Spiel, Satz & Improvisation

Die Ballerina als Schwein

Oliver Schrank: Wanda tanzt am Nil, Pixi Buch Nr. 1057, Hamburg: Carlsen 2000

Von Norma Jean Sedlmayr

„Ich bin ein stolzes Tanzschwein und werde für dich niemals tanzen, du Grobian“, ruft die entführte Wanda empört. Krokodil Ben Tasch ist überrascht. Eng wird es für ihn, als ihm Nilpferd Nabila ins Kreuz springt. Die Befreiungsaktion gelingt. Wanda ist erleichtert.

Das Tanzen ist ein Spielen, und wir müssen nicht erst auf den bekannten Satz von Johan Huizinga zurückgreifen, der den Tanz als „eine der reinsten und vollkommensten Formen des Spiels“ ansah. In Oliver Schranks Pixi-Buch „Wanda tanzt am Nil“ (verspielt auch mit seinem falschen Beistrich auf dem Buchtitel, der dann im Innentitel weggelassen wird) lesen wir mit kindlichem Vergnügen Giorgio Agambens Überlegungen über den Menschen und das Tier ein. Nämlich schon von dem Georges-Louis-Buffon-Zitat an, das „Das Offene“ miteröffnet: „S’il n’existait point d’ animaux, la nature de l’homme serait encore plus incompréhensible.“

Spiel mit dem Spiel 

So, und nicht umgekehrt, können wir auch die Metaphern des Animalischen in der Bildergeschichte verstehen. Und gar bei Wanda, dem Tanzschwein und ihren Freunden, allen voran Nabila Nilpferd, die Bauchtänzerin. Denn Wanda und Nabila entsprechen so gar nicht dem Idealtyp von Ballerina und Bellydancer. Wanda, klein und füllig, stellt gar das Gegenteil des Körperideals im Spitzentanz dar. Und sie ist kein Schwan, sondern eben ein Schwein. Ein Tier, dem das Tanzen im Kanon der Stereotypbildung unserer Kultur, nicht wirklich zugestanden wird - anders als dem Bären oder dem Pferd oder etwa dem Geflügel.

Im Pixi-Buch wird ein Spiel mit den Stereotypen des Tanzens angezettelt, damit ein Spiel mit dem Spiel, das als solches im Rahmen von Kunstausübungen tierisch ernst genommen zu werden pflegt. Auch das Spiel mit dem Spiel trägt sich den kleinen Lesern mit der diskursiven Härte eines grundlegenden Witzes an. Welches anorexiefördernde Klischee, mein Kind, trägst du bereits in dir?

Nach ihrem Abenteuer erhält Wanda eine gute Nachricht. Sie soll die große Ballerina Madame Straußvogel in dem Klassiker „Der sterbende Strauß“ ersetzen. „Du sollst mein Ersatz sein?“ Die als graue und grausige Furie dargestellte Straußin macht Wanda zu Hause fertig: „Ein Schwein in ,Straußensee‘, wer hätte je davon gehört?“ Die kleine Ungenauigkeit in der Ballettliteratur sei dahingestellt. Was zählt, ist die Pointe: Das Publikum liebt Wanda, und sie geht „als erstes Ballerinaschwein in die Geschichte ein“. Die überzüchteten Straußballerinen mit ihren gedopt wirkenden Muskelmassen rücken in den Hintergrund.

Ambivalenz für die Kleinen 

Anders sein und gewinnen. Das Andere als das Eigentliche erfahren oder vielmehr die Akzeptanz des Andersseins als das Zentrum jedes politischen Diskurses verstehen. Das lernen die Kleinen bei Wanda (und durch das Vorlesen vielleicht auch so manche Große). Aber sie lernen auch etwas über Ambivalenz. Denn der Entführer Ben Tasch muß ausgerechnet ein burnustragendes Muselmanen-Kroko mitsamt seinem Beduinenzwelt sein. Gewiß, das Büchlein ist vor 9/11 erschienen. Dennoch ist die kulturelle Festlegung des üblen Entführers problematisch. Es könnte als Kritik an der orientalischen Macho-Kultur verstanden werden, und damit sollte nicht gespart werden. Der wirkliche Effekt ist aber doch, daß hier gegen ein Stereotyp angegangen und hinten herum ein anderes aufgezäumt wird.

Und das kratzt an der Glaubwürdigkeit des hübsch gezeichneten Pixi-Buchs. Da müssen die Eltern beim Vorlesen kommentieren. Vielleicht keine schlechte Herausforderung, denn die Reflexion von Ambivalenzen ist sowieso keine Selbstverständlichkeit. Sie paßt auch nicht wirklich in das Spiel der Diskurse in der politischen Debatte. Was diese immer flach hält und viele ideologische „Denker“ oft vom politischen Denken entfernt.

Satz und Spiel mit A.

