

orientations that affect how the piece itself generates spacetimes of experience. As a choreographic object, it is always and only what it does, here, now. This means that each iteration of the work will reorient what the work can do. Nothing can be taken for granted. Participatory art cannot be conceived to template: every participant will affect how the work unfolds, and each unfolding of the work will make demands on how the work evolves for the next iteration. No matter how many times a piece has been exhibited, no matter how successful it has been in this or that context, no matter how many evolving techniques have been woven into the work to facilitate its structured improvisation, there is no guarantee that the conditions of this particular enunciation will unfold the piece in predictable (or interesting) ways. There is simply no guarantee with work that depends on participation for its unfolding. Day 1 DJ increasingly found himself in a fix. He wanted to engage with the work, wanted to see touch as the invitation to play, but understandably felt that play was tinted with expectations not yet fully worked out. What if in the playing, tactlessness reared its head, re-stereotyping him? For DJ is visibly autistic and has had enough of being accused of untactful behavior—too loud, too disruptive, too excited, too alive. He has been taught over and over by a largely uncomprehending normopathic world to not touch- engagerelate with such verve, so directly. Here, in the context of Folds to Infinity, he risked once more being “too much” or, even worse, being “taken as stupid,” as he calls it. For while there is no question that DJ is highly intelligent, a scenario whose stakes are muddy risks putting him in a position wherein he is incapable of properly working out the conditions of the environment and rising to the occasion, thus reinvigorating the deep anxiety he lives with, and making his motor-activation issues more acute. On top of this, it is already hard enough for DJ to try to mask the complexity of sensation he lives with every second of the day without having to spontaneously learn what we neurotypicals might have in mind when we select out one sense (touch) and incite him to follow our lead. What can this even mean to someone for whom the concept of discrete sense modalities remains a mystery? For DJ’s experience of the world, like many autistics, involves a complex synesthesia where it is unclear how discrete modalities on their own do the work of sensing. What can touch mean to those of Fiery, Luminous, Scary 127

us for whom to sense is to participate in a crossmodal orientation toward the world, where to smell means to hear color, where to see means to taste sound? Intense synesthesia creates an agitation of perception complicating the parsing out of experience into this or that—this touch or that fabric— undermining the easy separation of human-actor and object-receptor. For the autistic, to be in the world is to world, to experience the unfolding, in all of its complexity, of the commingling of all drops of experience. Day 2 Sometimes composing on his iPad, sometimes exploring the field of forces of the rare earth magnets of which the collection and the architecture are composed, sometimes quietly attending to the environment from the halfdistance of his seat on the couch, DJ participated in a dance of attention that was never disinterested. For it was clear, as we communicated through the iPad’s synthesized voice, that DJ did want to actively compose with the installation, and that he felt drawn to it—“I want Erin to help me create play,” he typed. The question was how to bridge that first injunction of tact-touch, how to invite DJ to reach beyond this first injunction toward a new constellation that precisely did not seek to prefigure in advance how the relational field should express itself ? How might we open the work to the differential created in the act of reaching-toward, a reaching-toward through which a relationality could be crafted that would exceed the sum of the event’s parts? On the second day, it occured to me to ask DJ to tell me about his experience of the space. Was an environment of my creation also an opening to him? Did he think Folds to Infinity’s mobile architecture as I had conceived it could be a generative proposition for other autistics? After some reflection, DJ suggested that the installation might not cater to all kinds of movement, and that it might in fact not foreground movement enough. We followed through with this proposition, discussing the possibility of bringing the work to autcoM in the form of a mobile experiment that would use participants’ wheelchairs themselves as metallic architectures. Although we did not ultimately follow through with this, it became the first clue: Perhaps to “create” play was to allow the artwork to travel on its own? To make movement its subject as well as its outcome?

128 interlude

Day 3 DJ Savarese writes: “Experts think they can determine our thoughts from observing our behaviour, but most of you know this is hard to do for anyone. It is especially hard to do if the person’s body deserts its hopeful mind because of severe anxiety or illogical sensory input. For example, some of us see emotions as colours and others of us feel noise. We might stop a movement. People think we’re avoiding doing work, but we’re deserting our reasonable selves because we feel a fearful sound or see quiet green reassessed as approval.”3 “Quiet green reassessed as approval” began to tint this third day already suffused with explorations into participation-as-mobility, participation as an opening to a mobile unfolding of event-time. With the beginnings of this constellation mapped out, in a rare bid to “independence,” a concept that means much to those who have daily needs that must be met by others, DJ typed for his parents to leave the room so that he could finally “create play with Erin.” What is the difference between playing and creating play? To be forced to play is like being forced to touch. Not only does it potentially do violence to the complex relational field in co- composition, it also presupposes an already-homogenized arena of engagement. This tends to put play squarely in the realm of a local interaction instead of within a field of relation where what is foregrounded is not the human per se but the more-than of experience in the unfolding. Was there enough nuance within the artwork’s proposition, I wondered, to activate relation beyond the linear model of a localized interactivity? Folds to Infinity was initially conceived as an intervention into prêt-àporter culture. My research question was what might it mean for a body to express itself as a continuum in the dressing rather than to have to prefit the clothing? While conventions of haute couture were based on the creation of the garment for the body in its present form (without an ideal of shape or size preinscribed), haute couture was never democratically available for the populace at large. Would it be possible to reinscribe certain aspects of haute couture—the singularity of creation for just this shape, just this movement of the body-becoming—while still making the garment available to all, as it was meant to be in the prêt-à-porter tradition with which we are more familiar? Adjacent to these concerns was the exploration of what it might mean to dress relationally. The force of the magnets—and the disquiet they Fiery, Luminous, Scary 129

cause in the dressing, creating sporadic folds and spontaneously connecting to pieces in their proximity—would make it very difficult to compose alone, thus proposing an opening for a collective practice of dressing. I knew, of course, that this was only one proposition of what the work could do as a choreographic object. Nonetheless, spending time with DJ in the SenseLab, I realized that my research questions were still too prominent, creating too tight a constraint within what I wanted to see as an exploratory matrix. With DJ it became clear that I had to actively open up the work to its own more-than, to engage with what it could do without necessarily assuming that it was only doing its work when it was directly, locally handled. Already tending toward these kinds of considerations, in 2009 I began to explore, through conductive fabric, proximity sensors, speakers, and miniature fans, how Folds to Infinity might begin to “entertain the environment” beyond the kind of participatory call already sewn into its concept. The idea behind this phase of Folds to Infinity (titled Weather Patterns) was to set up a system of sensors embedded into the fabric that react to movement, altering the threshold conditions of sound in the environment while activating barely perceptible air currents. For this to happen, the participants need not actually touch the work—any shift in the electromagnetic conditions of the room has an effect, as will any movement, including that of air currents. The idea behind this version of Folds to Infinity is to make felt how the simple presence of movement in the space affects the environmental conditions not only of the space itself but also of the work. Because the focus of Weather Patterns is on thresholds of perception, these changes in environmental conditions are not meant to physically alter the space in any radically apparent way. The idea is to enter into relationship with the largely nonsensuous dynamics of a mobile environment, making felt how space is always already in movement. This project, now in its final phase—with collaborators Mazi Javidiami, Nathaniel Stern, Bryan Cera, and Andrew Goodman—seek to entertain the environment with and, in some sense, despite the participant, making the participant part of the active ecology of the world tuning to its difference without necessarily putting the participant in the role of direct activator of change. There of course remains the option to compose with the fabric, to build, to dress, to architect. But the proposition remains more environmental in this piece. Although this phase of the project was not yet resolved during DJ’s visit to be SenseLab, it felt as though the potential of this notion of entertain130 interlude

ment as related to the environmentality of ecologies in the making was exactly what DJ and I were working toward. Entertaining the Environment It took three days, but finally it occurred to me to ask DJ what it was he saw exactly, in this field of experimentation. “Quiet green in a sea of noise” was his answer. “What shall we do to quieten the environment?” I asked him, realizing that the field of color was too much, too loud, too overwhelming to really engage with. We immediately took down the black, which DJ classified as “scary,” scary perhaps because of the color, or perhaps simply because of the injunction (Touch! Do not touch! ) it had come to embody—for it was the black fabric of Volumetrics that incited DJ to pull back in his initial encounter with Folds to Infinity upon entering the SenseLab for the first time. What became clear during this process of scaling back on color was that, for DJ, a color does not simply evoke a quality, it is a qualitative field in itself. He hears the qualitative resonance of color’s relational field in its emergence: he feels “fiery” for orange, he directly experiences “luminous” when he “sees” the varying shades of blue, purple, and pink of the dupioni silks. This direct experience of quality is allied to synesthesia, and particularly to what Daniel Stern calls the event’s “activation contour”—the force of form of an event’s coming into itself. As it became more apparent that DJ and I were dealing with the affective force of activation contours—instead of discrete objects or even colors—we finally began to see how we might actively create play. To create play was to play with and generate new activation contours. To touch will always of course also mean to handle, to reach across toward the texture of the world in all of its complexity, but its attendant affective quality—to be touched, to touch in the between of words—is ultimately how activation contours are tweaked. From DJ—as from many other autistics—what we can learn is that touch is a worlding that always already participates in the making sense of the world. No laying of hands is necessary for this: to touch is to become attuned to the ecologies of sensation always already activating the world as we embody it, as it embodies us. In the end, DJ and I did create play. And we did directly touch the fabric. But this touching felt like an afterthought. For in our creation of a new mobile architecture, what we were doing was less handling the fabrics than activating the architecture of light that was always already part of the inFiery, Luminous, Scary 131

stallation. In a sense what we were doing was parsing out the luminousness from the wider field of movement-moving and sensations overcrowding. To create play is not as simple as to touch. Perhaps for the neurotypical, touch is as immediate an entry into the relational as we can, in the first instance, conceive of. But all participatory work, to be successful, must get beyond this first injunction. The work must carry within its concept the conditions for play that can propel the participant toward the more-than of touch where the activity of the work in its eventness can be felt, where the work’s already attuning relational potential affects what a body-worlding can do. Seen this way, there is no work that isn’t already potentially participatory, be it a painting, an architecture, an installation, a musical composition. The challenge is to create the conditions for the work to work in an ecology of relation that does not privilege the interactive but seeks to open the way for the activation of the more-than the work has to offer. What neurodiversity teaches us, it seems to me, are techniques to become attuned to this more-than, to become-attuned to the ineffable amodality of experience that activates the contours of the event toward a moving, an encountering, a being-moved in a complex ecology of practices. Spacetimes of relation are never neutral. They are fiery, luminous, scary. They are alive across their resonances, human and nonhuman, modal and amodal. They are attendant and attending, attuning and entertaining. With DJ at the SenseLab, over time we began to collectively attune to how the work did its work, alone and in recombination. We found that even without laying hands on the work, the work was never passive, never still. It was lived in a synesthetic interplay that was mobile and complex, propositional across registers. And we found that it was here, in an approach more ecological than interactive, in a veering from implicit demand, from implicit expectation, that the work began to create play.

132 interlude

six

The Dance of Attention

Diagrammatic Praxis Step 1: Lie down on the floor. Close your eyes. Step 2: Begin to create a diagram of the space. Allow the diagram to settle. Step 3: Find an open space in the diagram and move into it, virtually. Step 4: Locate another open space. Move into it. Step 5: Wait. Feel time’s elasticity. Feel the space shifting. Step 6: Keep your eyes closed even while you keep moving in and through the diagram. Step 7: Slowly stand up, eyes still shut. In the standing, reencounter your diagram. Step 8: Wait. Step 9: Find another opening within the diagram. Step 10: Move into it, actually this time. Step 11: When your movement slows to a standstill and the diagram has solidified, slowly open your eyes. The first step in the procedure above,1 recursively attended to in subsequent steps, already exceeds a visual mapping. For while the initial boundaries of the diagram may seem to hold to a perspectival order, their potential for variability is experienced as soon as movement is introduced in the third step: find an opening and move into it. Here, the activity of space-shaping is emphasized. This space-shaping, while it may seem to take off from the representation of a space—a vision of a diagram fully-formed—actually emerges more through a feeling of space shifting than a visualization of a form.

Space-shaping is a procedure not so much for the creation of a stable version of space as for the bringing forth of active intervals—associated milieus—that are the diagram’s force of form. What the procedure of a diagrammatic praxis such as the one above can do is make felt the processual nature of space in-forming for experience. One of the ways this processual quality of experiential spacetime is felt most keenly is through movement, in particular preacceleration, the virtual premovement that accompanies all actual movement. What preacceleration does is make felt the tendings already in germ before a displacement happens, emphasizing that movement happens less in an individual body than in the intervals proposed by movement’s inherent relationality. Space-shaping is immanent to the activity of diagramming. The diagram does not preexist its shaping. This is felt in step 4: Locate another open space. Move into it. As the participant responds to this step, they find that space is reshaped in the (virtual) moving. They experience a relational movement, a moving-between that connects the first diagram to the incipient diagramming in the shaping. The diagram that may have seemed to be an individual form now reveals itself to be an emergent multiplicity. They are not moving into a space so much as moving the opening through which space is crafted. This makes felt a quality of body-spacing—not your body exactly but a body- elastic co- constituted in the shaping—that itself becomes part of the ecology of the diagrammatic praxis. Spacing and bodying transindividuate, fashioning a multiple singularity: a body- diagrammatic. The bodydiagrammatic is a procedural “I” that stands not for the subject but for individuation. For the process is not one of defining an individual—a body, a form—but of making felt the merging of topological registers of coconstitution: space-bodying, time-spacing. Step 5 is everywhere present: Feel time’s elasticity. Feel the space shifting. A notable dephasing comes with step 7—Slowly stand up, eyes still shut. In the standing, reencounter your diagram. Here, in the recalibration of equilibriums, preaccelerations of movement potential cross the vertical-horizontal axis, leaving the body- diagrammatic unmoored. What has shifted here is not the body per se but the conditions for bodying in movement. As participants stand with/in their shifting diagrams, what tends to happen is the experience of an intensifying of mutation, a multiplying of intervals. Some participants describe this as a heightened sense of the becomingenvironment’s affective tonality: they talk about the intensification of sound or touch; they talk of space becoming multidimensional. 134 chaPtEr six

This is perhaps why, in step 10—Move into it, actually this time—despite the call to “actually move,” participants tend to prioritize a stilling (a quiet moving in place) rather than an actual displacement. It is as though with the volumetric shifting in the standing comes an infradimensionalizing of the very idea of ground that requires a new modality of attention, attentionwith, in the intensive stilling. Participants speak of a sense of a volumizing of dimension, a curving of spacetime, an opening of the field of “behindness” or “underneathness” that topples their sense of bodily integrity on the the horizontal-vertical axis. It is here that preacceleration’s interval in continuous modulation can be felt most strikingly: the infradimensionality of diagrams recalibrating is expressive of the multiplicity of intervals creating openings for the moving. What is felt: an uncanny intensity, vertigo, a resonance or vibration in the stilling, a multiplicity of movement potential. Preacceleration does not occur “in” space (as though space preexisted it): preacceleration feeds experience in the moving at the incipient edge where the before and between of movement coincide. In habitual movement, it is most often too fleeting to be felt. Since it is only tending toward the actual, we know it only in the moving, and even then, we cannot easily make sense of it “as such.” But in a focused diagrammatic praxis, especially in the moving across registers of space-timing, preacceleration can sometimes be passingly felt, and it is this feeling that most palpably makes apparent the inherent elasticity of spacetimes bodying that occurs in step 10. The procedure above is just one example of a diagrammatic praxis that serves to demonstrate the mobility of spacetime in experience. I focus on this to emphasize that all architectings of movement are activations of spacetime in the making, and that the activity of spacing we experience in the moving is an infralayer of the infinite potentiality of bodying, itself cocomposing in an environment of change. Another thing this simple procedure demonstrates is that all movement is relational movement. There is no shifting of a diagram, no shaping of spacetime, that isn’t implicated in the relational constellation of a wider ecology of movement-moving. While relational movement can operate between two bodies, can be felt as the relational interval of the preacceleration of a body moving toward and with another body, relational movement never operates solely between two.2 It is always multiple, always already distributed in morphing spacetimes of experience. The proposition: distributed relational movement is the form movement takes when it becomes the ontogenetic expression of diagrams in the making. thE DancE of attEntion  135

What Moves? The initial tendency is to place movement in the human body. This is especially the case in the context of stage-based choreography, where the dancing body tends to be at the forefront. In chapter 5 I explore how movement moves in two distinct instances—in William Forsythe’s choreography One Flat Thing, reproduced (see figure 20), as featured on the Synchronous Objects website, and in the participatory installations of my own artwork, Folds to Infinity (see figure 21). Here, my focus is on the ways in which these two variants of choreographic practice create their own complex diagrams, a mobile architecture. A mobile architecture, as I suggest in chapter 5, is not a resting place for human bodies, nor is it a built enclosure. Like the diagrammatic praxis of the movement exercise recounted above, a mobile architecture is about the fielding of experimental spacetimes such that they produce an intensive turbulence that becomes the force for a distillation of absolute movement, for the making felt of how movement-moving merges with the actual in its unfolding. The mobile architecture of a choreography is not the plan of the movement or the partitioning of the individual bodies in space. It is the relational force that persists from the collective movement’s incipient cueings and alignings. It is the gathering of a force-field not of the bodies per se but of the active intervals their relational movement creates, intervals it taps into to make felt the more-than of a given movement composition. In chapter 5, through an analysis of the techniques proposed by Forsythe and his dancers, techniques that take counterpoint to a very complex limit, I explore how what cues and aligns is not the human body per se but the landings of sites for future cueings and alignings. These landing sites are more than human. They are the active force of movement’s fieldings in co- constitutive spacetimes of experience, felt as the coming and going of tendencies too quick for the actual perceiving. Certainly, a body moves. But what moves the body is more-than cue, more-than alignment as such. What moves the body is a tendency for movement, a movement of thought. This tendency feeds a collective process, shifting it toward a new aligning. Alignment is a moving with incipient tendency that realigns the choreographic whole, shifting not simply the body in space, but the space bodying. The shift I make in this chapter is to look more closely at diagrammatic praxis as an experiment in cueing and aligning aimed at directly experiencing the elasticity of spacetime. How does the creation of a diagram morph 136 chaPtEr six

20. One Flat Thing, reproduced from the Synchronous Objects Project, The Ohio State University and The Forsythe Company.

into a fielding that expands beyond the visual data of space mapped? What happens when the choreographic field does not begin with a preexistent mapping onto which moving bodies are subsequently integrated? How is the moving body (re)created diagrammatically? How does the aligning body morph into a diagrammatic praxis in its own right? Remembering the Future Cues play with memory, yet their modality is not remembering. A dancer’s response based on remembering would be far too slow, especially in the case of the rapid flow of Forsythe’s singular movement exploration. The cue mobilizes not memory as preexistent but memory as crafted in movement. Memory is the force of attention mobilized in an emergent spacetime. Memory not simply in and of the body, but with the bodying-in-movement of space-timing. As emphasized in chapter 4, bodies move in active memory of the present-passing, which is simultaneously a remembering of the future in the tense of the déjà-felt. Ask a dancer to describe in language the way he just moved and he likely won’t be able to do it. The movement moved him at a velocity too quick to remember in a time impossible to grasp as such. Yet the dancer’s movement remembers. The movement can move again into what the dancer “himself ” cannot quite hold onto: movement-moving is thE DancE of attEntion  137

21. Erin Manning, Volumetrics, Dancehouse Melbourne, 2009. Photos by Brian Massumi.

active in a futurity virtually impossible to articulate except through movement. Its position can be grasped after the fact, but to tap into its intensity of variation, it must ultimately be recalled in the moving. To tap into movement-moving is to recall the future in its presenting: in the moving, the future-pastness of movement’s force of form is tapped into, cueing all the while to diagrams in the making. In a choreographic setting such as One Flat Thing, reproduced, a common assumption is that the space in the moving is premapped. Yet, were this the case, there would be little opportunity for what Suzanne Langer (1977) calls the “commanding form” of the piece, its force of form across iterations. Also called “matrix idea,” commanding form is the virtual force of a composition’s inherent potential for recomposing. It is the intensive magnitude of the emergent co-expression of the composition in its serial reiteration. The “how” of the work as it is replayed across settings and environments is its commanding form. This “how” is emergent each time anew and is always a complex mixture of technique and technicity. Technique to keep the piece rigorous, to give it the subtlety and nuance and precision it requires. Technicity to make the work outdo itself, to make the work work. The commanding form of a piece is how the work dances to attention. The Dance of Attention The dance of attention is activated by the co- compositional force of diagrams for the moving that emerge over the course of an event’s coming to expression. What dances to attention is not an external subject but the event itself. It is the event that is attentive to its coming into deformation, an attention that reorients the event toward its intensive more-than. Each of these concepts—the diagram, commanding form, mobile architecture, dance of attention—is specific to context. The diagram of a painting feeds on texture, light, and incipient form; the commanding form of a musical piece creates a sonorous refrain across performances and recompositions; a mobile architecture is the activation of the incipient formwithout-form of a choreographic proto-architecture; and the dance of attention is the attentiveness of the milieu itself to the complex landings of experience in the making. Each of these diagrammatic praxes is intensively intertwined, the concepts mobilized in their difference less to mark a general distinction than to orient the practice through which they come to expression. thE DancE of attEntion  139

Another way to talk about the practices through which incipient tendencies express themselves is to differentiate between modes of existence. Modes of existence, for Étienne Souriau and Gilbert Simondon, are emergent modalities of life-living nascent through an event’s form-taking. Modes of existence never preexist a given individuation. They are immanent to it. Nor are they, in relation to art practices, about the more superficial notion of style or genre. Modes of existence refer instead to an emergent fielding of tendencies that bring a given work or series of works to life across iterations. For example: the mode of existence of William Forsythe’s oeuvre is not the representation of a type of movement or style of content. It has to do instead with a certain quality of experimentation associated, certainly, with the tools the Forsythe Company uses to create movement potential out of the more-than of the dance figure, but not limited to them. To speak of a mode of existence is to find within the practice the singularity that gives it its diagrammatic force. The Working of the Work “Put the activation into every part,” Forsythe suggests, “think about where the movement starts and stops—if you raise your arm, where does your skin stretch? Activate the skin.”3 This task, invented for a choreographic process, results in certain qualities of movement expressibility that lead the body-space continuum to reconfigure itself less in terms of balletic position (though the movement can take fugitive balletic form) than in the unmooring quality of the more-than of a given position. In another context, such as William Forsythe’s Woolf Phrase, a different technique is necessary. This piece, which draws from the work of Virginia Woolf and complexly intertwines the spoken word and the dancing, explores the intensity of activation across two modalities—the voice and the body-becoming. In this case, a technique is needed to tune language to an otherness of expression where words and movement taken together are capable of creating an active interval that pushes both beyond the limits of their form such that we begin to feel the words in the moving. Another piece, NNNN, depends on a different set of tasks or techniques. NNNN is a quartet that explicitly draws out the breath of the dance. In a play of cueing and aligning, the piece breathes the movement that ensues. Here, the dancers might explore principles of preacceleration and relational movement. For while they move together in what seems to be a call-and-response scenario, what unfolds is a complex 140 chaPtEr six

resonance of incipient movement: the dancers move in the moving of each other’s movement. Each of these techniques creates the basis for a mode of existence that bridges the oeuvre in its divergence while activating its resonances. A mode of existence is not a superficial marker of similarity across an oeuvre. It is not about finding confluences between paintings by a given artist or locating similar forms in a choreographer’s repertoire. Modes of existence are thresholds in the workings of the work that mark a certain productive dephasing of its process. They refer not to the form the work takes but to the consistency of its capacity to exceed a predictable form-taking across varied iterations. The mode of existence activated by an artist’s oeuvre is felt more than seen, plotted not to position but to its very outdoing in a realm of expression that is more technicity than technique. A dance of attention is the singular expression of the wider range of expressibility of a mode of existence. A dance of attention is not a general occurrence: it emerges only when the conditions are right. It can be felt when, in the shift from technique to technicity, the incipient potential of a set of emergent relations is tapped into, when a web of precise yet open-ended intensities courses through an event rigorously tuning it to its more-than. A dance of attention is a direct feltness of the field of emergence, understood here as a quality of infinite potential with a margin of indetermination at its core. In a dance of attention, attention itself constitutes the limit. Attention not of, but toward. A dance of attention is the holding pattern of an almost unidentifiable set of forces that modulate the event. We do not attend—the field attends, an attention sustained by the procedural rigor of a set of conditions, tasks, techniques that hold the event to itself even while elastically bending time to make space for points of inflection that create differentials of relation. Tapping into a compositional matrix of relational movement depends on the capacity of a work to fold through what Simondon calls the “operative solidarity” of the elements in co- composition. A dance of attention emerges when this operative solidarity forms not a structure but a mobile architecture—a proto-architecting of movement-moving. Movement-moving is not spurred solely by human intention. It erupts in the between of the cueing’s aligning, in the relational interval of distributed movement. As Brian Massumi (2009b) writes in relation to Simondon’s notion of individuation, “the causation is always indirect, passing through thE DancE of attEntion  141

an interval of immanence: a moment of concretization whose schema is immanent to active matter.” What returns as commanding form is not the form of the event but the force of its formation. Cue to force of form. Force of Form A dance of attention has its own technicity. For each work—be it a choreography, a performance installation, a musical composition—a rigorous setting into place of conditions is necessary. These conditions are always specific to the event but never completely stable across its iterations. Each iteration of the event dephases the memory of its having come into existence. No movement can be cued, aligned to, or performed in exactly the same way twice. Conditions are pragmatic and based, always, on the elastic now of event-time as it makes itself felt. Think event-time as the foregrounding of the co- compositional infralayering of diagrammatic force-form in the now of experience. For the event to dance to attention, the event must create a resonant intensity between the preacceleration of the present futuring and the alignment to a future presenting. Topological time squeezed into the improbable now of movement-moving. What emerges as a dance of attention cannot be replicated. It is not a thing, a form. Attention dances in the between of diagrams in-forming. Attention is its own emergent choreographing. We feel attention’s dance, but it is not of us or even for us. It is with, in the milieu. It is what we connect to when we feel the procedural pull of the event’s magnetism, its overcoming of posture, form, figure, its outdoing. It is how we feel the work working. For when attention dances, the ground begins to move, and in the moving, we are moved. Taking-Time Where in this matrix might we find the germs of a protopolitics? A protopolitics is a setting into motion of the conditions for political potential. Political potential emerges not from the representation of a given content, but through the event’s challenge to the very idea of form. Think the political here at the very incipiency of its coming to expression, as force of the in-act. And recall that in an activist philosophy, politics must always be understood as a sustained encounter with the modalities of the in-act. 142 chaPtEr six

A dance of attention is not a politics as such, but it does carry the germ of protopolitical potential. For if the political is about the tremulous in-act at the heart of experience in-forming, a focus, in the event, on its modality of attending must to some degree be an opening to a protopolitics. Attending here is aligned to Whitehead’s concept of concern: the dance of attention has a concern for the event in its unfolding. The dance of attention is the event’s capacity to make felt the ethos of its very process of coming to force of form. A dance of attention is a protopolitics in that it actualizes an ethos in-formation. This ethos is not a moral category. It is a quality of relation. The concern for the event is not an individual’s concern. It is the “how” of an event’s concrescence. This concern for the event in its unfolding is linked to another Whiteheadian concept: importance. As Whitehead defines it, importance is the force of the infinite in the finite that distinguishes this event from another and makes it stand out in the constellation of a wider nexus of events of its kind. “Importance, limited to a finite individual occasion, ceases to be important. In some sense or other, importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite” (1938, 28). Importance, again, is not a category imposed on the event. It is how the event has come to feel its coincidence with other events in its emergence as this or that singular concrescence. A politics in the moving begins with the germ of importance at the heart of the event’s ethos. The dance of attention can be understood as the resonant field through which this is expressed. What the political can do depends on what the event’s taking-form leaves behind (or casts forth). This more-than touches on the event’s immortality across phases. Every event is held together in the forming by dynamic tendencies. The final taking form of an event occurs when the dynamic form resolves. Here, where the event reaches its subjective form, everything the occasion will come to be is at its apex. But despite this monadic quality, as mentioned earlier, there remains an intensive more-than that continues to feed the process of how the next occasion will come to expression, this in a nonlinear model of spacetime. Here lies the germ of the political. Diagrammatic Praxis To activate this political potential, a rigorous procedurality is necessary. I turn here to the conceptual artists/architects Arakawa and Gins because of their use of procedures as a diagrammatic praxis. thE DancE of attEntion  143

“Step 1: So as to discover what most urgently needs to be made to be otherwise, take a long, boldly uncompromising look at what goes on as (an) organism that persons (human being).4 . . . [I]t is the task of those who would produce architectural procedures to augment the bioscleave, the insufficiently procedural bioscleave, and thereby recast it” (Arakawa and Gins 2003, 11). Every aspect of Arakawa and Gins’s philosophy is already here, in the first step. This first step, its urgency, its insistence on the more than human (the organism that persons), its procedurality, its emphasis on the associated milieu (the bioscleave), its underscoring of transformation, and its belief in the transductive force of dephasing as the modality of invention, make apparent the fact that architecting mobility—creating a mobile architecture that dances you—depends on an eternal return into the dephasing potentiality of the initial step. “Step 5: The hoped-for outcome may simply spring into existence as a result of what has been worked into the architectural surround, but it is more likely that it will only make an appearance indirectly, having been brought into existence by called-forth sequences of actions that have led the way to it and which will, in some cases, turn out to be, to various degrees, constitutive of it” (Arakawa and Gins 2003, 14). The outcome is never stated in advance. Conditions are set into place for the event’s activation, not toward a preplanned resolution. These conditions involve the event’s terminus, as James would say, the “end in sight” that activates the event without necessarily becoming the promise of a predetermined goal.5 Terminus as that which gets the action underway, as that which in-forms the event without preempting an outcome. Terminus as that which captivates the process and propels a dephasing that results in the nowness of this or that occasion. Terminus as that which activates the distributed relational movement of the event in its concrescence. That which propels a transduction. Terminus: the realization that step 1 is already a memory of step 10 infradimensionalizing. Return to the exercise for diagrammatic praxis. You are lying on the ground and the diagram is in-forming, multiplying angles and lines, forces and tendencies. As the second diagram begins to emerge—the diagram for movement-bodying—the first diagram does not externalize: it intensifies. The two diagrams infra-individuate into a dimensionalizing that is more feeling than form. We have not a doubling of form, but an intensive multi144 chaPtEr six

plying of infradimensionality in the moving. The terminus that activates a procedure does not create a precomposed map, it potentializes the map. Scales of Process The time of the event is multiscalar. “Between the physical and the vital, between the plant and the animal, we must not look for substantial differences capable of creating distinctions of genre or species, but rather differences in speed in the process of their formation” (Combes 1999, 42). Organisms that person populate the intensive strata of the dance of attention, but they do not monopolize it. Different speeds coexist in an infraspecies, infradimensional field. The dance of attention is a tentative holding-in-place of agitation at the limit where speciation and dimensionalizing meet. It is the holding-in-place of the rhythm of the infra where becoming is on the cusp of defining itself as this or that. “What divides being into domains is ultimately nothing other than the rhythm of becoming” (Combes 1999, 42). “Step 8: Once an architectural procedure has been invented and assembled, still other ways to assemble it will become apparent” (Arakawa and Gins 2003, 15). With each new step, scales of procedurality overlap. These scales of procedurality are incipient diagrams: they activate an architecting of mobility that can assemble itself in myriad ways. But this assemblage will reach its potential as a mode of invention for a quality of becoming only if the constraints for its coming into existence are more enabling than disabling. As an example, think of a hospital and consider it in procedural terms. Ask what it holds in place. Inquire into its architecting of mobility. Then recall the last time you were sick or visited a sick friend. Reexperience the hospital’s entropy of sameness, pale wall after pale wall, high bed after high bed, closed curtain after closed curtain, double door after double door. Recall the smell and note how the smell affected posture, appetite, rhythm of walk. See, hear, touch again the glare of metal, the shrill soundscape, beep, beep, the cry behind the half-closed curtain. Note that devastation takes the smell of loneliness, that pain comes with a taste of grit. All this in the name of life. A procedurality not for life-living, but for the suspension of this life in treatment against death. Humanity, toward death staved off. Now take some of these tendencies but tweak them toward a different dance of attention. Remember that a dance of attention is a mobile surthE DancE of attEntion  145

facing that is immanent to the event in the making. Never mistake the built architecture itself for the event: architect mobility! Bring the architecting back to procedurality and explore what kinds of assemblages are called forth. Note that there are procedural fissures in the account of the hospital’s architecting. Hospitals are also for birthing. They are also for exhibiting art, for the gathering of friends and family, for species innovation in laboratory research. Procedural intervention into the architectings of mobility involves finding modalities in the event that open the architecting to its more-than such that new speciations, new ecologies, new forms and forces of life can emerge. Take the hospital again. This time, tune its diagram away from the suspension of life to see what happens when life’s relation to death no longer frames the event. Go beyond the human and see the more than human coursing in speciations that exceed the mortal body to include different speeds and slownesses that cut across it, infinitely. Care for the human life span but never overlook the potential of the bacterial. Take note of how life-living courses across this event in the making. Play with the procedures this new operative autonomy lays forth. Bring circulation into it. Circulation happens on many scales at once, on different timelines, creating topologies of spacetime. When the dance of attention circulates, it resists stultification into a linear expectation: birthdeath. Activated through multiple contemporary dephasings in a spiraling eternal return, the interval emerges and takes shape as the radically empirical option of life itself or, as Deleuze would say, of a life. A life: the infraindividuation of the force of potential across the surface of life-living. Architecting mobility always involves creating new modes of existence. It is not so much about rebuilding the hospital as about resituating the question of how life-living expresses itself architecturally, procedurally. Modes of existence are transindividual, collective. “Novel ways of structuring” are experiments in collective individuation. The new hospital may not exist as a place, but it may come to life as a performative choreography that activates the force of a life in the living. If this happens, it won’t only be the building we have to remodel. What will need to be attended to is the concern for the event of its unfolding across strata that must resolutely remain more than human in their complex speciations. This all sounds pretty impractical! Rebuild the whole concept of the hospital in order to tune its dance of attention? Rethink cultural norms around life, death, and the predominance of the human? Impossible. 146 chaPtEr six

Perhaps. But this is the politics of procedurality: that to begin is to begin again, differently, impossibly, impractically. It is to begin not with form but with the force of the more-than as articulated by the welling diagram the event calls forth. What Arakawa and Gins bring to the table is the proposition that diagrammatic praxis is one of circulation and modulation. Begin and begin again, in the middle. A diagrammatic praxis may delve into an existing structure such as the hospital but it will only affect it if what is targeted is the creation of new modes of existence that defy or outdo its structure. This is what Arakawa and Gins mean by their proposition “we have decided not to die” (2007). Politics of Individuation In their desire to affect the force of form, Arakawa and Gins are political artists: they understand that art cannot create new modes of existence if what it builds on is preexisting content. They know that to invent involves creating at the interstices of multiple interscalar event-times. And so they craft kitchens that are at once opportunities for cooking and invitations for climbing. Their hope? To “help [us] cradle tentativeness.” They design floors that can be an opportunity for walking, but are as likely to be an invitation for dizzying, for toppling, for rolling, “to use [our] bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium.” Architectural surrounds less for “getting somewhere” or “doing something” than to orient toward new extrusions from position, in order to “practice not to die.”6 And this way, in the dancing of the form’s outdoing of itself, they literally make a place for the political. Politics are often perceived as an individual’s relation to the other. Deleuze’s a life is a challenge to such individualized politics. A life foregrounds the force of life—its political potential as an infra-individuating force for a diagrammatic praxis of life-living—at the cusp of individuation where the preindividual is active in all its intensity. A life is power across life, not biopolitical power over life. It is the event of life-living as it emerges on the transindividual threshold of collective individuation. Not of the human per se, not life in this or that precomposed body, but across, with. A life “is precisely what has been stripped of everything that could contain it or represent it” (Palbart 2009, 41; my translation). A life: a force that dephases this life into the more than human where what lives is a tendency for life across its complex relational modalities. thE DancE of attEntion  147

Politics, then, as the force of the more-than where what is at stake is not simply the human but the ecologies of existence that coevolve in the realm of the more than human. Politics as an aesthetico-ethical engagement with the forces of becoming that are fleetingly perceptible in an event’s dance of attention. Politics as that which “contains in itself a power of amplification” (Simondon 1995, 16). Life, Once More! Arakawa and Gins’s procedure for life (because it is that, much more than it is a procedure against death) screams once more Nietzsche’s refrain “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” (1966, 157). Reversible Destiny, their procedural manifesto, makes life-living the basis of an ethos: there is nothing “more unethical than that we are required to be mortal” (2002, xviii). A politics for life, with life, reversible destiny names life as an event in its own right. It understands life ecologically as the preindividual force of life-living that accompanies all modalities of existence, human and more than human. By making life the procedural condition for event-time, Arakawa and Gins enact a politics of performance that is attentive to life-living. That it is a politics of performance makes it no less real and no less viable. Aren’t all politics performative? Arakawa and Gins’s politics: to activate an attentiveness to life that opens life to its associated milieu, to generate a relational matrix that attends to the more-than, to create a mode of existence that activates the potential in procedure that is life-living’s dance of attention. Politics: a tentative attentiveness to the conditions through which an event expresses itself, a tentative constructing toward a holding in place of a distributed relational movement, an attending, in the event, to the how of its deformation.

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sE vEn

An Ethics of Language in the Making

Any local agitation shakes the whole universe.

*  alfrED north whitEhEaD “As a child, everything was somewhat alive to me.” “I hear the rocks and the trees.” “My world is organized around textures. . . . All emotions, perceptions, my whole world . . . [has] been influenced by textures.” “There was very little difference in meaning between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human.”