Giorgio Agamben: Die kommende Gemeinschaft, Berlin: Merve 2003

Martina Ruhsam & GVRbabaLAN verführen zu einem  Agamben-Spiel

Wahrnehmungstraining: William Forsythes "Improvisation Technologies"

RÜCKBLICK AUF EINE ERFOLGSGESCHICHTE 

William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies. A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye,
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 19999

Von Wibke Hartewig

Wie lassen sich die Gedanken verfolgen, mit deren Hilfe ein Forsythe-Tänzer durch den Tanzakt navigiert und dabei immer neue Bewegungsvariationen generiert? Wie die Vorstellungen vermitteln, die Forsythes hyperkomplexen Bewegungskonstrukten zugrunde liegen? Indem man wortwörtlich ihren Spuren folgt. Bei einer Begegnung des Medienkünstlers Paul Kaiser mit William Forsythe entstand Anfang der 1990er Jahre die Idee, die Spurformen, also die durch Bewegung in den Raum gezeichneten imaginären Gebilde, sowie die körper- und raumgeometrischen Beziehungen, an denen sich die Tänzer geistig orientieren, mit Hilfe digitaler Techniken sichtbar zu machen. Der Anstoß für die Entwicklung einer multimedialen Präsentationsform von Forsythes choreographischer Methodik war gegeben.

Zu diesem Zeitpunkt hatten sich Forsythe und das Ballett Frankfurt bereits über ein Jahrzehnt lang eine Improvisationstechnik erarbeitet, die Teil ihres Programms zur tanzpraktischen ‚Erforschung‘ von Bewegung war. Material bot vor allem das ihren Körpern perfekt geläufige Ballett; die Tanzenden waren trainiert, sich in einem Netz von Relationen aus Punkten, Linien und Flächen zu verorten. Aufbauend auf der Analyse der geometrischen Strukturen und Mechanismen dieses Materials hatten sie eine Vielzahl von Improvisationsverfahren entwickelt, mit deren Hilfe sie gewohnte Zusammenhänge auflösen, Variationsmöglichkeiten erkennen, Bewegungen transformieren und neue Bewegungsimpulse initiieren konnten. Diese Verfahren waren jeweils im Zusammenhang mit bestimmten Stücken entstanden und benannt worden, um eine verbale Verständigungsbasis innerhalb des Ensembles zu schaffen. Zu dessen Wortschatz gehörten nun das „Falten“ und „Entfalten“ von Linien, die beispielsweise durch einen Arm gebildet werden, das „Zusammenführen“ und „Fallenlassen“ von Körperpunkten, das „Transportieren“ von imaginären Formen durch den Raum, das „Annähern“ an außerhalb des Körpers gedachte Gebilde oder das „Ausweichen“ um sie herum.

Es war vom „Schreiben“ und „Zeichnen" der als „Pinsel“ charakterisierten Körperteile die Rede, die mit Operationen wie „u-ing“ und „o-ing“ bestimmte geometrische Spurformen - hier einen Bogen oder einen Kreis - produzieren, und von der „Re-Organisation“ geometrischer Formen und Bewegungsmuster, die zum Beispiel räumlich und zeitlich „komprimiert“ oder neu ausgerichtet werden. Ein ausgewählter Teil der Verfahren fand Eingang in das 1994 vorgestellte multimediale Programm Improvisation Technologies I, das den neuen Tänzerinnen und Tänzern der Kompanie eine schnelle, systematische Einarbeitung in Forsythes Improvisationssystem ermöglichen sollte. Diese gemeinsam mit dem Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM) entwickelte Festplattenversion stieß auf ein derart großes, internationales Interesse, dass man sich entschied, 1999 mit Unterstützung des Tanzarchivs Köln eine überarbeitete Version als CD-ROM zu veröffentlichen. Wie schon in der Festplattenversion sind auch hier drei Hauptkomponenten interaktiv miteinander verknüpft.

Im Theorieteil präsentiert der Choreograph seine Ideen in 64 von ehemals 100 „lecture demonstrations“: In Trainingsoutfit, auf hellgrauer Bodenfläche vor schwarzem Hintergrund führt er verbal in seine Begriffe ein und illustriert sie gleichzeitig mit Bewegung. Paul Kaisers Idee folgend werden dabei die Spurformen und imaginären geometrischen Gebilde als weiße Linien und Formen im PC nachgezeichnet und über die Videoaufzeichnung Forsythes gelegt - Gedanken nehmen plötzlich visuelle Gestalt an. Von den einzelnen Lektionen kann der Benutzer über einen Link jederzeit zur zweiten Hauptkomponente der CD-ROM wechseln: exemplarische Improvisationen von vier Tänzerinnen und Tänzern der Frankfurter Kompanie, in denen sie das jeweilige Verfahren im größeren Bewegungszusammenhang ausprobieren. Und schließlich wird mit der von Forsythe getanzten Videoperformance Solo als dritter Hauptkomponente ein hyperkomplexes Ergebnis des angewandten Improvisationssystems vorgestellt. Die geschickte Form der Verlinkung der einzelnen Komponenten wie auch die grafische Lösung erweisen sich als didaktische Kunstgriffe, die die Möglichkeiten des digitalen Mediums voll ausschöpfen.

Das käufliche "Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye" wendet sich im Gegensatz zur Festplattenversion gleichermaßen an Tänzer und Tanzzuschauer, Profis und interessierte Laien. Nicht nur der breite Adressatenkreis dürfte für die Popularität der Improvisation Technologies verantwortlich sein. „Interesse und Nachfrage waren überwältigend groß, die Reaktionen durch und durch positiv und enthusiastisch, und zwar schon vor Veröffentlichung der CD-ROM“, berichtet Astrid Sommer, Koordinatorin des Projekts. Das Projektteam kümmerte sich vorbildlich um die Verbreitung, präsentierte bereits die Festplattenversion weltweit auf Tanz-, Kunst-, Medien-, Film- und Videofestivals, in Theatern und Kulturzentren, auf Symposien und in Ausstellungen: So reiste Improvisation Technologies I 1995 von Frankfurt a.M. über Melbourne, Cannes, Berlin, Maubeuge, Nagoya, Wroclaw, München, Karlsruhe, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Montpellier, Seoul, Fukui, Montreal, Barcelona, Paris, Tokio, Berlin, Bonn und Köln nach Rotterdam und machte im darauffolgenden Jahr an ebenso vielen Stationen halt, bevor es 1997 einen festen Platz in der Ausstellung des Deutschen Tanzarchivs Köln fand, von wo aus es weitere Tourneen antrat.