*  MM anD Daina kruMins

What is it we really mean when we say “human?” According to autistic Amanda Baggs, we certainly don’t mean “autistic.”1 We mean neurotypical, we mean oriented to interaction with other humans, we mean almost exclusively tuned to human language. “Most people attend to human voices above all else” (Krumins qtd. in Miller 2003, 23). When the orientation toward the world does not privilege the human voice—or the human face—a diagnosis of “mindblindness” too often ensues. The concept of mindblindness is described by Simon Baron-Cohen as an “inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another

human” (1995; my emphasis). For Simon Baron-Cohen and his many followers, there remains the firm belief that when there is limited attendance to the human, when the parsing of the environment does not explicitly focus on the human, what is demonstrated is a failure to be truly human. He writes: “Imagine what your world would be like if you were aware of physical things but were blind to the existence of mental things. I mean, of course, blind to things like thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions, which for most of us self- evidently underlie behavior. Stretch your imagination to consider what sense you could make of human action (or, for that matter, any animate action whatsoever) if, as for a behaviorist, a mentalistic explanation was forever beyond your limits” (1995, 1). Baron Cohen’s argument is that the autistic cannot bridge the worlds of the physical and the imaginary. The reason the autistic cannot do this is that they cannot put themselves in the position of another to “imagine or represent states that we or others might hold” (1995, 2). This, because the autistic does not manage to convey the complexity of his or her perception to the attending psychologist, neuroscientist, medical doctor, or academic, within a controlled environment that in many cases does not even begin to attend to his or her needs. From this comes the still far too dominant assumption that the autistic is categorically incapable of relation and empathy, the assumption that the autistic cannot experience feelings or states that concern another human. And, as we well know, without empathy you are not considered truly human. What those who uphold this approach refuse to understand is that in the theater of individuation that is the autistic spectrum, communication does not unfold in ways that make general categorizations about perception possible. Views such as those of Baron-Cohen are based on a kind of scenario that tends to focus solely on human-human interaction, emphasizing those limits of perception that can easily be mapped, such as the direct communication through language between two humans or the ability, in language, to articulate the limits of a relationship. As Daina Krumins and many others have made clear, however, the autistic dwells in an ecology of practices that creates resonances across scales and registers of life, both organic and inorganic, not solely in the so- called human realm. “Everything [is] somewhat alive,” Daina Krumins writes, “I attend to everything the same way with no discrimination, so that the caw of the crow in the tree is as clear and important as the voice of the person I’m walking with” (qtd. in Miller 2003, 86–87). 150 chaPtEr sEvEn

How to reconcile the urgency of “everything is alive,” the entranced and unhierarchized commitment to the interweaving of the organic and the inorganic, the fascination with color, sound, texture, the “aroundness” of the world Ralph Savarese notes is ever present in autistic Tito Mukhopadhyay’s writing, how to reconcile these with the medicalized view that, due to autistics’ perceived incapacity to articulate their relation to other humans at the exclusion of the wider ecologies that co- compose the world, they are inherently mindblind and therefore unrelational? How to reconcile the complex dance of attention that is autistic perception with the claim of their inattention to life (understood, of course, as an inattention to the life of the human)? In the annals of autism pathologization, the diagnosis of mindblindness comes about in a caricatured encounter that goes something like this: An anxious parent takes his child to the doctor. The parent has noticed that the child is not developing according to the norm. The child has either never spoken or has lost what speech was acquired, does not look at or seem to attend to the parent, repeats tasks with a perseveration that seems to border on obsession, demonstrates difficulty with activation and inhibition, and suffers from intense tantrums.2 The doctor takes the situation in hand by attempting to attract the child’s attention in order to see whether the child can indeed communicate. When the child seems to refuse to attend to the doctor—by neither playing with the toys nor looking the doctor in the eye— the child is typically characterized as “unresponsive,” and the parent is sent home with a diagnosis that the child is on the autistic spectrum, a diagnosis too often considered to be the death knell of the potential for a meaningful relationship between parent and child. Tito Mukhopadhyay, a classical autistic who writes brilliantly and, at twenty-one, is the author of three books, The Mind Tree, The Gold of the Sunbeams, and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move, tells the tale from his side, emphasizing the disconnect built into the practice of diagnosis. “Does he flap his hands all the time?” the clinical psychologist in a Calcutta hospital asked Mother. . . . I chose to stand in the corner between two glass doors, so that I could see as many reflections of my flapping hands as possible through the glass. . . . I wanted to continue seeing the reflections of that wonder room through the glass doors. I was invited several times to approach all those blocks and toys that were now laid on the table and do something with them. . . . I could do anything I wanted an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  151

with them, so that the clinical psychologist could record it in her observation chart. . . . And each time I was brought near the table, I would go back to stand in front of the cupboards. How could I tell them that the shadows and reflections made me feel secure? (2008, 28) What is sidestepped in the pathologization of autism as mindblindness by the likes of Baron-Cohen is the different modality of relational emphasis Mukhopadhyay evokes here. It’s not that Mukhopadhyay is suffering from a lack of relation, it’s that he is not interacting according to standard humancentered expectations, consumed as he is by the ecology of what is unfolding around him. This ecology is not an object per se—though it may appear as though an autistic child is indeed consumed by an object. It is less a thing-in-itself that captures Mukhopadhyay’s attention than it is an intensive shaping, a complex relational matrix, a milieu of light, color, movement, sound, and social context. Does this attunement to life as an incipient ecology of practices, an ecology that does not privilege the human but attends to the more than human, demonstrate a lack of empathy? Asked about his capacity to feel empathy in the context of a miner trapped in a mine, Mukhopadhyay writes: It’s true that when I think of the situation, there may be empathy. But my empathy would probably be towards the flashlight batteries of those trapped coal miners if there happens to be a selection on my part. Or my empathy would perhaps be towards the trapped air around those coal miners. There would be me watching through the eyes of the flashlight cell the utter hopelessness of those unfortunate miners as my last chemicals struggled to glow the faint bulb so that I didn’t leave them dying in darkness. As the air around them, I would try to find a way to let myself squeeze every bit of oxygen I have to allow the doomed lungs to breathe, for I am responsible for their doom. And while I found myself trapped, I would smell the burning rice being cooked with neglect in an earthen pot. (Mukhopadhyay and Savarese 2010) Empathy not explicitly for or toward the human, but with the world in its emergence. An ethics of relation. While I do not want to underestimate the complex motor and neurological challenges that accompany autism, and would rather not fall into the trap warned against by Amanda Baggs—“If we were real people, people would see us as individuals, rather than heroes, tragedies, inspirations, 152 chaPtEr sEvEn

or representatives of our entire impairment group”3—I want to propose that autistic perception, in its divergent, complex, and continually evolving forms, may open the way for an ethic of the more than human urgently needed today, focusing as it does not on the macrolevel of preimposed moral systems such as human- centered empathy, but on an ecology of practices, a focus that emphasizes hyperrelationality and dynamic expression in a worlding that is co-constitutive. With Amanda Baggs, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Sue Rubin, Larry Bissonnette, DJ Savarese, and so many others who have been (mis)classified as “low functioning autistics” yet are clearly “highly functioning” in their insight about disability, language, the body, poetry, politics, and life, I would like to suggest that autistic perception provides a window into an ethics of relation sorely needed today, an ethics that is concerned with the associated milieu of relation and the protopolitics it calls forth.4 Like all bodies, but perhaps more experientially so, the autistics’ body is always already more than one, expressive not in its parts but across the registers of its emergence in co- constituting spacetimes of experience. Relation comes to expression before a body-as-such reveals itself, the body not so much an afterthought or a priori as “with-thought,” implicit in cocompositional emergence. For many autistics the body does not feel precomposed, with preordained roles: it travels, shifting, changing, recomposing with events of experience. “Autism,” writes Tito Mukhopadhyay about himself, “was making him feel that his voice was a distant substance that was required to be collected and put somewhere in his throat” (2002, 52). “My voice comes from my stomach. It is centrifuged” (Mukhopadhyay qtd. in Iversen 2006, 243). For many autistics, it is a real challenge to locate a single organ or limb in a mélange of fields of relation, fields composed of complex networks of sounds, colors, textures, of object-body- environment composites, and bring it to expression through a single predetermined path.5 It seems almost impossible to subtract from the polyphonous multiplicity of sensation. “I don’t have many buffers,” writes Amanda Baggs. “To me the world comes in such great detail that it is hard for me to put the easy interpretations on it that most people use; the way they divide it into pieces and make it abstract is foreign to me” (2010b). For autistics all along the spectrum, the world seems to emerge directly in all of its relational complexity with few immediate buffers to compartmentalize it. Added to the constantly agitating relational environment is the fact that sense modalities are overlapan Ethics of languagE in thE Making  153

ping, crossed in ways that make lived experience even more challenging to convey. To manage the theater of individuation of everyday life with its panoply of sensorial and perceptual emphases, and its unrelenting synesthesia, many autistics speak of needing to redirect experience through a specific sense modality. For Tito Mukhopadhyay, for instance, sound is the modality of choice for the reduction of sensory chaos: “I concentrate on the sound of water falling because I am more sensitive to sounds. . . . I have developed my hearing better than my other senses. I have learned to be comfortable that way because trying to use all my senses turns into a total chaos” (qtd. in Iversen 2006, 69–70). When the senses are as acute and as complexly entwined as they are with autism, it can be very difficult to partition the environment from its sensations. Amanda Baggs explains: I was pouring water from a large bucket, onto an electric fence. I slowly realized something was different—no, bad—no, very bad—and hang on, it seems to be in the vicinity. And colored bright white, and . . . oh yeah, painful, and pain has something to do with my body (???), yeah it does, but where on my body, . . . , . . . , . . . , . . . , . . . , arm. My arm is a part of me. Let me turn my eyes on. Now look at my arm. Stuff on my arm. Stuff . . . water. Where is the water going? Fence. Electric . . . oh. Better stop this. Where’s the arm again? Got to move it. (Wait for those instructions to mosey down into my arm.) There. Phew.6 What is happening here is complex in ways theories of mindblindness cannot even begin to comprehend. For Baggs, as for all of the autistics I have encountered and about whom I write here, there is no clear separation between the world and the body. World and body are startlingly, painfully, exquisitely, processually one. This is what autism in all of its complexity brings to the project of Always More Than One: it demonstrates that there is a modality of life-living that intimately knows the richness of the more-than, and that this modality dominates in autistics. Not only that: these autistics politicize the role the more-than plays in their experience by insisting that they do not want to be cured of this perceptual gift, no matter how difficult it can make their lives in a so-called neurotypical society. And, with this expression of the necessity for the more-than, they remind us that there are key questions and concerns that need to be addressed about the place of the human in human- centered experience. 154 chaPtEr sEvEn

Worlding To articulate the ontogenetic worlding of experience—to make the jump into language that is so vital to inclusion in everyday life—it is necessary to hone a modality of subtraction. Subtraction from the chaos of hypersensory stimulation is a central aspect of all experience: it is what allows many of us to tune out the deafening music while we are having a conversation, or to abstract meaning from rhythm when listening to a piece of writing. For those, however, for whom this kind of subtraction proves difficult (if not impossible), there can be a sense of deep loss associated with parsing out certain aspects of experience from others. For the parsing out of sensation from experience entails a loss of relational potential. Amanda Baggs often mourns this. But, as autistic writing has shown, this can also be less a deadening of experience than an enlivening of it by other means. The writing I will focus on here is largely what Ralph Savarese (2012) calls “autie-type,” which he describes as “the spontaneous production of figurative language that occurs when Autist, facilitator and computer come together in the act of communication.”7 For autistics on the “classical” end of the spectrum, where motor- control issues make the voice difficult to access, communication is often restricted to typing, which tends to necessitate a facilitator, as seen in the encounter with DJ at the SenseLab in the interlude “Fiery, Luminous, Scary.” Savarese coins the concept of autietype to emphasize that this modality of writing is a genre in its own right, an intrinsically relational way of thinking and communicating.8 Savarese believes that this relational quality in the composing has a role to play in what we have come to see as the exquisite poetic voices autistics have collectively honed. Theirs is a relational writing, he argues, a writing that activates the associated milieu not simply of environmentality but of words themselves—a worlding in words. Savarese writes: For decades it has been assumed that Autistics are the victims of an obdurate literality, which leaves them baffled by figurative language. While this may be the case with ‘high-functioning’ Autistics or those with Asperger syndrome, it is not with classical Autistics. The published writings of DJ Savarese, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Amanda Baggs, Jamie Burke, and Larry Bissonnette, to name just a few, reveal how metaphorical the “severely” autistic can be. Indeed, they are compulsively so and not simply when they are writing poems. . . . Only recently have some of an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  155

these Autistics been exposed to creative writing instruction, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.9 In the poetic language of classical autism, language is a sensing practice in its own right—a field of affective tonality activated in rhythms and tones, in speeds and intensities. Here, the turn toward expression does not cut itself off from the experiential vastness of sensation and perception but writes with them. A language in the moving makes itself felt: “yes. dearest sad dad you heard fresh self and freshly responded deserting your fears and just freed sad dear saved me. yes. yes. yes. yes” (DJ Savarese).10 Expression here makes felt the agitation that resonates at the very edges of expressibility. The result: language becomes force of expression, the more-than of subtraction. We hear language dance in new and singular ways with adjectives and adverbs modifying the situation rather than simply the nouns, we hear with the force of qualifiers intensities never before articulated quite this way, we hear voices being given to the fields of relation, to objects-becoming-fields, rather than simply to individuals. “Larry is mighty proud to movie star you people of lipsticked words of appreciation loving our movie mouthing off at our mostly poor jokes is fine voting for us as people magazine worthy.”11 “Hours of light like heat hibernate/great icebergs hear the cries of the hurt” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Ralph Savarese, forthcoming). Writing the more-than is to feel-with the world as it comes to expression, to feel-with the bare activity of wor(l)ding. For Whitehead, every occasion of experience is composed of feelings. These feelings fold through the affective tonality—the concern—of the event in its emergence. They arise not from the subject per se but from the field of relation itself. Every worlding—every prehension, every grasping-with the world—is a feeling, in Whiteheadian terms. An event is a composition of feelings selected from the panoply of potential, a complex of affective tonality agitating toward actualization. No occasion of experience can be abstracted from its feeling: “The feelings are inseparable from the end at which they aim; and this end is the feeler” (Whitehead 1978, 339). The feeler is the subject of the experience, a subject that is in every way immanent to the event. Feeling-with implies that the event has a concern for how it comes to emergence. Autie-type takes this concern for the event in its emergence to heart: the writing never seems to be separate from the ethics of relation it calls forth. This ethics of relation is the attentiveness, in the event, to its relational matrix, to the how of its composition, making language the beck156 chaPtEr sEvEn

oning field of what a feeling has felt, expressing this feeling in a modality that remains, even while fully intelligible, quasi-ineffable. What is significant about autie-type is that autistics come to this kind of poetic writing intuitively. It is not learned or honed. The affective tonality that runs through it seems to be distinctively linked to the direct perception of the more-than experienced in everyday life. They write autistic perception. As Ralph Savarese writes: “With Tito, language steps lightly, provisionally; it neither masters nor replaces the object it names” (Mukhopadhyay and Savarese 2010). Rather than undoing itself completely of the complexity of the ineffable of what William James calls pure experience— experience at the very edge of the actual where it still resonates with virtuality—autie-type makes it felt. Rather than disconnecting from the field of relation, it bridges it, conceptually, propositionally. This allows autistics to bring to expression the complex subtleties of the dance of attention that is at the heart of all incipient becomings. To bring this dance of attention to articulation is probably the biggest challenge any writer will face, as language invariably involves a certain sum of representation. To write-with language in the making is to dance-with experience rather than to exclude it from the dance. The dance of attention of experience in the worlding is brought to expression by autistics in an infinity of ways. What much of the writing has in common, however, is its capacity to make felt the intensity of attending, of participating in a worlding that never stops dancing. “Attempts to freshly respond to humans were terrifying quests through killer trees. Where I sent my real self, reasonable, easy breathing, satisfying humans never could find me” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Savarese, forthcoming). The writing is a play of rhythm and image, a relational movement of incipient becomings expressive in a toward that is not linear but diagrammatic, intensely phasing, topologically orienting: “Sadness drew the trees together. Wasted, freaky actions took over my arms. The trees desired to feast upon me” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Savarese, forthcoming). In autie-type, it is as though the complex process of subtraction becomes strangely palpable, as though the uneasiness of the more-than surfaces in the breaks, the pauses, the punctuation, in the rhythm and the metaphor. How, in the intensity of an incipient diagrammatic praxis, how to select, asks the writing? How to move expressibility into and across the metastable field of attention’s dance? How to make words world? “Part loving person, part plant I kid people. Only the

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kids who look beyond loud noises hear my real self ” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Savarese 2007).12 Selection is always immanent to the event. Registers of expression and expressibility are key to the complexity of this process. Before the event concresces into its subjective form, it is alive in its felt potential but not yet determinate as this or that. At this stage of the process, the charge of potential (the preindividual) coursing through the individuation makes itself felt as the agitation of incipient expressibility. There is not yet expression. Only once the event stabilizes into this or that is there expression as such. This expression gives voice to the subtraction. Yet, as mentioned above, subtraction always carries a share of the more-than co- constituted in the comingto-act of the occasion. What autie-type demonstrates is that writing can attend to this incipient expressibility even as it begins to be overshadowed by the delimitations of expression. It does so by activating, in the writing, an affective tonality that opens language to the more-than of its expressibility. In autie-type, metaphor is key to this, but not metaphor as a linkage on the representational stratum13—metaphor as a mobility of relations in the making: “The choice of metaphoric vehicles is striking; notice how disparate the things compared are. One might be tempted to accuse this Autie of engaging in mixed metaphors, so quickly do the analogies, both implicit and explicit, come. But the point seems to be a world reconnected, a world included, on the level of sensory perception,” writes Ralph Savarese (forthcoming). The metaphors move relationality across strata of expressibility, less metaphors in the strict sense than mobile architectings of expressionmeets- expressibility: “Yes, the trees are rewarding to look at now. They partly shade the house I live in now. The kind looking tree plots to grow taller. Opening my dear self, I hear my mom call my name. It looks like the sun has moved to the front of the house as I plot my response. Resting hints freely that the green grass grows” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Savarese, forthcoming). What courses through autie-type might be named prearticulation, the incipient more-than of expression. Like its movement- cousin preacceleration, prearticulation is about the virtual field of expressibility that precedes (or follows) expression as such. It is the feltness of language in the moving, before the saying, between the words. It can be gesture, rhythm, movement. It can be laughter, stuttering. It can be silence. From sensation to experience, from relation to perception, from feeling to writing, prearticulation makes felt how the more-than of expression—expressibility—accompanies 158 chaPtEr sEvEn

language in the making. Prearticulation does not express some thing, or some body, it expresses-with. The proposition: there is no language that does not carry its share of prearticulation. Foregrounding the share of expressibility within expression and shifting the register of experience toward articulation in language does not necessarily mean reducing experience to representation, and certainly does not mean undoing it of affective tonality. Language can remain expressive, can embody the more-than—this is what autie-type demonstrates so well. In fact, the foregrounding of language’s capacity to participate in an emergent, co- composing dance of attention is a gift autistics—like other wordsmiths—bring to writing. Making felt the more-than of expression in writing might be called composing-with. Composing-with does have its pitfalls: “When I heard the word banana while I was looking at a cloud, I labelled the cloud banana. Education, though, helped me settle my dispute with nouns” (Mukhopadhyay and Savarese 2010). Composing-with does not preclude misunderstandings, misthinkings, missayings: “What use are the feelings, when you do not know how to feel them? And the mind thinks another ‘apple.’ The body does a ‘banana’” (Mukhopadhyay qtd. in Iversen 2006, 96). Beyond the content of the utterance—its most bare communicability—composing-with makes felt the collective breath of the more-than in the saying, makes heard the fragility of expressibility in it tuning to expression. Composing-with makes felt the more-than of experience in the telling. For some autistics, language remains a frustration, however. Amanda Baggs has written about this on many occasions. Despite being an excellent writer, she often finds that words cannot get at the heart of the more-than she directly experiences, which makes language a continuous problem. She writes: “The way my thoughts work creates some . . . problems for language. And it’s not just that I haven’t found the absolute best combination of words to translate my thoughts with. It’s that on a fundamental level the thoughts don’t translate.”14 For Baggs, there is a sense that language just does not get to the complexity of worlding she would like to convey. While all of us deal with the impossibility of translation between modalities of experience, for autistics the challenge is exacerbated by perceptual/sensory overload and motor activation issues, both of which can make it difficult to use language as a trusted tool for communication.15 Added to this is their unpalatable experience of having been too often “spoken for” with the assumption that if they don’t use speech to communicate they have nothing to say. Writing of an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  159

the frustration of being ignored when he does not immediately respond to a statement or a query, DJ Savarese explains that for him “the words [often] come too late,” urging interlocutors to be patient. Composing-with offers a different perspective on language, opening the play of wor(l)ding across registers of perception, sensation, and affect, activating language’s inherent capacity to write-with the edges of pure experience. It also signals to something else. Facilitated communication depends on the presence of the facilitator. The role the facilitator plays is different depending on the individual and can range from their simply being in the room to them holding the end of a pencil while the autistic types to having a hand on his or her elbow or shoulder. As suggested earlier, facilitated communication brings out the relational aspect of language and challenges us to wonder why we tend to consider language—and writing in particular—to be so inherently solitary. This has long been one of the critiques of facilitated communication: that the necessity of the facilitator’s presence suggests that the autistic is in fact incapable of “really” using language— that is, of thinking or writing “independently.” This despite several careful studies of cases where the autistic is tested in the presence of a facilitator who does not actually touch him or her, and despite the fact that there is clearly a genre of writing that can be attributed to autistics that is very much their own—autie-type—not only among communities in the United States and Canada but across the world.16 To compose-with is to place language within an ecology of practices. It is to think-with in the time of the utterance’s becoming- expression. To compose-with is to collectively write time in the shaping.17 Soma Mukhopadhyay, who facilitated her son Tito’s entry into language through a method she calls rapid prompting, emphasizes his strange relationship to time. Even with language, she suggests, her son continues to have an unusual relationship to time: he experiences intense anxiety because he is incapable of anticipating what comes next. Tito Mukhopadhyay’s experience of the world, even as he is capable of articulately composing-with literary pasts and futures, continues to dwell in the now of experience in the making (Iversen 2006, 143). This suggests that language does not necessarily produce a sensation of time in itself, even as it gives time to the shaping of experience. Language awakens the potential of multiplications of expressibility—“As I began to type, my mind began to wake up” (Sue Rubin)—giving a duration to expression that favors a certain notion of intelligibility, but it does not entirely overwrite the complexity of experience.18 In giving voice 160 chaPtEr sEvEn

to experience, it structures time, but within that structure there remains a tinge of the virtual stratum of polyphonous indefiniteness which is pure experience. Language is both more-than and less-than: it brings to expression the world in time even as it agitates the complex timeless interminglings of pure experience. As more-than and less-than, language is a two-edged sword, particularly for autism activists who want the radicality of their difference across modalities of expression and perception to be respected in the name of neurodiversity.19 For them, the constraint language places on ideals of interaction—including the expectation of eye- contact20—often excludes them from social encounters even if they can speak or write. They also rightly feel that any engagement with expressibility outside or beyond language as such is deemed secondary and, too often, irrelevant. “If I [don’t] interact with [the] much more limited set of responses [of spoken language] they judge my existence, awareness and personhood,” explains Amanda Baggs in her video In My Language.21 The autistic who does not speak or write in the language of the human—according to human mores of interaction—is quickly relegated to the position of living in “a world of their own,” a world considered far less rich: “Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me. Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as ‘being in a world of my own,’ whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am ‘opening up to true interaction with the world.’”22 It is human language in the form of exclusively human-to-human interaction, more than anything else, that seems to function as the bridge to intelligence and, by consequence, to offer inclusion to the realm of the neurotypical. As I mentioned above using the example of Sue Rubin, when autistics learn to write or speak, they are often said to have “awakened” into language. While in Rubin’s case she is referring to an ability to bridge expressibility with expression, when the term is used with the notion of “coming back” it becomes very problematic. “Coming back” depends on the idea that without language, existence is barely human. “Dov seemed to be demonstrating a level of intelligence that I had never suspected or dreamed he might possess,” writes Portia Iversen about her son’s coming into language. “I could barely begin to comprehend what this meant. . . . It meant that he was not retarded. It meant that he’d been in there . . . all these years. I could barely keep from crying” (2006, 290; my emphasis). an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  161

“Coming back” relies on the idea that language as the model of humanto-human interaction is the passport to a human life worth living. Without language, the presupposition is that the child dwells in nothingness from which he or she must be saved. When language is thus understood as the basis for meaningful existence, it situates autistics without language outside of the realm of meaningful experience. Catherine Maurice, whose children—like many others—were diagnosed with autism after an initial entry into language, refers to her children’s loss of language as a “descent” into autism, making autism synonymous with the loss of her children: “this autism thing was taking over the very essence of who Anne-Marie was. . . . Stripped of our illusions, we found Anne-Marie to be suddenly alien” (1993, 31, 46).23 Maurice clearly sees her daughter’s loss of language and withdrawal as the loss of her humanity—without language she has lost her essence and has become alien: “The mornings brought no relief. She never called me. . . . ‘Good morning, sweetheart!’ I called out. She didn’t even turn her head. Suddenly I sat down on the floor, back against the wall. ‘That’s not Anne-Marie,’ I whispered” (1993, 57). The race against time to reclaim the child for the pleasures of a human- centered universe secures the dichotomy between the neurotypical—who owns language and with it the facility of human contact—and the neurodiverse, for whom language— and, of course, empathy and relationality—is absent: “I was in a race against time,” Catherine Maurice writes after her daughter Anne-Marie’s diagnosis, “and either I found someone or something that truly helped or I had lost Anne-Marie forever. It was as simple as that. There is something about autism that to me gave meaning to the phrase ‘death in life.’ Autism is an impossible condition of being there and not being there; a person without a self; a life without a soul” (1993, 57). “Coming back” to language and composing-with language represent two very different perspectives. “Coming back” refers to an ideal of communication that relies on a humanist individualist model which disregards the complex ecology of autistic perception.24 Within the trope of “coming back,” there is little appreciation for any kind of wor(l)ding that does not mimic the most normative neurotypical type of language interaction. Composing-with, on the other hand, suggests a commitment to making the pure experience of the more-than of expression felt. This is an ecological approach to language. It does not seek to delimit or deny the complexities (and unsayabilities) of expressibility. Rather, it addresses the full-

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ness of autistic experience, adding to it another modality: words. Maurice’s approach to “coming back” to language is quite the opposite. Within her model, everything that connects to autism is dangerous and is, as a result, denied. For this reason, in the behavioral therapy she claims “cured” her children, consistent effort was made to distract Anne-Marie and Michel from any kind of daydreaming (being “lost in space”) that appeared “autistic.” During therapeutic sessions, the children were also repeatedly made to look into the aide’s eyes (and later the mother’s eyes), even if this meant forcefully holding their chin. They were also discouraged from engaging in any kind of rhythmic repetitions of language or echolalia that might be associated with parroting or stimming on a word. “Coming back” is about locating the child in a universe compatible with a much more limited notion of experience and communication. It is therefore far from the “awakening” experienced by Sue Rubin through language. For it lacks sensitivity to neurodiversity and the richness of radical difference, and of course backgrounds a long history of what makes language rich within the realm of the literary and the poetic. Language is a double-edged sword. While autistics like Amanda Baggs want language to be de-emphasized so that the fullness of other kinds of experience can better be appreciated, there is a keen appreciation among autistics that without spoken or written language it can be excruciatingly difficult to be heard. For the modality of expression of the neurotypical tends to be language. Language is key to inclusion and, as such, to the opportunity to participate in a world that does not label you “retarded.” “Realize that I have lots on my mind and lots to say,” writes DJ Savarese (2010) in a piece called “Communicate with Me.” “What can you do to help me? The answer is communicate with me. Boldly reach out to me, and together we will goldenly share our views of the world we long to greet.” I wonder whether this tension within language is partly what moves autistics to be so creative in their use of it, inviting as so many of them do the poetic voice to be multiply embodied in the writing, activating registers of feeling that allow us to glimpse the prearticulating more-than of expression in-forming.25 The result is a writing that continuously astonishes, a writing with a precision and a sharpness that hits at the core of preconceptions of the role signification and denotation play in language. Expressing the force of what language can do, making apparent how prearticulation cuts across signification even as it allies itself with it, autie-type travels across denota-

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tion to invent with the more-than that is at the heart of composing-with. As Larry Bissonnette writes, “I am seriously past learning swimming in the shallow end of the pool of language” (Savarese 2012). While prearticulation is a forerunner to language, it also weaves into language’s unfolding. Words are never just what they seem to mean: they dance, they gallop, they rest, they tune in or out, they call forth and efface. However they express, the incipiency of expressibility accompanies them, even if radically backgrounded. This force of expressibility within expression agitates language as its articulatory edge. When thus pushed to its limit, language makes felt on the strata of shared communication the aliveness of the associated milieu of relation. It recasts the myth that communication is simply the organization and transmission of content fully-formed. It generates a definition of the communicative as the fragile sharing of the ineffable in the nowness of experience in the making. Writing as the bringing to expression of wonder. There is of course wonder and communication without language. What language does is tweak communicative potential toward human intelligibility. The expressive strands of movement or texture, of color or sound, shift as they meet word configurations and together with the affective tonality of worlds folding into expression, they create new rhythms, new urgencies, new environments.26 But keep in mind: an “awakening” toward communication in language is but one step of a much more complex relational process. This one step does open doors, does create an opportunity to be heard, but it is the quality of composing-with that really makes the difference, because it is here that language begins to participate in the matrix of the more than human, that language begins to be heard from the edges of experience in-forming. Amanda Baggs’s activism is squarely located within these complex politics of language: her work of many years within the disability community has often focused on language’s implicit relationship to everything neurotypical, especially the neurotypical tendency to place the (speaking) human at the center of all experience. Baggs consistently challenges categorizations of personhood associated with language acquisition and “passing” in the neurotypical world. For Baggs, language is both that which facilitates an understanding of radical difference and that which dangerously restricts this same difference from being valued as such, subtracting as language does from the wealth of relation that is pure experience. “I don’t quite have words for this” is a common 164 chaPtEr sEvEn

complaint of hers, and yet more words, more ways of composing, always follow. Take this as an example: “There are so many injustices, large and small, that affect autistic people. None of them are divorced from the injustices that happen to others. None of them are unique. Autistic people are not a special kind of people set apart from all other people. We are just one of many kinds of people, and oppression and injustice take depressingly familiar shapes. My task here is to scale the cliffs of language and shout up to you the pattern of one or more injustices” (Baggs 2010a). Here, the ineffable more-than of composing-with is heard, and felt. We are drawn into the cadence of what at first seems like a straightforward set of problems to cliffs of language and patterns of injustices. We are pulled into a world that is actively shaping around the more-than of denotation. Patterns are a key concept here. Amanda Baggs calls the ineffable morethan of experience “patterns.” Patterns are neither symbols nor categories as Baggs defines them. “I mean things fitting together in certain ways, outside of me,” she writes. “I mean perceiving connections without forcefitting a set of thoughts on top of them” (Baggs 2010a). While Baggs argues that patterns are precisely what is inexpressible in language, I would suggest that in the realm of composing-with, these very patterns make their way into language as the more-than of expressibility that is prearticulation. They populate expression at the edge of its intelligibility. The pattern is a field of force, a “manner,” as Whitehead would say, rather than a “matter” of becoming. Whitehead writes: “The manner of a pattern is the individual essence of the pattern. But no individual essence is realizable apart from some of its potentialities of relationship, that is, apart from its relational essence” (1978, 115). In language, the more-than of expressibility—the pattern—is transduced into a matter for articulation or, as Whitehead would say, a “matter of fact.” Contrast is how the matter for articulation actualizes: contrast spurs the subtraction. It fields pattern: “the realization of the pattern is through the realization of this contrast” (Whitehead 1978, 115). The “realization” of actualization does not replace the pattern: contrast subtracts from the resonant field of patterning even as it holds the resonance of the pattern in quasi-appearance. Contrast is contrast precisely because it is more-than the sum of its complexly divergent parts. Contrast brings to expression how the actual is also, to some degree, a field of vibratory potential in-act. Pattern and contrast coevolve in the affective tunings of language in the making. Contrast spurs articulation through its selection for emphasis, an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  165

each contrast the fielding of an incipient patterning. Where pattern is affective tonality, contrast is affective attunement. For Baggs the frustration with patterns as regards language is their “untranslatability.” She writes: “Words are forming at the surface / While in here they make no sense / Patterns forming losing meaning / No way still to comprehend / Standing in the shattered fragments / Language falling all around.”27 Patterns cannot be translated because they are not yet articulated within structures of meaning. They are affective tonalities on the cusp of articulation. Pushing pattern prematurely into language causes the intense disturbance of “sense” Amanda Baggs foregrounds, with “language falling all around,” conspicuously incapable of making sense of the ineffable morethan. And yet, as autie-type demonstrates, there is also more to language, a more-than that can bring into act the very complexities we all tend to find difficult to express in words. Contrast cuts through the collective agitations of sense-making and parses their becoming-language into an intelligibility. It articulates polyphasing expressibility even while it subtracts for definite sayability. Contrast transduces. To transduce in this context is to write-with the shifting of registers of intelligibility, thereby creating new processes for the cocomposing of signification and affective tonality. Thought plays a key role here. Once more, consider thought less as that which inhabits the register of language than as that which fields prearticulation. Thought in the feeling, in the moving. Thought in the preaccelerating is a certain kind of enabling constraint (recall choreographic thinking), albeit not necessarily at the level of language: think of a movement of thought, of the articulating of movement in a thinking that is coconstitutive with an environment bodying. Thought understood this way is a selected pathway through which experience unfolding begins to express itself. In a tuning toward language, thought regathers its force for expressibility not to translate the field of relation it in-gathers but to transduce it into a coming-to-expression. This coming-to-expression cannot be reiterated exactly the same way twice: its quality of more-than will remain in act.28 There is no adequate verb tense for thought. Thought is the immanent articulating-with of feeling in-forming. It is the more-than of language in the making, a future pastness that conditions the opportunity for expression on a different register. Thought prearticulating in the fullness of its agitation is what we taste when we hear Bissonnette’s words—“Without art, wafting smells of earth’s pleasures would kite away to land of inanimate ob166 chaPtEr sEvEn

jects, so it’s past point of personal hobby.” Thought is a patterning, a “rich and varied form of communication in [its] own right, not [an] inadequate substitute for the more standard forms of communication” (Baggs 2010a). Thought, as Baggs (2010a) suggests, “take[s] place so quietly they can barely notice it’s there,” activating, with the force of immanent relationality, “the much more direct relationships, connections, and patterns formed between one thing and another.” These “quiet thoughts,” as Baggs calls them, are distinct from “loud over-thoughts” that precipitate experience toward the realm of expectation, the realm of content, the realm of the alreadysaid. Quiet thoughts are forces for the thinking-with, forces that move a body-worlding, that open the more-than to a perception in the making that always exceeds its own framing. Thought is the withness of the objectenvironment-milieu beckoning in a feeling-with that co- composes the animate and the inanimate across complex scales of experience. The resonance of this composition—its vibrancy—is the how of thought-thinking. Thought-thinking is always in the register of feeling, and, as such, it is not yet object- or human-oriented. Everything is still agitating, co- composing, across strata of expressibility. Thought in the feeling is allied to the force of the concept. Think the concept here, as do Deleuze and Guattari, not as that which gives order to thought but as that which opens thought to its outside, making available within the register of thought-thinking the force of movement. In its attunement to language it is therefore never the case that what is said is a replication of thought. The saying is a movement of thought that abstracts from the complex relation of thought-feeling. The saying is the activation of a concept itself in movement that is always more-than content. Swimming beyond the shallow end of language means composing-with language’s prearticulations, its rhythms, its silences, its jumps in register. Composing-with this beyond means making mobile the inexpressibility of the more-than in the nowness of articulation. “The closer you get to the heart of things, the more words fall apart. First they get shaky. Then they start contradicting each other or getting paradoxical. Then they just fall apart, dissolve, vanish.”29 The dissolving, vanishing, falling apart of words even as they are crafted, this is language in the making. It is what spurs us to read between the words—“But if you look between the words (not the same as between the lines), rather than at them, you can start to see things far more interesting than the words themselves.”30 Reading between the words is to attend to the interval where expressibility continues to shape expression, where the ineffable continues to caress the evolution of meaning in an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  167

the fielding of the paradoxical ecologies of language and pure experience. Here, thought transduces, patterning expression in the activation of contrast, making language collective. The making- collective of language is an ethics. Think-with, feel-with, autie-type says. Experience the force of expression. Compose-with, participate at the edge of meaning where language no longer holds together. Learn to listen across registers. Dance the dance of attention of polyphonous expressibility. The between of words is what is continuously at stake not only in the language of autism but in all language. For the between emphasizes the inherent collectivity of language, its share in body-worlding. Language is always collective, the between tells us—it activates fields of relation, it patterns for contrast, it connects in the milieu of experience’s unfolding. Language is not separate from the ecologies of practice through which it expresses. All writing, all speaking, is a collective individuation. Dawn Prince (2010) writes: “if a thing existed, it existed as a living part of language and had a deep understanding of its place in the vibrations of speech, in the vibrations of experience.” Language is not an accessory to experience. Language operates in an ecology that includes at once the realm of attention in the event, expressibility, expression, and comprehension. These cannot be abstracted from one another. Language is the collective individuation of sense across strata of intelligibility and inexpressibility. It is not “about”—not about the individual, about being, about sensation, about experience—it is sensation in the forming, between the words. “Signification is not being but between beings, or rather across them: it is transindividual” (Simondon 2005, 307). The transindividual in the writing that is beyond being activates wonder. Wonder: when language begins to move with the ripples of what can only be felt in the saying. The language of Tito Mukhopadhyay, of DJ Savarese and Amanda Baggs, of Larry Bissonnette and Sue Rubin, of Dawn Prince and so many others activates the wonder that is the thinking-with of the co- composed more-than. It worlds in an ecology that is co-constitutive of its expressibility. It generates registers of experience. It activates realms of emergence and relation even as it brings them to the edge of intelligibility. This language of wonder is with, not about. It exists across, in the thinkingfeeling. And it worlds, refusing to categorically distinguish between forms and forces. Instead, it caresses, it captures, it distorts, to create expressibilities anew. Human, object, environment, tone, color, sound, what makes 168 chaPtEr sEvEn

its way into communication is not first and foremost the monadic nature of forms but the transversal forces of the as-yet-unthought in the thinking. The Immanence of the Finite in the Multitude In the realm of pure experience—the virtual pole of the edge of experience in-forming—the affective resonance of the not-yet agitates, thought in germ. Where thought fields more than it forms, language as such does not yet exist. But even where language is not-yet, there is nonetheless within thought-thinking a drifting, a rhythmic shifting, a polyphonic multiplicity in germ ready to be activated, to be articulated, be it in words, in movement, in gesture. When language composes with this more-than, it brings to the fore the fragility of all forms of expression, including signification, alerting us to the complex tectonic forces of the “immanence of the finite in the multitude” (Simondon 1958, 28). Through an ecological sensitivity—a sensing-with that occurs across registers and scales—the writers foregrounded here emphasize how being is always a composing-with in a dance of attention that registers the echoes, the silences, the rhythms of language, its subtractions and unsayabilities. In this regard, autistics are indeed otherworldly (in a way we would be wise to follow): they lead us toward an otherness of worlding. An otherness of worlding does not begin with the human: it engages with and across in a vibratory expression that must be “read between.” An otherness of worlding is always more than one. It composes-with experience, refuting the notion that the world is already known, pre-formed. This worlding is thought in motion, thought individuating in an amplifying incorporeality, a vibratory materiality. It is a becoming across registers of experience, “not the becoming of the individuated being but the becoming of the individuation of being” (Simondon 2005, 322). It is the dephasing of expression into a language of relation, cutting across signification, making felt at once the absolute imperative of being heard and the impossibility of saying, once and for all. What is singular about the autistic experience of and in language is that it emphasizes this tuning of language across its difference, making this difference felt in the writing. As emphasized above, with expression comes subtraction, and with this subtraction, the field of experience realigns. For the autistic, and likely for each of us, the subtraction expression entails is palpable, sometimes even painfully so. To participate in language is to feel the associated milieu of an Ethics of languagE in thE Making  169

potential regressing. But it is also to become capable of participating in an attunement. This attunement changes the stakes of the field of expression. Coming to expression empowers even as it limits. From potential to act. Language that speaks the ineffable makes felt the collective individuation of a complex dance of attention that is less a straightforward means of denotation than an incipient choreographing of movements of thought. Across the associated milieu of relation that is its emergent field it calls forth a protopolitics that resituates the conditions for a body-worlding each time anew. This protopolitics does not yet distinguish between forms of life and forces for life: it brings into resonance the incipient potentials of lifeliving, cutting across this life with a life. In its continual intersections with the force of a life, language as composing-with collectively agitates at the very limit where the human and the nonhuman intersect. Such writing reminds us that this life, this human life, is but a point of emphasis in a complex ecology that interfolds the realms of the organic and the inorganic, an ecology of practices that interlaces with the potential of the more-than every step of the way. Toward Ethics The question is not whether autistics are empathetic or relational. The question is how their ethics of relation can be transduced widely and fiercely, as DJ Savarese might say: “Reasonable people promote very easy breathing. Fearful creatures sadden me. Treating me as weird teases the creatures. Testing real justices I’m treated hurtfully. Very interested in freeing justice not creatures. Justice frees my true self. If someone understands that testing kids might make them resentful testing might be stopped. I’m never going to be like anyone else. People need humanitarian approaches to my hurt mind. Unhurt, responsible, persevering, humorous, mighty people are helping my real, mighty, very smart self ” (DJ Savarese qtd. in Savarese 2007, 435). Here, as elsewhere, the agitation of collective individuation is palpable: we feel-with the stumblings that life-living provokes, we participate in the welling into formation of the ineffable in the writing even as it communicates across registers, creating new ecologies for expression. There is no mindblindness here. Mindblindness dwells in the neurotypical world. It lurks on the edges of a notion of politics that speaks of democracy as though we had all acceded to the level of easy breathing. And it lurks within a macropolitical notion of ethics that seeks to place moral standards 170 chaPtEr sEvEn

on behavior, an ethics that overwrites, that judges and sequesters into socalled intelligibility the agitation of all ecologies that do not resemble it. A transversal, ontogenetic concept of the ethical can never begin with the human or with the body as such. To situate the ethical on the macropolitical scale of human interactivity is to underestimate the hold preconceptions have on our engagement with difference. It is to put too much faith in a politics of representation where the force of a life—the protopolitical bare activity of collective individuation—has been backgrounded by the systems that place the human above all else. An ethics of relation such as the one called for by DJ Savarese must heed the call of difference in its bare agitation. An ethics of relation is an act that agitates at the level of thought-feeling, in the event: an ethics of relation has concern for the event in its emergence, refuting knower/known hierarchies, preferring instead a horizontalizing milieu of experience where what emerges conditions the stakes of its coming-to-be. Ethics are unsayable, and yet they can be felt in the relational matrices language calls forth, in the rhythms, tonalities, silences, velocities of language in the making. Here, the ineffable briefly comes to life, not to my life but to a life, acting with the force of life across the more-than of wor(l)ding. This more-than soars between the words. It writes-with, active in an incipient choreography of expression that dances attention. Composing-with is the bringing into act of the relation between affective tonality and affective attunement in a collectivity expressive of an acrossness of wor(l)dings that captivates, that unmoors, that tunes toward radical difference. Its ethics are its unspoken call, agitating in the interstices of its commanding form, a call heard, always, in the register of the more-than that is individuation’s dance.

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interlude

Love the Anonymous Elements

Before you quite see it, Bracha Ettinger’s Autistwork n2 (1993; see figure 22) is already folding, drawing you into its vortical movement, capturing your gaze with the mesmerizing colorlessness of its center, creating an open field of turbulence for vision. You try to see the image, but it escapes you. Feel the velocity of its folding-through vision. What is it that Autistwork n2 does to keep frame, image, form in abeyance? How does it paint the force of its continual unfolding?1 Ettinger’s Autistwork n2 is small (26 x 22.5 cm). The technique of its execution, like the others of this period of painting on paper that hold the mark of a photocopying process halted, is one of subtraction. Begin with a photograph—of family, of war, of loss—and disallow the image to resolve on paper by stopping the photocopy machine halfway. Burn the copying process into the image while allowing the toner to unsettle. Create a shadow, a blur of pastness. And then activate the passing-by of the photographic image not by giving it a form—not by repainting the “completeness” of the image having passed by—but by undoing it of its ground, by painting the very impossibility of the image ever finding a secure resting place: “What is being painted is ‘the instant where the instant turns its back’: turns back on itself ” (Massumi 2006, 203). This turning back of the instant on itself creates the sensation of an abyss in the seeing, a folding vortex that catches seeing in the making, transporting the act of seeing with a tumultuousness that is visceral. Notice that even when there is the sense of a form, an image, or a narrative, nothing comes to rest. The quality of the work is not its renouncing of the image. Nor is it simply a turn against image into the

22. Bracha Ettinger, Autistwork n2, 1993

ineffability of trauma. The folding is not an abyssal infolding—something is called forth. Something excessive, an almost unseeable more-than in the moving is at stake here. Autistwork n2 is not at its core traumatic, not an infinite infolding: the abyss of seeing it provokes a velocity that has a centrifugal force. We are moved to see in excess of the image’s representation. To see centrifuge is to experience the force of a folding-through not of image per se—not of form—but of textures of resonance. It is to experience a surfacing of the affective tonality of the more-than of form, to see not lines but force-fields thick with vibratory movement. Autistwork n2 is full of potential, active with an intensity that calls forth an openness for perception. This openness for perception feels generative—it beckons. Rather than creating a sinking toward the nothingness of a lost history, Autistwork n2 seems to invite a new way of seeing that is a sensing in motion, toward, with. Like “autistic perception,”2 which, as Donna Williams (1998) suggests, is an experience of encountering the “art of the object” before perceiving the object as such,3 Autistwork n2 makes felt the very ontogenetic force of emergence in its ecological worlding that is perception at its most creative and indeterminate. “Water,” writes Sue Rubin, “in which I find great comfort and joy, is something that falls with an unexplainable grace. For that split second when water falls, I can almost see into an other world” (qtd. in Biklen 2005, 83, 84). Here, where force is still taking form and seeing is still a feeling, anything is possible. Autistwork n2 escapes the preimposition of bounded form. This is a synesthetic work that trembles at the edge where color becomes light and surface becomes the activity of shaping. “One could say that the light opened vivid rifts between shapes, . . . I was a child fighting sensorial distortions, attracted by light’s double spell, which altered reality made of perspectives that seemed to have been put there for me to play with,” writes Alberto Frugone (qtd. in Biklen 2005, 185). Shape is not the same as form. The magic of the shaping Frugone describes refers to an experience of directly perceiving a proliferation of worlds that are themselves infinitely shaping. They are shaping in the sense that edges are meeting textures, that velocities are meeting intensities, creating ecologies not yet resolved on the strata of objects, subjects, or form. Autistwork n2 paints this process of shaping, inviting the gaze to encounter the exuberant fieldings of what might be called “autistic perception,” making felt that all comings-to-form are first experienced in the vor174 interlude

tex of their incipient relational encounterings. It does this by slowing down the process of moving from shaping to form, actively making felt the shaping process. In so doing, it activates the more-than of perception, a morethan that is composed of foldings, of color become movement, of movement become light. Autistwork n2 is cut through more than it is traced over by a purpling: purple traces, color-lines cut across the tremulous center, vibrate in a quiver of surfacing that creates an incessant foregrounding-backgrounding. Feel the vortex and you cannot but see the purple texturing, the purple pushing through a background of open quasi- colorlessness into a tremulous foregrounding not of purple per se but of an intensively affective purpling, a force of light shimmering. This purpling is an activity more than it is a color, a trace, or a line. It agitates the fold. It surfaces it, layering it with potential shapings, affects on the verge. Barely felt, in the seeing. This is the minima at work, a restless not-yet of the painterly in a painting that prevents you from seeing solely in the form of the actual. To see here is to see-with, beyond the seeing-as-such. What we perceive is an exuberance of form, an uneasy pairing of an image abstracted and an experience to come. What makes this exuberance felt? What prevents the abyss from dovetailing into a nothingness thick with the pain of a memory always out of reach, of time disjointed? It’s the red in the vertical doubling of red and purple that courses up from the bottom right of the canvas, cutting into the central vortex. A red line moving from the bottom up, shifting into a shadow of itself, purple verticality. In fact it’s less the red line itself than it is the quality of redness that shifts the perceptual field. Redness is here less a color or the form of a trace than it is a line of force—or what Ettinger might call a “color-line-light”—that intercepts the traumatic infolding of the work by unmooring it, by startling the painting back to the surface. This redness provokes the centrifuge of perception in-the-making. A color-line because the line reverberates with color’s intensity, a color-line-light because it is not color or line we ultimately perceive, but light. A light beyond the seeingas-such. This light beyond the seeing is a with-seeing of a shaping directly felt in a vertiginousness that continuously flirts with what cannot, will not, be seen as such. This light beyond the seeing is an encounter with the beyond of seeing where vision itself begins to fold. The redness of Autistwork n2 makes the more-than of seeing felt. To do so, Love the Anonymous Elements 175

it paradoxically assists in composing the work. It is what Whitehead would call an eternal object. To repeat: for Whitehead, to perceive this or that is to have cut or subtracted or foregrounded from the welter of potential. This process Whitehead calls prehension. An actual occasion is a prehension that delimits a field. It is short-lived, often active only for the smallest interval of time, before which it perishes and is replaced by a new set of delimited conditions for actual experience. The actual occasion itself will never evolve or change because how it came to be cannot be replicated. The conditions for subtraction from potential are infinite yet, in actuality, absolutely singular. An experience in the realm of the actual is therefore always absolutely what it is and has been. Eternal objects are the key to understanding the processuality of what here perhaps appears as a complete atomicity. Eternal objects make ingress into the actual, activating the more-than of its actuality—its virtual force. They are what give Whiteheadian metaphysics of the actual its potential. They are the force of relation that bleeds across all actuality, creating resonances—virtual linkages—between tendencies on the cusp of expressibility. The paradox is that for an experience to be known as such, there has to be a subtraction into actuality. Pure virtuality is pure indetermination. Eternal objects are a mechanism by which the actual becomes more-than, expressing its latent potentiality. Eternal objects are a reminder that all actuality is in fact activity—a coming-to-act. To paint a coming-to-act is to activate the fine line between the welter of a chaos infolding and the actualization of an image or a form. Redness plays this role in Ettinger’s Autistwork n2. It is the eternal object that activates the comingto-perception of the work at the same time as it is what keeps the painting from resolving once and for all. The eternal object is a bit of misnomer—it is neither eternal in the usual sense nor an object. An eternal object is only eternal insofar as it remains a force for composition that creates an infinitely potentializing field of relation across occasions. Think of how redness carries a certain color-light quality beyond this or that actualization, a quality that can be called up as a somewhat stable tendency despite there being millions of individual versions of red: redness evokes a perceptual field that carries beyond this or that event despite the fact that this red will, strictly speaking, never again be the same red. Redness, despite its returning across iterations, is nonetheless not an object. It is a force for the shaping that makes ingress, affecting, luring the actual (the image, the form, the object) toward a vibratory experience of “red” that is both absolutely singular (this quality of light in 176 interlude

the coloring) and eternal (generalizable as a shaping that, while it resists form, creates a force of form that exceeds this particular instance of ingression). In Autistwork n2 redness catches vision in its abyssal folding, looping the whirl, flattening the vibratory surface (for all surfaces are also folds), tuning it toward a provisory stilling. Redness as a doubling verticality in the horizontality, a line in the non-line of a force shaping. Not quite an image: the welling of a force for the seeing. For what we see is not the red, or even the shadow-purple, but foldings-through fields of force that continuously and infinitely tremble the shaping. The force of the welling image emerges as light in the between of colorlessness and the redness in the purpling. It emerges as the surfacing for perception of a field of resonance. To see Autistwork n2 is to see the very edge of see-ability. It is to see-with the feeling of experiencing a vertiginous loss of ground. To make felt the ingress of eternal objects into the realm of the actual is to make felt the ineffable quality of autistic perception. It is to create for the seeing the between of words of which Amanda Baggs speaks. It is to activate the very cusp where the resonant field of potentializing attaches to this event, here, for the seeing. This is exuberance at work. For there is nothing like making perceptible the vibratory edges of potential. Autistic perception struggles with its necessary coexistence with neurotypical perception. Where neurotypical perception tends to quickly parse the object from the field of resonance, autistic perception tends to dwell in the shaping. Donna Williams writes: “I have vague recollections of being able to sense the surfaces around me. I have a sketchy sense of having been able to sense the wall and changes in its structure where some parts were more solid than others. I recall sensing this without looking or using touch, changes such as where a door or window broke up or changed the continuity. I recall a sort of ‘resonance’ with matter, a kind of non-physical bodymapping” (1998, 37). The wide breadth of perceptual richness experienced by autistics—and also by neurotypicals, under certain conditions4—cannot easily be bridged in words, which renders explication difficult. “Conventional language only allows me [the] terms [of the neurotypical], so I have done my best to point out the enormous and beautiful world of experiences that lie between those words and beyond the limits of a language never equipped to describe them,” writes Baggs (2010a). How to articulate the realm of the not- yet, Love the Anonymous Elements 177

“that richness [that] is infinite compared to the broadest of humanity’s finite capacities?” How to explain that the body is not bounded? “Am I made up of thoughts or am I made up of my body?” asks Baggs (2010a). “For a long time I had no idea of waking or dreaming concept because everything looked as an extension of thoughts. Thoughts would get alive like anything that is alive” (Mukhopadhyay qtd. in Biklen 2005, 121). How to share a fielding of experience so rich that it continuously reinvents the frame of existence? “My first memories involve sensations of all kinds. Colors. Sounds. Textures. Flavors. Smells. Shapes. Tones. These are short words, but the meaning of them is long, involved, and complex. Some things caught my attention, others did not, but all of them were absorbed into my mind. It is hard to explain to another person the patterns of perception that come before the ones they themselves have” (Baggs 2010a). Such a way of life is not economical, not tuned to the quickness to which we are accustomed in a world where there remains the presupposition that form precedes force and image precedes shape. “Unless your brain is unusually wired, I doubt you have ever—even in infancy—perceived things the way I most readily perceive them” writes Baggs (2010a). “I don’t doubt that this is the reason most people view my way of perceiving the world as an empty hole rather than every bit as rich and beautiful as their own.” Autistic perception dances the environment, folding-through a seeing-feeling that does not delimit in advance the realm of experience. “My experiences have their own richness that other people may not be able to see, and they are far more than a mere lack of movement, conventional thought, speech, language, or perception. . . . As someone whose cognitive and physical abilities vary widely from day to day, and moment to moment, I know that this richness is just as present when I lack the capacity to differentiate one sensation or moment from another as it is when I am engaging in complex thought” (Baggs 2010a). When experience folds into a synesthesia, when sensation and world are thoroughly intertwined, what is felt is experience infinitely layering: color become sound become resonant trace purpling in the redness of a more-than of seeing. This is how autistics describe their complex perceptual worlds, and this is what occurs, it seems to me, in Ettinger’s Autistwork n2, which reminds us that this is also what painting can do, what can be brought to the world by art. Art can teach us again how to see in the before of form where we might still glimpse the relational force of an eternal object coursing through the actual. 178 interlude

When actualized, perception ultimately resolves into an object or a form. The point is not to deny the presence of form but to stage an encounter with the shaping of its more-than. When this occurs, we catch nonsensuous perception in the folding: the direct perception of the half-second of pastness that is already leaking into an experience of the here-now. We feel forward to a memory of the future, an activation in the here-now of the not-yet. For the folds of perception are never linear and never completely actual—they always expose bits of duration that touch on pasts and futures unexplored, creating event-time in the seeing. Return to Autistwork n2: see again how before there is frame, image, or form, there is a folding, this folding so intensive in its force that it literally folds seeing onto itself. This makes felt new modalities of perception or, as Souriau would say, new modes of existence. Here, vision itself vibrates with the force of all the seeing-feeling it cannot quite contain. “As though we conjugated with the non-seeing, seeing between, in the virtual unsettledness of these composite images, images superimposed, thought-images” (Buci-Glucksmann 1995, 45). Let’s return to the technique of the work. Autistwork n2 begins on paper. A photograph is photocopied, the photocopier stopped midway, toner still leaking onto the image. In each of the stages, an image is held in abeyance, the paper serving less as a stable matrix for the image than as a thick parchment for what will never quite be seen. “The image has degenerated. But it hasn’t disappeared. You might say instead that it has been caught appearing, bearing degeneracy as a birthmark. Already degenerate, still just appearing: suspended between ages (appearing still)” (Massumi 2006, 1). It’s not that Ettinger hides the originary image—it’s that her technique foregrounds how the bringing to emergence of the work of art must always occur against the grain of preexistent form. This is the work’s technicity: what is painted is force taking-form, not a representation of it (not the image of trauma, for instance). For this feeling of force of form to stand out, the intensity of a trace barely there must catch you before the actual seeing can begin, moving you to a perception that occurs in the before of classification, a before that catches seeing in the making, a seeing where the virtual and the actual coincide, a seeing of the event of tremulousness itself. Two reds are active in Autistwork n2. The -ness of red vertically cocomposing with the purple line-shadow is what catches perception in the abyssing and moves the seeing to occur in a here-now of expressibility. The second red works differently, grounding an image temporarily having Love the Anonymous Elements 179

come to rest. Look for it in the right-hand corner of the painting in the triangulation of red-purpleness. This red-purple triangulation seems to settle vision—it appears for perception when the gaze is momentarily no longer caught in the vertigo of a more-than seeing—giving a certain resting place to the tumultuousness of perception. This second red is a reddening more than a redness, perception of color as such more than of quality or force. Where the redness—the first red—is an eternal object, a machine for continuous reorientation in the folding through of the fold, a quality of relation that holds the seeing-with to the abyss of its eventful nonrepresentation, the second red—the reddening—is the mechanism though which vision is invited to return, if indeed vision ever makes it back here. For with autistworks we run the risk that we never actually come to the groundedness of actual perception, that we never quite land. Autistwork n2—despite its title—is not a work about autism. But it does activate autistic perception. It is a work that fields the force of perception toward a limit that keeps the bounded image at bay, shaping an affective intensity before it takes a form. In so doing, it makes felt the eternity of a more-than that attends less to the trauma of an ineffable past lost to the seeing than to a vibratory joy of the Spinozist kind, a joy that tunes toward the potential that courses through all becomings. This joy is not a happiness— it is a turbulent openness toward the invention of worlds in the making. A proposition for seeing again, with. Autism is a modality of becoming before it is any kind of state. This is not to negate the movement disorder that tends to accompany the “classical autism” of which I speak throughout, nor to downgrade the myriad everyday challenges that tend to set autistics apart. It is simply to emphasize what classical autistics themselves continuously underscore: that autism is also and perhaps especially a way of perceiving the more-than of the coming-to-appearance of a worlding always under way. With autistic perception—which is on a continuum of perception not limited to autistics— there is never first a line, then an image, never first a frame, then light. Here, in the field of the more-than directly experienced, the resonance of eternal objects activating a relational field of quality can be felt, with form a residue—almost the afterthought—of a process too intensive to articulate easily in spoken language. What we see: a thinking-feeling that folds perception into experience without the orientation of explication or form as an intermediary. Autistic perception never begins with an object. Similarly, the “image180 interlude

object” of Autistwork n2 is not what we see. What appears is not strictly a photograph taken in a time of war, trauma, or diaspora, though this of course leaves its memory-shadow. What we see is how we see: the withness of perception folding. We see the experience of feeling the fold. We see the quality of the abyss of perception’s virtual infinity, we see the unseeable (the unbearable). Or better: we feel it in the amodal more-than of vision. We see-feel the vibratory force of purple edging to red, of parchment texturally haunted. We see-feel an edging into tendency, a durational velocity folding toward a more-than that continuously redraws the relation between seeing and feeling, between image and fold, between reddening and redness. For Ettinger, the Autistwork series marks the drawing of a threshold that accepts, and even rejoices in, a certain not-seeing that follows in all her subsequent work. This not-seeing is a more-than of seeing that allows itself to perceive with the “remembering that I do not remember anymore” that coexists with the “knowing that I do not know” (Ettinger 1993, 62). The Autistwork series foregrounds that it is the how of the painting’s coming to appearance that knows (not the artist)—just as it is the ecology of relation of autistic perception that knows (not the autistic). It demonstrates that the how of knowing much exceeds the what (and the who) of knowing. It makes the more-than of image or object felt. It makes seen the constitutive difference between knowing-with and a more generalized knowing—knowing as categorization, organization, representation. It reminds us that to know is to participate in a folding that will remain an intensity too multiple, too ineffable and too infinite to articulate without composing-with. To know is to know-with—to participate in the creation of worlds, worlds churning with the exquisite singular-infinity of eternal objects, seeings-in-the-feeling that continuously reinvent what perception (and knowing) can do. That the painting knows, that the more-than of vision is felt through a perceptual field that takes its time before centering-in on an object suggests, perhaps, that powerful artworks are, to different degrees and in differing constellations, autistworks. Artworks, that is, that make felt the more-than of their intensive fielding, that call forth durational traces that exceed the tracing of the already-circumscribed to become the active extinguishing of any concept of the “about.” Autistwork is not about figure or no figure, not about body or no body: it is an experience of with-seeing on a quivering edge that can never know in advance what it will become. On the level of technicity, Ettinger’s work directly engages with the Love the Anonymous Elements 181

quivering edge. At this edge, what she calls the “withdrawing of traces” takes hold “where aesthetics approaches ethics beyond the artist’s intentions or conscious control”—a withdrawing that stages an encounter in the erasing (Ettinger 1993, 63). This encounter is multi-phased and multiphasing. It begins, in Autistwork n2, as mentioned above, with a photograph that encounters a photocopy machine. Moving through a doubling of the grain, the photograph emerges retouched by photocopy dust—retouched by the ashes of its moving-through the appearing- disappearing image— such that it begins to disresemble itself, new edges and tendencies coming into appearance while others are backgrounded in the transfer. An addition for a subtraction. It would be a mistake, however, to think of the painting beginning to take form in the aftermath of the photocopy machine. First, because the painting will continue to resist an ultimate taking-form, its forces for withdrawing always active, always vibrating in the resonant seeing-with the painting proposes. Second, because the photocopy machine is itself a way of seeingwith, a collaborator in the processual fielding that is this autistwork. That the photocopy machine is collaborator is a reminder that in autistworks we are never speaking of a subject painting and an object painted. With autistic perception, we are always speaking of a hyperrelational field of edgings-into and seeings-with, of color-lines become light and verticalities horizontalizing. We are speaking, always, of a constitutive loss of ground in the seeing. Autistworks create not form but a certain intensive shaping, a shaping that brings to the fore a force-field of potential that gives a singularity to the emergent. What autistworks shape is never preexistent—this is an immanent shaping in the not-yet of experience tuning toward the thisness of actual perception. Autistworks shape insofar as they intensively delimit by inflecting, creating not form but tendency. For an artwork to be an autistwork, it will have to create itself beyond its content, beyond the subject of its iteration, beyond the linear determinations of its history. It is not that these will have no bearing on it—the photocopier will always have left its withdrawing trace on Autistwork n2 as will the Holocaust, the family, the mother—but that the work will always have to beckon to the beyond of its genesis. The beyond is not a spiritual realm outside the ecology of worlding that is life-living. The beyond is an interval of life-living, here-now in an incessant eternal return, as Nietzsche might say, active in the spiraling of interstices 182 interlude

through which the edgings-toward of speciations continuously metamorphose. The beyond, a shaping without limit, infused with “the language we speak, / we who can see without looking” (Sinclair 1993). The more-than, the beyond of representation, the knowing-with, this we might also call love—“love the anonymous elements” (Ettinger 1993, 65). Love as the more-than where feeling achieves its final escape from the subject. Love as the fielding of the agitation-that-worlds in an ecology of movement. Love as the force that architects a mobility without preimposed direction. Love as a sense of encountering what we thought was delimited—is that me?—again, differently. Love as the crafting, in a relational effortlessness, of an event of generosity that occludes any notion of the “I”—is that you? Love as the expression of how the bounded me never was and never will be. Love as the spark that shapes an enthusiasm that forever exceeds us. Love has no subject. It is where the object never was. Love is more than human: it courses across the human, across life in all its material and incorporeal ecologies, touching on the folding of the world bodying. Love: that which catches the more-than of feeling in the edging toward perception and incites a landing that never quite sites. Does the me ever return? Only as an afterthought. And never as an autistwork.

Love the Anonymous Elements 183

Ei ght

The Shape of Enthusiasm

Autispeak This is the language we speak, we who can talk without sound. This is our voice in the silence Where every word has weight, and no thought is ever lost. This is the language we speak, we who embrace without touching, This is our dance without bodies Where every touch has meaning, and no glance is ever wasted. This is the language we speak, we who can see without looking. This is our star behind darkness where velvet rainbows sing, and no tear falls unseen. This is the language we speak, we who can float outside time. This is our home beyond nowhere where shadows’ footsteps fall, where memory echoes from the future, and comfort flows back from the past, where smiles have no need for faces and warmth breathes from the frozen places. This is our source, our destination, where every song is heard, and no soul shines unknown.

*  JiM sinclair, “Our Voice”

“This is our dance without bodies / Where every touch has meaning, / and no glance is ever wasted. / This is the language we speak.” This is the language we speak, a language between the sounding of words, a language in the shaping for “we who can float outside time.”1 This is the language we speak, a language beyond communication, a language that shapes a different kind of coming-together, a different kind of being-heard. This is the language we speak, autispeak. But it is also the language we speak, anyspeak, a language that spreads across the telling and marks the underneath of wording, a language that is mute and sounding of expressions in the shaping, of becomings-with in the pre- of articulation. This is the language we speak, written before the words, between the lines, with and across expression and expressibility, where “smiles have no need for faces / and warmth breathes from frozen places.” The language not of syllables but of shapes, the language within language before language that is a field of resonance, an intensive enjoyment of an enthusiasm with and in a world that speaks not in the name of “I” but in the interval where the many become one and are increased by one. “This is our voice in the silence / Where every word has weight, and no thought is ever lost.” This is a language we hear in autie-type by those whose typing makes felt how the relational is everywhere active in the writing, a language we can also become attuned to in the complex fieldings of choreographic thinking, in the dance of attention, in architectings of mobility that create propositions for an ecology of participation that exceeds what we thought movement could do. This language we never quite speak but are always tuning toward is a language with weight, heavy with not-yet soundings, a language that vibrates in a suspense of the in-act but that acts nonetheless, intensively shaping a worlding that redefines the very core of what we understand as activity. Activist philosophy: the in-act of worldings yet to come, in the tremulous ecological resonance of the elastic almost where movement moves and life lives. This intensity, an intensity of the withness of expressibility, activates a process, I want to suggest, that takes the shape of enthusiasm, a kind of Spinozist joy of the betweenness of experience. An enthusiasm with life in the making. An enthusiasm with life in the making is a shaping of the resonant field of experience in the withness of expressibility’s taking form. This shaping thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  185

is not a closed shape, does not take after an object or come from a subject. It is not the human as preconstituted who is enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is the name I am giving to the tremulous field of expression itself, to its exuberance, especially when this field percolates at the very limits of expressibility in the before of the subject or object, in the before of image or form. Enthusiasm as a movement-with that colors expressibility, giving a certain allure to the coming-to-expression. “I” is not enthusiastic—the shape of worlding is enthusiastic, in-forming toward an act without predecessor, an act always yet in the trembling “where memory echoes from the future.” Enthusiasm touches on a future-pastness in a topology of time that does not sequester the beginning from the end, that captures the saying in its middling. In the middling, bodies are not yet constituted: eventually they will resolve, taking the form of a thousand different species, with a thousand different agencies. But let’s not move too quickly toward a body reborn, for this is not where enthusiasm resonates. Let’s stay instead in the between, in the force of form that shapes experience. For, when we learn to dwell in the shaping of enthusiasm that is the middling of experience, we discover many things, not least of which is that the difference between autispeak and anyspeak is not as fundamental as we may have believed, despite what Francis Tustin says. From the perspective of her long-standing clinical research into autism, Francis Tustin writes of her many encounters with “autistic shapes,” which she describes as the non-object–oriented realm of preconscious experience where autistics linger. She does this critically, arguing that this process of shaping is something to be avoided. Rather than seeing the fascinating concept of prelinguistic shapes as an inroad into understanding the complexity of experience, autistic or otherwise, Tustin prefers to confine the concept of shapes to the realm of the pathological, making it the goal of the psychoanalytic process she condones to divest autistics of their shapes. In so doing, she believes they will become more accountable to the objects in their midst. Tustin writes: “In the days when I was working as a psychoanalyst child therapist with young autistic children, as they began to talk, they would tell me about their ‘shapes.’ . . . They were not the shapes of any particular object. Just ‘shapes.’ . . . I do not know what other forms were covered by what they referred to as ‘shapes’ . . . it was not the shape of a specific object which existed in actuality; it was just a ‘shape’” (1984, 278). That Tustin cannot quite articulate the nature of a “shape” is not sur186 chaPtEr Eight

prising: the shaping of experience in the making is dynamic and amodal— active in the perceptual field where language is not-yet. It is, as described in chapter 1, a vitality form, a preconscious verging toward a coming-to-act that tunes to the relational milieu of experience. Such a vitality form occurs in the half-second or less of an event’s coming to expression. It is, as Stern underlines, a “manifestation of being alive” that is all about movement— vitality forms shape the lived experience of duration, giving incipient experience its activation contour. Giving this activity of shaping the name of enthusiasm, making enthusiasm the force of the not-yet, emphasizes the towardness, the exuberance and the intensity of vitality forms, calling forth the way in which they manifest always in excess of actual forms in the towardness of a comingto-be. Vitality forms take the shape of the not-yet such that they in-form not simply the content of the experience but its affective tonality: “they are the felt experience of force—in movement—with a temporal contour, and a sense of aliveness, of going somewhere” (Stern 2010, 8). They are the “‘shapes’ of sound, smell, taste and sight” that are “‘felt’ rather than heard, smelled, tasted or seen” (Tustin 1984, 279). “We are already reacting to a stimulus before we know what it is,” writes Stern (2010, 68). Think the shape of enthusiasm as the associated milieu of experience where the relational field is still in-forming. Remember: the associated milieu is not an external environment, nor is it a neutral between of two actualized forms. The associated milieu is the withness of every coming-to- expression. It is always with its associated milieu that a given occasion of experience begins to take shape. Enthusiasm is of the milieu, not an external qualifier. Enthusiasm is the force of a resonant intensity that continuously reorients the field toward the more-than of its potential. This reorientation is indeed “already reacting to a stimulus,” as Stern writes, but not through the specter of the “we.” It is not “we” who are reacting, for “we” are not yet. Co- constitutive worlding. The shape of enthusiasm is emphatically not a quantification of experience. Enthusiasm is not a moral category, not good or evil, just as the morethan is not a quantification of life. Enthusiasm is what moves the field of experience toward the creativity of its continual recomposition. It is the insistent refrain that keeps coming back: “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” (Nietzsche 1967, 318). The shaping of the more-than creates speciations. These speciations are hybrids—not human, not environmental, not animal. They emerge across thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  187

forces of life-living through the contour of the experiential matrix that is this or that coming-to-act. Speciation is not a question of scale but of mode: it binds the organic and the inorganic in an infinity of microperceptible yet tangible ways, creating new forms of life-living barely categorizable as form or matter. The core of the problem in Tustin’s analysis of shapes is that she begins with species instead of speciations. To begin with species is to have already put into place a hierarchy of forms. The hierarchy itself then becomes a pathology, an enclosure that wrests from its protected environment all that does not resemble it, separating, as Félix Guattari would say,2 the “normopaths” from the neurotics and psychopaths and, of course, the autistics. For pathologization takes the fully formed individual as the starting point to experience and erects it as a norm. Yet, because there is no such thing as a stable individual—because the individual is always only a temporary vectorization of the larger process of individuation—more and more systems must be put into place to keep up the pretence of the stability of this imposed notion of the norm. These efforts include identifying certain traits within the human species and attempting to link them superficially with every individual in the category (think mindblindness), thus creating a precise assemblage of normative behavior consistently reinforceable. Anything that does not immediately conform to the superficial content of what has been defined as the norm now falls into the more unstable field of the pathological (the sick, the other, the less-than-human), which in effect, creates not only a paradoxical pathologization of the individual as such (who never really existed in any stable and reiterable way in the first place) but the more widespread pathologization of experience itself. The pathologization of experience then works to subtract from experience the ineffable more-than, for there is no place for the more-than in an ideology of rationalization or progress or survival or cure (whatever the leading by-line of the time). This not only disqualifies all that does not resemble it—it wrests experience of its incipiency, violently seeking to undermine the complexity of life-living’s processual shaping. Tustin’s analysis of “autistic shapes” feeds into this very tendency, using the psychoanalytic language- oriented by-line of her era. The human individual is the norm, and to be human is to be in language in a specific way: it is to be capable of symbolizing the processual, of stabilizing experience. The autistic who lingers in the shape of enthusiasm must therefore be divested of her attachment to the processual, must be taught to speak, and, 188 chaPtEr Eight

more specifically, must be taught to articulate the content of experience in terms of already-formed objects and events. “We live in a world dominated by words and by the shapes of actual objects,” Tustin explains to justify her claim that it is counter to the autistic’s well-being to dwell in the process of shaping (1984, 280). The ineffable, the unspeakable, must be avoided at all costs, for there is no future, no capacity for survival in “the language we speak.” Tustin is adamant: “Autistic shapes are not merely psychological curiosities. They are blocks to more normal functioning” (1984, 284). This is why Tustin must so quickly move toward the “curing” of autistics of their shapes. For while Tustin agrees that there is likely a “normal” “inbuilt disposition to form ‘shapes,’” she is adamant that ultimately there is no place in the normopathic world for the ineffable in-act of shaping. And yet, as Stern demonstrates with the concept of vitality forms, all experience is in-forming. It is replete with the “lulling” “spinning,” and “vague formations of sensation” Tustin describes (1984, 278). “Shapes” are everywhere active, and, despite what Tustin says, the process of shaping is not predominantly “autistic.” The only reason to foreground the autistic here would be to underscore the way autistics seem to be capable of lingering in the shaping, capable of slowing down the process of shiftingto- content.3 As Roy Bedward writes: “Never think I’m not paying attention when I’m not looking because I’m always paying complete attention to everything. I just can’t begin to say how much you miss when you make your attention narrow and focused. It is the bane of autism to be able to attend to way too much.”4 Communication is everywhere amplified by the more-than of its apparent content. The shape of words—their affective tonality, the way they taste, what they provoke, how they appear, what lines of drift they trace—is as intensely foregrounded for autistics as the what of language’s content. This is something Tustin cannot understand: autistics “listen to other people’s voices, not as a communication, but as a self-envelopment by lulling shapes,” Tustin writes dismissively (1984, 280). She is clearly missing the point. She cannot fathom that the direct experience of lulling shapes means being capable of seeing the dance of attention of a worlding taking form. Of seeing the shape of enthusiasm. In the communicating—a composingwith. The shape of enthusiasm carries with it an intuition. Bergson calls intuition a “direct vision,” a “vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and event coincidence” (2007, thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  189

20). In the event, in the language we speak, between and in excess of words, there is an intuition of a coming-to- content that is more-than the form of its communicability. This vision, as Bergson might call it, is a direct experience of dynamic form: a swelling, a surging, a bursting, an accelerating, a fading, a fleeting, a moving-with. This dynamic form in the event’s unfolding has “no pre-imposed modality [and is not a] direct cognition” (Stern 2010, 8). It is a direct vision of experience in the making, an intuited immediate feltness of the “how” of experience (Stern 2010, 8). What Tustin cannot fathom is that this “how” of experience is itself a form of composing-with. It is an enthusiasm shared not simply with the human interlocutor but with the world itself in the shaping. Enthusiasm in the field of relation, a durational thinking-feeling co- composing with movement worlding. “Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty” (Bergson 1997, 23). “This is the language we speak, / we who can float outside time” (Bergson 1992, 34–35). In this ineffability of expression, in the intuition of duration itself, what of words? Are vitality forms always in excess of words, in the before of articulation? Can there be a shaping of language in-forming, a listening-with “between the words.” A shape of enthusiasm in the saying, in the writing? This is a question Tustin never thinks to ask. Fernand Deligny In 1967 Fernand Deligny takes on a project of living with autistics in order to explore the potential of a different notion of care not encountered within the institutions that seek to organize experience and pathologize those who cannot speak the dominant language.5 Over a period of more than two decades, Deligny leads a network of encampments in the Cevennes at Monoblet where autistic children are paired with local people assisted by interns.6 The idea was to welcome children between the ages of three and ten who were mute (“out of language”—hors parole, as Deligny calls it). The cost was very low and the stays could last “between three or four months, three or four times a year” (Toledo 2007, 683). In an effort to conceive of a living networking of difference, Deligny turns his back on the psychiatric institution and especially on the psychoanalytic tendency to pathologize “the language we speak.” He proposes in-

190 chaPtEr Eight

stead a cartography of everyday life that occurs in a mode of cohabitation where the vectors of necessity—the sharing of a site—reorient the question of the normal and pathological toward notions of dynamic mappings that affect experience at the level of movement itself. The project is not to make autistics more “like us”—to make them speak or act within the communicational matrix of societal expectation. It is, rather, to create a dynamic milieu in the everyday context that can make felt the force of prearticulation that lingers in the unsaid. This, he believes, will allow us to ask the question Tustin never addresses, the question of the between of words, thus reorienting what it means to speak in the first person singular. Over the years, building on this explicit mandate to invent modes of relation that do not necessarily rely on words, a singular iteration of experience in the making begins to take the form of maps of movement, “tracings,” as Deligny calls them.7 These tracings, a collaboration between the network and the autistics, become incipient cartographies of an associated milieu of relation that builds on the way movement and life-living interrelate.8 The challenge, as Deligny conceived it, was to learn “to see language from the point of view of a mute child” (Toledo 2007, 679).9 A choreographic proposition. Together, farmer and child, intern and child, writer and child, filmmaker and child, militant and child, share a life that is parsed in hundreds of ways by the necessity of the everyday—the washing of clothing, the leading of goats, the building of encampments. From these daily tasks, tracings on paper emerge that outline the shiftings between sites and the reorientings of territories in the moving, tracings that magnify the moreness of habitual pathways. These tracings at once trace the regularity of habit and routine and the unrepresentable of its drifts. They do not reproduce movement, they activate it. Deleuze writes: A cartography is suggested today by Deligny when he follows the course of autistic children. . . . All these lines are tangled. Deligny produces a geo-analysis, an analysis of lines which takes his path far from psychoanalysis, and which relates not only to autistic children, but to all children, to all adults (watch someone walking down the street and see what little inventions he introduces into it, if he is not too caught up in his rigid segmentarity, what little inventions he puts there), and not only their walk, but their gestures, their affects, their language, their style. (2007, 128; my emphasis)10 thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  191

23. Line of Drift 3

In the aligning to the simple togetherness of the everyday, an everyday that moves in certain directions out of necessity and lifelong habits, and in other directions out of curiosity and drift, the tracings surreptitiously go far beyond the paths they trace to make felt the vitality forms of the comings-toact that erupt across the territory’s more stable lines: explosions of congruence, intensive contours. Through the shape of enthusiasm felt in the lines of drift, in the contours that reform the edges of spacetime, an intuition is drawn. This is the intuition of a commoning that is beyond commonality, a commoning of lines of drift meeting, of lines lingering, thickening, curving in a reorienting of spacetimes of experience in the making.11 The tracings begin as a kind of intervention. In 1969 Jacques Lin, a longtime collaborator of Deligny’s in the network, is overtaken by an overwhelming feeling of disempowerment in the face of what he perceives as an uncontainable violence brought on by an autistic tantrum no doubt in 192 chaPtEr Eight

large part caused by the potent mixture of a lack of inhibition and oversensory stimulation. He is at a loss and turns to Deligny for assistance. Instead of trying to sort out the experience with language, Deligny suggests that Lin transcribe the autistics’ movements, their displacements in order “to channel language through gesture in the tracing” (Toledo 2007, 798). In time, these tracings become a practice (and a project) across the network: “And so we must trace, not so that there be a trace, to keep something or to locate on the lines of space an experience; we must trace a trace before there is even a trace. . . . We must trace these maps, give being to this drift, to this line that has nothing more than its own path, than the force of being-there without a place of existence” (Han 2006, 187). Deligny’s project can be seen as one of co- composition through a common tracing that allows the uncommon to emerge. Deligny underscores: it is a lost cause to attempt to reform others to our image. What is important is to learn techniques of listening-with, techniques that allow us to movewith in a continuance of drift that opens the spacetime of experience to the richness of its vitality forms, allowing the felt intensity of its shaping to stretch in duration, as it seems to do for autistics. Deligny writes, “And if, instead of teaching them to speak, we learned to hold our tongues?” (1975, 3).The muteness of autism touches on the ineffable in expressibility. It is more-than a silence, more-than a not-speaking. It is “the language we speak.” “To be silent . . . is not to stop talking [se taire], it is not a reaction; it is a posture, an attitude, a style of life, an ensemble of gestures that hold speech in abeyance” (Querrien 2006, 172). Deligny is suspicious of language: for Deligny, language is tied too closely to the institutionalization of the other. Language is too content to categorize, organize, close down, too intent on subsuming intensity to content: language “is the matrix of representation, the structure of our world and the root of this specific belief that we need a ‘me’ in order to exist” (Deligny qtd. in Han 2006, 188).12 But is there not another way of conceiving language? As autie-type demonstrates, in the force of expressibility where the shape of enthusiasm lingers—“in the language we speak”—lives a certain muteness that is the prearticulation of language in-forming. Prearticulation’s activation contour is the how of language’s movement-with that shapes not necessarily words as such but the force of their incipient expressibility. Language, autie-type demonstrates, can also be active in lines of drift that move in a worlding that persists “between the words.” Poetry has long done this, exposing lanthE shaPE of EnthusiasM  193

24. Line of Drift 9

guage to the more-than of its content, activating the incipient expressibility within expression. Jim Sinclair’s poem leads the way here, reminding us that poetry can be a voice for “the language we speak,” that poetry’s techniques of rhythm and repetition give us a taste of what lurks between the words and across the lines. Deligny also seems to have an intuition that takes him in this direction, for he makes a place for his own poetic voice to be heard beside (between?) the tracings,13 activating the traces with words written in a rhythm that co- composes with the drifting lines. This opens writing itself to a drift that reorients the territory, that composes across the “we” of “this is the language we speak” and “we, the normopaths.” For Deligny’s is a composing-with where the “we” is continuously replaced by the more-than of the iteration, the not-quite sayable of its ineffability where “we” are not-yet. If a “we” does emerge it is an uncommon we: “The wE of which I speak is the inverse of a we-two: but it is not a myth and resides discreetly with all the forms of a we-here, we-there. To respect it requires no doubt a certain rigour for which I would be incapable of formulating rules” (Deligny 1976, 24). “We” here is multiple—always more-than the expressibility of its taking-form. For the “we” in the tracings, in “the language we speak,” is a field continuously co-constituted by the events it calls forth. It never knows what to say in advance of the saying. The “we” is adrift. “Tracing maps . . . is first to try to not speak, to not want to know. It is to accept that there is more than the human, that there exists a human who is nothing of ourselves and yet is nonetheless there without knowing who he is, who is there closeby without anything to do” (Han 2006, 188). They drift “to try to see from the other side of We, to no longer enclose, and to stop thinking in the mode of ‘I.’ . . . ‘I’ is but a truncated metaphor for Deligny, the source of all their delusions and missed encounters, a substantive forged by the history of discourse, a stranglehold of grammar” (Han 2006, 188). The Smile That Needs No Face “This is our home beyond nowhere / where shadows’ footsteps fall, / where memory echoes from the future, / and comfort flows back from the past, / where smiles have no need for faces” (Sinclair 1993). The smile that needs no face is a becoming without an “I,” a life-living in the speciation. The smile that needs no face precedes being. It shapes not being-as-such but the force of a becoming that is not-yet. This force of bethE shaPE of EnthusiasM  195

coming is a phasing toward a vectoring. From the amorphous shape of enthusiasm it is a tweaking toward a taking-form that en-acts. This enacting is already a hybrid, its speciation agglomerating across tendencies rather than fixed form. The smile that needs no face lulls in the betweenness of a saying, it dances in the territory of its making. The force of its more-than is always in excess of a given species. Each tracing is a speciation. It draws not an image so much as a choreographic proposition for a new kind of attuning, a new kind of mapping of experience. These mappings of experience are procedures not for the representation of a movement already lived. They are the activation for life-living of a process of shaping. This shaping takes the shape of enthusiasm when it truly proposes a new mode of existence. “Against all pedagogical methods, all institutional and coercive forms, Deligny develops a mode of common living that consists of tracing” that blossoms in “a living-with” and that consists of “line[s] of drift that borrow one of the trajectories, fugitive, gracile, reedy as a thread without a net” for “there is nothing to say, there is nothing to do, only to exist and trace again” (Han 2006, 190). Tracings, layer upon layer, superimposed on tracing paper, harbingers, as Deligny refers to them, of “an immediate enthusiasm” that touches us without our knowing why, a touching that occurs not through the effects of language but beyond, where “something that cannot be seen” exists, something ineffable but nonetheless “immediately felt” (Deligny 1990).14 Tracings make apparent the briefest of felt intervals. “To maintain the interstices, this should be the work of these maps we are tracing” (Deligny 1976, 8). “The maps stop there, at the threshold of the encounter, at the limit of the void and the unbearable, at the confluence of the living and the undecidable” (Han 2006, 192). At this briefest interval, at the threshold of a different kind of togetherness, the tracings define a modality of orientation that exceeds or defies Euclidean maps. For their orienting is a shaping in the encounter. It does not direct or foreshadow. It draws out a confluence. This confluence activates new tendencies, new orientations in the living. These new orientations occur at “the limit of the void and the unbearable,” a limit that tells us nothing—“there is nothing to say”—but speaks instead between the words “at the confluence of the living and the undecidable.” Lines of drift: a tracing that activates an encounter with an orientation that maps time’s spiral.15 The felt interval is an emergent attuning to forces in the moving. What can be felt, here, is the event’s vitality form, a dynamic that “give[s] a tem196 chaPtEr Eight

25. Line of Drift 5

26. Line of Drift 6

poral and intensity contour to the content” (Stern 2010, 23). What is at stake here is not the content of the image but the activity of the field the event gives rise to: “It is the difference between transcribing a sensation and tracing to permit something wholly other than the already-felt to appear” (Deligny 1976, 11). The already-felt is content premapped onto experience. This does violence to experience, if for no other reason than that in order to consistently reappear as the form of what-was in the mode of the already-felt, the content will have to be policed, held together, frozen: no experience can truly be replayed quite the same way twice. Content premapped requires a suffocation of time, of process. It requires the premapping onto experience of the no-time of the will-have-known-in-advance. Pathologization happens in this no-time of experience. 198 chaPtEr Eight