Die CD-ROM-Version rief dann erneut ein großes Echo hervor: Sie wurde dank ihrer handlichen Form nicht nur auf den einschlägigen Festivals, Messen und Symposien, sondern auch in zahlreichen Vorträgen in Universitäten, Kultureinrichtungen und Ausbildungsstätten vorgestellt. Die Presse sprach von einer „maßgebende[n] Pionierarbeit“ (Tanz und Gymnastik), der „feingliedrig durchdachte[n] und methodisch klug ausgetüftelte[n] Konzeption“ (tanzdrama), der „ungewöhnliche[n] audiovisuelle[n] Qualität“ (Nov'Art) und davon, dass Improvisation Technologies „eine neue Dimension der Kunstrezeption“ (medien praktisch) schaffe. Das Projekt wurde mit zahlreichen Rezensionen in Zeitungen und Fachzeitschriften bedacht, das Fernsehen strahlte mehrere Berichte aus. Es erhielt eine Reihe von Auszeichnungen, darunter eine Nominierung für den EuroPrix MultiMediaArt 1999, einen Spezialpreis beim Prix Möbius Deutschland 1999 und im Jahr darauf den Bronze Award des New Yorker I.D. Magazine.

Entsprechend gut sehen die Verkaufszahlen aus: Der ersten Auflage 1999 von 3000 Stück folgte 2003 eine zweite, nahezu unveränderte Auflage gleicher Größe, deren Begleitheft um die Transkription der „lectures“ ergänzt wurde. Parallel erschien im Jahr 2000 in Japan eine englisch-japanische Ausgabe mit einer Auflagenhöhe von 2000 Stück. Für den Bereich der Kunst-CD-ROMs bzw. -DVDs ein höchst beachtliches Ergebnis. Eine zukünftige Webversion, die noch leichter und günstiger zugänglich wäre, wurde angedacht.

Forsythe selbst macht im Begleitheft zu den Improvisation Technologies deutlich, dass es sich hier nicht um ein Mittel zur Verbreitung einer bestimmten Tanztechnik handelt: „Die CD-ROM [...] bietet die Möglichkeit, zu trainieren, wie man Bewegungsspuren wahrnehmen und ein Bewusstsein für die körperlichen Mechanismen des Beugens, Anwinkelns usw. entwickeln kann. Sie bietet einen Zugang zur Improvisation auf einer sehr elementaren Ebene. Wobei es vielleicht weniger darum geht, wie man improvisiert, als vielmehr darum, wie man Improvisation analysieren kann.“ Es gehe „um den wichtigen Moment, der der Erfindung einer Bewegung vorausgeht“, um die Wahrnehmung von Bewegung und Raum. Entsprechend finden die Improvisation Technologies nicht nur in der Tanz- und Medien-Szene viel und anhaltende Beachtung: Ihre Ideen lassen sich auch auf nicht-tanzspezifische Fragestellungen aus Musik, Bildender Kunst und Architektur übertragen - wobei besonders aus letzterem Bereich ein starkes Interesse zu verzeichnen ist. So hat die CD-ROM, eher unvorhergesehen, auch Eingang in die Postgraduierten-Ausbildung von Architekten gefunden. Eingesetzt wird sie ansonsten vor allem in professionellen Tanz- und Theaterkompanien, in Tanz(hoch)schulen und -institutionen, an Universitäten und anderen Ausbildungsstätten; sie wird von Tänzern und Choreographen, Tanzheoretikern und -interessierten erworben.

Dabei erfüllt sie mehrere Funktionen: Als didaktischem Werkzeug gelingt es ihr, Forsythes choreographische Ideen auch Tanz-Laien leicht verständlich zu vermitteln, was besonders auf die weißen Grafikanimationen zurückzuführen ist. Nik Haffner, Mitglied des Projektteams, schildert aus seinen Erfahrungen bei Präsentationen der CD-ROM, dass die Zuschauer dank dieser Gestaltungsmethode schon nach dem Zeigen weniger kurzer Beispiele ein „Aha-Erlebnis“ hätten. Darüber hinaus stellt die CD-ROM ein interaktives Dokumentationssystem dar, das den Stand einer bestimmten Entwicklungsphase von Forsythes Improvisationssystem und dessen theoretische Voraussetzungen speichert: ein Prototyp für Archivare und Forscher. Auch als Trainingsinstrument für Tanzpraktiker dient die CD-ROM, mit gewissen Einschränkungen: Haffners Beobachtungen nach wurde sie weniger beim konkreten Improvisieren im Studio benutzt, sondern als „Recherchematerial“: „Ich denke, viele Benutzer arbeiten mit dem Programm, um dann später im Studio die eine oder andere Idee selbst auszuprobieren.“