In ordinary maps, in a cartography of precise Euclidean coordinates, the already- defined masks lines of drift.16 Such maps draw conclusions in advance based on the autocracy of the similar, of the already-seen, of the livedbefore. “No trace of democracy in this enterprise,” writes Deligny about his networking experiment. “At the limit, and in the best moments, [the children’s] mode of listening is imperceptible. To formulate it is to put into danger this imperceptibility” (Deligny 1976, 25). Vitality forms are the marker of life welling, of life-living beyond the thisness of content preimposed. There is no experience that does not carry into its realization the contours of its having come to expression. And these contours are nothing if not imperceptible—felt but imperceptible as such in the howness of their evolution. Vitality forms are not formed in advance by the content of the event they call forth—they color the coming-intoexpression of life as we know it, creating the allure of what comes to be without deciding in advance what it is that will come-to-act. “The vitality dynamic gives the content its form as a dynamic experience. The contents, by themselves, need not conform to any particular dynamic experience” (Stern 2010, 23). Vitality forms “are the most fundamental of all felt experience.” They are inherent in each coming-to-act, bringing forth a speciation that always exceeds containment (Stern 2010, 8). These speciations occur in the between of experience and experiencing where embodiment is not-yet. They meet as tendencies, as proclivities. Arm meets rosebush to become gardeningtendency, thorn meets sound to become weapon, disintegrating rock meets water to become raft. Bodies, life-forms do emerge, but never as fully formed, never “as such”: something always escapes the delineation of the coming-to-act, and something always exceeds it. The body, the individual, life as such is but a shorthand for a million speciations, organic and inorganic, intertwining. Speciations create drifts, and these drifts create runoffs. This is not a metaphor. When autistic perception meets the world, something is doing that fundamentally changes the field of relation. This field of relation “includes” the “we” that is not “I.” It creates a tending-toward, a procedurefor-life that is a shaping of the relational milieu of experience. “Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 203). Lines of drift are lines of life-living. They are emphatically thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  199

real, if abstract. They shape the trajectories of life-living and of the morethan that animates it. Our Home Beyond Nowhere Like a choreographer, Deligny’s project in the Cevennes involves a crafting of conditions for the creation of an ontogenetic process of bodying that does not begin with existing form but seeks to create speciations—new forms/forces of live-living. This choreographic process occurs at a locus that is always itself being redefined—not the place of the institution but also not simply the place of the mountains, the place of the locals, the place of the autistics. The locality is itself reorienting—note that Deligny focuses on encampments rather than on a more conventional notion of home or place. The locus of the encounter is both here and more-than here, turning the very concept of place onto itself in an intensive reorienting of the associated milieu of relation. The goal? To make encounter into event, to create the conditions for the emergence of speciations that are made of variations on the milieu. To architect an environment that is potentializing not only for the autistic but for the community as it reinvents itself, to create, as Blanchot might say, a community to come. Pathology is never far away. Speciations extrude species. Surely there was plenty of stratification, hierarchy, habit? No doubt. But what makes Deligny’s choreographic proposition stand out is that he was interested not in fashioning a project that would define itself (and the autistic) once and for all but, like Félix Guattari and Jean Oury with La Borde, sought to craft conditions that would allow for an attuning of emergent relations in order not so much to heal the autistic than to activate the community toward a rethinking of the “we.” Deligny was interested in how a choreographic proposition might create drifts that continuously cut through, despite and with the powers-that-be, unraveling pathologies in the making. In the orienting toward a concept of life-living where the human is notyet and more-than, Deligny worked to invent techniques for the proliferation of drifts that not only gave the autistics a voice but also gave him a story to tell, a trace to follow. “This is our home beyond nowhere,” writes Jim Sinclair. Beyond nowhere, the more-than of life-living dwells in a shaping that continuously drifts. Beyond nowhere is a line that moves, not running from the world or running the world, but running with it, now-here,17 “causing runoffs. . . . There is no social system that does not leak from all 200 chaPtEr Eight

directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 204). Our home beyond nowhere is “the language we speak.” Now-here is the milieu, the never known in advance. Here, speciations abound, forever getting overcoded by species, by the imposition of the no-time of pathologization, by the segmentarity of rigid lines that mark off a territory, creating an inside and an outside. This will always happen. And yet speciations will also infinitely reemerge. They are unstoppable. The technical question is how to draw out the durational intensity of the drift, how to forestall the lingering in experience that autistics describe so beautifully. The language of the drift, of shapes, is pathologized because the lingering seems hedonistic, because there are things to do, places to be. What happens when the tables are turned? What happens when we begin to realize that these places to be are themselves composed of infinite lines of drift, creating runoffs, orienting anew, again? Lines of drift are everywhere active. You can’t start from the macro and build down but nor can you assume that all change happens in the micro. The movement is across. You can never fully count on the edifice you’ve built to protect you from the orientings-in-place of pure experience. The drift is ultimately unavoidable. Between the words. The shape of enthusiasm is but one possible shape the drift can take. There are an infinity of ways of articulating the force of an intensive enjoyment that speciates across the organic and the inorganic, an infinity of ways to conceive of the confluence of life and experience. There is an infinite ecology of practices. The shape of enthusiasm is but one way to give a direct vision of the feltness of the exuberance of life-living, its unrestrained, infinitely multiplying orienting that is not a directionality (not an acting-on) but an in-act alive in the driftings of life-living’s coming-to-expression. The shape of enthusiasm lurks in and beyond language, across the lines of drifts, at all scales of life-living. Deligny suggests that this shaping creates a commoning, a common emphatically beyond community and commonality, beyond communication as the making-symbolic of life-aslanguage, beyond the social as the organization of the “I.” “The social is created economically, in the norm, and has nothing in common with the common, with the welcome of one and each. The social separates the wheat from the chaff, it sorts, and it merits itself. And it creates its remains, the ‘scum’ in the etymological sense of the word; these remains are for Deligny thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  201

27. Line of Drift 8

discoveries, the apparition of the other, what counts in a life” (Querrien 2006, 168). A commons in the crossing, in the composing. Commons are active in the tracings, and tracings are ubiquitous: “individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesics, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 202). Tracings cut as much as they run off. They create no certainty, but they do delimit. Each line has its own modality, and with the drift no doubt come all kinds of rigid segmentarities, language being only one of them. “Supple segmentarity . . . is only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to the rigid line” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 205). Limits are always already there, even within the lines of drift. They are the affordances that enable the tracings—thickenings of the brush, mountainings of the slope—affordances emergent on the paper as exuberances in their own right. Limits are also thresholds or even bar-

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riers—the end of a road, the wall that cannot be scaled. These create the stillings, the diversions, the segmentarity. The notion of the limit plays two ways within tracings, activating both the constraint that allows for the tracing in the first place—for there to have been a line, there had to have been a certain quality of movement, a certain opening within the territory—and the barrier through which the line must fold or break. There is never indifference at the limit. Everything matters. “The space of the maps on which the movements of everyday life are inscribed configures a common space where the trajectories are not indifferent to the presence of others, where a limit appears in the comings and goings of the children who up until now the adults would not follow, a limit centred on the space of a life in common” (Querrien 2006, 169). Think the limit as an activation contour onto which a certain tenor of movement moves. The limit not as that which delimits the “common” but that through which a commoning becomes expressive. The limit as enabling constraint of a commonality in the making, a language unsaid but ripe for the moving. The common as becoming-body, as more-than, is not the result of a negotiation. The common is never there in advance of the field it proposes, it is a coming-to- expression of the associated milieu of life-living. Here, in the milieu of life-living, new forms of life emerge that are not beings so much as dynamic shapings of experience in the making: bursts and broken circles, hard lines and soft contours, agitated crossings and ludic darkenings of the field of experience in the moving. “These maps, to tell the truth, do not say much, except that we in no way know what the human is, nor the common” (Deligny 1980, 19).

thE shaPE of EnthusiasM  203

c oDa

Another Regard

The gorillas regarded me. To them, I had never been away, because I had really been there once. Time is different to the gorillas. It is about being together, not about being apart. I am content to feel that kind of time, and I close my eyes and smell deeply the hot lemon smell of gorillas and the thick sweet smell of the hay.

*  Dawn PrincE First Movement ~ Are You a Gorilla? In a piece entitled “The Silence Between,” Dawn Prince writes of an encounter with a bonobo chimpanzee, Kanzi, that sets the stage for a rethinking of the deep “regard” she shares with apes of all kinds. Having flown to Decatur, Georgia, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Prince finds herself alone with Kanzi. She writes: “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew, a language of body, mind, and spirit. Kanzi and I played chase up and down the fence line, both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths.” Then something uncanny occurred: He stopped suddenly and grabbed his word board off the ground. He pointed to a symbol and then pointed to me and made a hand gesture with his eyebrows raised. It was clear that he was asking me a question. He repeated this series of words and movements over and over, until I said, out loud, “I’m sorry, I can’t understand, Kanzi. Let me get Sue and maybe she can help me.” At first, she was at a loss. Then after asking

him to point to the word again, she realized he was pointing to the word “gorilla” on his board and making the American Sign Language sign for question after pointing to me. It was clear he was asking me if I was a gorilla. What was amazing, though, is that he didn’t know American Sign Language: he had seen a video of the gorilla Koko using it and must have not only remembered the signed words, but, not having known other gorillas, assumed that all gorillas understood sign language. If I was a gorilla, he thought, this must be a way of communicating that I would understand. (Prince 2010) Before I turn to the story in detail, I want to begin with the epigraph above where Dawn Prince writes “The gorillas regarded me.” This regard of which she speaks is how I want to frame the engagement with Prince’s story, beginning right away with the speculation that the regard about which Prince speaks sets the stage for the encounter with the bonobo Kanzi, shifting it from one of detached observation to one of concern. For Whitehead’s notion of concern, as outlined throughout this book, is very much about the emphasis on a different notion of regard, regard not of the subject for the object, or of one individual for another, but of the occasion for its own unfolding. The notion of concern is one way of reworking the dichotomy of subject and object, reinserting them in the event: “The occasion as subject has a ‘concern’ for the object. And the ‘concern’ at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it” (Whitehead 1967, 176). The subject does not begin the process: it is the process that activates the subject. “The subject- object relation can be conceived as Recipient and Provoker, where the fact provoked is an affective tone about the status of the provoker in the provoked experience,” Whitehead writes, adding that “the word ‘recipient’ suggests a passivity which is erroneous” (1967, 176). Concern is not an intersubjective term but rather the basis for understanding that experience emerges through “the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given” (Whitehead 1967, 176). This is relevant to the story Prince recounts for two reasons. First, as I mention above, the framing of the event is built on a notion of regard that foregrounds less an interpersonal stance than an affective tonality. Second, in the event of the regard there is a slippage in time that undermines a static positioning of subject and object. Whitehead’s notion of concern gives us Another Regard 205

the tools to understand this crafting of time in the relation. Prince writes: “To them, I had never been away, because I had really been there once.” In the event of relation, a concern is emergent that alters the conditions for a regard that “will always have been there once.” Recipient and provoker are not to be confused simply with “Dawn Prince” and “the gorillas” or “Prince” and “Kanzi.” Recipient and provoker are the myriad affective tonalities of an encounter that stages time and event such that “to have really been there once” is to have set into motion the conditions for an activation of regard— of concern—that is capable of outliving the immediate occasion. The challenge here is to understand that regard is not something that flows unidirectionally between the human and the animal. What is happening in the epigraph is the setting into place of a dynamic relation that foregrounds the movement of time, emphasizing how time is itself a dynamic form that recasts how relation is conceived. When Prince writes that “To them, I had never been away, because I had really been there once,” it is of course her interpretation of the event, but nonetheless it sets into motion an interesting provocation to the relational field that continues to be foregrounded in the story Prince then tells about her encounter with Kanzi. I want to suggest that this notion of regard allows us to reposition the ultimate question—“Are you a gorilla?”—away from the interpersonal toward an emphasis on the relational movement that frames the second encounter—“Kanzi and I played chase up and down the fence line, both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths”—where movement itself becomes the way the event has concern for its unfolding. Let’s replay the event: Dawn Prince and Kanzi run along a fence, goading one another, moving one another forward in an eight-footed play. First, Prince moves with what she knows: “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew, a language of body, mind, and spirit.” She is not mimicking. Her movement comes from an affective attunement based on a longstanding connection to nonhuman languages: “When I was young I talked to animals in that language of silence. I knew what trees and streams were saying because they told me. I knew what sow bugs and snakes were saying because they molded me. . . . Sometimes my grandfather would ask me in the garden, ‘What are the worms saying today.’ ‘Fine fine slither dirt push good rotting green,’ I would answer, smiling” (Prince 2010). This, the language of the nonhuman, is a language that already tunes, for Prince, to her movement. She listens with movement, listens to how it expresses in the now of the encounter. She knows the welling event has regard for this move206 coda

ment, this expression in the moving of the more-than of human experience. Kanzi, in turn, plays with the language of movement she proposes, “both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths” (Prince 2010). Prince and Kanzi, cueing, aligning, creating a rhythm, in counterpoint. Gorilla-like. Counterpoint * Recall Forsythe’s definition of counterpoint: “a field of action in which the intermittent and irregular coincidence of attributes between organizational elements produces an ordered interplay.”1 This definition of counterpoint emphasizes the relationship between movement and time. Forsythe speaks of choreographing the future in the present-moving, asking his dancers to “dance where the other dancer is going” to “meet him there.”2 Dancing in an alignment with futures in the making suggests a structured improvisation that is attuned to the incipient more-than of movement—movement’s technicity. To move into the technicity of movement is not to mimic or predict: there is no standing back from the eventin-the-moving. It is to move-with the movement’s excess of position. It is to craft movement-moving in the more-than of movement’s taking-form. This happens in counterpoint as dancers “shift each other’s time.” Forsythe explains: “syncing is not what’s important, in the sense of matching an already known timing.” Move in the timeframes of the becoming-movement, preaccelerate into the relational field activated by movement-moving, move with the affective tonality, with future time presenting: “This can operate in different timeframes: go slower, be in another’s past right before they catch up to you, then move past them to their future—look for the moment—aim at it rather than going directly to it.”3 Counterpoint is not the activity of an individual body—it is the activity of a relational field through which movement moves. Movement-moving is intensively distributed— always beyond its simple location, as Whitehead would say.4 In counterpoint, the movement exceeds the frame—the frame of time, the frame of the skin- envelope—activating an inframobility that tunes to a relational movement. As collective movement becomes attuned to this relational field, time folds, individual movements no longer abstractable from the whole. One movement-moving, in difference. Counterpoint. The one is of course, always more than one. It is an infinity of movementspeciations. Speciations make dancing-body, not the other way around. We no longer have one, two, three bodies dancing. We have an affective attunement. This affective attunement cannot be measured in linear time. It hapAnother Regard 207

pens in a time continuously folding through the intervals created by the moving field. This time of movement-moving is felt by the dancers as a moment of uncanny synchronicity. Synchronous because the movements create a collective experience of time-shaping. Strange because the collective movement is slightly off, attuned to but in the difference of movement’s capacity to invent, creating “an ordered interplay,” yes, but also something more: a sense of having been transported into the more-than by the event. A field in counterpoint has been created. Any repetition of the exercise of counterpoint will necessarily create a different field. Each counterpointevent makes its own time. Counterpoint’s intermittent and irregular coincidence of attributes agitate the field of action at the level of speciations. In the case of Prince and Kanzi, it is not two fully constituted body- envelopes that dance but a multiplicity of body-tendings moving in their difference. Speciations in the moving: finger-ground-spine, extension-rotation-bend, metal-fur-breath. What agitates is a body-likeness, a field of relations that does not mimic a body, but creates a bodying in a shifting co- composition of experiential spacetimes. Von Uexküll speaks of spiders that are fly-like, of cups that are coffee-like. These are speciations—compositional tendencies active in the relational field their coming-into- eventness calls forth: “To be fly-like means that the spider has taken up certain elements of the fly in its constitution. . . . Better expressed, the fly-likeness of the spider means that it has taken up certain motifs of the fly melody in its bodily composition. Everywhere it is the counterpoint which expresses itself as a motif in such configurations” (Von Uexküll 2010, 190–91). The dancer’s movement was perhaps spiral-like, wall-like, sound-like, connecting not directly to another body, but to a sounding, a spiraling, a levitating gravitational field. Heavyto-the-ground meets laughter-in-movement: gorilla-like. Speciations are rhythmic activations of a body-morphing that never precede the event of their coming-into-relation. They give rhythm, give tone, to the how of the event’s in-forming, cutting across species fully-formed, connective as they are in the milieu of their relational activation. In the event of Prince and Kanzi, to take these two first as the human and the bonobo would be to engage in the practice of placing the subject outside the event, ignoring the force of speciation. It would be to take the notion of species as given and assume that all encounters are framed by species already fullyformed. This is a brand of identity politics: before we can know how to approach the question “are you a gorilla?” we must know who you really are—a 208 coda

captive gorilla, an autistic woman, a philosopher, an animal activist, a zookeeper, an anthropologist? While all of these criteria make a difference to how the event unfolds—there is no suggestion here that there aren’t asymmetrical power relations5—to posit identity politics as the starting point of the process is to background in advance the activity of the milieu’s rhythmic in-forming and, even more importantly, to undermine the potential of coming, if not to a different answer, at least to a different way of framing the question. For to begin with identity politics is always to assume to know in advance how to frame an answer to a question of belonging, of territory, of identity. To frame the event in advance of its unfolding with markers of identity (“obviously” she is not a gorilla, “clearly” Kanzi is misrecognizing) is to sidestep the act of the event’s unfolding as event: for who can know yet what constitutes gorilla in this context of movement counterpoint? All movement is, to some degree, counterpoint. Movement rhythms: it connects, prolongs, undermines, subverts, dances. It never stops. Movement is always of multiple valences. There is total movement—the durational field of movement-moving that envelops all worldings—and actual movement—this or that singular occasion, this or that actual displacement. Counterpoint cuts into total movement to create an actualizable field—“an ordered interplay.” In doing so, counterpoint touches on both registers of movement, virtual and actual, tapping into the field of total movement to create an opening for this singular movement-quality in the realm of the actual. The milieu of movement now resonates with the more-than. This more-than is the counterpoint- event’s motif. This motif is a likeness. It gives the milieu a singular tonality. This tone in turn tunes the milieu to certain tendencies. A milieu with a springing motif tunes to air-likeness, for instance. Or, as in Von Uexküll’s example, fly-likeness tunes not to fly-asspecies but to a qualitative likeness of a fly-movement intensively in rhythm with the spider’s web. This likeness is first and foremost affective—it is an attunement not simply to the fly in its quantitative dimensions, or to its behaviors, but to the way the fly’s singular movement-tendencies affect the speciation spider-like. “The web—but never the fly—can be called the goal of forming the web. But the fly does indeed serve as the counterpoint . . . for the formation of the web” (Von Uexküll 2010, 193).6 A speciation is not, as such, organic. It is not made up of separately definable human and animal components in a metonymic relation to an organic whole. This very idea of the organic whole is a misnomer: both “body” and “species” are general categories that can only be conceived as Another Regard 209

such by divesting them of the relational field that co- constitutes them.7 To posit such a notion of the whole is to have separated out the event of bodying from its activity. Speciations are how to think this activity, the in-act of body-world constellations in all their organic and inorganic intermixings. These in-acts are not strictly physical—they are a conglomeration of physicalities with affective tonalities that emerge from the very necessity of the milieu: it is the milieu that fashions them. Speciations body in the event of their direct co-relation to the event, they are not body-species pre-formed and are never finally formed—they are bodyings. An event has concern for the bodying. And there is no body that is not infinitely more than one. An autonomy of expression is at work in the relational field speciations call forth. We are not talking of relations that exist outside of the event of their emergence. The relational field of movement-moving activates the distributed field in which the dancers dance, and in the dancing, they move with it, aligning to it, moving it. The field expresses, the field dances to attention, not the dancers as individuals. And what it expresses is a relational movement that exceeds the terms of the dancers’ individual bodyness, bringing into complex constellations a rhythm that in-forms the speciations their movement-moving creates. The culmination of the movement-moving is a territorializing. Something has come to form, and with the coming-to-form, a certain casting into itself of movement has emerged. “An ordered interplay.” From here, techniques can be abstracted and positions extracted. Territories are shortlived, however: movement keeps moving, occasions keep perishing. So what is left? Motifs, expressive tendencies. These motifs are the mode of appearance of a vacillating territorialization—a mobile architecture—that is an abstraction of a subjective form. With them comes the tonality of the event’s form-taking. Style * “Expressive qualities entertain variable or constant relations with one another (that is what matters of expression do); they no longer constitute placards that mark a territory, but motifs and counterpoints that express the relation of the territory to interior impulses or exterior circumstances, whether or not they are given. No longer signatures, but a style” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 318). Style can never be pinned down to form. It is a mode of existence always intimately tied to the event of its expression, as defined in chapter 6. And yet, as with all modes of existence, there

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is a certain consistency to style across occasions. A style can be recognized, in the feeling—we know-feel the languid grace of a cat, the frenzied disappearance of a cockroach, even before we quite see them. Style happens in this “not quite,” in the movement of expression before it takes its form as this or that. Style is always in the moving. Style connects with the event’s affective tonality. It is movement quality carried forth into an event through the force of its reactivation from relational field to relational field. It is chiefly nonsensuous, as Whitehead would say, activating for the event a certain quality of past occasions. This quality is always a renewal of itself for the present occasion. Style is therefore never quite the same for two occasions. A moving-body’s expressivity will carry the force of an attunement that can be aligned to. This aligning will express a certain style that can be connected, transversally, to other events of its kind. A movement, Forsythe-like. The how of the aligning as style is not a question of connecting to a certain superficial quality but of moving with the movement’s movement so as to captivate the movement’s very potential for expression. Moving gorilla-like. Second Movement ~ At Play The dynamic form gorilla-like is bred in play. Prince and Kanzi run, on all fours, along a fence, laughing, grunting. There is no outside to their game: it is not meant for anyone else. Play is unself- conscious. Improvisation, spontaneity, mixed in with the constraints of incipient territorializations—the fence, the time of day, the newness of the encounter with gestures no doubt at first quizzical, careful, and then perhaps engaged, untroubled even, at times. Instinct, some people would say. Art, others would respond. Counterpoint is creative. It proposes an assemblage and this assemblage is always, to a degree, a territorializing platform. But what counterpoint also does is keep that territory moving, active, transductive. For counterpoint activates the associated milieus of the territory, the milieus that cross through it and are always, to some extent, in excess of it. This is the paradox of counterpoint: it must remain territorial to the degree that it can be accessed and returned to. But what is returned to is always, to a certain degree, difference. The field of counterpoint is dynamic, its movements local insofar as they co- constitute the singular expression of emergence their in- concertness calls forth, and global to the degree that they can be recap-

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tured for future events in the making. Counterpoint produces not positions as such, but the more-than of position on its way to activating times as yet unseen, unfelt. Positions outdoing themselves, in concert. Territory’s play undoes the dichotomy between speciations and species, locating them not as opposites but on a continuum. For speciations are complex aggregates—they affect on a multitude of strata, including that of the species, elasticizing the territory even as they move in concert with it. It’s not that there is no longer a bonobo and a human, it’s that the event never begins there. It begins in movement, in the mobility of relation where there is always more than this particular species- combination. For as soon as the territory becomes an active milieu, it becomes a field of movement constellations. Species is a general category always abstracted from the movement of the event. What is concretely in act is never the general category. This is why starting with a general category cannot not yield nuanced results. Take, for instance, the question of gender. While (en)gendering—as speciation—has many roles to play in an event such as that between Kanzi and Prince, “gender” posited as a pre-formed category cannot make sense of their encounter without imposing a framing device onto the event from the outside. This has the effect of backgrounding the in-act of the event, losing sight of the intricate complexities of the event’s acting out. For instance, a general statement about the general category “woman” in relation to Prince would immediately connect her body to a certain set of qualities or criteria that would mediate the event of her encounter with Kanzi, who, as a “male,” would then be expected to respond in certain, often stereotyped, ways. To posit the genders male/female as the framing device would also ignore the fact that gender identification tends to be speculative at best for many autistics, for whom having a fixed body, let alone a fixed gender, is one of the most abstract of all abstractions.8 What is concretely in act, I want to suggest, is never a “gender” but an engendering, a coming-into-itself of a singular set of relations, of which male-likeness and female-likeness may be defining elements, but always only in their in-actness, in tandem with co- constitutive elements active in the associated milieu. This engendering opens the field to new constellations, some of which may be allied to gender, others of which may constitute forms of speciation not yet defined and categorized. Back to the fence and to the art of play: “We consider that an animal, in a complex and accidental milieu, would have few chances of survival if he could only use stereotyped behaviour, even if more or less corrected by 212 coda

orienting stimuli. Much more important are the improvised responses directed to the stimuli . . . that act as a sort of irritant, not as a signal” (Ruyer 1958, 149; my translation). Animals play, and play is an art, as Brian Massumi (2011c) underlines, precisely because instinct, conceived as artless, is “downright maladaptive”—its stereotyping forbids a response tailored to the singularity of the situation. Following Ruyer, Massumi suggests that, at play, a processual trigger spurs a creative advance, an “immanent modification. . . . The stimulus irritates, it provokes, it is a processual inducer. What it most directly induces is an integral modification of the tendencial self- consistency of the animal experience, correlated to the externality of the accident but obeying its own logic of qualitative variation.” Instinct, as Bergson writes, is played more than it is represented (Bergson 1988, 180).9 It is too simplistic, then, to suggest that what moves Kanzi, or what moves Prince, is simply behavior predating the event, such as instinct tied to gender or species categories. They are not imitating or responding to something that predefines them—they are creating play. Gorilla-like is an art. No gorilla has actually entered the scene. What has entered is a movementconstellation that has taken both Prince and Kanzi by surprise. Gorilla-like is the more-than of their coming-together, the style, the mode of existence, the motif of the event’s counterpoint. And although it is spoken in the language of the third—the sign language “of ” the gorilla—it erupts in the language of counterpoint, the language of movement’s possession by itself. The movement moves the gorilla-like speciation of which Kanzi and Prince (in a million variations) are part. Paw-earth, foot-air, laughter- dirt, gruntmetal, all of these speciations are at work in dancing the emergent counterpoint. A speciation: a bloc of sensation, as Deleuze and Guattari might say. A desiring machine. “Deleuze and Guattari have a favorite word to designate the affective force that pulls deformationally forward toward creativity: desire” (Massumi 2011c, 73). Desire as a transformational pull that activates a relational field. There is no purpose to play, except to create more play, to create more desire for play. “Are you a gorilla?” is this event of play’s postscript, not its mandate. If we take it as the starting point, the question of subjectivity will become the framing device for the event. I am, you are, a question of species. Play will be undone of precisely what makes it play: it will become a rehearsal for something that exceeds it in advance. This is not what happens here. Play between Kanzi and Prince is the fielding of relational movement, and it is out of this improvisatory field that the question “are you a gorilla?” Another Regard 213

emerges, not the other way around. It is not a general category “gorilla” that is at stake here, but the gorilla of play’s motif, and the way the motif makes ingression into the newly formed constellation: gorilla-like. “Play is the abstractive suspension of a vital context” (2011c, 87). It bursts open the frame of expectation. It intuits, activating a consciousness not of, but with—a regard in the playing that defies the extraction of movement from the event at play. This regard creates incipient territories never before moved in the playing. Not “are you a gorilla?” but “how do you move me?” or better, “how does our movement move us?” Play as the bringing into focus of an affective force of relation that reinvents, in its small way, the relational how of life-living. A constellation-machine for movementinvention and for time-looping. Counterpoint. Third Movement ~ On Novelty “Life means novelty,” writes Whitehead (1978, 104). Life is appetition, appetite for the more-than. Life always in tune with a life—the force of life-living across the organic and inorganic realms where speciations converge to create territories of difference. To restrict life to the physical plane, as Whitehead notes, is to starkly underestimate the play of its capacity for invention. Whitehead has a strange name for the force of appetition that activates the more-than of life-living: he calls it reason. “Reason,” for Whitehead, is another word for the force of thought that is immanent to the event. This force of thought is never thought as that which lands onto the event from outside its concrescence. It is the reason of nature, in nature, a concern with the very edges of the thinkable in its nonalignment to consciousness. For Whitehead, nature thinks. When Whitehead says that nature “is impenetrable by thought,” what he means is that thought does not enter into nature from the outside to orchestrate it from without (1929, 13). Nature is not a passive element to be mediated. Nor is thought a mediating activity. Nature creates thought— a thinking in the event. This thinking makes ingress into the event in large part through the constellations speciations take. Nature and speciations are co- combinatory—they cannot be taken separately. The question is never, as Whitehead underscores, “what is in the mind and what is in nature” (1929, 30). The question is “how is gorilla-like”: how does nature’s play move lifeliving, creating thought?

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Nature’s play is never separate from the event of its coming into being in the same way that the occasion is never preceded by an already- composed notion of space or time. Nature is its speciations, active, always, in the time of the event’s making. Nature is thus never in-itself, in the same way that a species, a body, an individual, are never solely in-themselves. Nature is a relational field through which certain motifs become active, motifs that in turn activate new fields of relation in the time of the event. It is, in all of its eventness, a multitude of modes of existence, a field of creativity. Key to what Whitehead calls “the creative advance” is what he terms selfenjoyment, the concern the event has for its coming to subjective form: “The notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment” where each occasion of experience is “an individual act of immediate self-enjoyment” (1938, 150–51). Self-enjoyment is not a moral category. It is not about the enjoyment of this or that. Not the enjoyment of the subject for life, but the enjoyment of life in the event of life-living. Life-living, it bears reminding, as the continuous outdoing of any notion of life in-itself or nature in-itself. Self-enjoyment is the occasion’s concern for its own process, a process that always includes a certain more-than. This more-than, as mentioned above, is brought forth by the event’s capacity to exceed its physical pole. The physical pole is a concept in Whitehead that denotes the most bare aspect of the occasion, a concept that is inseparable from the adjacent notion of the mental pole (or “reason”), which he defines as the how of the creative advance. Mentality—“a factor of intensity in experience”—moves the event beyond its physical pole (Whitehead 1978, 101). “When the species refuses adventure, there is relapse into the well-attested habit of mere life. . . . Varied freshness has been lost, and the species lives upon the blind appetitions of old usages” (Whitehead 1929, 19). If the physical pole were all that were at stake, and if life were merely about a passive overcoming in the interests of self-preservation, there would be no creativity, and certainly no reinvention of life. Again, it is necessary to move beyond the thought of this or that human or animal life: life here touches on all that has the capacity for transition. It is life-living, a life: speciation in exquisite more than human configurations. Novelty abounds, a novelty spurred by the complex of self- enjoyment, appetition, mentality. Think mentality as the event’s thinking-feeling, as Massumi might say, a feltness in the thinking resonant at the edges of ex-

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perience. Each occasion dances with this not-yet, its becoming always in counterpoint with the more-than of its will-have-been. Time folding: recall Forsythe’s “dance into future movement!” (2008; see also Massumi 2011b). Mentality is perhaps the wrong word for this intensive process, this “organ of novelty,” or “urge beyond,” for despite this not being the case, mentality, like its earlier counterpart, reason, still sounds as though it is in the mind or of consciousness (Whitehead 1929, 33). We might therefore simply call it “thinking-feeling,” emphasizing how it is an activity in the event that co- composes with the occasion’s physicality to create, in the act, a contributory more-than that emphasizes how novelty is a process of thought in the doing. Mentality “seeks to vivify the massive physical fact, which is repetitive, with the novelties which beckon” (Whitehead 1929, 33). The force of appetition, as mentioned above, could be another good term for mentality in that it emphasizes the hunger of a process which opens the occasion to novel motifs, activating in the occasion a “factor of anarchy” (Whitehead 1929, 34).10 This is not to say that creative advance is active all the time under all circumstances. It is to emphasize the fact that the force of appetition and thinking-feeling are always present in germ and contributory in the dynamic form of events concrescing. Whitehead writes: “The quality of an act of experience is largely determined by the factor of the thinking it contains” (1929, 80). As soon as a process falls into general categories, its capacity for creative advance is stunted, for general categories don’t think. Creativity is always in the dynamic details of a process. These details are played out at the level of the emergent occasion in the constellation of the event. They are its speciations, its technicities, its overarticulations, its preaccelerations. They are the event’s more-than. This is where the thinking-feeling happens, in the in-act of the event’s outdoing of form, in the in-act of the event’s outdoing of simple location. Movement-moving. Fourth Movement ~ An Incompletion Whitehead writes: “The community of actual things is an organism, but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production” (1978, 215). Kanzi and Prince meet. Play ensues. Their movement moves them, connecting them at the level of speciations that exceed them as individuals. In the speciation, a counterpoint emerges. This emergent counterpoint is a structured improvisation: it moves into the habitual movements brought 216 coda

into play at the same time as it connects to a generative field of movementmoving. The generative force of movement in counterpoint activated in the moving creates a motif. This prolongs the dance, giving it a style all its own. This style exceeds Prince or Kanzi as individuals, exceeds their habitual ways of moving—a relational movement has emerged. This relational movement is a field experience. Everything is concretely at play—the quality of air, the sound of breath on metal, on fur, on skin, the feel of paws on earth, on cement, the heaviness of limbs at play, the grumblings of stomachs, the pull of muscles, the rustlings of fallen leaves. Everything singularly contributes. And in this field teeming with activity, a question is drawn: “Are you a gorilla?” This is not a question intended to be answered: it is a motif. It is a platform to spring from through which new movement- constellations can take flight. Gorilla-like is a new concept. New concepts, when they really do their work, activate speciations, which, in turn, affect how societies evolve. A society: “A type of order. . . . A nexus. . . . Endurance. . . . An animal body is a society involving a vast number of occasions, spatially and temporally coordinated. . . . Each living body is a society” (Whitehead 1967, 203–5). As chapter 2 emphasizes, what we usually call a body, a body in the narrow sense, is not a knot of speciations (a nexus), a society. This is the force of concepts, that they insist, they irritate, they agitate in the cross-fertilization of occasions and societies. These agitations play out on the level of the occasion, but as the occasion perishes onto the nexus, they also affect the contributive realm—for they continue to make ingress. Concepts resonate transversally, creating a vibratory field that affects how future events are composed. They feed the futurepresenting with their appetite for more. They are counterpoint machines: they create a field of action that provokes a coincidence of attributes to produce the excess of an ordered interplay. Gorilla-like. The complex relational field of movement-moving courses across the societies “Dawn Prince” and “Kanzi.” These societies are altered by the process, as are all of the contributory forces that have made their way into the event. These contributory forces touch on the many stories the event calls forth, each one of them now tainted by the motif, gorilla-like. Take the story of Kanzi, born October 28, 1980, a bonobo chimpanzee raised in captivity, for whom contact has been for the most part restricted to the human. Infuse this story into the event and consider how gorilla-like reframes it, foregrounding, perhaps, the fact that Kanzi’s “advanced linguistic aptitude” has made language the vehicle for communication since he was a baby. For Another Regard 217

not only does he use lexigrams but he can also understand aspects of spoken language and associate it with the lexigrams. No surprise, then, that gorilla-like emerges in the speaking as much as in the moving. Take the story of Dawn Prince, born January 31, 1964, an autistic fighting for a place in a world tuned to neurotypical modes of encounter that continuously, painfully, set her apart. Infuse this story into the event and consider how gorilla-like speaks to the force of “another regard,” something Prince has honed in her years of working with gorillas, gorillas who she feels have offered her a place in the world. These are some of the societies, in brief, that meet on that fateful afternoon to play along the fence. The contributory force of a society (a nexus of occasions) on an individual occasion is not quantitatively measurable. Ingression is not about quantitative content per se: it is about the tuning of an occasion toward certain kinds of activations of the past in the present for future-presenting. Style. Style carries across occasions, giving them a sense of consistency. The relational field as it emerges through Kanzi and Prince’s play is imbued with style, marked and fashioned by modes of thought—mentalities—already in counterpoint with their wider comings-to-be. With this in mind, in the spirit of incompletion, I want to turn briefly to one key element of style that I believe makes the question “are you a gorilla?” far less strange than we may at first have assumed it to be. I want to turn once again to autistic perception: a style of perception wherein an encounter with the world does not begin by sorting the field into objects or subjects. But first, let me repeat: autistic perception is a tendency in perception on a continuum with all perception, not a definition of autism. It is a style that has been remarked upon by the many autistics whose voices we’ve heard throughout, a perceptual style that actively thinks-feels the edgings and contourings of fields of relation coagulating into instances of shaped experience. As the writings of these autistics attest to, the direct experience of the in-actness of worlding results in an ecological sensibility to life-living. Lest it has not been clear enough when the concept has come up throughout this book, let me repeat: while all autistics I have encountered prize this mode of perception, none of them would ever create a simplified relay between autistic perception and the everyday experience of an autistic. For autism is a complex world at once full of perceptual richness and replete with painful misalignments to everyday neurotypical existence, many of them of the motor variety that make independent living if not impossible, then very difficult.11 Not only that: there is no “single” autism. Autism is 218 coda

a spectrum,with as many infinities of perceptual difference as there are within the misidentified “neurotypical” group. What makes autistic perception so valuable for the rethinking of experience is the process of shaping, or the complexity of what Anne Corwin calls “chunking.” Anne Corwin writes: “I often tend to sit on floors and other surfaces even if furniture is available, because it’s a lot easier to identify ‘flat surface a person can sit on’ than it is to sort the environment into chunks like ‘couch,’ ‘chair,’ ‘floor,’ and ‘coffee table.’”12 All perception involves chunking, but what autistics have access to that is usually backgrounded for neurotypicals is the direct experience of the relational field’s morphing into objects and subjects. Experientially speaking, there is never—for anyone— the direct apprehension of an object or a subject. What we perceive is always first a relational field. It is a key contribution of Whitehead to have created a whole philosophical vocabulary of process to make this clear. Still, given the quickness of the morphing from the relational field into the objects and subjects of our perceptions, many of us neurotypicals feel as though the world is “pre- chunked” into species, into bodies and individuals. This is the shortcoming, as autistics might say, of neurotypical perception (that we are simply too quick to chunk), and it is certainly one of the things that makes many autistics feel lost in a world overtaken by normopaths. The foregrounding of the world in its morphability as experienced in autistic perception opens experience to a level of relation with the world which is rare. This level of relation is an ecological attunement to the multiplicity that is life-living, for it attends, always, to the dynamic details of a process: autistic perception never begins with the general attribute, never assumes integration over complexity. It prehends, always, from the middle, with an active regard for the emergent field’s environmentality. In the register of autistic perception, the world is experienced as an ecology of practices. This results in a mode of existence that moves not from self to self, or self to other, but from dynamic constellation to dynamic constellation. As Mukhopadhyay writes: “Maybe I do not have to try very hard to be the wind or a rain cloud. There is a big sense of extreme connection I feel with a stone or perhaps with a pen on a tabletop or a tree. . . . There is no separation” (Mukhopadhyay and Savarese 2010). Cloud-like. Rock-like. If we ignore the nonhuman-centered valence of Prince’s or Mukhopadhyay’s approach and persist in placing the human at the forefront as the motivating force of all events, their words will seem anthropomorphic. We will read Prince’s encounter with Kanzi simply as a human once more telling Another Regard 219

the story of an animal, in human terms; we will interpret Mukhopadhyay as giving a human face to the pen, to the tabletop, to the tree. Autistic perception warns us against this approach, however, persistently reminding us not to begin with the pre- chunked. Begin in the middle! it says. Don’t assume to know in advance how the chunking will resolve! It seems to me that we should heed these words and learn from them, with them. That we might listen more intently to how the world composes itself in a mode of perception that does not privilege the human in any of its precomposed guises or any other general categories. But let us not stop there. The accusation of anthropomorphism whether misplaced as in the case of Kanzi and Prince, or fitting in other instances, need not be a reason for us to return to our old habits of generalizing and categorizing. For is it not true that the accusation of anthropomorphism has become one more way of not attending to the complex counterpoint of the creative advance? As Jane Bennett writes, a “touch of anthropomorphism . . . can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. . . . Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing . . . because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment’” (2010, 99, 120). There is counterpoint in infinite abundance and we are not hearing it, let alone dancing it. Ecologies of perception are backgrounded by an overarching emphasis on general categories. New modes of attention are needed, and persistent efforts to experience the novelty of life-living are essential to enjoying the complexity of worldings that populates us. The more pressing question is not whether or not an engagement with the more-than human is anthropomorphic but what exactly it is that has led us to the certainty we seem to have that the world can be parsed out into subjects and objects, and how intertwined this assertion has become with a notion of interactivity that sets itself up not as a radical empiricism but as a mediating interplay between already-existent terms. James’s mantra bears repeating: “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (1996, 42). There is no object “in-itself ” just as there is no subject only “for-itself.” To cite Whitehead again, “the occasion has a ‘concern’ for the object. And the concern at once places the object as 220 coda

a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and toward it” (1967, 176). Subjects and objects edge into experience, relationally. Not human-relationally but in an incipient relation that speciates. The in-itselfness of the object (or the animal) must be resisted as strongly as the in-itselfness of the human. Neither human nor object nor animal comes to experience fully-formed. It is the counterpoint of their speciations that is at stake in experience. This, it seems to me, is what can be taken wholesale from Kanzi and Prince’s dance: speciations connect, cutting transversally across all genera, meeting at the level of intensities, motifs, creating styles, in the moving. An ecology of practices. A mode of existence. An activist philosophy. Dawn Prince (2010) writes: “I hope that autistic people, and others that have been beyond understanding until recently, will be the natural interpreters of an important patois.” The patois of which Prince speaks is a language replete with the sensitivity of autistic perception, thick with a force of thought in the middling of its expressibility, textured by a more-than of future movements and unchunked experiences, ripe for the infralinguistic telling. The incomplete answer to “are you a gorilla?” is spoken in such a patois, a language that can only be heard in the moving, in the infra of positioning, in the choreographic thinking that is always in the beyond of subject and object. This is the challenge: To move in counterpoint with a language that trembles on the edges of understanding. To become as “autistically perceptive” as possible, even at the risk of losing our footing in a species-oriented world—and gaining our footing in a world of speciation. To participate in the concern for another regard.