Als Projekt der multimedialen Dokumentation und Vermittlung tanztheatraler Ideen besitzt Improvisation Technologies Modellcharakter. Auch andere Choreographen und Theatermacher wie Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown oder Jo Fabian haben ihre Arbeit multimedial aufbereiten lassen. Doch handelt es sich dabei zumeist um Archive ihrer Werke mit erläuterndem Material. Im Gegensatz zu diesen Projekten macht Forsythes CD-ROM seine Arbeitsweise und Vorstellungen transparent - und dies mit Hilfe einer originären grafischen Lösung. Als eine Nachfolgearbeit kann in dieser Hinsicht Mansaku & Mansai. That's Kyogen (Tokio 2001) gesehen werden, eine DVD-ROM, die ebenfalls am ZKM produziert wurde und im Auftrag der Waseda Universität Tokio und der Tokio Media Connections die traditionelle japanische Theaterform Kyogen vermittelt und dokumentiert. Struktur und Interface-Design wurden stark vom Vorgängerprojekt inspiriert - nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil mit Volker Kuchelmeister, Christian Ziegler und Yvonne Mohr Mitglieder des Improvisation Technologies-Teams deren Gestaltung übernahmen.

William Forsythe geht es mit seiner CD-ROM vor allem um eine neue Form der Wissensvermittlung. Das trifft auch auf sein aktuelles DVD-Projekt zu, ein „online interactive multimedia dance score“ seiner Choreographie One Flat Thing, reproduced, das 2008 abgeschlossen sein soll. Dieses Projekt, eine Zusammenarbeit der Forsythe Foundation und des Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Design sowie des Department of Dance der Ohio State University, USA, kann als „Part 2“ des „Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye“ gesehen werden. Während sich die Improvisation Technologies noch auf die Erläuterung grundlegender improvisatorischer Verfahren und ihre Anwendung durch den einzelnen Tänzer konzentrieren, geht es nun darum, eine komplette Choreographie leicht und allgemein lesbar zu machen. Mit Hilfe von interaktiven Grafiken und Animationen, die über die aus unterschiedlichen Kameraperspektiven aufgenommene Videodokumentation der Aufführung gelegt werden, sollen choreographische, musikalische und thematische Strukturen sichtbar gemacht werden, ebenso wie das Netz von „cues“, das die Tanzenden miteinander verschaltet. Forsythe möchte mit diesem interaktiven Werkzeug sein Stück „von Innen [...] zeigen, wie es sich entwickelt, funktioniert, wie es zusammengestellt ist. Um es zu demystifizieren und choreografische Prinzipien zu erläutern“. (Frankfurter Rundschau, 16.4.2005). Wir sind gespannt.

William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies. A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye (CD-ROM und Begleitheft), Karlsruhe 1999. Hrsg. vom ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe in Kooperation mit dem Deutschen Tanzarchiv Köln. Eine CD-ROM von William Forsythe, Nik Haffner, Volker Kuchelmeister, Yvonne Mohr, Astrid Sommer, Christian Ziegler. Tänzer und Tänzerinnen: William Forsythe, Christine Bürkle, Noah D. Gelber, Thomas McManus, Crystal Pite; Interface-Design: Nik Haffner, Volker Kuchelmeister, Christian Ziegler; Coding: Volker Kuchelmeister; Screen Design: Christian Ziegler; Digitale Videobearbeitung: Nik Haffner, Yvonne Mohr; Koordination und Redaktion: Astrid Sommer; Vertrieb: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Hereby we publish excerpts from the essay “BRIAN MASSUMI: concrete is as concrete doesn’t” (forthcoming) in which Bojana Cvejić studies Massumi’s thought in his seminal book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Sensation, Affect (Duke, 2002).

Brian Massumi – Parables for the Virtual
concrete is as concrete doesn’t*

The name “Brian Massumi” tingles on the lips of many today. At first, it may have appeared to be linked mainly with architects and designers, or electronic, digital, or interactive media artists, now to be as often summoned by choreographers, and theater makers, political activists or cultural theorists alike.[i] Whether it unravels an innovative software in architecture that programs a set of modifications before having a geometrical form to modify,[ii] or serves the dancer’s body to divorce expression from communication, or elaborates the affective-machine of fear in the climate of two George (W.) Bush administrations, Massumi’s conceptual framework reinvents itself again and again with a stunning detail of the concrete. The mode in which Massumi’s thought operates in his book Parables for the Virtual – interweaving a heterogeneous fabric of situations and notions from art, media, politics, technology, science, philosophy etc. – conforms to a new set of theoretical issues he puts forward. Running his concepts through seemingly any material that falls under his attention, Massumi reclaims the everyday as a place where a lot happens. That is, only if one is willing to experiment a little. Or better, he seeks to develop conceptual tools that will enable a pragmatist view of the world, one that affirms change in every move adding something new to a “self-augmenting” world. The difficulty with defining “difference” and the “new” here, a Massumi-reader accepts if she is ready to deal with it experimentally: how to assume uncertainty as a “margin of maneuvrability” in every situation, a potential one registers affectively, i.e., consciously, but vaguely as the sense of direction about where to go and what to do, or as a movement of thought before its articulation? How to plug in affect (or movement of thought) as a variation in capacity to change in one’s body, increase the awareness of this potential, focus and act upon it? How to experiment on the level of everyday life by composing one’s experience and ability to act with the movement of thought?