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Notes

One. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self 1 As Marc Lafrance points out, Bick is critical in this instance of Melanie Klein’s suggestion that all infants are capable of introjection and projection. In the psychoanalytic literature, these are considered to be defense mechanisms. Introjection refers “to an unconscious process of incorporating the attitudes or attributes of an absent person—such as a father or a mother—into the self. Through this process of incorporation, the self is able to feel closer to he or she who is absent and, as a result, its anxiety is arrested. . . . Projection refers to an unconscious process of expelling the self ’s undesirable thoughts and feelings into someone else. Through the process of expulsion, the self is able to get rid of that which it cannot bear about itself and, as a result, its anxiety is allayed” (Lafrance 2009, 20n5). A more nuanced reading of psychoanalysis, and especially object relations, could have been done in this chapter to more clearly differentiate Bick’s position from that of Klein and to explore variants that are less dogmatic about the skin-as-envelope (see, for instance, Ettinger 1999). My point, however, is less to critique psychoanalysis than to propose a different perspective on the body and on affective processes. 2 Lafrance writes, “According to Bick, the infant’s sense of being held together by the skin does not occur automatically. This sense must be achieved, and it can only be achieved if the infant’s body is stimulated in a way that gives rise to an enduring experience of epidermal envelopment. If all goes well and the infant is provided with regular and reliable experiences of skin-to-skin contact with its caregiver, then it will over time be able to internalize—or, as Kleinians like Bick put it, introject—the experience of the skin as a container” (2009, 8). 3 Bick describes second skins as formations “through which dependence on the

4

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[containing] object is replaced by a pseudo-independence, by the inappropriate use of certain mental functions, or perhaps innate talents, for the purpose of creating a substitute for this skin container function” (1987, 115). Throughout, “feeling” is used in the Whiteheadian sense and is allied to affect (and affective tonality) more than to emotion. For Whitehead, feeling is never a secondary experience. The world is made of feeling. This will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter 2. Lafrance writes: “For Esther Bick, the experience of the skin as a binding and limiting membrane must be achieved, and that this achievement is vitally enabled by contact with the binding and limiting membrane of a caregiver. Once this experience has been achieved, the infant will gradually begin to make sense of itself as a being with insides and outsides and, as a result, will gradually begin to introject and project” (2009, 8). Lafrance further explains that this differentiation between inside and outside “must be learned through embodied engagements with a caregiving other,” providing the psychoanalytic example of the child’s relation with the nipple: “The concept of a space inside that holds the parts that make up his “self ” is developed through sensing the mouth, a hole in the boundary of the skin, being closed with the arrival of the nipple. This space inside is thus felt as one into which the object can be introjected” (Lafrance qtd. in Briggs 2002, 10). See James 1996. The concept of relation as used throughout this book is developed in more detail in Relationscapes (Manning 2009). In Relationscapes, I suggest that the interval is the metastable quality through which the relation is felt. For a more detailed exploration of the interval in relation to movement, see “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet” in Relationscapes (Manning 2009). For a development of the concept of reaching-toward in relation to a politics of touch, see Politics of Touch (Manning 2007). In Politics of Touch (Manning 2007) I argue that sensing is always imbricated in the activity of reaching-toward, an activity that is never restrained to a single body or self, but that takes place in a complex relational field of its own making. The virtual here is not opposed to the real. It is always an integral aspect of the actual, if inexpressible and inexperiencable as such. Simondon writes: “We would like to show that the principle of individuation is not an isolated reality turned in on itself, preexisting the individual as an already individualized germ of the individual. The principle of individuation, in the strict sense of the term, is the complete system in which the genesis of the individual takes effect. And that, in addition, this system prolongs itself in the living individual, in the form of an associated milieu of the individual, in which individuation continues to evolve; that life is thus a perpetual individuation, a continuing individuation across time that prolongs a singularity” (1995, 63). Psychoanalytic theory’s desire to limit behavior to distinct phases suggests, as

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Stern notes, that processes are not explored ontogenetically (at the level of their emergence) but ontologically (in their matrix of being or having become). Stern asks: “what about the process itself—the very experience of making the leaps and creating relations or consolidating sensorimotor schemas. Can the infant experience not only the sense of an organization already formed and grasped, but the coming-into-being of organization?” (1985, 45). Stern’s criticism of psychoanalytic theory is that it does not tend to explore the processual complexities of development/emergence as a fractal phase-space that contains interweaving strata. “The traditional notions of clinical theorists have taken the observer’s knowledge of infants—that is, relative undifferentiation compared with the differentiated view of older children—reified it, and given it back, or attributed it, to infants as their own dominant subjective sense of things” (1985, 46). Following the philosophical lineage of thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, an actual occasion or event is conceived throughout as that through which experience coalesces into actuality. I take the liberty to align event and occasion despite the fact that some readings of Whitehead see the occasion rather as a micro-event. In my reading of Whitehead, occasions are not classified according to scale. An occasion is always an event in its own right. This usage conforms to Whitehead’s own in Science and the Modern World (1925) and Modes of Thought (1938). See also Deleuze 1992; Massumi 2011b. I define preacceleration as the felt experience of the not-yet in the moving, particularly noticeable in the beginning of a displacement. For a more detailed reading of the concept, see “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet” in Manning 2009. Ogden makes the assumption here that autism is directly associated with a lack of empathy. This notion that autistics cannot establish relations is allied to the concept of mindblindness (Baron-Cohen 1995), a view that I believe is completely unwarranted. I discuss this in detail in chapter 7. Suffice it to say for now that this view presupposes that autism involves the impossibility of sensing the acuteness of the world in its activity, human and nonhuman, a view that has been challenged by many autistics and writers on autism. In discussing his autistic son, for instance, Ralph Savarese talks of DJ being a “seismograph” who feels every aspect of his environment so fully that it deeply affects how he interacts in the world. See Savarese 2007 and Ogden 1989. To view Amanda Baggs’s video, In My Language, visit http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc. See, for instance, Baron-Cohen 1995; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright 2004; Charman et al., Simon Baron-Cohen, John Swettenham, Anthony Cox, Gillian Baird, Auriol Drew “Infants with Autism: An Investigation of Empathy, Pretend Play, Joint Attention and Imitation” in Developmental Psychology 33, no. 5 (1997): 781–89. For a more complex reading of empathy in relation to autism, see R. J. Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of EmpanotEs to chaPtEr onE  225

thy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” at http://www18 .homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/PSY8900_CogNeuro psych/9_ToM/BlairEmpathy.pdf. In this piece, Blair differentiates between different kinds of empathy, making the point that “motor empathy is likely to be impaired in autism” (9) and questioning the claim that “there is any evidence of impairment for emotional empathy” (10). By motor emphathy, Blair is directing his attention to the fact that many autistics are not capable of using their voices or bodies in a way that clearly demonstrates what they are feeling. Sue Rubin, for instance, talks about how her echolalia often gets in the way of what she really means to say. The example she gives is of a visitor ringing her doorbell and her greeting the visitor with an emphatic “go away” when she is actually happy to see them. She speaks of feeling taken over by the echolalia. Within the autistic spectrum I am calling “classical” here, there also tends to be a lot of difficulty with activation (making a decision about an action and immediately following through with it). I have written more extensively about motor activation issues in the context of a Parkinsons-like condition called Encephalitis Lethargica in a chapter entitled “Touch as Technique” in Relationscapes (Manning 2009). Motor activation issues make it difficult to operate on a neurotypical time-line. Anticipated sequences of events such as extending the arm to reach for a pencil or a keyboard to communicate are often severely impeded, which can give the neurotypical the impression that the autistic does not want to respond, with the undesired effect that he or she will either ignore them or speak for them. “Freezing” also happens regularly for some autistics, making it difficult for them to reactivate themselves without assistance. All of these issues can also have important social consequences. Tito Mukhopadhyay (n.d.) explains: “There is the social pressure of performing those social gestures—like organizing the muscles of the face and beam out a social smile of acknowledgment to a face that is waiting with expectation, ready to get hurt or disappointed when the smile fails to happen. It does fail to happen with my face under that pressure. This ‘not being able to smile socially’ is not a universal fact. For I do not represent the whole Autism community. I have seen many people with Autism smile impartially at friends and strangers, happy faces and sad faces. But I don’t because I can’t.” Activation issues surrounding motor impairment are often the reason classical autistics are assumed to be unintelligent or “low-functioning.” This is of course completely false. 18 In a weblog-based dispute with well-known “high-functioning” autistic Temple Grandin, Amanda Baggs takes umbrage at Grandin’s categorical separation of so- called low-functioning autistics from high-functioning autistics. Grandin writes: “I would think in an ideal world, you don’t want to have people who can’t talk, but on the other hand, you definitely don’t want to get rid of all of the autism genetics because if you did that, there’d be no scientists. After all, who do you think made the first stone spear back in the caves? It wasn’t the really social

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people. . . . A little bit of the autism trait provides advantages but too much creates a low-functioning individual who cannot live independently. The paradox is that milder forms of autism and Asperger’s are part of human diversity but severe autism is a great disability. There is no black-and-white dividing line between an eccentric brilliant scientist and Asperger’s. . . . In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive.” See this interview at http://www.wrongplanet.net/ asperger.html?name=News&file=article&sid=295. Amanda Baggs responds: “Note that I think the division between low-functioning and high-functioning is completely artificial. I do not regard myself as either one because I do not think it is possible to divide up autism that way. I do not think there is a straight continuum from Asperger’s to ‘full-blown autistic.’ I think that there are too many aspects of autism, that can be different in each person, for it to be possible to just draw a neat line as if autism is one trait that varies in ‘severity.’ I say this because sometimes people get the impression that I consider myself lowfunctioning. I don’t. I don’t consider myself high-functioning either” (see the post “Temple Grandin, displaying near-textbook ‘hfa/as elitism,’” at http:// ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/?p=27). Note also Melanie Yergeau’s comment on the category: “If one can speak but can’t work, can cook but can’t drive, can read existential philosophy but can’t add single digits, can hug on demand but can’t stop a head-banging binge, can mimic small-talk but can’t modulate the volume of her voice, can pass in short bursts but can’t refrain from hand-flapping, is she high-functioning?” (2010). For stimulating and incisive reading on neurodiversity, disability politics, and writing, see Melanie Yergeau (2009, 2010; Yergeau and Duffy 2011). In her 2010 essay titled “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay,” she writes, “Of course, this is what the typical autism essay leads us to believe: the genre—and the authors who have painstakingly constructed this genre, a genre that is rife with painful history—has constructed autism just as neurological difference— which it is—yet fails to account for the social construction of neurological difference—which it also is—instead lumping the difference circle with that of deviance” (Yergeau 2010). See Amanda Baggs’s post from November 20, 2010, titled “Doing Things Differently,” http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/. See Langer 1977. For a more detailed exploration of landing sites, see Arakawa and Gins 2002.

interlude: When Movement Dances The epigraph for this interlude is from Gil 2001.

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TwO. Always More Than One The epigraph for this chapter is from Deleuze (2007, 390–91). 1 On the body as more-than, Whitehead writes: “Consider one definite molecule. It is part of nature. It has moved about for millions of years. Perhaps it started from a distant nebula. It enters the body; it may be as a factor in some edible vegetable; or it passes into the lungs as part of the air. At what exact point as it enters the mouth, or as it is absorbed through the skin, is it part of the body? At what exact moment, later on, does it cease to be part of the body? Exactness is out of the question. It can only be obtained by some trivial convention” (1933, 30). 2 It was only upon completion of Always More Than One that I came across the work of David Abram (1996) and his similar concept of the more than human. I share with Abram the belief that the more-than is a relational field that must be tended ecologically. In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes: “Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. . . . For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. . . . And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished” (1996, ix). Where I depart from him is that, rather than turning to phenomenology to explore this, I turn to process philosophy. To read more on my position concerning the more than human in relation to phenomenology, and on Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to Whiteheadian thought, see Manning, “Wondering the World” in Body and Society (forthcoming). 3 A more involved exploration of the concept of engendering can be found in “Engenderings: Gender, Politics, Individuation” in Politics of Touch (Manning 2007). 4 I follow Jane Bennett here. Bennett writes: “My aim . . . is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of the passive, mechanistic or divinely infused substance. This vibrant matter is not the raw material from the creative activity of humans or God” (2010, xiii). 5 This is a term developed by Isabelle Stengers (2010) in reference to Félix Guattari. In her work on an ecology of practices, Stengers emphasizes “thinking par le milieu” using the French double meaning of milieu, both the middle and the surrounding or habitat. “Par le mileu,” or ecologically, means that there is never the opportunity to disentangle the event from its particular surrounding. This is an etho-ecology that emphasizes that there can be no relevant ecology without a correlate ethology, ethology here understood in the Spinozist sense. As Deleuze explains in relation to Spinoza’s concept of ethology, this is less a moral standpoint than a “practical science of the manners of being” (1980). 6 My translations throughout for the texts that are as yet untranslated into English.

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For the Muriel Combes translations, I used Thomas Lamarre’s translation, currently in press at Mit in the Technologies of Lived Abstraction book series.

interlude: Dancing the Virtual 1 Throughout Always More Than One, I define “speciation” in a way very different from the mainstream notion, coming out of evolutionary theory, that understands speciation as the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. In my work, speciation never leads to a species. It refers instead to the processual force of the not-yet that exceeds the concept of species. Speciations are what connect in the moving, I am suggesting, and not species in the sense of discrete categories of being. Speciations are neither organic nor inorganic—they are series, as Deleuze defines them, affective tonalities in act that merge tendencies for form and force. 2 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 16, 2010. 3 For documentation of the event Society of Molecules, as well as interviews on micropolitics with Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Maurizio Lazzarato, Barbara Glowczewski, Julia Loktev, Adam Bobette, and Brian Massumi, see “From Noun to Verb: The Micropolitics of ‘Making Collectives,’” Inflexions 3 (October 2009), http://www.inflexions.org/issues.html#i3. For more on the SenseLab and Society of Molecules, see http://senselab.ca/events/technologies-of-lived-abstraction/ society-of-molecules-2009. 4 In cases where the host might leave during the five-month period, allowances within the movement profile had to be made. This became quite interesting as it required another member of the local molecule to move into the host’s movement profile for the duration of the host’s absence. 5 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 18, 2010. 6 Ibid. 7 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 13, 2010. 8 Gil’s (1985) concept of exfoliation is explored at length in Metamorphoses of the Body. The concept of exfoliation suggests the creation of space through which body and space co- compose. 9 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 20, 2010.

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Three. Waltzing the Limit 1 Waltz with Bashir was made first as a nonanimated video based on a ninety-page script and then transformed into animation (with 2,300 illustrations drawn by the art director David Polonsky and his three assistants). The animation format is a combination of Flash animation, classic animation, and 3D. In an interview with Erica Abeel from indieWIRE, Ari Folman discusses his use of animation for this film (with the exception of the last scene of the film, which is documentary archival footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre). He says, “I had the basic idea for the film for several years, but I was not happy to do it in real life video. How would that have looked like? . . . If it could be done in animation with fantastic drawings, it would capture the surreal aspect of war. If you look at all the elements in the film—memory, lost memory, dreams, the subconscious, hallucinations, drugs, youth, lost youth—the only way to combine all those things in one storyline was drawings and animation. You know, the question most frequently asked since Cannes is ‘why animation?’ And it’s a question that’s absurd to me. I mean, how else could it have been done? . . . [With animation] you can go from one dimension to another. . . . I think you get enormous freedom with animation and illustrations. It’s a really great language for me, the best. You can imagine everything” (Folman and Abeel 2009). 2 In fact, this scene is almost identical to the final scene of the film, except that in the last scene, the camera will not turn its back on the women, and the face will open itself to the unthinkable suffering of the massacre. 3 Deleuze speaks of the necessity for “the actual image [to] enter into relation with its own virtual image as such; from the outset pure description must divide in two, ‘repeat itself, take itself up again, fork, contradict itself.’ An image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual, must be constituted. . . . We are in a situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the fictional, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange. . . . And just as the real and the fictional become indiscernible in certain very specific conditions of the image, the true and the false now become undecidable or inextricable: the impossible proceeds from the possible, and the past is not necessarily true” (1989, 274–75; translation modified). 4 This is not a film about personal redemption. In response to a question about the “therapeutic” aspects of making this film about “his” experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war, Ari Folman says: “I’d say the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked” (Folman and Abeel 2009). Elsewhere, underscoring the dynamic aspect of experience, he says: “My belief is that any kind of filmmaking is therapy; but, it’s dynamic. You’re actually doing something” (Folman and Guillén 2009). 5 In his excellent work on anime, Thomas Lamarre works with the concept of the “superflat,” suggesting that it is the very flatness of the animated image that

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creates the potential for a certain kind of metamorphosis and timing. He writes: “This is because, if one thinks about flatness in terms of two- dimensional surfaces, then the logical question becomes: how does anything happen in this surface world? How does anything come forth or vanish? And how is such change expressed? Clearly, events and change can be expressed only in terms of an interaction of surfaces, as a movement of surfaces on surfaces, as shift from surface to surface. I should like to stretch Murakami’s superflat, and think of a superflat that entails flat interactions or flat articulations. That is, the superflat becomes a quality of movement, change or transformation. In effect, the supposedly flat and depthless characters and figures in anime are superflat. In their very flatness, they are traversed by a potential for interaction, motion and transformation. They move on a specific field of forces” (Lamarre 2002, 338). While Waltz with Bashir does not fit into the category of anime, the use I am making of the idea of surface resonates with Lamarre’s analysis and is informed by it. See also Lamarre 2009, where he develops, much more thoroughly than I do here, the concept of animation and its potential as a visual and cultural practice. 6 In the English translation of Deleuze’s cinema books, fabulation is translated as storytelling, which in its common definition departs from the way Deleuze is using the term. Fabulation, or the “function of fabulation,” is a concept Deleuze takes from Bergson that departs from the idea of narrative to touch on the question of what Deleuze calls “the power of the false.” It is also implicitly aligned with the notion of “intercessor” (often mistranslated into English as “mediator”), which Deleuze defines as the conduit for expression. Deleuze writes: “Whether they’re real or fictional, animate or inanimate, we must create our intercessors. It’s a series. If we do not form a series, even completely imaginary, we are lost. I need my intercessors to express myself, and they could never express themselves without me: when we work we are always many, even when it is not obvious” (1995, 125; translation modified). Fabulation follows from this notion of a manyness of expression. In Deleuze’s text on intercessors, it is through Pierre Perrault’s work that Deleuze activates the concept of fabulation. Deleuze writes: “The fabrication of intercessors in a community stands out in the work of the Canadian cinematographer Pierre Perrault: I gave myself intercessors, and this is how I can say what I have to say. Perrault thinks that, if he speaks alone, even if he invents fictions, he’s bound to come out with an intellectual discourse, he won’t be able to get away from a ‘master’s or colonist discourse,’ an established discourse. What is needed: to catch someone else ‘legending,’ ‘caught in the act of legending.’ Then a minority discourse, between two or several, begins to form. We here come upon what Bergson calls ‘fabulation.’ . . . To catch people in the act of legending is to catch the movement of the constitution of a people. Peoples do not preexist” (1995, 126; translation modified). This ties in with what Deleuze writes in Cinema 2: “When Perrault is addressing his real characters of Quebec, it is not simply to eliminate fiction but to free it from the model of truth notEs to chaPtEr thrEE  231

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which penetrates it, and on the contrary to rediscover the pure and simple function of fabulation which is opposed to this model. What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the fabulatory function for the poor, insofar as it gives the false the power that makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster” (1989, 150; translation modified). “Pure experience” is the term William James gives to the virtual-actual nexus of experience in the making. James writes: “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either subject or object as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that” (1996, 23). Ari Folman also speaks of the movements of the film as being aberrant, referring especially to the strange gait of the animated characters. He says, “Look at the motion. People don’t walk in reality like they walk in this film. It’s a different kind of walk we developed, slow and awkward. We had problems in animation creating this slow movement. It’s much easier to make action scenes” (Folman and Abeel 2009). In the preface to the Chinese translation of A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi writes: “What is at issue philosophically is never the empirical question of “what” something is (the question of being). It is the pragmatic question of ‘how’ things go (the question of becoming- oriented). What is always at issue philosophically is this pragmatic question, taken to the limit of thought” (2010b, 12). In Cinema 2 Deleuze connects a cinema that creates time (creating thought) to one that departs from a certain fascism of the cinematographic. Citing Artaud, Deleuze writes: “the image must produce a shock, a nerve-wave which gives rise to thought” (1989, 165). Microfascisms are challenged by the “as yet unthought” allowing us to “discover the identity of thought and life” where “the whole is the outside” and “what counts is the interstice between images” (Deleuze 1989, 179). While it is clear that the filmmaker “represents” Ari Folman, we never actually get to know the character. We know only that he was a soldier and now makes films and that this is a film he is moved to make. “I’m just a filmmaker!” he says when Boaz seeks his help about the dog nightmare. “Can’t films be therapeutic?” Boaz asks. The filmmaker does not answer directly, except to say that he has not had any flashbacks: “The truth is, that’s not stored in my system,” he says, referring to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. “You never think about it?” Boaz insists. “No, no . . . no,” the filmmaker responds, his face impassive. They hug and go their separate ways. “I’ll think of something,” the filmmaker says. Waltz with Bashir is the force of thought this thinking propels. For more on back-gridding and experience, see “Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t” in Massumi 2002. The “techno” sound for this scene was made from ninety- eight tracks reduced to five, as Ari Folman has explained (Folman and Abeel 2009).

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14 The graphic novel Waltz with Bashir is completely different from the film, despite the fact that the images are original animated drawings and the text is the same. Without the movement-across of the cinematic imagescape, the affective tonality of the surface as a life does not come through. In the graphic novel the text takes over and the images become aids or representations to the story. As a result, the characters take on a more standard “personality,” and the story thus becomes more traditional in its telling. This is not to suggest that only cinematic images have movement. For stills that are resonant with absolute movement, see any of Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs from Olympia (this question of the still-inmovement is further developed in “From Biopolitics to the Biogram” in Manning 2009). 15 On the topic of movement and anime, Thomas Lamarre writes: “Animation then becomes something other than a process of animating figures, of drawing all the stages to produce seamless movement. It is a process of inventing machines of movement—machines of walking, of talking, of running, leaping, flying, and so forth—that take up all manner of objects” (2002, 339). 16 For more on semblance and event, see Massumi 2011b. 17 Deleuze and Guattari write: “The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought. . . . Thought demands ‘only’ movement that can be carried on to infinity. What thought claims by right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the movement of the infinite. It is this that constitutes the image of thought” (1994, 37). 18 I say this while being fully aware of the conflicting responses to the film and the disavowal of the film from many left-wing groups in Israel, Palestine, and abroad. That Waltz with Bashir is a film that awakens paradoxical responses is its strength, I believe, and its politics. Critiques follow two major lines: denouncing its lack of political commitment (see Todd Brown below) and critiquing the absence of Palestinians in the role of writing history, resulting in its incapacity to do justice to the horror (see Naira Antoun below). Todd Brown writes: “In many ways, this is the hardest review I’ve ever sat down and committed myself to writing. I regret watching Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir. No, it’s not because it was a waste of time. It wasn’t because it was bad filmmaking. On the contrary, it is filmmaking at its finest. Waltz with Bashir is, at the very least, an astounding animated documentary with incredible originality and breathtaking impact, a film that must be watched by anyone with even a passing interest in world affairs or Middle Eastern History. . . . While Waltz with Bashir occupies the upper end of the scale in terms of quality filmmaking, it incredibly dominates the lower end of the political propaganda spectrum with its insidiousness. . . . While I applaud Folman for attempting to face up to the guilt of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, this film falls utterly short of making any commitment on the issue, instead choosing to weasel out of the grasp of notEs to chaPtEr thrEE  233

responsibility which even Israel’s own Kahan Commission had assigned to the iDf” (see the full review at http://twitchfilm.com/reviews/2009/10/waltz-withbashir-reviewwal.php). The second line of critique is the one I am more interested in. Antoun’s critique below seems to me to be extremely important, but also short-sighted in terms of the political techniques it foregrounds, many of which firmly reside within the realm of identity politics. My reading of the film does not seek to disqualify the question of responsibility such a critique brings up. Quite the contrary: I explore the notion of responsibility through the film’s reproblematization of memory, experience, and the political via its use of affect, rhythm and surface. Whether or not the film ultimately does justice to the horror of the massacre cannot be the question, it seems to me, as nothing could do the massacre justice. How movements of thought are generated by art, how surfacings are complicated through the qualitative expressions of the transcendental field art can activate is what I hope to address here. To attend to these issues in a nuanced manner, it is important to keep in mind the differential between molar and molecular questions. Identity politics, as I argue in the final coda, are always located in the register of the molar, and from there quickly fall into a personalization of politics. A third way that does not repersonalize the political must surely be thinkable? Naira Antoun writes: “To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with Bashir, to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians but with Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely begins to describe the violence that this film commits against Palestinians. There is nothing interesting or new in the depiction of Palestinians—they have no names, they don’t speak, they are anonymous. But they are not simply faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story that Waltz with Bashir tells are Israeli soldiers. Their anguish, their questioning, their confusion, their pain—it is this that is intended to pull us. The rotoscope animation is beautifully done, the facial expressions so engaging, subtle and torn, we find ourselves grimacing and gasping at the trials and tribulations of the young Israeli soldiers and their older agonizing selves. We don’t see Palestinian facial expressions; only a lingering on dead, anonymous faces. So while Palestinians are never fully human, Israelis are, and indeed are humanized through the course of the film. . . . In the final analysis, this is what Waltz with Bashir is about: the evasion of responsibility. It is not that the self-reflection offered by the film is only partial, and that we would simply be nay-sayers to be dissatisfied with it. Because there is no sense of what the Israeli role in Lebanon was, because it is about ethically and morally redeeming the filmmaker and his contemporaries—and by extension the Israeli self, military and nation, the Israeli collective in other words—because of all this, the film is an act not of limited self-reflection but self-justification. It is a striving towards working through qualms to restabilize the self as it is currently constituted; it does not ask challenging questions that would destabilize that self ” (see the full review at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml).

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19 Empathy is not affective. It is an emotion that operates within the register of the first person singular, where “I” see “you,” where subject and object are predefined. As I will outline at the end of the chapter, there is an important difference between “responsibility for” the other and responsibility “before” the other, the first based on an ethics of recognition. Being responsible “before” the other involves the embrace not of an other qua human other but of a tendency toward a generative field where self and other are not yet differentiated. We are responsible before in a collective individuation that resonates on the cusp of the actual and the virtual where experience has not yet devolved into form and where the stakes are not laid out in advance. 20 Enola Gay is the name given to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 21 Cake’s “I Bombed Korea” is reworked into “Beirut” by Ze’ve Tene. 22 This scene is strangely reminiscent of the dappled forest scenes and classical music in Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line (1999). 23 “‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus’ says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own alienation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art” (Benjamin 2002 [1936], 122). 24 Deleuze’s concept of the diagram (particularly as he develops it in relation to Francis Bacon’s work in Logic of Sensation) is closely allied to my use of the biogram. See also “Strange Horizons: Building, Biograms and the Body Topologic” in Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual (2002). 25 “The territory is the surface form extruded by the life-priming of bare activity. It is the effective form of expression of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a cutting edge of deterritorialization, understood as the processual suspension of prior griddings remitted to the formative commotion from which they emerged” (Massumi, forthcoming). 26 For more on the relationship between the political and politics, see Rancière 1999. 27 See also Foucault’s introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti- Oedipus, which he calls a “handbook for anti-fascist living.” Foucault writes: “How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? how do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? how do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?” (1983, xiii). 28 “Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle. The German preromantic Karl notEs to chaPtEr thrEE  235

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Philipp Moritz feels responsible not for the calves that die but before the calves that die and give him the incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect. For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings. These are not regressions, although fragments of regression, sequences of regression may enter in” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 240; my emphasis). Comprehension suggests a holding-together of “facts” with a sense of “objectivity.” On the subject of objectivity and its relation to filmmaking, Ari Folman says: “I don’t believe in objectivity. There is no objectivity in filmmaking. Logically, it cannot exist. The basic fact that you go into an editing room with 200 hours of footage and by the end of the editing process come out with a film that is 50 minutes or an hour negates objectivity” (Folman and Guillén 2009). On the topic of blame, in answer to Erica Abeel’s question “Why didn’t you hold the leadership more to account? Sharon was complicit, after all, he allowed the massacre to happen,” Ari Folman responds: “I didn’t want to make any statement about the leadership. I wanted to re- create the world of the ordinary soldier. There was a commission that found Sharon guilty, he was banned from office for life, then he came back as Prime Minister, came back as a hero, think of it. Those things happen in Israel. . . . Bottom line, for me it was not a revenge film against Ariel Sharon. As for why he didn’t stop the massacre, he’s asleep now, so we can’t ask him. The whole plan for Lebanon was so sick, to my mind. What the master plan was nobody really knows” (Folman and Abeel 2009). I quote this to emphasize the push/pull between the molar and molecular as it plays out both in Waltz with Bashir and in my reading of it. For a thought-provoking article on Waltz with Bashir, see Gary Kamiya’s “What Waltz with Bashir Can Teach Us about Gaza” (2009). For a more sustained exploration of my views on the horror of the face with respect to Levinas’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of faciality, see “Face to Face with the Incommensurable” in Ephemeral Territories (Manning 2003). See “Year 0: Faciality” in Deleuze and Guattari 1987. Deleuze and Guattari write: “Memories of a Sorcerer, I. A becoming- animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that” (1987, 688).

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FOur. Propositions for the Verge 1 This is not to deny the role choreography as a disciplinary technique has historically played in dance. André Lepecki writes, for instance, of the majoritarian role choreography has played: “Let us not forget that choreographic power is genealogically majoritarian in the sense that ‘choreography’ names a very specific masculinist, fatherly, Stately, judicial, theological, and disciplinary project—a project that, moreover, removed dance from its social terrain (the communal yard) and placed it in a private (courtly) chamber, thus subordinating dance to signification, to full presence, and to archiving. In other words: at a certain point in the history of Western subjectivity, a certain social (and socializing) activity called dance fell prey to a Stately (and theological) apparatus of capture called choreography. As I have written elsewhere . . . , this falling prey took place under the auspices of two fathers: a Jesuit priest who happened to be an ecclesiastical judge and a lawyer who happened to be a mathematician. These two characters of majoritarian masculinity—Thoinot Arbeau and his alter ego, the student Capriol—join forces under the power of State, Justice, Science, and God to create the new art of moving rigorously and privately, which Arbeau named orchesography. That the first exercise of Arbeau’s homonymous dance manual published in 1589 is a martial march to the rhythms of a military drum only reinforces the utilitarian possibilities that the choreographic brings to dance and movement for use by the State. Under the Stately apparatus of capture, dance can be mobilized to the Stately war machine. Moreover, under the Judgment of God, choreographic power turns the body into a subordinate, a subjugated subject, to that entity Jacques Derrida once identified, in his essay on Artaud, as a god-robberof-bodies” (2007, 122–23). I do not deny this. And yet, as I argued in chapter 3, the minoritarian potential of a practice is always also at stake. The work I propose to do here places the concept of the choreographic back into a minoritarian frame to ask how it might function as or in relation to a micropolitical practice such as an activist philosophy. 2 Bojana Cvejic’s work is also interesting in this regard. She writes: “What does it mean for the art of choreography to think its territory as a field of forces, and the movement of the body not as an instrument, medium, or site of inscription, but as the machine driving a desiring production?” (Etcetera 98, 2005) at http:// metteingvartsen.net/etcetera-bojana- cvejic/. For her work on and collaboration with Teresa de Keersmaeker, see also A Choreographer’s Score. 3 In Deborah Hay’s words, “What if each cell in the body (currently estimated at 100 trillion) had the potential to get what it needs, while surrendering the habit of a singular facing, and inviting being seen?” (qtd. in Goldman 2009, 283). 4 Time signatures as I am using them here have nothing to do with the ways they are used in musical scores. In musical scoring a time signature refers to the numerical sign placed at the beginning of a piece of music, or during the course notEs to chaPtEr four  237

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of it, to indicate the meter of the piece. In this case, the time signature helps to determine the number of beats to a measure. Throughout Always More Than One, I use time signature as a means of conceiving the singularity of time-as-rhythm in the becoming-actual of an event’s duration. William Forsythe was the director of the Ballet Frankfurt from 1984 to 2004, during which period seminal pieces were crafted, such as Artifact (1984), The Loss of Small Detail (1991), Eidos: Telos (1995), and Decreation (2003). In 2005 the company moved from the state-funded Frankfurt Opera to become the Forsythe Company. Deleuze defines the diagram, via Francis Bacon, as “the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour-patches” whose function “is to be suggestive” (2003, 101). He speaks of the diagram being capable of “unlock[ing] areas of sensation,” suggesting that the diagram is “chaos, a catastrophe, but . . . also a germ of order or rhythm” (Deleuze 2003, 102). Whitehead writes: “The ‘locus’ of a proposition consists of those actual occasions whose actual worlds include the logical subjects of the proposition. When an actual entity belongs to the locus of a proposition, then conversely the proposition is an element in the lure for feeling of that actual entity. If by the decision of the concrescence, the proposition has been admitted into feeling, then the proposition constitutes what the feeling has felt. The proposition constitutes a lure for a member of its locus by reason of the germaneness of the complex predicate to the logical subjects, having regard to forms of definiteness in the actual world of that member, and to its antecedent phases of feeling” (1978, 186; my emphasis). Decision is immanent to the process of concrescence in Whitehead. I sometimes use “cut” rather than “decision” to underline the way in which decision operates not from outside the occasion but participates in the difference of its unfolding. There is no event without decision, and no decision that can alter an already constituted event. In the watching of dance, there is a similar qualitative transformation of what a (perceiving) body can do. This occurs partly due to the work of mirror neurons but also through the way time loops such that what we see is already also that which we have remembered. Not memory of the past but memory in the moving toward an open future dancing itself before our eyes. The process of moving through the metastability of verticalizing- and horizontalizing-balances that walking requires is very apparent in children learning to walk. The first stage of walking tends toward a falling back: from sitting to standing to sitting. Verticality is tended toward as a limit that throws the movement back. In the second stage, a tottering occurs whereby momentum is gathered for forward-falling. This translates into saccaded steps, each step its own dynamic form. For walking to ensue, the steps themselves must become absorbed into the horizontal advance of the movement. This backgrounds the steps as such, allowing the momentum of horizontality to take over.

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10 I explore the idea of movement, posture, and balance more fully in an interlude entitled “A Mover’s Guide to Standing Still” in Relationscapes (2009). 11 For an account of a woman who lost her sense of proprioception and could no longer walk, see Sacks 1998. 12 For more on rhythm, see “On the Refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari 1987. 13 Rhythm plays a direct role in activating the “walking of the walk” in those who suffer from motor activation problems such as autism. Many of the autistics discussed in this book have worked with rhythm therapy to not only activate their movement or increase its flow but also to enable and facilitate speech and writing. A key technique used in occupational therapy consists in drumming across the center line, creating a three-part rhythm (the ideal seems to be to work with a syncopated rhythm, 1–2 and, 1–2 and). The following video shows Temple Grandin experimenting with this technique: see http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=2KaKMxojU60. For more information, see Suzanne Oliver at Neurologic Music Therapy, Services of Arizona, http://www.nmtsa.org/. Another key aspect to rhythm is breath—and Forsythe’s sounding can be seen as one way of foregrounding the rhythm of breath in the moving. In subsequent chapters, I will sometimes bring up DJ Savarese’s observation that neurotypicals are “easy-breathers.” In a recent conversation (Boston, July 2011) about anxiety and movement, DJ typed, “Anxiety is not breathing movement.” For DJ, as for many on the autistic spectrum who suffer from the overlap of motor difficulty and acute anxiety, it can be very challenging to create a rhythm in the breathing (it should be said that the overflow of so- called neurotypicals in yoga classes, most of which explicitly focus on breath, gives us reason to believe that DJ might not be quite right that neurotypicals are in fact naturally “easybreathers”). 14 In ballet “épaulement” is defined as the use of the head to complete the line of the body during a movement. Generally, the head inclines toward whichever foot is in front. 15 I discuss the interval in more detail in “Incipient Action” in Relationscapes (2009).

interlude: What Else? 1 Gilles Deleuze uses the term “objectile” to emphasize “not only a temporal but also a qualitative conception of the object, to the extent that sounds and colours are flexible and taken in modulation” (1993, 19). 2 White Bouncy Castle is an installation by Dana Casperson, William Forsythe, and Joel Ryan and was coproduced with Group.ie—originally commissioned by artangEl, London—premiering on March 26, 1997, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London. For images, see http://whitebouncycastle.com/de/index_reload .html?bodyFrame=/de/_body/03_pictures.html. 3 On the half-second lapse in perception, see Libet 1985. For philosophical disnotEs to chaPtEr four  239

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cussions about the half-second as an event for perception, see Massumi 2002 (23–25, 177–207). The Defenders is a choreographic object by William Forsythe, with music by Dietrich Krüger and Thom Willems, premiering on May 17, 2008, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal. Conversation with William Forsythe, November 2010. The aspect of “falsity” often associated with the specious is at its most creative here. It could be thought alongside Deleuze’s concept of the power of the false. For more on Lygia Clark’s work and on her concept of relational objects, see, for instance, “About the Magic of the Object” at http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/ defaultING.asp. See Peter Boenisch (2007, 20) for an example of how Forsythe invites his students to participate in creating physical solutions to dramaturgic propositions. Scattered Crowd is a choreographic object by William Forsythe, with music by Ekkehard Ehlers, premiering March 15, 2002, Halle 7, Messe Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main. For extraordinary images, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/37945735@ N00/537174230/.

Five. Choreography as Mobile Architecture The epigraph for this chapter is from Massumi, forthcoming. 1 William Forsythe, Norah Zuniga Shaw, and Maria Palazzi, “Introduction to Synchronous Objects,” http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/. 2 William Forsythe and Norah Zuniga Shaw, “Introduction: The Dance,” http:// synchronousobjects.osu.edu/. 3 Norah Zuniga Shaw, “Introduction: The Data,” http://synchronousobjects.osu .edu/. 4 Synchronous Objects is a substrate of the wider Motion Bank project initiated by William Forsythe, as the first instance of Motion Bank, and as an initiatory collective project between dancers, architects, mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers, designers and choreographers. I felt the platform as a whole reached its highest potential when exhibited by Norah Zuniga Shaw as a participatory installation (isEa 2010, Germany). In this context, participants could watch “The Dance,” compose with a counterpoint tool (a large movement-based proposition set up as a participatory installation), familiarize themselves with the complexity of the data stream created by the Motion Bank project, all the while interacting with one another. This, it seems to me, best created the conditions for the collective engagement with choreographic thought that is the mandate of the project: to rethink what else choreography can look like. 5 Maria Palazzi, “Introduction: The Objects,” http://synchronousobjects.osu .edu/.

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6 William Forsythe, “Improvisation Technologies” (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), cD- roM. 7 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, November 14, 2010. 8 Jill Johnson, http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/cueAnnotations. 9 There are three kinds of landing sites (each of them interweaving) outlined in Arakawa and Gins 2002. The landing site described here would fall most closely into the realm of the “imaging landing site”—there are also “perceptual landing sites” and “dimensionalizing landing sites.” 10 William Forsythe and Norah Zuniga Shaw describe alignment this way: “Essential to the counterpoint of the dance is a system of relationships that the company refers to as alignments. Alignments are short instances of synchronization between dancers in which their actions share some, but not necessarily all, attributes. Manifested as analogous shapes, related timings, or corresponding directional flows, alignments occur in every moment of the dance and are constantly shifting throughout the group. . . . Other words the company uses to describe this phenomenon include hook-ups, agreements and isometries. Within the thousands of alignments in the choreography, approximately 200 can be understood as a subset called sync-ups. These are moments in the choreography when a dancer’s task is to briefly join with another individual or group” (Forsythe and Shaw, “Introduction: The Dance,” http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/). 11 This collective experience occurs not only in so-called participatory installations. It has nothing to do with an object per se or a genre of art. I discuss this more fully in chapter 6. 12 A video of the event can be found at http://www.erinmovement.com. 13 These sculptures are made of different gauges of fencing metal and fabric. Pictures can be found at http://www.erinmovement.com. 14 This is part of the proposition for the final iteration of Folds to Infinity titled Stitching Time—A Collective Fashioning (June–September 2012, Sydney Biennale).

interlude: Fiery, Luminous, Scary 1 The topic of the 2010 autcoM conference was “Communication, Competence, Community: Nothing About Us Without Us.” 2 I discuss this challenge at length in an earlier piece entitled “Dancing the Technogenetic Body” in Relationscapes (2009) where I suggest that “local” interactivity is most often deadening to the processual aspect of the work because it creates a posture of cause and effect in the spectator that tends not to lead to a complex interrelation with the work’s potential above and beyond the effective constraint of the limits of the interactive set-up. 3 Savarese, A Dispute with Nouns, forthcoming.

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Six. The Dance of Attention 1 This movement experiment opened a one- day workshop I led at Critical Path in Sydney, Australia (September 16, 2009) on the topic of distributed relational movement. I would like to thank the participants of the workshop, whose open exploration of the workshop experiments allowed me to conceive of the concepts foregrounded here. Participants were Debra Batton, Lone Bertelsen, Haya Cohen, Atlanta Eke, Paul Gazzola, Petra Gemeinboeck, Diana Hani, Baki Kocaballi, Christiane Lo, Pauline Manley, Brian Massumi, Jodie McNeilly, Andrew Murphie, Banu Pekol, Gretel Taylor, Jade Tyas Tunggal, Beth Weinstein, and Danielle Wilde. 2 I explore this question of the between-two in my work on tango in “Negotiating Influence” in Politics of Touch (2007). When relational movement takes over in the context of a milonga in Argentine tango, the experience is that the floor- craft seems to move with the couples dancing in an elasticity of relation that resonates across bodies. You no longer dance between two: the mobility of the milieu dances you. 3 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 10, 2010. 4 C. S. Peirce—who can be firmly situated in the philosophical lineage foregrounded here—has a similar concept of personing: “The consciousness of a general idea has a certain ‘unity of ego’ in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore quite analogous to a person; and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea” (1992, 350). 5 For more on the concept of terminus, see William James (1912). He writes: “the percept’s existence as the terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates the function. Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept ‘had in mind’” (31). 6 See Arakawa and Gins’ Making Dying Illegal (2007). For descriptions of their architectural work, see also “For Sale: Eternal Life in the Hamptons,” Hooked on Houses, http://hookedonhouses.net/2011/02/22/for-sale- eternal-life-in-the-hamptons/; and Fred Bernstein, “A House Not for Mere Mortals,” New York Times, April 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/garden/03destiny.html.

Seven. An Ethics of Language The first epigraph for this chapter is from Whitehead 1938 (188). The second epigraph is composed of statements made by MM and Daina Krumins in Miller 2003. 1 Amanda Baggs writes: “If we were real people, killing us would be bad, and killing ourselves would be unfortunate rather than something people build special laws to enable. / If we were real people, the world would be designed in a way that

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allowed us to move through it without extra obstacles thrown in our way. / If we were real people, people would see us as individuals, rather than heroes, tragedies, inspirations, or representatives of our entire impairment group. / If we were real people, then giving us proper medical care would never be seen as pointless. / If we were real people, the whole myriad range of disability stereotypes would look flimsy and silly because people would see us as we are. / Of course we’re already real people. But the problem is that so few people have noticed” (March 24, 2010, http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/). As will no doubt be clear by now, autistics are extremely complex people who reorient the very idea of “function” as a basis for experience. As Melanie Yergeau writes, “When others denote me as a high-functioning autistic, there’s still an assumption that I’m malfunctioning, because no matter how ‘high’ I am on the grid, I’m never just plain functioning” (2010). I bring up the terminology of “low functioning” simply to note that the bias of “function” is still very much alive in our culture and that these remarkable thinkers do face complex disabilities ranging from the inability of self-activation to issues of inhibition associated with involuntary movements, the inability to speak, and so on. Autistics who are placed in the “low-functioning” category generally do need daily assistance for many tasks and can rarely live completely on their own. The categories of autism are perhaps most useful for the determination of specific care situations and for access to medical funding and education (including an aide in the classroom, for instance). But when the categorization becomes fixed as a point of identity, dangerous assumptions are made that restratify the field of neurodiversity. Baggs writes: “When I write long things, that is not a statement that I am ‘high functioning.’ When I appear somewhere, that is not a statement that I am ‘low functioning’ (in fact, my appearance is not a claim of anything—it’s just my appearance, it’s like calling my hair color a claim to anything in particular). If you make an assumption based on one ability or another, about my other abilities, you will be wrong” (“If we were real people,” January 24, 2009, http://ballastexistenz .wordpress.com/). I prefer to use the term “classical autistic,” as Ralph Savarese does. For an excellent expository article on autism with a particular emphasis on movement differences, see Donnellan, Hill and Leary 2010. Amanda Baggs, “If we were real people,” March 24, 2010, http://ballastexistenz .wordpress.com/. Tito Mukhopadhyay writes: “Sometimes I had to knock my head or slap it to feel it. Of course from my knowledge of biology I knew that I had voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. I also knew that my hands and legs were made of voluntary muscles. But I experimented with myself that when I ordered my hand to pick up a pencil I could not do it. I remember long back when I had ordered my lips to move I could not do it” (2002, 73). Mukhopadhyay continues: “If I am asked to close my eyes and pick potatoes from a mixture of potatoes and onions, I would not be able to do so because my sense notEs to chaPtEr sEvEn  243

of touch is poor. So I do not mind people hugging me like Tom, who is tactile sensitive. My tactile sensitivity is limited to textures of fabric. I do not like wool” (qtd. in Iversen 2006, 70). 6 Amanda Baggs, “The Summer Thing,” February 20, 2010, http://ballastexistenz .wordpress.com/. 7 In his forthcoming book, A Dispute with Nouns—Autism, Poetry, and the Sensing Body, Ralph Savarese writes: “‘Autie’ is a term that some people with autism use to refer to themselves; ‘Autie-type,’ a highly poetic language that many nonspeaking Auties produce spontaneously on their letter boards or computers.” In her book, Between Their World and Ours: Breakthroughs with Autistic Children, Karen Zelan asks, “Why do Autistics use language the way they do? Many of their utterances seem essentially poetic” (2004, 48). No one has yet adequately accounted for this singular use of rhythm. Perhaps I should say that no one has yet wanted to account for it, as many in the scientific community continue to cling to outdated notions of mindblindness, which imagine that classical autistics have no awareness of self or others. Without such awareness, of course, poetry is impossible. 8 Much has been written on facilitated communication, a method used by many autistics to assist them first in pointing, then in typing on a computer, an Augmented and Alternative Communication Device, or an iPad. Ralph Savarese (2007) provides an excellent introduction to the technique and to the controversy that surrounds it. See also Biklen 1997; Erevelles 2005; Kliewer, Biklen, and Kasa-Hendrickson 2006; Kasa-Hendrickson, Broderick, and Hanson 2009. Each of the autistics mentioned here types with little or no direct typing assistance, though they tend to require assistance in the triggering of an activity—and this evolves with time. Jamie Burke, for instance, has recently become capable of reading his writing aloud, and DJ Savarese is capable of typing several sentences at a time with little or no direct facilitation. Tito Mukhopadhyay writes on his own with a pencil and types with no facilitation except having his mother in the room. Larry Bissonnette can read his writing and types with a facilitator’s hand on his shoulder or simply touching his shirt. Amanda Baggs types without facilitation. What all of these autistics share are activation issues, some connected specifically to writing and some connected more generally to everyday life. In the case of Amanda Baggs, for instance, writing is not something for which she requires assistance, but her body does freeze and in these cases, humans or cats are often needed to reactivate her (she speaks of her cat’s sensitivity to her “freezing,” as a result of which the cat—Fey—has taken it upon herself to walk over her body to trigger activity). In Tito Mukhopadhyay’s case, activation might be needed to focus him on a task. His mother and facilitator, Soma Mukhopadhyay, has developed a method called rapid prompting that includes triggerings. These can take the form of a tap on the knee or shoulder but more often rely

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on words of encouragement. In DJ Savarese’s case, he and his aide sometimes share a pencil that is held throughout the typing process. Because of the proximity of the assistant to the keyboard, in testing situations he has had to demonstrate that he is indeed typing his own words. Each of these demonstrations has shown that it is DJ writing and not the aide. Ralph Savarese calls facilitation “arm time” and defines it as an “intimate explosion into communicative sociality through a physical interconnectedness” (2007, 339). This is how DJ Savarese describes facilitated communication: “The first question people freshly asked was why I sometimes have someone hold the pencil while I type or write. The answer is that the person fearlessly makes me feel safe by helping me regulate my nervous system. The adult helps me not to greet the kids directly. If I greet them directly, I get over-stimulated, and my feelings grow so strong that holding them inside is impossible. I desert reason, and my body repeatedly begins to flap or reach freshly toward them. I love greeting kids, but it can cause me to desert selfcontrol temporarily. Another reason why I use a facilitator is to help me focus. The Frees [speaking people without autism] who understand me know how to hear my dear self. They greet my dear self and free me to respond. Treating me as free, they tell me what to do until my breathing feels deep and slow, and my fingers and eyes can once again communicate with each other, so I can type my thoughts. Years of inhaling voluntarily greet hope that I can regulate my own sensory input and hold myself in control. When I was only able to exhale voluntarily, I had to rely completely on my mom to help me fold up my fear and relax. This was frustrating and fearful for everyone, including me” (in special issue of disability studies quarterly on autism, Savarese 2010). 9 At the autcoM conference I discuss in “Fiery, Luminous, Scary” (Milwaukee, 2010, http://www.autcom.org/conf2010/AUTCOM-2010-program.pdf ) I was struck by the proliferation among the autistics represented there of poetic writing, much of which was “identifiable” as “autie-type”—intensely rhythmical, metaphorical, creative. There was also a keen tendency for irony. This was particularly apparent in a panel titled “Rated ‘R’: That Oh-So-Difficult Topic,” hosted by classical autistics Jacob Pratt and Nick Pentzell, both of whom used forms of facilitation to communicate (for the conference talk, their writing was read aloud by facilitators or family). In the description of their panel they wrote: “We’ve watched Casablanca 17 times, and we know about the birds and the bees, but—uh—love and s- e-x weren’t taught as social skills or as Pt, ot, or sensory integration. . . . How do we go about having mature relationships? And how in the world do we integrate support staff ??” While the subject of the panel and the way it was dealt with was both extraordinarily touching and hilarious, what struck me was the exquisiteness of the writing—its perspicacious precision, its rhythm, its humor. There was definite delight in the writing itself even in a context as unusual as “where do I put my facilitator when I am having sex, and do I pull them out from under the bed if I need to say something?” notEs to chaPtEr sEvEn  245

10 DJ Savarese’s writings are available at http://www.reasonable-people.com/writ ings.html. 11 Keynote address by Larry Bissonnette at the Institute on Communication and Inclusion, Mit Media Labs, July 20–22, 2011. 12 See a lovely piece written by the poet and writer Steve Kuusisto on the occasion of DJ’s graduation from high school, http://www.planet-of-the-blind.com/2011/02/ dj-savarese-my-friend- our-ally-in- disability-rights.html. 13 Deleuze and Guattari are famous for their critique of metaphor. In Deleuze’s preface to Difference and Repetition, he writes: “We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it (from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus.) We also have a tendency to subordinate it to resemblance (from the point of view of perception), to opposition (from the point of view of predicates), and to analogy (from the point of view of judgement). In other words, we do not think difference in itself ” (1994, xv). With Ralph Savarese, I would argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the need for a politics of difference is activated in the metaphors—or mobile architectings—used by the autistics mentioned above. In their work, metaphor activates a mobility of relations rather than simply being a representation of preexisting concepts. 14 Amanda Baggs, “The Fireworks Are Interesting,” March 5, 2010, http://ballast existenz.wordpress.com/. In an email correspondence, Baggs explains: “When I talk about not matching words to thoughts I mean that when I learned to speak I didn’t understand a single word, or even what language is for. (Which is already outside most people’s experiences because babies understand language before they produce it.) What I had was the ability to look at patterns: ‘When someone makes this set of sounds, someone else makes that set of sounds.’ Over time I developed a complex system of working such things out. By the time I began to understand at least some language, I already had a long time of using words as the solution to a puzzle. Meaning seeped into what I heard over time, and some of what I said corresponded to what I thought, but most of it was still memorized puzzle solutions. . . . Something that helped with poetry though, I think, is that even if words were not much mapped to thoughts, words were somewhat connected to situations. Not in a purely descriptive form. But like noticing the pattern that certain strings of words corresponded well to certain situations. So a lot of what poetry allowed me to do was put those strings of words together.” 15 For autistics who use facilitated communication, communication can only happen when someone is present to facilitate. Because of the severe activation issues, the facilitator is not only there to touch the autistic or hold their hand or elbow but also to sense when they would like to speak. 16 In the film Wretches and Jabberers (Gerardine Wurzburg, 2011), which tracks Larry Bissonnette and Tracy Tresher on their “global quest to change attitudes about disability and intelligence,” it is fascinating how the lyrical rhythm I have come

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to admire and recognize in the writings of those I mention here (DJ Savarese, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and others) is shared by their autistic counterparts in India, Japan, and Finland. This should be enough to convince the detractors of facilitated communication that autistics speak in their own voices. This is not the case with Jamie Burke and Tito Mukhopadhyay, both of whom were already working with typing and writing when they were four. Larry Bissonnette, on the other hand, only learned to express himself by typing in his late forties (though he was a prolific artist long before then). There is therefore clearly a range, but what seems to be the case is that most autistics become capable of expressing themselves in language later than neurotypicals. This can and often does create an unusual relationship to language, which seems to “come all at once” when it does despite the fact that often the autistics speak of not having been able to really understand language beforehand. Sue Rubin, quoted in Autism Is a World, a documentary film written by Sue Rubin, produced and directed by Gerardine Wurzburg, and coproduced by the cnn cable network. Throughout this chapter, I use “emergence” as the coming-into- expression of difference, very much in opposition to the notion of “coming back” that will be highlighted later on regarding children “returning to the world” through language acquisition. Emergence, a keystone concept in process philosophy, connotes the coming into being of an occasion of experience. During a typed interview at an autism conference, an unnamed nine- or ten-yearold boy was asked: “Describe one or two things that people can do to help you.” He responded: “They can have utter respect for diversity, and they can understand that diversity leads a tattered life when not wedded to tolerance.” This interview was initially posted on Autism Diva’s blog http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/ and reposted on Amanda Baggs’ blog at http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/. It is typical of autistics to experience various degrees of discomfort looking at people’s eyes, though the severity of this discomfort varies (I have often had eye contact with DJ Savarese, for instance, but not when speaking to him). This has to do with the sensory overload that the face and eye- contact, in particular, provoke. For some, this is compounded by a degree of face-blindness, or prosopagnosia, a condition that impedes the recognition of people by their faces. Tito Mukhopadhyay writes: “Every face becomes a combination of eyes, nose, mouth and other parts. Yet the lengths and sizes of these parts differ from person to person. Now, can you imagine what a big confusion it will be if I started linking facial parts, with every detail, each one having a different expression, a worried look or a smiling look or a sad look or a puzzled look? How many links I should require to recognize Portia smiling at me? Can you imagine the strain?” (qtd. in Iversen 2006, 80). In a piece entitled “Coming of Age,” Susan Golubock writes: “When I looked at a person’s face, the light reflecting off it made it painful. . . . To look at their face as a whole made me dizzy. The body and facial movements notEs to chaPtEr sEvEn  247

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were too much for me to process. . . . The extra effort plus the added visual input were distracting, so my understanding of what they were saying dropped even more” (qtd. in Miller 2003, 151). Amanda Baggs, with her usual panache, describes being forced to look into someone’s eyes this way: “Okay . . . he’s got to. . . . EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls he’s got to be unaware . . . EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls is he saying something? EyEBalls EyEBalls am I trying to type something? EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls . . . what’s he saying? [shading eyes as if staring at sun] EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls am I saying something? EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls EyEBalls what’s going on?” (May 19, 2010, http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/). Shutdown ensues. Chapter 1 deals with this video. I also discuss it in detail in the concluding chapter, “Thought in Motion,” in Relationscapes (2009). Baggs, In My Language, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc. Many children seem to show signs of autism around age two, and, in some cases, there can be a regression of language acquisition as well as fine motor skills. As mentioned in an earlier note, while in literature on autism this is often called “emergence,” I would firmly situate emergence within the conceptual realm of worlding and place “coming back” within the modality of a return to the perceived norm. Amanda Baggs describes how her poems “write themselves” almost despite language: “They would sort of write themselves. And then I would have to go and look up the words because I didn’t know the meaning. And then the meaning would fit. Other times I wouldn’t be sure of a word in the same way as a misheard song lyric. I guess that’s sort of normal if you learned to spit out combinations of words before you learned what words were . . . but it’s still strange when that happens so blatantly sometimes” (email correspondence, April 18, 2010). This urgency is palpable not only in DJ Savarese’s own writings but also in his desire to assist others in coming to expression through language. He writes: “In the future I hope to encourage students who don’t speak to free themselves through writing” (http://www.reasonable-people.com/writings.html). For Tito Mukhopadhyay, the urgency expresses itself in his focus on publishing. At an autism conference for which he was a keynote speaker (during his first visit to the United States), this is how he responded to the questions about his needs for the future: “A scientist in the back asked: ‘For those of us who are researchers, Tito, what can we do for you?’ Without hesitation, Tito pounded out: ‘I need an artificial voice.’ And when another asked: ‘What are your hopes for the future?’ ‘Get me a publisher,’ was Tito’s reply” (qtd. in Iversen 2006, 48). The poem continues: “Solitude an empty circle / Unassuming, filled with light / Here I linger at the center / Wait untouched by outside worlds / Still and silent solitary / Never moves but ever shines” (Amanda Baggs, unpublished).

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28 This creates what is often called a “writerly” text. When writing creates-with the fragility of the emergence of thought, it beckons the reader to return again and again to the text not simply to return to the content but to experience it in its serial emergence. 29 Baggs, “The Fireworks Are Interesting.” 30 Ibid.

interlude: Love the Anonymous Elements The title of this interlude is a quotation from Ettinger 1993. 1 A color version of this figure is available at 2 Generalizations are of course always dangerous, and it is not my intention to subsume all autistic perception to a few main traits. Instead, what I am proposing are limit concepts of autistic and neurotypical perception, both of which I believe function on a spectrum. Donna Williams describes what might be called “autistic perception” this way: “Perhaps the feeling comes from a time before words, before thought, before interpretation, before competition, before reliance on the conscious mind and before identity, in a time when all new experiences are equal in their worth and there is, as yet, no discrimination and no established sense of boundaries or hierarchy. This is a time when, without boundaries or restriction, one is ‘the whole world’ and everything experienced of that world is an indistinguishable and resonant part of one’s self with no need to explore it as a separate entity” (1998, 12). 3 Donna Williams writes: “Most people perceive objects beyond their grainy, sheeny, reflective, flowing, coloured or opaque appearances, beyond their smooth, raspy, cold, textured tactile experience, beyond the sounds of their chinking, thud-thud, tap-tap surfaces when impacted upon, their sweet, or savoury or chemical tastes or smells, their flexibility, solidness or bounce when bitten into or impacted upon. Most people experience the object before the art of it” (1998, 14). 4 Neurotypical perception is a continuum, with tendencies closer to what I am calling autistic perception in the realms of art, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or in the keen perceptual awareness of new love, to name a few states that might privilege a more processual experience of the world in-forming. I agree with Donna Williams that it is likely that all newborns experience what might be called “pure perception”—the state of rich undifferentiation that could be thought of as an ecological withness of existence—but are trained out of it by a system that, in most cultures, privileges categorization. Williams writes: “As people grow up, there’s a huge pressure not to sense but to use ‘common sense,’ which is to use a system of interpretation” (1998, 34). The point is not to draw a strict differentiation between neurotypical and autistic perception but to empha-

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size certain aspects of perception that are foregrounded in autistic perception and most often backgrounded in neurotypical perception.

eighT. The Shape of Enthusiasm All reproductions of the images in this chapter are thanks to Editions l’Arachnéen, which owns the copyright for all of Fernand Deligny’s maps. They have generously ceded copyright for the use of the images throughout, very much in the spirit of Deligny’s work. The poem by Jim Sinclair (1993) that opens this chapter was originally published as “Our Voice” in the newsletter for Autism Network International (now offline). It was reproduced and posted by Amanda Baggs, August 18, 2010, http:// ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/. 1 Amanda Baggs (2010a) talks of thought as a perceptual field of prearticulation that existis in the between of words. Roy Bedward describes it like this: “I have vision that sees beyond the immediate context and hearing that hears more than just sounds. It is difficult to describe but I can tell you that there is so much more to the universe than you will ever know by just using narrow vision and limited hearing. When you open your senses to all that exists more comes to you than you can ever imagine” (“Communication Makes or Breaks a Life: This Boy’s Life-Saving Typing,” May 2008, http://artfuladventures.typepad.com/artful_ad ventures/meet-roy-bedward.html). 2 Guattari gets this concept from Jean Oury, who is known to have said that normopathy is the most widespread and most incurable disease. 3 For more on the question of continuities between autism (neurodiversity) and the neurotypical, especially in the context of perception and the parsing out of experience, see “Coming Alive in a World of Texture,” in Thought in the Act (Manning and Massumi, forthcoming). 4 Bedward, “Communication Makes or Breaks a Life.” 5 While at La Borde working with Jean Oury and Félix Guattari in 1966, a young autistic by the name of Jean-Marie [Janmari] is entrusted to Deligny by the child’s mother. An immediate bond ensues, and Deligny begins to conceive of a project of taking autistics out of the institutional frameworks of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He commits his life to this project, summing up his commitment in one sentence: “to live in the presence of Janmari” (Toledo 2007, 641). On July 14, 1967, Deligny leaves La Borde with Janmari and a few others to move to Gourgas, a large house in ruins bought by Felix Guattari. Guattari’s project was originally to make of Gourgas a meeting-place for militants, intellectuals, artists, and workers, and to hand over the task of organizing it to Deligny (Toledo 2007, 641). Deligny shied away from this task, preferring to dedicate himself to his own developing project of facilitating an environment for what we would today call neurodiversity.

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6 The first children were sent by Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Emile Monnerot. Since the psychiatric institutions that housed the children closed during the summer vacation, the children could be sent to the Cevennes to Deligny (Toledo 2007, 673). 7 Jean Oury remembers Deligny’s frustrations with the language of psychoanalysis while still at La Borde, particularly in any encounter where patients’ dossiers were foregrounded. For Deligny, what seemed to be most vital was the lived experience of coexistence, not how the patient had been evaluated in an institutional framework: “What matters, he would say, is the project. We could care less about thought” (Oury qtd. in Toledo 2007, 638). 8 “About the tracings—which he calls act-signs—we do not always know whether they concern the adults or the children. The border is mobile” (Toledo 2007, 644). Tracings developed as a way for the caretakers or accompaniers to be in conversation with the autistics, not for the autistics to represent their movements to them. And yet, the tracings are absolutely a collaborative enterprise, a drawing-with of emergent spacetimes of recomposition. The traces, and especially what Deligny calls the “lines of drift” (lignes d’erres), allow the mobile territory to “become seen,” mapping into it its collective resonance. 9 The tracings are a way of learning not to speak “about” autistics in their presence as though they had no language or as though their experience didn’t count. This would only feed the already ingrained institutional habits Deligny wanted to usurp. They were a way to make experience collective, to create a movement-with that could lead the group to see anew. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo speaks of “machines for seeing,” a modality of seeing that does not return to the eyes themselves [le regard ] or language. The tracings “made seen the forms of the human absent from the image of man” (Toledo 2007, 799). Isaac Joseph writes, “The maps [tracings] were an attenuated and aestheticized echo of the work in the presence of the children,” a project to teach the adults how to see the autistics’ lines of drift, “how to see a common territory without subject or language, to see oneself within it (s’Y voir), despite themselves” (qtd. in Toledo 2007, 684). 10 In Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi translates “lignes d’erre” as “lines of drift.” In Dialogues, translated the same year by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, it is translated as “lines of wandering.” I’ve retranslated them here as “lines of drift” to keep the text consistent. Though “erre” does have the sense of wandering, I like the sense of drift as not being necessarily activated by the human but also in the environment, in a movement-with of emergent spacetimes. 11 In “What Children Say,” Deleuze writes: “The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in this who travel through it. The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement. Nothing is more instructive than notEs to chaPtEr Eight  251

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the paths of autistic children, such as those whose maps Deligny has revealed and superimposed, with their customary lines, wandering lines [lines of drift], loops, corrections, and turnings back—all their singularities. . . . A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archeological conception of psychoanalysis. The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception that pertains to persons or objects, the milieus being nothing more than terrains capable of conserving, identifying, or authenticating them. From such a point of view, the superposition of layers is necessarily traversed by a shaft that goes from top to bottom, and it is always a question of penetration. Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one map to the next, it is not a matter of searching for an origin, but of evaluating displacements. Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily go from bottom to top” (1997, 61–64; my emphasis). The quotations from Anne Querrien and Beatrice Han that reference Deligny are for the most part spoken in their own words, not those of Deligny. But they are a poetic paraphrasing of his practice, and insofar as they are written as a tribute to his work, they are, in a sense, the tracings of his thoughts. Deligny’s poetic texts are never “about” the tracings. They take place in a beside that is, in a sense, between the words of the moving drifts. These are tentative words, themselves drifting in a togetherness that creates a complicity between the tracings and the words. This complicity draws out confluences but never seeks to explain or to organize. They orient in the same way the tracings orient. As Toledo writes, “Deligny’s legends (his texts) do not clarify the maps; they intensify their ambiguities” (2007, 800). Deligny’s concept of “camérer” (to camera) is very interesting in this context. Deligny suggests that we have not yet moved into the time of the image, where the image exceeds its representation, exceeds language. “No matter what they say,” he writes, “ours is not the time of the image” (Deligny 1990). See also Deligny’s 1971 film Le moindre geste. Deligny makes much of Janmari’s open circles. He calls them “cernes d’erre,” referring to the growth-line of the tree and to the circling that is not quite a circle, a Nietzschean circling of eternal return perhaps, linking this spiral- circling to the idea of the common or what I am calling the commoning. Australian Aboriginal art and, in particular, the works of Clifford Possum (“The Map Series”) challenge Euclidean mappings, foregrounding something quite similar to Deligny’s lines of drift. For a more sustained engagement with Possum’s work with respect to different kinds of mapping practices, see Bardon and Bardon 2004; Glowczewski 1989; Johnson 2003; Muecke, Benterrak, and Roe 1984; Morphy 1998; and Myers 2002. I have also written about these issues

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in “Relationscapes: How Contemporary Aboriginal Art Moves Beyond the Map” in Relationscapes (2009). 17 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994, 285) explores the idea of the “now here” as an inversion of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.

coda. Another Regard The epigraph for this chapter is from Prince 2004. 1 This definition was coined by Norah Zuniga Shaw with William Forsythe for the Synchronous Objects website, http://www.synchronousobjects.org. 2 William Forsythe, from Forsythe Company rehearsal, Frankfurt, November 2010. 3 Ibid. 4 In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead writes: “To say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time” (1925, 58). 5 One response might be: “but these asymmetrical relations are so dominant that to sidestep them is to not even begin to address the place from whence such an investigation can begin!” A film like Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011) makes this abundantly clear. It seems to me that this issue is nonetheless best returned to through other means than those of identity politics. Movements are restricted in an infinity of ways, and while the fence that separates Kanzi and Prince is a blatant case of the imposition of controls on animals, the more interesting question is how speciations open the way for a different ecology of freedom of movement that affects the human constellation as well, albeit in different ways. Once the question of speciation has unfolded and the counterpoint has been explored, questions of power (and the fact, for instance, that there are asymmetrical notions of freedom that frame the event) become all the more complex. In other words, to not settle the distinction in a vocabulary based only on species might allow us to understand better the complexities—the ecologies—through which to better take care of notions such as freedom of movement, leading, perhaps, to a stronger sense of how an ecology of practices might lead to different practices of animal internment. 6 In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi develops a concept of semblance connected to that of “likeness” as I explore it here. He writes, “The ‘likeness’ of things is a qualitative fringe, or aura to use a totally unpopular word, that betokens a moreness to life” (2011b, 44). 7 Deleuze and Guattari write: “Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans’s

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8

9 10

11

horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse- omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse ‘can do’” (1987, 257). There is a large literature on “gender dysphoria” and autism. This literature tends to take gender identity as a given, ignoring the rich literature by autistics that describes their own experience of gender and the difficulty of fitting into preexsiting categories. In Women from Another Planet—Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Miller writes: “For some of us here, our lives, outlook, and behavior don’t have much of a sense of gender at all. I myself live a somewhat femme life but it feels in some sense detachable, like a costume. I was an androgynous kid and most clearly perceive the world in a non-gendered way” (2003, 38). See Miller 2003 for a variety of perspectives on gender and engendering. The French “jouée” is translated to “acted” in the English. See Bergson 1941 (181). In Whitehead, mentality and appetition are two different concepts, though aligned. He writes: “In physical experience, the forms are the defining factors: in mental experience the forms connect the immediate occasions with occasions which lie beyond. The connection of immediate fact with the future resides in its appetitions” (1929, 32). I reduce the concept here to the force of appetition simply to foreground how mentality is not of the mind but of the “hunger” of the process. Jim Sinclair writes: “In my own experience, sensory sensitivities can be painful and can prevent enjoyment of some aspects of normal social involvement—but I gain so much beauty and meaning from the way my senses work! My hearing is oversensitive and this is bothersome at times, but I wouldn’t change it because I don’t want to lose the colors of voices and the tactility of music. My vision is not just oversensitive but is scrambled and difficult to use. I would be cautiously interested in exploring therapies to enable me to have more functional use of my vision. The reason for caution was illustrated a couple of years ago when I tried wearing Irlen lenses. After an adjustment period, I found that the tinted lenses did indeed make certain utilitarian visual tasks easier—but they also messed up my hearing. I couldn’t see sounds anymore. I came up with the compromise solution of getting the tinted lenses put in flip-up frames, so I could have them flipped down when I needed efficient vision to do mundane things, and flip them up out of the way when I wanted to focus on something personally meaningful without being distracted. This still seems to me like it would be the best solution, but unfortunately the flip-up frames are not sturdy enough to withstand being used by a person with my motor planning problems. After the fourth or

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fifth time that I broke them, I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore. For me, it is more adaptive to find ways to compensate for my poor visual processing than to sacrifice meaning in perception by wearing the lenses all the time” (http://www.jimsinclair.org/). 12 Anne Corwin, http://www.existenceiswonderful.com/.

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Index

Abram, Davis, on the more-than human, 228 n. 2 Absolute, 24, 169; and alterity, 71; and difference, 71, 77; and movement, 13–14, 54, 136, 233 n. 14; and the occasion, 25; and recognition, 52; and self-enjoyment, 215; and the singular, 176–77; and tracings, 251 n. 8 Abstract, xv–xvi, 18, 28, 168, 212; and autistics, 10; and choreography, 76; and concrete, 2, 6; and lines of drift, 199–200; and movement, 85; and objects, 94; and occasions of experience, 156; and plane of experience, 62–64; and proposition, 77–78; and recognition, 65; and surface, 51; and totality, xii Action, 11, 77, 80, 99, 101, 105–7, 109, 144, 226 n. 17; field of, 102, 207–8, 217; human, 150 Activation contours, 131–32 Activist philosophy, 74–76, 142, 185, 221, 237 n. 1 Activity, xi, xvii, 9, 16, 18, 20, 28, 35, 37, 54, 60, 74, 81–82, 97, 103, 148, 176, 185, 209, 217; and autistic per-

ception, 180; and choreography, 76, 121; and “classical” autism, 226 n. 17; and difference, 65; and event, 25, 144, 216; force of, 84; and forgetting, 60; Forsythe on, 140; and the image, 172; and incipiency, 76; of individual body, 207; motor, 159, 226 n. 17, 239 n. 13; and movement, 191; and the past, 53; and political potential, 143; and proposition, 77–78; of reachingtoward, 2; refrain of, 109; of regard, 206; and relation, 10, 59, 110, 129; of relational field, 207; and rhythm, 87; of shaping, 174; of spacing, 135; and thought, 103; and time, 79. See also Bare activity Actual, 20–21, 37, 135–36, 156, 165, 176–79; and becoming, 238 n. 4; cues, 104; event, 110; and experience, 157; and form, 187; and image, 43; and immanence, 44; and inact, 25; landings, 108; and memory, 57; more-than, 87; and movement, 39–40, 83–84, 97, 209; occasion, 7, 24, 88, 106, 176, 225 n. 13, 238 n. 7; and representation, 109; virtual and,

Actual (continued) 16–17, 22, 24, 56, 58, 60, 88, 107, 109, 179, 209, 224 n. 10, 230 n. 3, 235 n. 19 Aesthetics: and death, 59; and ethics, 148, 182; and the political, 35–37 Affect, 5, 26–30, 36, 131, 147, 160, 169, 175–76, 191, 209, 212, 253 n. 5; 253 n. 7; and ecology, 78; and emotion, 68; and empathy, 235 n. 19; and the face, 42, 54; and feeling, 21, 26, 224 n. 4; and force, 77, 213–14; as force of becoming, 30; and image, 44, 60; and intensity, 8, 180; and memory, 56; and the political, 234 n. 18; potential, 132; and process, 223 n. 1; and recognition, 42; of a recollection, 56; sheets of, 57; as supramodal, 6; as transductive force; 26; and tuning, 115. See also Force; Vitality affect/forms Affective attunement, 7–9, 11, 23, 24, 32, 165–66, 171, 206–7; and milieu, 26–27 Affective tonality, 20–21, 23, 46, 48, 51, 53, 106, 134, 156–59, 164, 166, 171, 187, 189, 205–7, 210–11, 221; and affective attunement, 11; of “a” life, 62; and the imagescape, 44; and language, 156; of spacetime, 98; and speciation, 229 n. 1; and surface, 174, 233 n. 14; and technicity, 33 “A” life, xvii–xxi, xxiii, 19–21, 24, 30, 44–47, 54, 60–62, 65, 68–70, 72–73, 146–47, 170–71, 214–15, 233 n. 14; and life, 21–22, 24, 29; and lifeliving, 29; and lures for feeling, 23; multiplicity of, 27; and the preindividual, 17. See also Life; Life-living Alignment/aligning, 12, 102–10, 122– 23, 136–37, 140–42, 192, 207, 210–11,

268 inDEx

241 n. 10; collective, 108, 113, 122; and event, 225 n. 13; of event-space, 115; and field of experience, 169; of mentality and appetition, 254 n. 10; misalignment, 218; nonalignment, 214, and technique, 31. See also Counterpoint; Cues/cueing Allez, Eric, 18 Amodality, 5–6, 132; of experience, 132; and pure experience 11; and shaping of experience, 187; and vision, 181 Animal, xxi, 145, 187, 206, 209, 212–13, 215, 220–21, 235 n. 28, 253 n. 5, 253 n. 7; becoming-animal, 236 n. 34 Anthropomorphic, 116, 219–20 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 58 Appetition, 21, 23, 24, 214–16; and the body, 29; and mentality, 254 n. 10 Arakawa, Shusaku, and Madeline Gins, 104–6, 143–46; on architectures, 122–23; on organisms that person, 144; and politics, 147–48 Architecture/architecturing, 102–4, 109–13, 115–23, 125, 128, 130, 144, 146, 200; animation, 103; of light, 131; of movement, 135; ontogenetic, 100; and potential, 103; procedure, 145; proto-architecture, 107, 109, 121, 139, 141; surrounds, 147. See also Mobile architecture Architectural body. See Body, architectural Art, 59, 110, 140, 178–79, 181, 211, 234 n. 18; Australian Aboriginal, 252 n. 16; exceeding form, 101; event, 114, 124; and hospitals, 146; and object, 118, 174; participatory, 116, 124–32, 136; and perception, 249 n. 3, 249 n. 4; and politics, 36; and the problem, 126 Articulation, 34, 44, 159, 164–67, 185,

190, 201; double, 5, 7, 11. See also Prearticulation Assemblage, 2, 23, 32, 145–46, 211; and becoming, 110; and the body, 30, 31–32; collective, 14; and the desiring machine, 52; and the fourth person singular, 53; machinic, 114, 254 n. 7; of normative behavior, 188 Associated milieu, 2–4, 6, 8–11, 22, 27, 30, 34, 77, 101, 107, 134, 144, 148, 153, 155, 164, 169–70, 212; of experience, 187; of life-living, 203; of relation, 191, 200. See also Milieu Association, 11, 23, 32, 57 Attention, 90, 92, 107–10, 122, 139, 141–42, 151–52, 168, 189, 220; attention-with, 135; force of, 137; hyperattention, 26; modes of, 220. See also Dance of attention Attunement/attuning, 7, 18, 21, 23–24, 27, 32, 76, 98, 122, 131–32, 152, 167, 170, 185, 196, 200, 207–9, 211; and ecology, 219. See also Affective attunement Audio-vision, 56 Aura, 53, 253 n. 6 autcoM, 125, 128, 241 n. 1, 245 n. 9 Autie-type, 155–60, 162–66, 168, 185, 193, 244 n. 7, 245 n. 9 Autism, xxi–xxii, 8, 127–28, 131, 149– 71, 177, 180–81, 185–95, 200–201, 212, 217–19, 225 n. 15, 225 n. 17, 226 n. 18, 238 n. 13, 243 n. 2, 248 n. 23, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 9; “classic,” 180; community, 125; and eye contect, 247 n. 20; and facilitated communication, 160, 244 n. 8, 246 n. 16; and “functioning,” 243 n. 2; and gender dysphoria, 254 n. 8; and language, 247 n. 17; and maps, 252 n. 11; and mindblindness, 150; and neurodiver-

sity, 10; and relation, 9–10; and tracings, 251 n. 8; and writing, 155. See also Autistic perception; Mindblindness; Neurotypical Autistic perception, xxii, 151–54, 162, 174, 177–78, 180–82, 199, 218–20, 249 n. 2, 249 n. 4; and language, 221; and neurotypical, 250 n. 3. See also Microperception; Neurotypical; Perception Autistwork, 181–83 Autistwork n2 (Ettinger), 172–83 Bach, J. S., 56, 58–59, 73 Back-gridding, 50, 82, 232 n. 12 Background/backgrounding, xxii, 8, 14, 33, 69, 113, 212; and force, 35, 39; and foreground, 7, 24, 51, 54, 61, 175 Baggs, Amanda, 9–12, 149–50, 155, 163–64, 168, 226 n. 18, 244 n. 8; on autistics, 152–53; on experience, 178; on eye contact, 248 n. 20; on identity, 243 n. 2; on interaction, 161; and language, 159, 161, 163–66, 168, 177–78, 246 n. 14; on patterns, 165; on perception, 153, 178; on personhood, 242 n. 1; on sensation, 154, 178; on thought, 166–67, 178, 250 n. 1; and writing, 248 n. 25. See also individual works Bare activity, 45–46, 59–61, 64, 69, 72, 156, 171; and territory, 235 n. 25 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 152; on mindblindness, 149–50 Beauty, xiii, 27, 59, 254 n. 11; terror and, 51, 58–59 Becoming, 20, 26, 29, 32, 46, 77, 79, 145, 156–57, 180; and the actual, 238 n. 4; and assemblage, 110; becomingwith, 185, and the body, 59–65, 78,

inDEx  269

Becoming (continued) 84, 129, 140, 203; collective, 109; of continuity, 23–24, 87–89, 96; of difference, 88; double articulation of, 4–5; and environment, 134; events of, 47, 78; and experience, 89; and the face, 44; force of, 148, 195–96; and the human, 4; of the if-then, 37–38; and the image, 45; and language, 166; and life, 22; matter of, 165; and the metaphysical surface, 50; of micromovements, 15; motion, 39; and movement, 207; and politics, xix; and relation, 98 Bedward, Roy: on attention, 189; on thought, 250 n. 1 Being, xi–xii, xxiii, 22, 27, 30, 46, 168, 223 n. 2, 225 n. 12; and affect, 26, 28; and the face, 71; human, xx; and individuation, 3; phase of, 16; sense of, 4; and species, xviii; uncanniness of, 80; and worlding, 2, 6, 11 Benjamin, Walter, on fascism, 235 n. 10 Bennett, Jane: on anthropomorphism, 220; on vibrant matter, 228 n. 4 Bergson, Henri, 190; on instinct, 213; on intuition, 189–90; on memory, 84; on rhythm, 87, 89 Bick, Esther, 1–3, 223 n. 1, 223 n. 2, 224 n. 5; on second skins, 224 n. 3 Biogram, 59–61, 235 n. 24. See also Bare activity; Diagram Biopolitical. See Political, biopolitical Biopower, 61 Bissonnette, Larry, 153, 166–68, 244 n. 8, 247 n. 17; on language, 164 Blair, R. J., on empathy, 226 n. 17 Blanchot, Maurice, 200 Body, 16, 31, 41–43, 46, 60, 66, 81, 83, 85, 89, 108–10, 119, 122–23, 129, 135– 37, 147, 153, 159, 170, 177, 181, 184–

270 inDEx

86, 199, 208–10, 212, 215, 217, 219, 223 n. 1, 224 n. 9; and affect, 27–30; architectural, 104–5; and assemblage, 30, 31–32; and autism, 153; becoming and, 59–65, 78, 84, 140, 203; and choreography, 59, 76; and collective, 27, 114; and conscious, 103; and counterpoint, 103; dancing, 38–39, 105, 207; and ecology, 17, 27, 31, 78, 84; and emergence, 21; and environment, 125; and event, 18; and exfoliation, 229 n. 8; and feeling, 22; as field of relation, 17, 31; and folding, 103; and form, 31; group, 122; human, 33, 50, 54, 72, 76, 107–8, 136, 146; and in-act, 25; and the individual, 20, 59, 100, 104, 134, 136, 207; inflection of, 87; and information, 19–20; and milieu, 26; and the more-than, 228 n. 1; and movement, 13–15, 211, 237 n. 2; and an object, 32, 104; and one-many, 108; and perception, 80, 238 n. 8; precomposed, 76; as relational process, 19; sensing, 125; as society, 22–24; and space, 134, 140; and spacetime, 122; and surface, 111; and transindividuation, 29; and technique, 32–33; and worlding 2, 5, 9–10, 132, 154, 167–68, 170. See also Bodying; Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, on the body without organs Bodying, xxiii, 10, 12, 14–15, 19–20, 35–36, 95, 125, 134–37, 183, 208–9; choreography and, 59; and counterpoint, 103; and environment, 166; and form, 78; as lure for feeling, 23; and milieu, 26–27; and movement, 144; process of, 200; and proposition, 78; self- enjoyment of, 22; and space, 136; and technique, 31. See also Body

Bonobo chimpanzee, xx–xxi, 204–5, 208, 212, 217. See also Kanzi Brinks, Esther, 1–3, 223 n. 1–3 Burke, Jamie, 244 n. 8, 247 n. 17 Cake (band), 58 Cartography, 81, 191, 199. See also Map/ mapping Chopin, Frédéric, 61 Choreographic object, 92–97, 100, 110, 113, 116, 127, 130. See also Object; Objectile Choreography, 64, 74–81, 84–85, 87, 89–123, 136–39, 142, 146, 170–71; 237 n. 1, 237 n. 2, 240 n. 4, 241 n. 10; of bodies, 59; and bodying, 59; and the future, 207; and process, 140, 200. See also Dance; Proposition, choreographic; Thought/thinking, choreographic Chunking, 219–20; unchunked experience, 221 Circulation, 146–47 Clark, Lygia, 96, 240 n. 7 “Classic” autism. See Autism, “classic” Co- composition, xxi, xxiii, 9, 14–15, 20, 22, 33, 74, 81, 87, 98, 110, 125, 129, 135, 139, 141, 151, 153, 159, 165, 167– 68, 190, 193, 195, 208, 216, 229 n. 8. See also Composition/composing Collective, 24, 27, 35–37, 44, 59, 94, 102, 107–11, 127, 130, 159, 166, 240 n. 4; alignments, 113, 122; assemblage, 14; attunement, 112, 132; and body, 27, 114; choreography, 59; enunciation, 35, 109; experience, 241 n. 11, 251 n. 9; Israeli, 234 n. 18; iteration, 98; and language, 168; movement, 59–60, 98, 105, 108, 110, 207–8; process, 136; resistance, 94; resonance, 251 n. 8; sensibilities, 228 n. 2; and writing, 160