I. INDEX OF KEY ISSUES
From an ontological theory of expression to a pragmatist politics of affect

Listing the central concerns in Parables here to begin with projects the thematic lines I will be pursuing in this essay.

(1)  There is a kind of thought, which is of and in the body. It springs from an immediate assessment of the potential directions in a situation in which the subject is implicated. It manifests itself in bodily action before it is recognized as intention, or reflected upon as a thought. This claim does not just imply rethinking the body beyond the body/mind split or once again promising to bring “corporeality” into culture through “embodied experience”. It postulates an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation with wide-ranging implications for cultural theory.

(2)  The poststructuralist (semiotic, rhetorical, or more generally, constructivist) models of “reading” culture and ideology are fundamentally questioned for how useful they might be for theorizing change. Taking the sensing body in movement as a processual entity that transforms and is transformed in a technologically mediatized environment, Massumi inserts the hitherto bracketed relation of movement/sensation between body and change. The formula “body – movement/sensation – change” (PV:1) summarizes his project as a more generally philosophical one (a theory of “ontogenesis”, to use one of Massumi’s distinctive terms which I will explore later) and as a political one.

(3)  Philosophically (points 3–4), “movement” and “sensation” are created by exploring the microphysics of perception in a variety of situations: from a cognitive analysis of media effects to body art, from a soccer game to president Ronald Reagan’s pantomime. A Deleuzian, and even Spinozist repertoire of concepts like “affect” and “event” with regard to movement and sensation is now infused with scientific metaphors borrowed from chaos theory, complexity theory and systems theory (“emergence”, “recursivity”, “self-organization” etc.). Showing that the body in motion can only coincide with its own transition, Massumi argues that movement, passage and processual indeterminacy have an ontological priority over position, signification and social determination. He seeks to establish a dynamic unity rather than a new set of binaries between the potential and the possible, situation and context, invention and critique. Massumi takes up the challenge to think change as the process of formation in the field of emergence that is not presocial, but open-endedly social. Thus change is produced into an ontological principle on a par with, if not made equivalent to, expression, invention or creation.

(4) Postulating expression as creative differentiation (change) would not be possible without bringing “experience” from the radical empiricism of William James and Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of process into thinking movement, affect and sensation.[iii] Inquiring how affect can be in the world (and not in one’s head) reconstitutes subject-object relations along a relational, rather than formal or phenomenological, view of experience. The often cited statement of James, “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system”, enables Massumi to posit the autonomy of affect and expression as a third instance with respect to its subjects or objects. It becomes the place or the moment whereby change occurs: event.

(5)   Politically, the affects theory (or the theory of expression after Deleuze) is necessary in order for Massumi to link event with the potential or virtual. If he is to keep alive the possibility of systemic change in the everyday, he needs to replace the utopian notion of event as rupture with a politically more modest claim of event being any occurrence of change, a more or a less. “I guess ‘affect’ is the word I use for ‘hope’. One of the reasons it’s such an important concept for me is because it explains why focusing on the next experimental step rather than the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for more, either. It’s more like being right where you are – more intensely […] The question of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will finally be solved.” (I:3) Rather than issuing an empowering gesture in a New-Age fashion of “think positive”, Massumi offers to reconsider boundaries, identity politics and ideology with regard to the potential or the virtual, the indeterminacy of process, and an inventive-affirmative rather than a critical intent. Combining pragmatist logic (e.g. the concept of abduction from C.S. Peirce) and a speculative approach, he coins the distinction between instrumental and operative reason. Inventive rather than critical thinking arises from substituting the function of power as affect-modulation for ideology. This is yet another conceptual shift by Massumi that will be observed in a separate chapter here.

II. METHODS AND STYLES OF REASONING

A philosophical concept may be a “tool”. But it becomes a tool only after it has been picked up by nonphilosophical hands actually engaged in collective experimentation. Philosophy needs nonphilosophy to make an actual difference in the world.
(PV:244)

Before unpacking the key issues of Massumi’s theory, his orientation – speculative pragmatism – merits a few more remarks about the sources of its conceptual toolbox; namely, how it does what it does.[iv]

Brian Massumi first came to be known in the world of postphilosophical theory as the translator of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Mille plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Apart from a few other seminal works of French poststructuralism that he also translated (Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Michel de Certeau, 1986; The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard, 1984; Writing and Madness, Shoshana Felman, 1985)[v], it is the translation of A Thousand Plateaus and his subsequent book A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) that earned him the renown of a Deleuzian.

What distinguishes Massumi’s Deleuzianism from many recent ones, is that it assumes the role of furthering the theories of Deleuze and Guattari [D&G] rather than seeking the correct philosophical interpretation inside the originary milieu of French thought. Smuggling D&G into English language – and that also means, into the Anglo-American culture of theory – saves Massumi’s theory from the French orthodoxy and opens it to the questions of what implications and consequences, what new connections and relevance D&G’s theories might bear today. Wary of the rhetorical parroting that abounds among Deleuzian writers today, Massumi pursues some of the leads D&G left in heritage so as to provide a greater consistency and a more far-reaching transformation of their concepts. Thus particularly interesting and significant is his drawing on Henri Bergson’s and Whitehead’s theories of perception, as well as on James’s radical empiricism. Instead of relating concept/cognition and sensation/perception back to D&G’s conservative divisions between philosophy, science and art in What is Philosophy?,[vi] Massumi focuses on “process” as the notional relay between concepts and percepts. A process – of thought, even if he does not make a distinction between perception and thought at this point – is known if it has a terminus, and the terminus acts as a double, a constraint which is at the same time an enabling condition. If a concept is created in a process, then – when this process terminates – the concept is substituted by a percept. It can only be substituted when it becomes a percept, because the percept is what the concept “had in mind”. We perceive an object departing from the idea or the virtual knowledge “about” it. The knowledge “about” the object at the outset of perception is not yet a concept, but is abducted by a process unfolding in intermediary experiences that continuously develop in progress and, finally, in fulfilment, when the sensible percept which is the object is reached. James favors conjunctive over disjunctive relations (intermediary experiences). The concept is formed only at the terminus of the perception process when it can be verified by the percept, because its function of knowing that percept is proven to be true. Thus, “the percept is what the concept had in mind” when the percept was what the knower meant, for her idea passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention.

Massumi incorporates James’s thesis that the reality of things is indistinguishable from the experience of relations which are co-extensive with the things themselves: “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting-point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known.”[vii] A paraphrase of the fundamental principle of James’s empiricism in Massumi would be that “the object is an extension of the perceived thing, and the perceived thing is a sensible concept, and the sensible concept is a materialized idea embodied not so much in the perceiving or the perceived considered separately as in their between, in their felt conjunction.” (PV:95)

Massumi’s hinging of concepts, affects, and events, and why and how he advocates an inventive approach to writing, must be considered by how connectivity in D&G connects with James’s principle of relationality. If relations are external to their terms (Deleuze), and are directly perceived as real inasmuch as things are real (James), they are autonomous in the sense that they do not depend on nor can be reduced to object or subject. No naïve objectivism is permitted (concepts are not synthetic judgments), but neither is a naïve subjectivism which would relegate the concept to the attribution of the subject’s self-interest. “A concept is defined less by its semantic content than by the regularities of connection that have been established between it and other concepts: its rhythm of arrival and departure in the flow of thought and language; when and how it tends to relay into a next concept. When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts you still have its connectibility. You have a systemic connectibility without the system. In other words, the concept carries a certain residue of activity from its former role.” (PV:20) Concepts are events, or are like events, because they emerge through moving sets of connections, recasting and reconfiguring relations with other concepts as well as with themselves. Another name for it is process. The Bergsonian input here is to integrate movement into passage, so that the process is not a trajectory of displacements between positions, but a nonlinear duration in which transformation does not allow the positions to be anything but derived retrospectively, “working backward from the movement’s end.” (PV:6)

“The reason for the constant reconstellation of concepts, and the differences in their casting when they make repeat appearances, is that I have tried to take seriously the idea that writing in the humanities can be affirmative or inventive. Invention requires experimentation. The wager is that there are methods of writing, from an institutional base in the humanities disciplines, that can be considered experimental practices. What they would invent (or reinvent) would be concepts and connections between concepts. The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is: don’t apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material you apply it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts. The change is imposed upon the material by the concepts’ systematicity, and constitutes a becoming homologous of the material to the system. This is all very grim. It has less to do with ‘more to the world’ than ‘more of the same.’ It has less to do with invention than mastery and control. One device for avoiding application is to adopt an ‘exemplary’ method.” (PV:17)

The exemplary method in Massumi entails equality in status of both concept and example. The characteristics discerned for concepts apply to examples as well, like atomizibility and multiplicity. In an example, each and every detail matters to the extent that it could become a micro-example taking the original example to the edge of falling apart. Every example harbors terrible powers of deviation and digression, warns Massumi, but that risk constitutes the adventure of experimentation. An example thus is neither general (an abstract system, or analytic judgment), nor particular (concrete material to which a system is applied), but is singular and its details essentially partake in this singularity. “Singularity” here means that in actuality, the example belongs only to itself by being in relation to itself, but it virtually extends to everything else with which it might be connected: “one for all, and all in itself.” (PV:18) The logical category Massumi assigns to it is similar to the logical operation “abduction” in C.S. Peirce. According to Peirce, abduction is the only creative mode of thought, as it consists in generating a new rule as a possible explanation to a new observation. While induction is the mode dealing with actuality and the probable, and deduction is the mode dealing with regulation and the necessary, abduction deals with potentiality and the contingent. Massumi holds that what “philosophy tries to articulate are contingencies: potential relational modulations of contexts that are not yet contained in their ordering as possibilities that have been recognized and can be practically regulated.” (PV:240–241) The contingent, as we will see in the next chapter, is the mode in which the new emerges.