Collective individuation, xix–xx, 27–30, 35, 37, 95, 104–6, 108, 113–14, 123, 146–47, 168, 170–71, 235 n. 19; life and, 60. See also Collective; Individuation Collusion, 17–20, 23, 57; and fascism, 53; force of, 24; of micromovements, 83; and movement, 86; of the remarkable point, 22 Color, 17, 24–25, 46–48, 51, 56, 59, 111–14, 118–19, 131–32, 151–53, 164, 168, 178; and light, 66, 174–76, 182; perception of, 180 Coming-to-act, 68, 176, 187–88, 199 Coming-together, x, xviii, 6. See also Composition/composing Commons/commoning, 192, 201–3, 252 n. 15 Communication, 150–51, 155, 159, 163– 64, 169, 185, 189, 201, 205, 217; and form, 167; and process, 20 Composition/composing, ix–x, 22, 29, 110, 114–15, 119, 125, 128–30, 139, 156, 169, 176, 187, 195, 201, 208, 220; and the body, 32–33; composing-with, 159–60, 162– 65, 167–71, 181, 189–90, 195; and counterpoint, 103; and ecology, 78; and events, 217; and experience, 89; expression of, 21, 139; force of, 176; and habit, 96; and information, 19; matrix, 141; movement, 136; precompose, 145; and relation, 155; spacetimes of, 92, 103–4; and technicity, 39–40; and walking, 85. See also Cocomposition Concept, x–xv, xvii–xix, xxi, 9, 16, 36, 69, 110, 114, 118, 129–30, 132, 139, 157, 167 215, 217–18, 246 n. 13, 247 n. 18, 252 n. 11, 254 n. 10; ontogenetic, 171 Concern, xiii–xiv, 22, 37, 143, 150, 153, inDEx  271

Concern (continued) 154, 156–57, 171, 205–6, 210, 214–15, 220–21; of the event, 146 Concrete, 217; and abstract, 2, 6; and in-act, 212; and individuation, 141– 42 Concrescence, 21, 24, 88, 143–44, 214, 216, 238 n. 7 Conditions, 3, 11, 17–18, 53, 79, 83, 94, 96–97, 106, 110, 113, 121, 124, 126– 27, 130, 141, 148, 166, 170–71, 176– 77, 200, 206, 230 n. 3; for bodying, 134; enabling, 33; for play, 132; set of, 22, 35, 142, 144. See also Enabling constraints Conscious, xiii, 53, 87, 122, 214, 216, 242 n. 4; and the body, 103; and choreography, 75; and control, 182; of experience, 96; and knowing, 24; mind, 240 n. 2; and perception, xxiii, 84; and play, 214; quasi- conscious, 10–11; self- consciousness, 113, 212; subconscious, 230 n. 1; and the transcendental field, 47. See also Nonconscious; Preconscious; Unconscious Content, 3, 12, 22, 36, 38, 46–47, 53, 56, 66, 142, 187–88, 196, 199; body as, 60; of experience, 27, 189; and expression, 7, 9, 11, 66; and the face, 71–72; and feeling, 4; of the image, 198; and language, 193, 195; morethan of, 167, 189; quantitative, 218; and representation, 142; style of, 140 Contour, 12, 66, 187–88, 192, 198–99, 203, 218; activation, 131–32, 187, 193, 203; of experience, 11 Contrast, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 65, 76, 83–84, 89, 91; and the becoming of continuity, 88; and pattern, 165–66, 168; and proposition, 77–78, 81 Corwin, Anne, on chunking, 219 Counterpoint, 102–4, 107, 123, 136,

272 inDEx

207–14, 216–18, 220–21, 240 n. 4, 253 n. 5; and dance, 107, 241 n. 10. See also Aligning/alignment; Cues/ Cueing Creative advance, 23–24, 28, 213, 214– 15, 220 Creativity, xvi, 30, 35, 187, 215–16; and counterpoint, 211; and eternal objects, 176; and life, 72–73; and perception, 174; and play, 128–32; and process, 74–75; and technique, 31 Cues/cueing, 102–10, 122, 136–42, 207; and objectiles, 92. See also Alignment/ aligning; Counterpoint; Primes/ priming Cut/cutting, xxii, 12–14, 38, 49, 77, 81, 89, 106, 111, 118–19, 156, 166, 175, 200, 202, 209, 221; cutting-across, 27, 52, 54, 146, 163, 169–70, 208; and decision, 105, 115, 238 n. 7; of the interval, 47; and rhythm, 86. See also Decision Cvejic, Bonjana; on choreography, 237 n. 2 Dance/dancing, 14–15, 33, 38–40, 55, 73, 75, 79–84, 91–92, 97, 102–10, 119, 136–40, 144, 184–85, 195, 207– 8, 210, 216–17, 237 n. 1, 238 n. 8, 241 n. 10, 242 n. 2; and the becomingbody, 62; and the body, 101, 122, 136, 207; and counterpoint, 220; and the dance of attention, 168; of the environment, 9, 178; of form, 147; and individuation, 171; and language, 157; and sculpture, 116; techniques for, 34; of victory, 58; and the what else, 99. See also Choreography; Dance of attention Dance of attention, 107–9, 114, 128, 139–46, 148, 151, 157, 159, 168–71, 185, 189, 210. See also Diagram/Dia-

gramming; Diagrammatic praxis; Form, commanding; Mobile architecture Dark precursor, 45–46, 57, 62 Death, 59–60, 145, 146, 148; and “a” life, xviii; of the collective, 28; fight to, 51, 53, 69; in life, 162; of potential, 151 Decision, 81–83, 85–86, 89, 105–6, 115, 122, 238 n. 7 Defenders, Part 2, The (Forsythe), 94–95, 240 n. 4 Déjà-felt, 78–79, 84, 137 Deleuze, Gilles, xiii, 146–47; and actual occasions, 225 n. 13; on the actualvirtual image, 230 n. 3; on “a” life, xvii, 19, 44; on assemblage, 253 n. 7; on the as yet unthought, 232 n. 10; on the baroque, 103; on coming-intoact, 68; on creating life, 72; on Deligny, 191; on the diagram, 29, 235 n. 24, 238 n. 6; on ethology, 228 n. 5; on fabulation, 44, 231 n. 6; on forgetting, 57; on immanence, 44; on the individual, 16; on the intercessor, 231 n. 6; on maps, 251 n. 11; on the memorandum, 55; on metaphor, 246 n. 13; on the metaphysical surface, 47; and the middle, ix; on the nomadic, 53; on now-here, 253 n. 17; on objectile, 239 n. 1; on the outside, 29; on the power of the false, 43, 240 n. 6; on recollection, 73; on singularity, 54–55; on time, 50; the transcendental field, 45–46; on transcendental memory, 56. See also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, xiv, 102, 213, 235 n. 25; on absolute movement, 13–14; and affect, 21; on animals, 235 n. 28; on becominganimals, 236 n. 34; on the body

without organs, 31; on collective assemblages, 14; and concept, 167; on content, 7; on expression, 7; on faciality, 72; on fascism, 64; on lines of flight, 200–201; on metaphor, 246 n. 13; on the plane of immanence, 233 n. 17; on practice, 199; on the political, 70; on recollection, 73; on responsibility, 235 n. 28; on segmentarity, 202; on style, 210; on tracing, 202; on the transcendental error, xi; on work working, 101 Delingy, Fernand, 190–96, 200–201, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 6, 251 n. 7, 251 n. 9, 252 n. 12, 252 n. 16; on camérer, 252 n. 14; on the imperceptible, 199; on language, 193; and maps, 203, 252 n. 11; on open circles, 252 n. 14; on sensation, 198; and traces, 251 n. 8, 252 n. 13; on “we,” 195 Dephasing/phasing, 4, 6, 9, 17–20, 24–25, 29, 65, 104, 106, 108–9, 134, 141, 143, 146–47, 157, 195; affective tonalities and, 7; of art, 114; and contrast, 77; and event, 142; of expression, 169; force of, 144; and individuation, 22; of movement, 88; and technicity, 33; and technique, 35; and threshold, 28; of vitality affects, 8. See also Multiphasing Derrida, Jacques, 124 Desire, 21, 52–53, 150, 213; and collective, 94; and microfascism, 64 Desiring machine, 52–53, 213 Deterritorialization, 235 n. 25; of the body, 1; and the face, 44; and segmentarity, 202 Diagram/diagramming, 29, 81, 133–39, 142–47, 157; and Deleuze, 235 n. 24, 238 n. 6; and force, 80, 83, 87, 121, 140, 142; in-forming of, 144; and objects, 114; and surface, 109. See also inDEx  273

Diagram/diagramming (continued) Biogram; Dance of attention; Form, commanding; Mobile architecture Diagrammatic praxis, 107, 109, 133–39, 143–47, 157 Difference, 7, 24, 35, 56, 65, 71, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 91, 105, 123, 164, 171, 207–8, 211; and the body, 18; and choreography, 76, 96; and emergence, 247 n. 18; ethics of, 9; event of, 106; forces of, 22–23, 77; and the interval, 88; and language, 169; networking of, 190; and the occasion, 77; perceptual, 219, qualitative, 33; of repetition, 56, 69, 105; territories of, 214; tonal, 60; unfolding of, 238 n. 7 Differential, 19, 23, 24, 30, 56, 74, 88–90, 128, 234 n. 18; of movement, 77; and relations, 71, 141 Dimension/Dimensionalizing, 14, 16, 20, 38–39, 104, 106, 119, 135; 144–45, 209, 230 n. 1, 231 n. 5; infradimensionalizing, 135–36, 144–45; and landing sites, 241 n. 9; multidimensional, 12, 104 Disability, 153, 243 n. 1, 243 n. 2, 246 n. 16; community, 164; and politics, 227 n. 19 Dream, 42, 44–45, 51, 178, 230 n. 1; daydreaming, 163; memory and, 53 Drift/drifting, 52, 55, 57, 169, 191, 193, 195, 199–202. See also Lines of drift Duration, 13, 84, 89, 96, 107, 110, 179, 190, 193, 209; and the body, 13; and choreographic thinking, 103; and event, 238 n. 4; of experience, 104, 187; and force, 39, 109; and intensity, 201; and the interval, 88; and movement, 39–40, 79; and process, 82; and rhythm, 87; and time, 80, 94;

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and trace, 181; and the transcendental field, 47; and the virtual, 97 Ecology, 19, 25, 26–27, 40, 46, 78, 81, 93, 97, 110, 146, 151–52, 169–71; and attunement, 219; of autistic perception, 162; of the body, 17, 27, 31, 34, 78, 84, 174; and choreography, 76, 87; of diagrammatic praxis, 134; and event, 89, 98; of existence, 148, 249 n. 4; of experience, 84, 94; and the human, 76; of language, 168; and life, 148; of life-living, 100, 218; of movement, 78, 183, 253 n. 5; of movement expression, 101; of movement-moving, 135; and object, 95; participatory, 110–23, 130, 185; of relation, 101, 126, 181; of the relational field, 228 n. 2; of sensation, 131; and technicity, 32–35; and worlding, 174, 182. See also Milieu Ecology of practice, 19, 26, 132, 152–53, 160, 168, 170, 201, 219, 221, 228 n. 5, 253 n. 5; and autism, 150; in-act of, 74; and objects, 32. See also Stengers, Isabelle Elasticity, 34, 142, 185; and body, 134; of movement, 86; of relation, 242 n. 2; of spacetime, 136, of territory, 212; and time, 82, 89, 141 Emergence/emerging, 2, 6–7, 10–12, 22, 28–29, 41, 44, 48, 58, 81, 83, 92, 108, 114–15, 133, 139, 143, 146–47, 152–54, 168, 179, 182, 195–96, 202, 210–11, 218, 225 n. 12, 247 n. 18, 248 n. 24; and affective tonalities, 210; of associated milieu, 9, 40; and the body, 17–18, 21, 42, 60; and choreography, 121; and collectivity, 111; and concepts, xiii; and concern, 106; and counterpoint, 213, 216; and the dance of attention, 141–42, 159; and the

diagram, 144; and difference, 96; and ecology, 26; and events, 50, 75, 156, 171; and event-time, 80; and experience, 59, 205; and feeling, 60; and field, 104, 170, 219; force of, 174, 177; and improvisation, 35, 37, 213–14; and life, 45, 203; and life-forms, 199; and milieu, 27; and multiplicity, 134; and occasions, 25, 216; and propositions, 97; reemergence, 25, 101, 109, 201; and relational movement, 217; and relations, 200; and remarkable points, 47; and the self, 4–5; and spacetime, 137, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 10; and speciation, 187–88, 200; of thought, 249 n. 28; and tracings, 191, 193; and the transcendental field, 47; and vitality affects, xx, xxii–xxiii; of “we,” 195 Emperical, 232 n. 9; memory, 55. See also Radical empericism Enabling constraints, 37, 77, 98, 104, 107, 109, 111–16, 126, 145, 166, 203, 211 Encounter, xx–xxiii, 2, 43, 75–76, 92, 126, 131–32, 151, 155, 174–75, 179, 182–83, 186, 190, 196, 205–9, 211–12, 218–20, 251 n. 7; face-to-face, 36, 54, 70–71; and the in-act, 142; locus of, 200; missed, 195; and objects, 94; reencounter, 133–34; social, 161; with space, 96 Engendering, 2, 24, 55, 212, 228 n. 3, 254 n. 8 Enola Gay, 235 n. 20 Enthusiasm, 113, 118, 185–90, 192–93, 196, 201; and love, 183. See also Shape of enthusiasm Enunciation, 37, 127; collective, 35, 109 Environment, 4, 9–12, 37, 76, 87, 91–93, 105, 108, 110, 113, 122–31, 139, 150, 154–55, 164, 168, 178, 200,

219, 225 n. 15, 251 n. 10; architecting of, 100; and becoming, 134; and the body, 31–32, 125, 153; and bodying, 166; of change, 135; choreographic, 104; and field, 219; in the making, 26, 98; and milieu, 167; nonhuman, 220; and object, 153, 167; participatory, 110, 125; and performance, 97; and the political, 37; and relation, 11, 98, 116, 153–54; and speciation, 187; and technique, 35. See also Ecology Eternal object, 176–78, 180, 190 Eternal return, 28, 144, 146, 182–83 Ethics, 168, 170; and aesthetics, 148, 182; and difference, 9; of Levinas, 70–71; of the more than human, 153; and the political, xix–xxi; and politics, 72; of recognition, 235 n. 19; of relation, 152–53, 156–57, 170–71 Ettinger, Bracha, 172, 175, 179, 181; on remembering, 181; on tracing, 182 Event, xv, 3–4, 7, 21, 25, 50–51, 54, 56–57, 60, 68, 74–76, 78–96, 100, 105–6, 108, 110–11, 114–16, 119–22, 139–48, 156, 168, 171, 179, 187, 189– 90, 195–200, 205–18; aestheticopolitical, 36; and art, 124–32; of becoming, 47; and the body, 18; collaborative, 35; concern for, 143; and duration, 238 n. 4; of experience, 153; and fabulation, 44–45; and the face, 45; folding/unfolding of, xvi, 12; force of, 23; immanent, 7, 158; and in-act, 25; and life, 21–22; and love, 183; macro- event, 27; and memory, 57; and milieu, 26–27; and movement, 39, 104, 122; as node of activity, 25; novelty and, 24; and occasions, 225 n. 13; and proposition, 96; singular, xvi, xviii, xx, 11, 18, 21, 25, 32; and Society of Molecules (SenseLab event), 36–38; and space, 104, 114– inDEx  275

Event (continued) 15, 118, 128; and the subject, 208; subjective form of, 23; and technicity, 33; and time, 11, 44, 50, 96, 98, 145; time-slip of, 95; and virtual, 6–7; and vitality affect, 10 Event-time, 79–80, 84, 90, 92, 95, 98, 106–8, 110, 121, 129, 142, 147–48, 179 Existence, modes of. See Modes of existence Experience, xv–xvii, 3, 6–8, 20–21, 46–47, 61, 65, 78–79, 81, 83–89, 91–96, 128, 134–35, 143, 154–60, 163–64, 166–69, 174–78, 180–81, 185, 187–90, 198–99, 205, 207, 215–16, 218–21, 223 n. 2, 225 n. 13, 235 n. 19, 254 n. 10; and “a” life, 44; animal, 213; and autism, 201, 251 n. 9; and bloc of sensation, 102; and the body, 153; choreographic, 103; and chunking, xxii; collective, 251 n. 9; consciousness of, 96; content of, 27; and decision, 105; and double articulation, 6; durations of, 104; events of, 153; of failure, 124; and feeling, 224 n. 4; field of, 19, 21, 30, 50, 94, 111, 178, 203, 217; folds of, 69; of form, 38; ineffability of, 68, 132; and intensity, 215; and language, 9, 193; and lines of drift, 252 n. 10; in the making, 2, 8, 10, 21, 43, 53, 60, 68, 77, 79, 139, 191–92, 203; mapping of, 196; milieu of, 171, 187, 199; of the more-than, 8, 100–101, 129, 165; nexus of, 25; and the notyet, 182, 199, 225 n. 15; of the now, 142; occasion of, 14, 18, 22–23, 25, 156, 215, 247 n. 18; of participation, 115; personal, 60; preconscious, 186; processual, 249 n. 4; and relation, 9–10; and relational movement, 134; and representation, 159; and sensa-

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tion, 9; shaping of, 187; sheets of, 43, 65; spacetimes of, xvi–xvii, xx, xxii– xxiii, 12, 45, 81, 91, 98, 104, 127, 134, 136, 153, 193, 208; and surface, 102, 109; and technicity, 33; then-now of, 59; and time, 50, 80, 96, 98; virtual, 5; virtual-actual of, 232 n. 7; in the watching, 69; of the what else, 103. See also Pure experience Experimentation, 85–86, 92–96, 111, 114, 119, 124, 128, 140, 146, 199, 242 n. 1, 243 n. 4; and choreographic propositions, 80; ecology of, 35; field of, 113, 131; and spacetime, 136; and technique, 34; and Temple Grandin, 239 n. 13 Expressibility, 3, 5, 11, 43, 156, 158–62, 164–68, 176, 179, 185–86, 193, 195, 221; movement, 81, 108, 140 Expression, 3, 26, 33, 34, 66, 121–22, 139, 141, 143, 153–54, 156–59, 161– 71, 176, 185–87, 190–91, 195, 199, 210–11; and the body, 31, 129; and choreography, 76, 80; of composition, 21, 139; and content, 7, 9, 11; and events, 50, 89, 139, 148; and fabulation, 44; and the face, 45–46; force of, 45, 168; form of, 235 n. 25; and the here-now, 179; and lifeliving, 42, 201; and love, 183; of a making-place, 106; and manyness, 43; and movement, 83–84, 91, 101, 104, 108, 140, 211; of a nowness, 25; ontogenetic, 135; otherness of, 140; and the political, 142; of process, 89; and proposition, 77; of relational field, 128; of the surface, 54–55; of transcendental field, 234 n. 18; of the world, 13 Fabulation, 44–45, 48–49, 52, 84, 95, 231 n. 6

Face, 42–46, 54, 59–60, 62–66, 70–72, 184, 195–96, 234 n. 18, 236 n. 32; human, 220 Facilitated communication, xxi, 155, 160, 239 n. 13, 244 n. 8, 245 n. 9, 246 n. 15. See also Communication Fascism, 46, 53, 64–70, 232 n. 10, 235 n. 23, 235 n. 27 Feeling, 20–21, 47, 104, 135, 144, 156– 59, 167, 177–81, 183, 190, 196, 211, 224 n. 4; and affect, 26; already-felt, 198; and content, 4; and event-time, 142; feel-with, 68, 156–57, 167–68, 170; field of, 25; and the force of form, 102; immanent, 6; intensity of, 60; of life-living, 201; lures for, 23–24, 26; more-than of, 183; movement-moving, 102; and proposition, 78, 238 n. 7; and seeing, 51, 68, 141, 175–76, 178–79, 181, 187, 211; singularity of, xvii, 11; surface of, 65; and telling, 56; and time, 81. See also Thinking-feeling Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 45, 52 Field/fielding, xi, 6, 22, 54, 76, 86, 94, 100–106, 108, 135–37, 141, 153, 156– 58, 168–69, 174–76, 181–83, 185, 187, 195, 198, 203, 208–10, 212–13, 215, 218–19; of action, 217; of affective tonality, 156; of alignment, 109; choreographic, 79, 81, 103, 105, 107, 136; of counterpoint, 211; of dance, 107; of difference, 24; of ecologies, 94; of emergence, 141, 170; of events, 50; of experience, 19, 21, 30, 50, 94, 111, 178, 203, 217; of experimentation, 111–13, 131; of expression, 170, 186; of feeling, 25; and force, xix, 11–12, 97, 128, 136, 165, 174, 180, 182, 237 n. 2; generative, 235 n. 19; of individuation, 114; infradimensional, 145; immanent, 3, 23;

of intensity, 10; of metastability, 19, 30, 157, 185; of mobility, 110; of the more-than, 180; and movement, 40, 101, 208; of movement-moving, 82, 209; of participation, 126; of patterning, 165–66; and perception, xxii–xxiii, 25, 175–76, 181, 187; of the political, 37; of potential, 28, 177; and process, 182; of protoarchitectural, 121; qualitative, 131; of recollection, 49–50; of resonance, 21, 25, 38, 47–48, 81, 86, 89, 143, 177, 185; of spacetime, 136; and technicity, 33–35; of tendencies, 140; of thought, xiii; and threshold, 28; transcendental, 44–50, 52, 57, 59–60, 64, 234 n. 18; and vibration, 217. See also Milieu; More-than; Relational field Folding/unfolding, 2–3, 54, 60, 66, 83, 88–89, 97, 102–3, 111, 141, 164, 172– 81, 183, 203, 208; of the actual, 136; of artwork, 124–26; and choreography, 102; and dance, 105, 107; of difference, 238 n. 7; and environment, 126; of events, 12, 92, 146, 190, 206, 209; of event-time, 129; of experience, 69, 168; of expressibility, 43; of form, 87; and the fourth person singular, 53; image(-scape), 42, 55; of individuation, 16; infolding, 174–76; of language, 164; of movement, 39; of an occasion, 94, 205; of perception, 85, 179–81; of propositions, 77; of space, 97; of surfaces, 107; of time, 37, 56, 207; of vision, 175; and walking, 84–85; and writing, xiii–xiv. See also Worlding Folds to Infinity (Manning), 111–21, 125– 31, 136, 241 n. 14 Folman, Ari, 43, 61, 64, 232 n. 11; on Ariel Sharon, 236 n. 30; on filmmaking as therapy, 230 n. 4; on inDEx  277

Folman, Ari (continued) movement, 232 n. 8; on objectivity, 236 n. 29; on Waltz with Bashir, 230 n. 1. See also Waltz with Bashir Force, 1, 4–5, 10, 15, 27, 32, 65, 88, 104, 136, 141, 144, 163–64, 168, 172, 177–83, 187, 193, 196, 211, 218; and activity, 84; and affect, 26, 28–30, 77, 213–14; of “a” life, 20, 27–28, 44–45, 146, 171; of appetition, 216; of attention, 137; bare active, 69; of becoming, 16, 30, 148, 195–96; and the body, 31, 83; centrifugal, 174; and choreography, 75–76, 100–101; co- compositional, 139; of collusion, 24; and composition, 25, 176; of concepts, 217; of contrast, 77; and counterpoint, 103; and dance, 108; of dephasing, 144; and diagram, 29, 80, 83, 87, 121, 140, 142; of difference, 22–23, 77; of duration, 39, 109; of enjoyment, 201; of eventness, 23; experience of, 174; of expressibility, 193; of expression, 45, 156; of fabulation, 44; and feeling, 21; and field, xix, 11–12, 97, 128, 136, 165, 174, 180, 182, 237 n. 2; and improvisation, 35; and in-act, 25–26, 78, 142; of the infinite, 143; of life, 17, 20–21, 25–26, 44, 60, 146–47, 170; of life-living, 6, 21–22, 25–26, 148, 188, 200, 214; of light, 175; of the more-than, 89, 105, 147–48, 196; and movement, 39, 87, 136, 167, 217; of movement-moving, 76, 78; of the not-yet, 187, 229 n. 1; and objects, 95; ontogenetic, 174; of the outside, 29; and the past, 33; of preacceleration, 8, 191; of the political, 74; of potential, 44, 146; and proposition, 77, 114; qualitative, 34, 79; relational, 8, 69, 100, 136, 167, 176, 178;

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of seeing-feeling, 179; and speciation, 208, 229 n. 1; taking form, 18, 23–24; and technicity, 34–35, 37, 39; of thought, 15, 214, 221; and time, 38, 89; and transindividuation, 25; and transversal, 169; virtual, 108, 139, 176. See also Affect Force of form, 14, 23, 26, 29, 31, 33, 39, 81–82, 88–90, 102, 109–10, 121, 131, 134, 142–43, 147, 174, 177, 179; and artwork, 101; and events, 50; and movement, 139 Foreground/foregrounding, 4, 5, 8–9, 11, 17, 57, 76, 80, 109, 189; of affective tonality, 205; of “a” life, 147; and background, 7, 24, 51, 54, 61, 175; of body, 135; of cueing, 102; of force-form, 142; and individuation, xi; and the metaphysical surface, 46; of movement, 128, 206; of political techniques, 234 n. 18; and reachingtoward, 2; and technicity, 38; and technique, 179; of the world, 219 Forgetting, 43, 45, 47, 51, 55–60. See also Memory Form, xix, 3, 5, 14–15, 21, 26, 30, 33, 65, 74, 80–81, 87–89, 102, 109–10, 119, 133, 140–42, 144–47, 168–69, 172–76, 178–80, 182, 185–88, 191, 196, 210, 254 n. 10; actual, 187; and artwork, 101; and the body, 31, 38, 129; and bodying, 78; commanding, 139, 142, 171; dancing of, 147; dynamic, xii, 12, 143, 190, 211, 216, 238 n. 9; and environment, 10; and the event, 50; experience of, 38; of expression, 235 n. 25; and fabulation, 44; and function, xi, xxii; incipient, 139; of life, 170, 199, 203; of life-living, 200; and memory, 53; the more-than of, 38, 170, 190; and movement, 82–83, 86, 135; and ob-

jects, 95–96; and the power of the false, 43; and relation, 12, 69, 74; singularity of, 34; and speciation, 229 n. 1; and spiral, 39; subjective, 21, 23, 25, 143, 158, 210, 215; undoing of, 38. See also Force of form; Matter; Taking-form Form-taking. See Taking-form Forsythe Company, 78, 137, 140, 238 n. 5 Forsythe, William, 14, 34, 80–83, 87, 92, 96, 99, 136–37, 140, 211, 238 n. 5, 253 n. 1; on activation, 140; on alignment, 241 n. 10; on choreography, 75–76; on the choreography object, 92; on counterpoint, 102, 207; on cues, 104; on dance, 75–76, 216; on memory, 86; and overarticulation, 38–39; and rhythm, 239 n. 13; on sensation, 39; on time, 80; on timeframes, 207. See also individual works Foucault, Michel, on fascism, 235 n. 17 Frame/framing, 22, 42, 75, 146, 167, 178–79, 205–9, 212–13, 237 n. 1, 253 n. 5; of existence, 178; of expectation, 214; reframe, 217 Frugone, Alberto, on light, 174 Future/Futurity, 6, 24, 27, 54, 70, 80, 88, 106, 184, 189; activity, 37; and actual entities, 22; anterior, 53; and becoming, 37–38; and the body, 20; and choreography, 104, 207; and cues, 105, 136; events, 212, 217; and event-time, 108; of experience, 95; future-passing, 57; imagescapes, 51; immanent, 40; in the making, 45; and memory, 179, 184, 186, 195; and movement, 216, 221; of movementmoving, 87, 137–39; and occasions, 24; and the past, 33, 35, 42, 49–50, 54, 85–86, 95–96, 104, 110, 166, 185;

and the present, 32, 50, 84, 139, 142, 207, 217–18; and remembering, 137; and the spiral, 39 Gender, 17, 64, 212–13, 228 n. 3; and identity, 254 n. 8 Gil, José, 38; on exfoliation, 39, 229 n. 8; on total movement, 13–14 Google Scholar, 75 Golubock, Susan, on face-blindness, 247 n. 20 Gorilla-like, xx, 207–8, 211, 213–14, 217–18 Gormley, Jeffery, 76 Grandin, Temple, 226 n. 18, 239 n. 13 Guattari, Félix, 64, 188, 200, 228 n. 5; and actual occasions, 225 n. 13; on choreography, 76; on the desiring machine, 52; on fascism, 64; and Jean Oury, 250 n. 2, 250 n. 5. See also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Habit, 36, 46, 76, 91, 108, 192, 215, 220; and composition, 96; contrast of, 83; and invention, 37; and life, 21; moreness of, 191; and movement, 39, 92, 113, 135, 216–17; and selfconsciousness, 113–14; of thought, x, xiii, 46 Haffner, Nik, 80–82 Haute couture, 129–30 Hay, Deborah, 76; on cells, 237 n. 3 Here-now. See Now, the, here-now/ now-here Holding-in-place, 122–23, 145, 148 Human, 2–3, 8, 10–12, 21, 22, 46, 54, 64, 75, 116, 129, 148–52, 154, 157, 161–62, 164, 168–71, 185, 188, 190, 201, 203, 206, 208, 212, 215, 217, 220–21, 235 n. 19, 253 n. 5; action, 150; and becoming, 4; and the body, 33, 50, 72, 107–8, 136; and choreoginDEx  279

Human (continued) raphy, 76; and event, 98; expression, 45; and the face, 44; frame, 111; human-oriented, 98, 167; infrahuman, 71; intention, 141; and lines of drift, 251 n. 10; and the morethan, xix–xxiii, 9–12, 76, 81, 87, 89, 105, 136, 144, 146–48, 152–53, 164, 183, 195, 200, 207, 220; and movement, 101, 122; and the nonhuman, 132, 170, 225 n. 15; and object, 128; and relation, 151; and speciation, 187 Identity, 4, 16, 17, 64, 70, 243 n. 2, 246 n. 13, 249 n. 2, 252 n. 11; gender, 254 n. 8; and politics, 208–9, 234 n. 18, 253 n. 5; self-identity, 94; of thought, 232 n. 10 Image(-scape), 46–51, 54–57, 61–62, 68–69, 172–79, 182, 185, 196, 233 n. 14; actual-virtual, 230 n. 3; and affect, 60; and becoming, 45; content of, 198; and the desiring machine, 52; folding, 42; movement and, xix, 44; and object, 180–81; and representation, 174, 252 n. 14; of sensation, 57; of thought, 233 n. 17; time of, 252 n. 14; and writing, 157 Immanence, xii, 3–4, 44, 140, 145–46, 169; and the event, 83, 106, 126, 156–57, 214; and feeling, 6; and field, 23, 76; and the future, 40, 45; and importance, 143; interval of, 141–42; and life, 30; and movement, 82; of object, 92; plane of, 15, 61, 233 n. 17; of possible worlds, 106; and proposition, 77, 98; pure, 54; and shapeshifting, 134; and shaping, 182; and thought, 166–67; and transcendence, 45. See also Virtual Imperceptible, 199. See also Microperception; Perception

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Importance, 143 Improvisation, 35, 37–38, 107–8, 111, 127, 207, 211, 213, 216 In-act, 24, 25–26, 78–79, 89–90, 143, 166, 185, 201, 209, 212, 216; of ecology of practice, 74; force of, 142; and the interval, 88; of shaping, 189; of worlding, 218 Incipiency, 6, 7, 32, 35, 39, 81, 85, 135, 152, 170; and action, 106; and activity, 76; and architecturing, 121; and associated milieu, 3; and becoming, 157; and cartography, 191; and choreography, 109, 114, 119, 171; and cues, 108; and diagram, 134, 145; and encounter, 174–75; and event, 77, 92; and experience, 187– 88; and expressibility, 158, 164, 193, 195; and force of form, 102, 110; and form, 139; of mobile architecture, 108; and movement, 82, 84–86, 104, 121, 141, 207; and patterning, 166; and the political, 142; and potential, 141; and relation, 18, 69, 221; tendencies, 140; and territory, 214 Incompletion, 216, 218 Individual, x–xi, xiii, 29–30, 59, 69, 98, 121, 156, 168, 188, 210, 219; and affect, 27–28; and the body, 20, 59, 100, 104, 134, 136, 199, 205, 207, 215–17; and choreographic objects, 96; and collective individuation, 35; the face, 45, 70; and the group, 10; and the human, 76; and individuation, 24; and life, 60; and a multiphasing process, 24; and multiplicity, 35; and the other, 147; positioning, 109; and the preindividual, 17; scenarios, 114; and singularities, 53; and speciation, xviii, xx; and transduction, 18. See also Individuation Individuation, x, xxiii, 2–3, 5, 8, 11–12,

16–19, 24, 26, 30, 37, 81, 134, 140–42, 147, 153, 156, 188, 224 n. 11; and affect, 27–28; and autism, 150; and the becoming-body, 60; and the body, 30, 122; and dance, 171; and dephasing, 22; field of, 114; and the individual, xi, 24; infra-individuation, 146–47; and movement-moving, 87; and the preindividual, 24; process of, 24; and technicity, 34–35; and thought, 169; transcendental field of, xii. See also Collective individuation; Individual; Preindividual; Simondon, Gilbert Ineffable, the, 5, 45, 47–50, 57, 59, 66–69, 72, 157, 164, 167–68, 170–71, 181, 189; and autistic perception, 177; of experience, 132; and expressibility, 193; of expression, 190; and the face, 70; of language, 157, 170; and the more-than, 42, 165–66, 188; quasiineffable, 157; and trauma, 174, 180 Inflection, xv, xvi, 83, 92, 93, 102, 122, 126, 182; and architecture, 123; of bodies, 87; points of, 102, 141; and process, x; and proposition, 77, 79; and space, 104; of the wrist, 34 In-formation/in-forming, 20, 143, 163, 166, 169, 186–87, 249 n. 4; and the body, 26; and diagrams, 142, 144; and event, 144, 208, 210; and environment, 76; and experience, 164, 189; force of, 21; and language, 190, 193; and milieu, 26, 209; and movement, 39, 88; and objects, 32; and the past, 33; and space, 134; and technicity, 35 Infradimensional. See Dimension/ dimensionalizing, infradimensionalizing Ingression, 176–77, 214, 217–18 In My Language (Baggs), 9, 11–12, 161, 225 n. 16

Inside, 45, 47, 54, 245 n. 8; and outside, xi–xiii, 2, 7, 50, 201, 224 n. 5, 232 n. 10 Intensity, 4, 11, 35, 39, 84, 134–35, 141– 42, 157, 181, 185, 187, 193, 221; and activation, 140; and affect, 8; affective, 180; of attending, 157; and the body, 101; of color, 175; and duration, 201; and event, 139; and experience, 215; of feeling, 60; and force, 179; of language, 156; of a moving in-time, 97; and perception, 174; and the preindividual, 147; quality of, 7; resonant, 142; and shaping, 152, 182; of a trace, 179; of variation, 139; of vitality forms, 187 Interaction, 1–3, 9–11, 64, 87, 126, 129, 132, 149, 220, 225 n. 15, 240 n. 4; flat, 231 n. 5; human, 11, 149–50, 152, 161–62, 171; local, 129, 241 n. 2; time of, 124; and touch, 124 Interval, 2, 8, 47–48, 55, 56, 78–90, 109–10, 134, 136, 140, 146, 167, 185, 208, 224 n. 7; of the decision, 105; and desiring machines, 52; of eventtime, 108; for forgetting, 57; of immanence, 141–42; of life-living, 182; and the limit, 54; and movement, 88; multiplicity of, 135; relational, 141; and technicity, 34, 40; of time, 176; and tracings, 196; virtual, 84 Introjection, 1, 223 n. 1, 223 n. 2, 224 n. 5 Intuition, 189–90, 192; and play, 214 Invention, 35, 37–38, 81, 108, 111, 119, 129, 144, 164, 180, 214; and dance, 107; mode of, 145; and movement, 40, 208; and time, 95; and tracings, 192 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, xvii–xix, 70. See also Sabra and Shatila massacre Iversen, Portia, on coming into language, 161 inDEx  281

James, William, xii, 74, 143; and pure experience, 3, 157, 232 n. 7; on relations, 220; on the terminus, 242 n. 5; on time, 96 Joseph, Issac, on tracings, 251 n. 9 Joy, 25, 174, 180, 185 Kant, Immanuel, xii Kanzi, xx–xxi, 204–8, 211–13, 216–21, 253 n. 5. See also Bonobo chimpanzee Kearns Miller, Jean, on gender, 254 n. 8 Klein, Melanie, 223 n. 1, 223 n. 2 Klien, Michael, 76 Knowing, 24, 181, 196; knower/known, 171; knowing-with, 181, 183 Krumins, Daina, 150 La Borde (clinic), 200, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 7 Lafrance, Marc, 224 n. 5; on introjection, 223 n. 1 Lamarre, Thomas: on movement and anime, 233 n. 15; on the superflat, 230 n. 5 Landing sites, 11–12, 105–8, 122–23, 136, 227 n. 22, 241 n. 9 Langer, Suzanne, 139; on life-living, 6; and virtual feeling, 11 Language, xx, 3, 5, 9–10, 66, 137, 140, 150, 153, 155–71, 184–85, 188–96, 201–3, 213, 217–18; and autistic perception, 221; and autism, 251 n. 9; and the body, 47; and choreographic thinking, 103; everyday, x; and experience, 9, 193; gorilla, 204, 206; human, 149; and image, 252 n. 14; of movement, 207; nonhuman, 206; and the not-yet, 187; and proposition, 77; and representation, 157, 193, 252 n. 14 Lepecki, André, on choreography, 237 n. 1 Levinas, Emannuel, 70; on alterity, 72;

282 inDEx

on the face, 70–71; on the other, 71; on Sabra and Shatila massacre, xix Life, 21–22, 28, 45, 47–48, 50, 60, 69, 145–46, 148, 150, 152–55, 157, 161, 171, 178, 187, 199, 201, 214–15; and affect, 30; and “a” life, 24, 29, 147; and art, 140; and collective individuation, 60; creating, 72–73; as a diagram, 29; enthusiasm with, 185– 86; force of, 17, 20–21, 25–26, 60, 146–47, 170; forms of, 170, 199, 203; of the human body, 54; and immanence, 30; intensity of, 60; limit of, 61; and love, 183; and lures for feeling, 23; and memory, 57; politics for, 148; preindividual, 60; procedure for, 148; surface of, 66; and transcendence, 50. See also “A” life; Life-living Life-living, xxiii, 25, 72–73, 140, 145– 48, 154, 170, 185, 188, 191, 195–96, 199–201, 203, 214–15, 219–20; and “a” life, 29, 54, 60; ecology of, 100, 218; and expression, 42; force of, 6, 21–22, 25–26, 148, 188, 200; interval of, 182; and lines of drift, 199; and memory, 50; and the transcendental field, 47 Light, 8, 10, 23–24, 27, 34, 41, 46, 61, 98, 131, 139, 152, 177, 180; and color, 66, 174–76, 182 Likeness, 208–9, 212, 253 n. 6 Limit, xi, 17, 54, 57, 64–65, 113, 140, 145, 180, 196, 202–3, 238 n. 9; of articulation, 44; and attention, 141; bare-active, 59–60, 72; of counterpoint, 136; and enabling constraints, 111; and ethics, xix–xx; of expressibility, 186; and expression, 170; of the future-passing, 57; of individual, 28; of intensity, 39; of language, 164; of life, 29, 44, 61; of the now, 46, 60; of perception, 150; of pure experi-

ence, 56; and relation, 8; and shaping, 183; and the skin, 1–2; of the sonorous continuum, 65; of technical vocabulary, 35; of thought, 46, 232 n. 9; of touch, 125. See also Threshold Lin, Jacques, 192–93 Line, xviii, 12, 17, 83, 106, 125, 144, 174–75, 177, 180, 191–93, 195, 199– 203, 238 n. 6, 239 n. 14, 252 n. 11; byline, 188; color-line, 175, 182; lines of flight, 201. See also Trace/tracing Lines of drift, 189, 192–99, 202, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 9, 251 n. 10, 252 n. 11, 252 n. 16 Love, 183 Machine, 104, 111, 214; and assemblage, 113; baroque, 102–3; counterpoint, 217; desiring, 52–53, 213, 237 n. 2; and eternal object, 180; of movement, 233 n. 15, 237 n. 2; resonance, 84; war, 64, 237 n. 1 Macropolitics, 62, 65, 69–70, 170–71 Manning, Erin. See individual works Many-one. See One-many Map/mapping, 60, 129, 137, 191, 193, 195–99, 203, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 11; and the body, 177; and choreography, 81, 109, 122; Euclidian, 196, 252 n. 16; and perception, 150; premapped, 125, 139, 145, 198; and thought, 246 n. 14; visual, 133. See also Trace/Tracing Massumi, Brian, 45; on activist philosophy, 74; on affect, 28–29; on bare activity, 61; on cueing, 105–6; on desire, 213; on individuation, 141–42; on likeness, 253 n. 6; on play, 213, 214; on the present, 106; on territory, 235 n. 25; and thinking-feeling, 215; on “what and “how,” 232 n. 9 Matter, 3, 19, 30, 54, 188; and the body, 31–32; of fact, 165; and form, 19–20,