“For the writing to continue to belong in the humanities, it must take into account and put into use already established concepts drawn for one or another humanities discipline, or better, from many or all at once (philosophy, psychology, semiotics, communications, literary theory, political economy, anthropology, cultural studies …). The important thing, once again, is that these found concepts not simply be applied. This can be done by extracting them from their usual connections to other concepts in their home system, and confronting them with the example or a detail from it. The activity of the example will transmit to the concept, more or less violently. The concept will start to deviate under the force. Let it. Then reconnect it to other concepts, drawn from other systems, until a whole new system of connection starts to form. Then … take another example. See what happens. Follow the new growth. You end up with many buds. Incipient systems. Leave them that way. You have made a system-like composition prolonging the active power of the example. You have left your readers with a very special gift: a headache. By which I mean a problem: what in the world to do with it all. That’s their problem. That’s where their experimentation begins.” (PV:18–19)

There are several reasons why Massumi favors experimentation. First, because it is the only way out of the complicity of critical thinking that strives to mirror and oppose something outside of itself, while in fact it fails to account for its own processual involvement. Critical approach disavows its own inventiveness and, however masterful, its judgment is counterproductive. Proceeding by the critique as a general operating principle prevents one from producing (“fostering”, “augmenting”) the world, warns Massumi. Therefore, he overtly advises that one’s approach be strategic, and critique, thereby, a question of timing and proportion (PV:13). Experiment vs. critique calls for another opposition: invention vs. construction. Massumi’s aim to retheorize the nature-culture continuum consists in comparing the processes of change in culture that are emergent with natural processes. If to experiment means to produce and invent, then it implies that construction operates together with evolution, evolution accounting for the gradual, unforeseen and unprescribed change. Theory imitates nature in its manner of operation – in writing. Experimenting in writing thus is a process that Massumi describes as a “flow” in which the writer is “caught up”, similarly to Peirce, “abducted”. In order for “your writing to cease at moments to be recognizable to you as your own” (PV:18), you have to be willing to experiment with yourself. This means to deviate from well-trodden paths and routines, and to apply as writing tools: paradox you generate and use as if it were a well-formed logical operator to put vagueness into play; vagueness as the indeterminacy that accompanies the “thing’s coming to be what it isn’t”; inattention that allows examples to burgeon, even at the risk of appearing silly. “In order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to ‘affirm’ even your own stupidity. […] The result is not so much the negation of system as a setting of systems into motion. The desired result is a systematic openness: an open system.” (Ibid.)

III. SENSATION, EXPRESSION AND ITS PART-OBJECTS, PART-SUBJECTS
The parable of the soccer game

A paradigmatic piece of Massumi’s writing, and a paradigm for the key concepts of Massumi’s theory, i.e., sensation, movement, field of potential, expression etc. is conveyed through an analysis of a soccer game. The argument unfolds through the parable “The Political Economy of Belonging” (PV:68–80).

What defines soccer, or any game for that matter? The codification of rules, would be a constructivist answer. But as with any collective formation, the rules follow an unformalized proto-sport that originally might have had a wide range of variation. The problem is if we arrogate to the rules the role of foundation of the game, while they derive as a framing which captures the game and formalizes its varieties. So, if “the rules formally determine the game, but don’t condition it,” what is the condition? “A field.” (PV:71)

It is important to understand that the field is not the same as context, though it is embedded in it. The context is the culture which assigns sports a place (literally, a soccer stadium). The culture only enables the formation of the field. What constitutes the field are goals, as they induce the directional movement and mark the outside limits (literally, the end-sides of the stadium, but also winning and losing). The goals polarize the space between them, and thus induce the play as a field of charged movement, a field of nothing substantial but rather a field of potential.

For players, referees, but also spectators to a large extent, the ball is the focus and the catalyst of the play. Who is the subject of the play, the ball or the player? If we consider that there would be no play without a kick, then the player, when he kicks the ball, is the subject of movement, and the ball is the object of that movement. “But if by subject we mean the point of unfolding of a tendential movement, then it is clear that the player is not the subject of the play. The ball is.” (PV:73) The ball moves the players, because “where and how it bounces differentially potentializes and depotentializes the entire field, intensifying and deintensifying the exertions of the players and the movements of the team.” (ibid.) The ball is considered a relatively autonomous actor, because when it moves, the whole game moves with it, i.e., it reconfigures the field of potential. Its movement thus has global game-effects that implicate every element of the game and are at the same time contingent with them (bodies of other players and referees, objects of various kinds, weather circumstances, audience response etc.). As it catalyzes the play as a whole, but is not itself a whole, the ball can be considered a part-subject. And, as it does not address the player as a whole, but only those sensory channels needed for him to play soccer (eyes, ears, and touch), each player becomes the part-object of the ball. The player does not bring his subjectivity into play, or else if he does, self-consciousness might damage the match. He functionalizes himself into a state of intensive readiness for reflex response, which Massumi calls “actionability”. The foot is the particular body part through which the player responds in action: the kick. “The kick is indeed an expression, but not of the player. It is an “ex-pression” of the ball, in the etymological sense […]. While the ball is catalyzer and the goals are inducers, the node of expression (the body of the player) is a transducer: a channel for the transformation of a local physical movement into another energetic mode, that of potential energy. Through the kick, human physicality transduces into the insubstantiality of event, releasing a potential that reorganizes the entire field of potential movement.” (PV:74)

If we regard their part-subject function with respect to event and sensation, the ball is the catalyst of the game as the event, for it corresponds to the indeterminacy and complexity resulting from a multifactor moving set of relations (reconfigurations of the field); the player is the channel of the sensation of the play. Massumi even goes so far as to claim that the player is that sensation, provided the sensation is a channeling of field potential into local action, from which it is again transduced into a global reconfiguration of the field of potential. “Sensation is the mode in which potential is present in the perceiving body.” (PV:75)

IV. AFFECT, PERCEPTION AND BODY

The skin is faster than the word.

Why does Massumi deem it crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion? Why does he take pains to distinguish sensation from perception or affect from sensation? What makes his contribution to rethinking affect after Deleuze novel, compared with a myriad of Spinozist refrains today about the body being defined by its capacity to affect and be affected?