30; and manner, 165; and more-than, 32. See also Form Maurice, Catherine, on the loss of language, 162–63 McCord Museum (Montreal), 116–21 Mediation, 35 Mentality, 215–16, 218; and appetition, 254 n. 10 Memory, 42–60, 62–64, 66, 73, 84–86, 142, 175, 230 n. 1, 232 n. 6, 234 n. 18; and cues, 105, 137; and the future, 179, 184, 186, 195, 238 n. 8; rhythm of, 94; and shadow, 181; and terminus, 144; and the unconscious, 252 n. 11. See also Forgetting Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Whitehead, 228 n. 2 Metaphor, 155, 157–58, 195, 245 n. 9, 246 n. 13 Metaphysical surface, xix, 44–47, 50, 57, 62, 66, 68–69. See also Transcendental, field of Metastability, 53, 85–86, 224 n. 7, 238 n. 9; and field, 19, 30, 157, 185 Microfascism, 46, 52–54, 59, 64–65, 70, 232 n. 10. See also Fascism Micromovement, 15, 39, 82–83, 85, 87. See also Dance; Movement Microperception, 15, 83, 85, 87, 94, 97, 188. See also Perception Micropolitics, 52, 62, 64, 70, 97, 229 n. 3, 237 n. 1. See also Political, the; Politics Milieu, xii, 26, 142, 152, 168, 187, 191, 200, 208–12, 228 n. 5, 242 n. 2, 251 n. 11; and body, 26; and choreography, 76; and environment, 167; of experience, 171, 187, 199; of interaction, 9; and invention, 34; of lifeliving, 203; of movement, 122; and the now-here, 201; and an object, 32, 167; of relation, 21–22, 32, 77, inDEx  283

Milieu (continued) 97–98, 121–22, 164; and technicity, 34–35, 40; and virtual, 8. See also Associated milieu; Ecology; Field/fielding; More-than Mindblindness, 149–52, 154, 170, 188, 225 n. 15, 244 n. 7. See also Autism; Autistic perception Mobile architecture, 81, 83–84, 100– 102, 104, 107–16, 119, 121–23, 125, 128, 131, 136 139, 141, 144–46, 158, 185, 201, 210. See also Dance of attention; Diagram/diagramming; Diagrammatic praxis; Form, commanding Modality, xv, xxii, 32, 77 109, 132, 137, 146, 155, 157, 163, 190, 202, 248 n. 24; of attending, 143; of attention, 122, 127–28, 135; of becoming, 180; cross-modal, 5, 10, 128; of encounter, 75; of experience, 159; of expression, 161, 163; of the in-act, 142; of invention, 144; of life-living, 140, 154; of the line, 202; of orientation, 196; of perception, 179; of relation, 147, 152; of seeing, 251 n. 9; of the senses, 153–54; of subtraction, 155; supramodal, 6; of writing, 155. See also Amodality Modes of existence, 140–41, 146–48, 179, 196, 210–11, 213, 215, 219, 221 Modulation/modulating, 30, 147, 227; continuous, 135; and the event, 141; and the objectile, 239 n. 1 Molecules, 36–38, 228, n. 1, 229 n. 4. See also Society of Molecules (SenseLab event) More-than, xi, xiii, 2, 25, 30, 42, 57, 78–79, 82–83, 87, 100–101, 109, 126, 130, 132, 143, 146, 153, 156–59, 161, 164–71, 174, 176, 180, 182, 187–88, 193, 200, 203, 208–9, 212, 214–16,

284 inDEx

228 n. 2; of the actual, 87; and actual occasion, 24; of the body, 17–20, 31, 153, 228 n. 1; and bodying, 22–23; of the content, 167, 189; of the dance figure, 140; and death, 59; desire for, 21; and event, 139, 141; of experience, 8, 100–101, 129, 165; of expressibility, 195; of expression, 163; force of, 89, 147–48, 196; of form, 38, 179, 190; human, xix–xxiii, 9–12, 76, 81, 87, 89, 105, 136, 144, 146–48, 152–53, 164, 183, 195, 200, 207, 220; of image, 181; and the individual, 35; and individuation, 24; and the ineffable, 42, 165–66, 188; of language, 195; of life-living, 200; and matter, 32; and movement, 14–15, 88, 136, 207, 221; and nexus, 23–24; of object, 81; of the past, 33; of perception, 175, 180; politics of, 70; of position, 140, 212; and the preindividual, 16–17; of seeing, 175, 180; of subtraction, 156; and surface, 157; and technicity, 32, 34; of technique, 33, 35–36, 79; and time, 96; of touch, 132; of vision, 181. See also Field/fielding; Milieu Motif, xiii, 208–10, 213–17, 221 Movement, 5, 38–40, 64, 66–68, 78, 80–92, 94, 96–98, 100–105, 108, 110, 118, 121–23, 128–40, 144–45, 152, 164, 169, 175, 182, 185, 187, 190–92, 196, 203, 206–9, 211–14, 216–19, 221, 232 n. 8, 233 n. 17, 237 n. 2, 253 n. 6; aberrant, 44–45, 50, 54, 232 n. 8; absolute, 13–14, 54, 136; and activist philosophy, 74; and anime, 233 n. 15; barely, 119; and bodying, 144; collective, 59–60; differential of, 77; ecology of, 78, 183, 253 n. 5; and event, 45, 76, 78–79; force of, 39, 87, 136, 167, 217; human, 101;

and the image, xix, 44; and language, 158, 207; and lines of drift, 252 n. 10; maps of, 191; movement-across, 51, 53, 60, 201, 233 n. 14; movementwith, 186, 190, 193, 207; and the object, 252 n. 11; and politics, 74–75; and points of inflection, 102; premovement, 134; process of, 175, 238 n. 9; pure, 113; and representation, 140; and rest, 59; singular, 137; and technicity, 33, 207; and technique, 38; of thought, xiii–xiv, 14–15, 31, 46, 81, 103–4, 136, 166–67, 170, 234 n. 18; of time, 44, 79, 97, 206; total, 13–15, 108, 209; unfolding of, 39; and vibration, 174; vortical, 172. See also Micromovement; Movementmoving Movement-moving, 14–15, 34–35, 40, 79, 83, 85–89, 96, 98, 100, 102, 106– 10, 122, 131, 136–39, 141–42, 185, 203, 207, 210–11, 216–17; and cues, 107; ecology of, 135; field of, 82, 209; force of, 76, 78; now of, 105; technicity of, 38 Movement-with, 251 n. 9 Mukhopadhyay, Soma, 160 Mukhopadhyay, Tito, 151, 153, 160, 168, 220, 244 n. 8, 247 n. 16, 247 n. 17; on autism, 151–52, 153; on communication, 248 n. 26; on connection, 219; on empathy, 152; on face-blindness, 247 n. 20; on motor activation, 226 n. 17, 243 n. 4; on sensing, 243 n. 5; on sound, 154; on thought, 178 Multiphasing, 4, 24, 26, 102, 106, 182; surfaces, 108. See also Dephasing/ phasing Multiplicity, ix, 8, 10, 12, 23, 53, 134, 169, 219; of “a” life, 27, and the body, 19, 208; and cues, 107; and individuality, 35; of intervals, 135; of nows,

80; and an object, 32; of rhythm, 90; of sensation, 153; of time-slips, 86; of “we,” 195. See also One-many Nature, 214–15; nature-affect, 236 n. 28 Negative prehension. See Prehension, negative Neurodiversity, 132, 162–63, 227 n. 19, 247 n. 19, 250 n. 5 Neurotypical, xxi, xiii, 10, 127, 132, 149, 154, 161–64, 170, 177, 217–19, 247 n. 17; and autistic perception, 250 n. 3; and perception, 177, 249 n. 4. See also Autism; Autistic perception Nexus, 23–24, 217; ecological, 97; of experience, 25, 97; of intervals, 89; of occasion, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 183; on forgetting, 156–57; on life, xxiii, 45, 148, 187; on memory, 56–57 Nihilism, 57 nnnn (Forsythe), 140 Nonconscious, 3 Nonhuman, xx–xxi, 72, 108, 219–20; and human, 132, 170, 225 n. 15; language, 206; movement, 122 Nonrelational, 10 Nonsensuous perception, 94, 179, 211. See also Perception Normopathic, 127, 188–89, 195, 219, 226 n. 17 Not-yet, the, 35, 169, 175, 177, 179, 195, 216; and experience, 182, 199, 225 n. 15; force of, 187, 229 n. 1; and the human, 200; and language, 187; and soundings, 185; and vitality, 187 Novelty, 24, 215–16; of life-living, 220; and object- ecology, 95 Now, the, 6, 14, 16, 19, 23, 25, 30, 32, 39, 43, 45–48, 51, 55, 57, 59–61, 68, 73, 78–80, 86–87, 89, 96, 142, 144, 160, 164, 206; of articulation, 167; inDEx  285

Now, the (continued) here-now/now-here, 127, 179, 182– 83, 200–201, 253 n. 17; of movementmoving, 105; of the occasion, 143; then-now, 59, 94, 109 Object, x, xiii, 32, 47, 74, 91–96, 103, 113–14, 119–21, 131, 152, 156, 167– 68, 174, 176–82, 185, 189, 205, 218, 223 n. 3; and art, 118, 174; and body, 104, 153; and the diagram, 114; and events, 50, 98; and field of relation, 25; and human, 128; and image, 180–81; and immanence, 44; and love, 183; and movement, 252 n. 11; object-oriented, xxii, 98, 114, 167, 186; and occasion, 23; oriented scenarios, 114; and relation, 96, 223 n. 1, 240 n. 7; screen-based, 99–100; as self- contained, 2; and subject, 70, 219–21, 235 n. 19 Object, eternal. See Eternal object Objectile, 74, 92–93, 96, 103, 110, 114, 239 n. 1 Occasion, 78, 80, 86, 89, 105, 121, 127, 143, 158, 205–6, 210–11, 214, 216–17, 254 n. 10; actual, 17, 24, 88, 106, 176, 225 n. 13, 238 n. 7; and choreography, 76; of experience, 14, 18, 22–23, 25, 156, 187, 215, 247 n. 18; nexus of, 218; as node of relation, 23; and proposition, 77, 97; and singular (-ity), 25, 209; unfolding of, 94 Ogden, Thomas, 3, 8, 225 n. 15 One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe), 99, 102–7, 109–10, 136, 139, 238 n. 4 One-many, ix–x, xiv–xvi, xix–xxiii, 27, 30, 87, 185, 207; and the body, 17–19, 27–28, 108; of expressibility, 43. See also More-than; Multiplicity; Singular(-ity) Operative solidarity, 141

286 inDEx

Organisms that person. See Person (verb), organisms that Organization, 3–4, 6, 99, 164, 181, 225 n. 12; of bodies, 81; and choreography, 76; collective, 36; and dance, 107; of the “I,” 201; immanent, 20; plane of, 62–64 Other, the, xi–xii, xix–xx, 71–72, 94, 123, 147, 188, 193, 201–2, 235 n. 19; and expression, 140; self and, 3, 7, 219, 235 n. 19, 244 n. 7 Otherness: of expression, 140; nourishment of, 228 n. 2; of worlding, 169 Oury, Jean, 200, 250 n. 2, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 7 Outside, xi, 14, 17, 28–30, 46, 83, 86, 182, 211; and the event, 208, 210, 212, 214; and fascism, 64; and inside, xii– xiii, 2, 7, 50, 201, 224 n. 5, 232 n. 10; and language, 161–62; of movement, 122; the nonhuman, 220; the occasion, 238 n. 7; and pure process, 89; and quantifiable time, 79; and thought, 167; time, 79, 184, 185, 190 Overarticulation, 38–40, 82, 85, 87, 216. See also Preacceleration; Technicity; Technique Palazzi, Maria, 99 Participation, 92, 96, 110–32, 241 n. 9, 241 n. 10; and artwork, 136; and ecology, 185; and language, 159, 169–70 Past, 6, 22, 33, 45, 80, 84, 107, 179–80, 184; and cues, 105; and the déjàfelt, 79; and experience, 95; and the future, 35, 42, 49–50, 54, 85–86, 95–96, 104, 110, 166, 185; and objects, 94; and occasions, 24; and the power of the false, 43; and the present, 44, 47–48, 52–53, 56, 94, 218; pure, 53; and transcendence, 50

Pathologic, xxi–xxiii, 151–52, 186, 188, 190, 198, 200–201. See also Autism Pattern/patterning, 165–68 Peirce, C. S., on person (verb), 242 n. 4 Perception, 11, 29, 84–85, 94, 136, 150, 154, 156–60, 167, 174–83, 218–19; and art, 249 n. 3; and amodality, 5–6; and the body, 80, 238 n. 8; and conscious, 84; and field, xxii–xxiii, 25, 175, 181, 187; and form, 96; halfsecond lapse, 239 n. 3; mode of, xxii, 220; neurotypical, 177, 249 n. 4; sense, 235 n. 23; surface of, 109; and synesthesia, 128; threshold of, 106, 115. See also Autistic perception; Microperception Person (verb), 104–5, 110, 242 n. 4; and architecture, 122; organisms that, 144–45 Phase-space, 4, 225 n. 12 Phasing. See Dephasing/phasing Phenomenology, xii, 228 n. 2 Photocopy machine, 173, 179, 182 Place, xvi; making-place, 106; placetaking, 92; and tentative constructings, 122–23; and worlding, 248 n. 24 Play, xxiii, 93–95, 111–19, 125–32, 151, 204, 206, 211–18; and language, 163, 207; of rhythm, 157; of sensation, 56; of worlding, 160 Political, the; xviii–xx, 46, 59–60, 62–70, 73, 143; and aesthetics, 35–36; and “a” life, 45; and art, 147; biopolitical, 147; force of, 74; and In My Language (Baggs), 9; and potential, 142; and Society of Molecules (SenseLab event), 36–37; techniques, 234 n. 18; and touch, 125; transcendence of, 71 Politics, xxi, 46, 60–61, 65, 73–74, 142– 43, 147–48, 170; and “a” life, xviii; and art, 37; and autism, 153–54; and

bare activity, 61; and becoming, xix; disability, 227 n. 19; ethics and, 72; and identity, 208–9, 234 n. 18, 253 n. 5; of language, 164; in the making, 70, 75; problem of, xix; of procedurality, 147; of recognition, 64; of representation, 171; and technicity, 35; of touch, 125, 126, 224 n. 8; and Waltz with Bashir, 233 n. 18. See also Macropolitics; Micropolitics; Protopolitics Politics of Touch (Manning), xvii Position, xiii–xiv, 36, 38–39, 82 Possum, Clifford, 252 n. 16 Potential, 22–23, 38, 64, 70, 74, 78, 133, 145, 151, 156, 158, 165, 170, 174, 176, 180, 187, 190, 209; affects, 132; and assemblage, 145; of the bacterial, 146; as body, 60; dephasing, 144; and desire, 52; and the desiring machine, 53; and the diagram, 29; and and event, 89, 114; and experience, 91; of expressibility, 160; field of, 28, 177, 182; force of, 146; of the future, 95; and landing sites, 106; molecular, 64; and movement, 34, 39, 88, 135, 140, 211; multiphasing of, 26; and objects, 32, 103; of the past, 33; and the political, 142–43, 147; and procedure, 148; and relation, 76, 122, 155; for recomposing, 139; and technicity, 33; and technique, 35–36; and vibration, 177 Power of the false, 43, 84, 231, 240 n. 6 Practice, 32–33, 35, 36, 40, 81, 107– 8, 139–40, 199, 208, 237 n. 1; aesthetico-political, 37; of animal internment, 253 n. 5; and art, 116, 125, 252 n. 16; of attunement, 98; of becoming, 29; choreographic, 74–77, 112, 109, 136; cultural, 231 n. 5; of diagnosis, 151; of dressing, 129–30; inDEx  287

Practice (continued) and language, 156; and movement, 92, 102; of tracing, 193. See also Ecology of practice Preacceleration, 5, 8, 39, 82–87, 108, 134–35, 140, 158–59, 163, 166, 207, 216, 225 n. 15; of the present, 142 Prearticulation, 5, 158, 164–67, 193; force of, 8, 191. See also Articulation; Preacceleration Preconscious, 6–9, 11, 186–87. See also Conscious; Nonconscious; Unconscious Prehension, 156, 176, 219; negative, 106 Preindividual, 16–17, 24, 61, 147–48, 158; and affect, 27–28; and “a” life, 19; and bare activity, 61; and collective, 27; and experience, 47; and individuation, 24; and life, 60; transcendental field, 45. See also Individuation; Simondon, Gilbert Present, 24, 57, 80, 84–86, 106; and the body, 20; and the future, 32, 50, 84, 139, 142, 207, 217–19; passage of, 43; and the past, 44, 47–48, 52–53, 56, 94, 218; and the power of the false, 43; present-moving, 207; presentpassing, 55, 137; sheets of, 48; and the spiral, 39; and transcendence, 50. See also Now, the Primes/priming, 99, 105–6, 108–10, 114–15; life and, 235 n. 25; and movement, 122. See also Cues/cueing Prince, Dawn, xxi, 204–8, 211–13, 216– 21, 253 n. 5; on language, 168; on nonhuman language, 206 Problem, 26, 55, 56, 161, 188; and art, 126; and language, 159; and memory, 234 n. 18; and motor activity, 239 n. 13, 254 n. 11; of politics, xix; set of, 165

288 inDEx

Procedure, 37, 134–35, 141–48, 196; back-gridding, 50; for life, 199; and movement, 39; scale of, 145 Process, x–xii, 46, 89, 114, 124, 134, 141, 144, 158, 176, 185, 198, 205, 215–16, 219; and affect, 223 n. 1; of bodying, 200; creative, 74–75; choreographic, 80, 99, 122, 140, 200; collective, 136; culmination of, 23; and duration, 82; enjoyment of, 21; and experience, 95–96, 249 n. 4; and fielding, 182; of moving, 175, 238 n. 9; multiphasing, 24; and objects, 32; oriented writing, xiii–xiv; philosophy, 228 n. 2; pure, 89; and relation, 164; representation of, 80; and shaping, 174, 186–88, 196, 219; singular and, 22; and Society of Molecules (Sense Lab event), 37–38; and technicity, 33–34 Projection, 1, 223 n. 1 Project Nim (Marsh), 253 n. 5 Proposition, xxvi, 47, 83–84, 97–98, 100, 104, 107, 113–14, 119, 124, 128– 32, 135, 147, 159, 185, 238 n. 7; and autie-type, 157; and choreography, 76–81, 89–90, 94–98, 100, 114, 191, 196, 200; and desiring machines, 52; and diagrammatic force, 87; dramaturgic, 96, 240 n. 8; and event, 96; and the face, 70; and movement, 76, 97, 104; for moving, 37; and objects, 92; for seeing-with, 180 Proprioception, 85–86, 108, 239 n. 11 Protopolitical, 46, 61, 70, 142–43, 153, 170–71. See also Political, the; Politics Psychoanalysis, 186, 188, 223 n. 1, 224 n. 5, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 7, 252 n. 11; and behavior, 224 n. 12; and language, 190; on self- containment, 1–2 Pure experience, 3, 10–11, 45, 51, 56, 60, 73, 157, 160–62, 164, 168–69, 201, 232 n. 7

Querrien, Anne, on the commons, 201–2, 203 Radical empiricism, 3, 47–48, 55, 74, 146, 220 Reaching-toward, 2, 7, 65, 125, 128, 224 n. 8, 224 n. 9. See also Worlding Reason, 215–16 Recollection, 48–50, 56, 73, 84 Recognition, 42, 52–54, 57, 60, 65–66, 70, 71, 211, 247 n. 20; and choreographic objects, 92; and choreography, 76; and cues, 105–6; ethics of, 235 n. 19; misrecognizing, 209; politics of, 64 Refrain, xiii, xxiii, 56, 70, 139, 187; of activity, 109 Regard, 204–6, 214, 218–19, 221 Relation, 2–4, 8–12, 55, 59, 71, 109–10, 132, 141, 143, 147–48, 152–53, 158, 162, 164–65, 167–70, 180, 185, 191, 200, 206, 208–10, 212, 214–15, 219, 221, 224 n. 6, 242 n. 2, 253 n. 4; and activity, 129; and affective attunement, 7–8; and amodality, 6; and architecture, 116; and art, 126; asymmetrical, 253 n. 5; and autism, 150; and becoming, 98; and the body, 16, 122; and choreography, 76; and desiring machines, 52; and difference, 96; and double articulation, 7; and dressing, 129–30; ecology of, 101, 126, 181; emergent, 200; and the encounter, 175; and environment, 11, 98, 116, 153–54; ethics of, 152–53, 156–57, 170–71; and event, 88, 206; of force, 69, 100, 136, 176, 178; and form, 12, 74; and the human, 151; to the image, 68; immanent, 7; and incipiency, 18; and life, 21; and love, 183; and milieu, 21–22, 32, 77, 97–98, 121–22, 164, 187, 199; and

modality, 147, 152; nodes of, 19; and objects, 96, 223 n. 1, 240 n. 7; and perception, 94; and potential, 76, 122, 155; and process, 164; and pure experience, 11; and Society of Molecules (SenseLab event), 36–38; spacetime of, 132; of taking-form, 88; and time, 206; and the transcendental field, 47 Relational field, 3–4, 9–10, 20, 23–24, 26, 31, 76, 78, 102, 125, 128–29, 131, 153, 156–57, 166, 168, 180, 187, 190, 199, 206–11, 213, 215, 217–19, 224 n. 9; hyperrelational field, 182; and the more-than, 228 n. 2 Relational movement, 97, 106–8, 110, 113–14, 122, 134–35, 140–41, 144, 148, 157, 206–7, 210, 213, 217, 242 n. 1, 242 n. 2. See also Movement Relationscapes (Manning), xvii, xxi Remember/remembering, 50, 56–57, 84–86, 89, 137–39, 181, 238 n. 8 Reminiscence, 52–53 Repetition, 34–35, 42, 56, 79, 105, 208; difference of, 69; and poetry, 195; and rhythm, 163; structures of, 123 Representation, 50, 52, 73, 80, 109, 142, 158–59, 174, 179, 181, 183, 196, 233 n. 14, 254 n. 7; amodal, 6; and bare activity, 64; of concepts, 246 n. 13; and content, 142; and experience, 159; and image, 174, 252 n. 14; and language, 157, 193, 252 n. 14; and movement, 140; nonrepresentational, 180; politics of, 171; of a process, 80; of space, 133 Resolution, 21; and the fourth person singular, 53; and transduction, 23 Resonance, 12, 14, 29, 47, 73, 83–84, 109, 135, 156, 165, 176–77, 185–87, 215, 235 n. 19; and affect, 30, 44; and bloc of sensation, 102; and the body, 30, 242 n. 2; collective, 251 n. 8; and inDEx  289

Resonance (continued) color, 131; and composition, 167; and concepts, 217; and contrast, 53, 88; of eternal objects, 180; and experience, 157; field of, 21, 25, 38, 47–48, 81, 86, 89, 143, 177, 185; of foreground/background, 24, 51; and form, 89; and in-formation, 20; and intensity, 142; of life-living, 72; and materiality, 19; and movement, 40, 82, 141; of objects, 94; of the past, 95; of the sonorous continuum, 56–57, 60; and spacetime, 92, 132; and territory, 108; textures of, 174; and trace, 178 Responsibility, 64, 68–69, 70–72, 233 n. 18, 235 n. 19, 235 n. 28 Reversible destiny, 148. See also Arakawa, Shusaku, and Madeline Gins Rhythm, 5, 15, 34, 43, 47–48, 56, 60, 79–80, 83, 86–87, 89–90, 164, 169, 171, 207, 209–10, 239 n. 13; and autism, 244 n. 7; and choreographic thinking, 103; durational, 97; of the infra, 145; and language, 156, 167; of memory, 94; and poetry, 195; and the political, 234 n. 18; and repetition, 163; and speciation, 208; time as, 57; tonal, 12; and writing, xiii, 157 Risk, xviii, 1, 68, 124, 127, 180, 220, 221; and desiring machines, 52; and relational art, 126; and transcendence, 52, 57, 71 Rubin, Sue, 153, 160–61, 163, 168; on echolalia, 226 n. 17 Russell, Bertrand, xiv Ruyer, Raymond, on the animal, 212– 13 Sabra and Shatila massacre, xix, 42–43, 58, 62, 65–68, 72, 233 n. 18 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, 204

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Savarese, DJ, 125–32, 153, 155, 159–60, 168, 225 n. 15, 239 n. 13, 244 n. 8, 247 n. 16, 247 n. 20; and communication, 163, 245 n. 8, 248 n. 26; and ethics of relation, 170–71; on thought and behavior, 129 Savarese, Ralph, 151, 246 n. 13; on autie-type, 155, 157, 244 n. 7; on autistic writing, 155–56; on DJ Savarese, 225 n. 15; on facilitated communication, 245 n. 8; on metaphors, 158 Scattered Crowd (Forsythe), 98, 100, 240 n. 9 Schubert, Franz, 56, 69 Seeing/sight, xi, 34, 50–51, 55, 61–62, 65–66, 104, 119, 129, 131, 145, 151, 167, 173–84, 187, 189, 191, 235 n. 19, 237 n. 4, 238 n. 8, 250 n. 1, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 9; already-seen, 199; and choreography, 75; and feeling, 51, 68, 141, 175–76, 178–79, 181, 187, 211; and hearing, 47; not-seeing, 94, 181; seeing-with, 86, 180, 182; and sound, 254 n. 11; and synesthesia, 128; and touch, 5; unseen, 47, 184, 212 Self, the, xiii, 1–2, 57, 72, 83, 95, 162, 219, 223 n. 1, 224 n. 5, 224 n. 9, 234 n. 18, 235 n. 19, 236 n. 28; and the other, 3, 7, 219, 235 n. 19, 244 n. 7 Self- enjoyment, 22, 189, 215–16 Semblance, 50, 51, 233 n. 16, 253 n. 6. See also Likeness Sensation, 5, 9, 29, 39, 78, 87, 101, 127, 153–60, 168, 172, 178, 189, 198; bloc of, 102, 213; ecologies of, 131; image of, 57; of the more-than, 79; of time, 56 Sense, xvi, 166; collective individuation of, 168; common, 249 n. 4; doubling up of, 57; and expression, 47, 57; and memory, 60; of object and subject, 9; of self, 1, 3–7, 11

SenseLab, 36, 38, 220 n. 3, 229 n. 3; and DJ Savarese, 125–32, 155 Senses, 5, 12, 19, 60–61, 85, 127–29, 153–56, 159, 174, 177, 183, 223 n. 2; 224 n. 5, 224 n. 9, 225 n. 15, 239 n. 10, 243 n. 5, 250 n. 1; and the body, 125; and perception, 94; sensing-with, 2, 169; Sinclair on, 254 n. 11; sounding-sensing, 9 Shape/shaping, 10, 60–61, 111, 114, 116, 118, 122, 125, 129, 152, 160, 165, 174–80, 182–83, 185–90, 193, 196– 97, 199–201, 203, 241 n, 10; and amodality, 6; and the body, 103–4; of experience, 29, 218–19; and expression, 167; and intensity, 152; and the interval, 146; qualities of, 7; and space, 133–34; of spacetime, 135; and time, 208; and volume, 118–19 Shape of enthusiasm, 183, 185–90, 192–93, 196, 201 Shaw, Norah Zuniga, 99, 253 n. 1; on alignment, 241 n. 10; on One Flat Thing, reproduced, 103 Signification, 168–69 Simondon, Gilbert, 8, 140–41; on associated milieu, 26; on the body, 16; on collective individuation, xix; on hylomorphism, 19, 30; on individuality, 29–30; on individuation, x, 16–18, 169, 224 n. 11; on information, 19; on the limit, 54; on more-than-being, 29; on signification, 168; on takingform, 35 Sinclair, Jim, 195, 200; on the senses, 254 n. 11 Singular(-ity), xv, 8, 11, 12, 19, 43, 51, 54–55, 176, 181–82, 209, 212–13, 217; and becoming, 29; and the becoming-body, 60; and the body, 16, 122; and event, xvi, xviii, xx, 11, 18, 21, 25, 32, 80, 82–84, 89, 114; and

experience, 25, 98, 169; and fascism, 53–54; of feeling, xvii, 11; first person, 191; fourth person, 45, 52–53; and language, 156; and movement, 85–88, 137; multiple, 134; and occasion, 25, 209; passage of, 43; points of identification, 5; and process, 22; and the self, 3; singular-generic, xvi, xix–xxiii; and spacetime, 92; and taking-form, 35, 93; and technique, 33; and the transcendental field, 45–46; of time-as-rhythm, 238 n. 4. See also One-many Skin, 1–2, 4, 5, 9–12, 39, 140, 217, 223 n. 2, 224 n. 3, 224 n. 5; skinenvelope, 207, 223 n. 1; second, 225 n. 3 Slow Clothes (Manning), 111–21 Society, 35–36, 217–18 Society of Art and Technology (Montreal), 114 Society of Molecules (SenseLab event), 36–38, 229 n. 3 Sonorous, 55, 139; continuum, 47, 51, 56, 60, 65, 68–69, 72 Sound, 9–10, 34, 51, 59, 61, 128, 164; and color, 56; and the face, 71; and micromovement, 16; touch of, 8 Souriau, Étienne, 140, 179 Space/spacing, 2, 9, 26, 82, 91–94, 97–98, 104, 114–15, 122–23, 128, 133–37, 139, 141, 203, 214; body and, 140; common, 203; and the diagram, 133; and exfoliation, 229 n. 8; folding of, 96; of maps, 203; preexisting, 118; and simple location, 253 n. 4; spaceshaping, 133–34; of thought, 15. See also Phase-space; Spacetime Spacetime, xvi–xvii, 11, 78–79, 101, 106–7, 110, 135, 137, 143, 192, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 10; and the body, 122; and bodying, 15; and choreography, inDEx  291

Spacetime (continued) 75; of composition, 103; of creation, 91–92; of the event, 94; of experience, xvi–xvii, xx, xxii–xxiii, 12, 45, 81, 91, 98, 104, 127, 134, 136, 153, 193, 208; and folding, 103; and the metaphysical surface, 50; of relation, 132; topologies of, 146 Speciation, xviii–xvix, xx–xxiii, 32, 95–96, 145–46, 183, 187–88, 195–96, 199–201, 207–10, 212–17, 221, 229 n. 1, 253 n. 5; and falsity, 240 n. 6; and time, 85 Species, 188, 196, 200–201, 208–10, 212–13, 215, 219, 221. See also Speciation Spuybroek, Lars, 109 Stengers, Isabelle, and ecology of practice, 19, 26, 228 n. 5 Stern, Daniel, ix, xiii, 131, 187; on amodality, 5–6; on experience, xv–xvii; and matching of feeling, 11; on organization, 3–4, 6, 225 n. 12; on relation, 3; on vitality forms, 187, 189, 196–99 Style, 210–11, 217–18, 221 Subject, x, xiii, 30, 47, 134, 139, 156, 174, 182–83, 185, 205, 208, 215, 218; and the desiring machine, 52; and events, 50, 74, 208; and immanence, 44; logical, 238 n. 7; and movement, 98; and object, 70, 219–21, 235 n. 19 Subtraction, 8, 10, 12, 13, 28, 6, 153–58, 164–66, 169, 172, 176, 182; and contrast, 165–66; and experience, 188; and language, 164; more-than of, 156 Surface/surfacing, 33, 42–66, 69, 72, 109–10, 121, 123, 174–75, 231 n. 5; choreographic, 104–6, 108; of affective tonality, 174; of experience, 102; and mobile, 145–46; and mobile architecture, 102; and the more-than,

292 inDEx

157; and the political, 238 n. 18; topological, 12, 20–21, 27, 29–30, 70–71; and vibration, 175, 177. See also Metaphysical surface Synesthesia, 127–29, 131, 154, 178 Synchronicity, 208 Synchronous Objects (website), 99–100, 102–3, 109, 136, 240 n. 4, 253 n. 1 Taking-form, 7, 10–12, 17–20, 22, 24, 31, 50, 83, 88–89, 93, 140–41, 182, 189, 195–96, 210; of bodies, 97; of event, 143; and force, 179; of movement, 86, 207; and technicity, 35. See also Form Technical, 39, 78 Technicity, 32–35, 37–40, 78–79, 84, 96, 102, 108, 113, 139, 141–42, 179, 181, 216; and movement, 207. See also Technique Technique, x, 14, 31–40, 84, 96, 102, 107–8, 111–13, 115, 119–22, 132, 136, 139–41, 172, 179, 200, 210; and autism, 239 n. 13; and choreography, 74–77, 237 n. 1; movement, 79, 82–83; participatory, 126; and poetry, 195; political, 234 n. 18; and proposition, 77–78; of relation, xxiii. See also Technicity Tending, 2, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 87–88, 96, 134, 208; tending-toward, 2, 4, 6–7, 12, 35, 64, 85, 110, 130, 135, 199 Tene, Zeve, 235 n. 21 Terminus, 143–45, 242 n. 5 Territory, 44, 62, 70, 72, 192, 195–96, 201, 203, 209–12, 214, 235 n. 25; mobile, 251 n. 8; in the moving, 191; resonant, 108–9. See also Deterritorialization Terror, 52, 58, 66–68; and beauty, 51, 58–59

Thinking-feeling, 46, 82, 166, 168, 171, 180, 190, 215–16, 218 Thin Red Line (Malick), 235 n. 22 Thought/thinking, 11, 46, 53, 165, 167–69, 177, 250 n. 1; and choreography, 75, 98, 103–4, 107, 166, 185, 215, 221, 240 n. 4; collective, 36; emergence of, 249 n. 28; and ethics, xix; fielding of, xiii; force of, 214, 221; habits of, x; identity of, 232 n. 10; image of, 233 n. 17; limit of, 232 n. 9; modes of, 218; movement of, xiii–xiv, 14–5, 31, 46, 81, 103–4, 136, 166–67, 170, 234 n. 18; and relation, 155; thinkable, 59–60; thinking-with, 167–68; thoughtthinking, 167, 169. See also Thinkingfeeling Threshold, 28, 181, 196, 202; of collective individuation, 147; of conditions, 130; and the map, 252 n. 11; and modes of existence, 141; of perception, 106, 115, 130; of spacetime, 94. See also Limit Time, xvi, 33, 43, 50, 57, 73, 79–93, 101, 110, 122, 160–61, 196, 198, 207–8, 212, 214–16; as aberrant movement, 50; and the body, 18; complexity of, 43; crystal of, 58; and decision, 106; doubling of, 95; and the event, 11, 44, 96, 98, 145; and folding, 37–38; of image, 252 n. 14; interval of, 176; linear, 6, 23, 37, 57, 95–96, 106, 207; and the lure for feeling, 23; in the making, 14; and movement, 44, 97, 206–7; non-linear, 18; no-time, 201; and paradox, 55; and relation, 206; sensation of, 56; and shaping, 160, 208; and simple location, 253 n. 4; and spacing, 134–35; timeframes, 207; timelines, 146; time-slip, 77, 79–81, 86, 94–96, 106; topological,

142, 186. See also Event-time; Spacetime Time signature, 79, 82, 85, 86–89, 106, 237 n. 4 Toledo, Sandra Alvarez de: on Fernand Deligny, 252 n. 13; on tracings, 251 n. 9 Total: chaos, 154; movement, 13–15, 108, 209 Totalitarianism, 46, 50, 53, 64 Totality, x, xii, 50; of experience, 82 Touch, 1–2, 5, 7–10, 12, 14, 85, 94, 114, 124–32, 134, 145, 160, 177, 184–85, 196, 243 n. 5, 244 n. 8, 246 n. 15; politics of, 125, 126, 224 n. 8 Trace/tracing, xi, xvi, 25, 35, 101, 175, 179, 181–82, 189, 191–96, 200, 202– 3, 251 n. 8, 252 n. 9, 252 n. 13; and duration, 181; and resonance, 178. See also Map/Mapping Transcendence, 44–46, 50, 53, 57, 69; and memory, 57; of the political, 71 Transcendental, xi–xii, 83; exercise, 55; field of, 44–50, 52, 59–60, 64, 69, 234 n. 18; and immanence, 44; memory, 56; surface, 59–60, 66 Transduction, 8, 18–19, 80–81, 83, 114, 143–44, 165–66, 170, 211; and affect, 26; and the body, 34; and contrast, 166; and life, 26; of the object, 113; and recomposition, 106; resolution and, 23; and technicity, 33; and technique, 32; and thought, 168; of time, 37–38 Transindividual, 168 Transindividuation, 24–26, 29, 78, 134. See also Individuation Transversal, 35, 52, 170, 211, 217, 221; and counterpoint, 103; and force, 169 Trauma, 174, 179–81 Tustin, Francis, 190–91; on shapes, 186–89 inDEx  293

Uncanny, 59, 64, 106, 206, 208; of being, 80; déjà-felt, 78, 84; intensity, 135 Unconscious, xiii, 223 n. 1, 252 n. 11; and singularities, 53. See also Conscious; Nonconscious; Preconscious Unfolding. See Folding/unfolding Unthought: and the limit, 59; as yet, 35, 69, 97, 169, 232 n. 10 Universal, 44, 64, 68; fact, 226 n. 17 Unseen. See Seeing/sight, unseen Valk, Steve, 76 Vector, 24, 32, 39, 77, 80–81, 83, 110, 188, 191, 196; feeling and, 4, 11, 23, 27 Vibration, 14–15, 56, 87, 135, 168; and composition, 167; and expression, 169; and field, 217; and force, 181; and joy, 180; and language, 185; and movement, 40, 174; of potential, 177; and spacetime, 101; and surface, 175, 177; and vision, 179 Virtual, 37, 47, 161, 169, 179; and actual, 2, 16–17, 22, 24, 56, 57, 60, 88, 107, 109, 158, 179, 209, 224 n. 10, 230 n. 3, 235 n. 19; and “a” life, 45; and associated milieu, 8; cues, 104; and dance, 40; and duration, 97; and experience, 157; feeling, 11; and force, 108, 139, 176; and landing sites, 106; and the metaphysical surface, 50; and movement, 39–40, 83–85, 134; and perception, 181; plane, 44; and pure experience, 3; and technicity, 38 Virtual event. See Event, and virtual Vision, 12, 173, 175, 177, 179–81; direct, 189–90, 201, 250 n. 1, 254 n. 11; peripheral, 26. See also Audio-vision; Seeing/sight Vitality affect/forms, xvii–xx, xxiii, 5–6, 10, 187, 189–90, 193, 196, 199; and af-

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fective attunement, 7–8; and dephasing, 8; and immanent events, 7; and tracings, 191. See also Affect; Form; Stern, Daniel Volumetric, 104–5, 109, 112, 121, 123, 135; surface, 54, 60 Volumetrics (Manning), 111–14, 121, 131, 138 Von Uexküll, Jakob, on counterpoint, 208, 209 Waltz, 61–65. See also Dance Waltz with Bashir (Folman), xix, 41–73, 84, 230 n. 1, 231 n. 6, 232 n. 11, 233 n. 14, 233 n. 18, 236 n. 30 War machine, 64, 237 n. 1. See also Fascism; Microfascism What else, the, xvi–xvii, 92, 98–100, 102–3, 109. See also Choreography White Bouncy Castle (Forsythe), 93–94, 239 n. 2 Whitehead, Alfred North, ix, xxvi, 74, 106, 156, 176, 219; on actual entities, 22; and actual occasions, 225 n. 13; on affective tonality, 20–21; on appetition, 254, n. 10; on the becoming of continuity, 18, 88; the body, 22, 228 n. 1; and concern, 143, 205; on contrast, 165; on the creative advance, 23–24, 215; on decision, 238 n. 7; on experience, 22–23, 216; on events, 21; and feeling, 20–21, 156, 224 n. 4; on a general idea, xv; on importance, 143; on language, 77; on life, 214; on manner, 165; on mentality and appetition, 254 n. 10; and MerleauPonty, 228 n. 2; on multiplicity, x; on nature, 214; on nonsensuous perception, 94, 211; on objects, 220–21; on propositions, 77, 78, 238 n. 7; on reason, 214; on self- enjoyment, 22, 215; on simple location, 207, 253

n. 4; on society, 22, 217; and subjective form, 21, 23; on the subjectobject relation, 205 Williams, Donna, 174; on autistic perception, 177, 249 n. 2; on common sense, 249 n. 4; on perceiving art, 249 n. 3 Will to power, 57, 69 Wonder, ix–x, xxiii, 164, 168 Woolf Phrase (Forsythe), 140 World/worlding, xii, xvii, 3, 6, 11–12, 22, 128, 152–53, 155–71, 174, 180–81, 183, 185–87, 189–90, 193, 200, 209, 219–20; and autistic perception, 199; and being, 2; body and, 2, 9–10, 16,

132, 154, 168, 210; ecology of, 182; in-actness of, 218; and sensation, 178; and singularities, 11; and touch, 131 Writing, x, xiii–xiv, xix, xxiii, 151, 155– 61, 163–64, 168–70, 185, 190, 195, 218, 227 n. 19, 239 n. 13, 244 n. 4, 245 n. 9, 247 n. 16, 247 n. 17, 248 n. 26, 249 n. 28; write-with, 166. See also Autie-type Yergeau, Melanie, 227 n. 18; on “functioning,” 243 n. 2; on neurodiversity, 227 n. 19

inDEx  295

Erin Manning is a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. She is director of the SenseLab and author of several books, including Relationscapes (2009) and Politics of Touch (2007).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manning, Erin. Always more than one : individuation’s dance / Erin Manning ; prelude by Brian Massumi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978- 0- 8223-5333-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isBn 978- 0- 8223-5334- 8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Individuation (Psychology)—Social aspects. 2. Group identity. 3. Individuality. 4. Movement (Philosophy). I. Title. Bf175.5.i53M36 2012 128—dc23 2012011643