In his essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (PV: 23–45) Massumi chooses two stories to make the case for the motto of this chapter: when is the skin faster than the word? The first one is about a short film shown on German television as an intermezzo between programs, in which a man builds a snowman on his roof garden. The snowman starts to melt in the sun; the man watches it melting and after some time, takes it into the mountains where he bids it good-bye and leaves. As many parents reported that their children had been frightened by this film, the case was taken up for an experimental study on cognition. Children were tested on a scale of “pleasantness” for their reception of three versions of the film, each one exhibiting another relationship between image and word (silent, dubbed with factual information, and dubbed with an emotional account). The results showed discrepancies between different registers of responses, between what children described as pleasant/unpleasant in regard to happy/sad scenes, as well as the measurement of their autonomic physiological reactions, such as heartbeat and skin resistance. The sadder, the more pleasant it was; the more factual, or nonverbal and image-based, the more aroused they were. The primacy of the affective in the reception of images (rather than of the narrating voice) indicated a gap between content and effect. Physiologically and semantically, the emotional content, the verbal report and the bodily arousal did not match. The discrepancy between the three terms could be furthered to a conceptual distinction: (1) emotion, conventional and consensual, the “sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (PV:28); (2) feeling, personal and biographical, because it relates sensation to previous experience, and (3) affect, nonconscious, irreducibly bodily and autonomic, therefore, pre-individual or impersonal. The intensity as the measured physiological response in this situation constitues a different order of connection that operates in parallel to the signifying order. Expression is disconnected from communication in the sense that it loses its supposed content as its cause. Expression and content do not share a form, but run in two parallel series, each one in its own, however mutually non-resembling, form. Massumi calls on the principle of self-organization to compare the situation of expression as being organized in multiple levels that have different logics and temporalities. He goes on to illustrate it with a story about another, more scientifically investigated, brain-skin disconnection: the mystery of the missing half second.

Two experiments were performed on patients with implanted cortical electrodes. In the first experiment, mild electrical impulses longer than half a second were applied to the cortical electrodes as well as to the skin. If the cortical electrodes were fired half a second earlier than the skin was stimulated, the patients reported the skin sensation first. The researcher concluded that the sensation refers backward in time and that brain and skin resonate recursively, rather than first being linearized in action-reaction. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to flex a finger at a moment of their choosing and to record the time of their decision. The flexes came 0.2 seconds after the noted decision, but the electroencephalograph registered significant brain activity 0.3 seconds before the decision. Massumi draws that there are “autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, prior to action and expression.” (PV:29) As William James famously argued on the example of one being chased by a dog: “We don’t run because we feel afraid, we feel afraid because we run.” (F:36) The body is struck and compelled to action before it consciously registers the affect.

Expression is, as Massumi continues from D&G, the impersonal agency or force that affects the body first, before it is captured, perceived and reflected. Perception comes second in this process, after the event (affect®sensation), by selecting and observing the elements retrospectively experienced as determining the situation. That perception and sensation are distinct, that affect precedes perception and that sensation prolongs the experience in the moment of perception by folding in the future-past of the potential, is proven by color memory.[viii] Namely, the remembering of a color never reproduces the past perception, but it exceeds it. Experiments have shown that “the co-functioning of language, memory, and affect ‘exaggerates’ a color. The exaggeration […] results from the ‘absolute striking character’ of certain ‘color-peculiarities’.” (PV:210) Discussing a case of mismatch between words and qualities of a “too blue”, Massumi makes a Jamesian twist to say that it is not a matter of what the subject does with the color, but what the color does to the subject. There is a pushiness in the vivacity of an impression that attests to a “self-activity of experience.” (PV:211) Here, sensation begins to work: it registers potential connections in the moment of a singular connection, a qualitative surplus of a self-referential feeling of having a feeling. What distinguishes “affect” from sensation?

Why Massumi holds fast to the concept of “affect” is that it grounds the connection between body and thought in movement not necessarily pertaining to the perceptual (as sensation does). To Deleuze’s definition of affect that leans so much on Spinoza, according to which, affect is what is extracted from affections on the body as a passage, a becoming, a continuous variation of increase or diminishing of the capacity to act, Massumi adds that affect is synaesthetic. It implies a participation of the senses in each other through “the living being’s ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another.” (PV:35) In other words, it is not enough to state that affect is what makes feelings feel and thus to reduce it to intensity, but it is a matter of transforming and extending the non-conscious affective resonance into another activity, process or potential event. Expression dissipates if it is not continued, the pragmatist Massumi would have it. “What expression loses in ontogenetic vivacity, it gains in longevity. The flash doesn’t disappear into the black of night. It continues. Its pick-up by a different process is the price of its continuing. Its culmination, the effect of its playing out (in this case a strikingly optical effect), feeds forward into another productive process for which it provides a content. […] It is a basically pragmatic question of how one performatively contributes to the stretch of expression in the world – or conversely prolongs its capture.” (E:14) If affect is the “smile without the cat”, or the impingement minus the impinging thing and the actual action that caused it and the actual context of that action, what is being expressed in affect is insubstantial and rational; that which is renewed and differentiated, a general capacity or power to understand, be affected, or act.

CONCLUSION

The essays in Parables for the Virtual open a new chapter in contemporary theory proper, mainly for two achievements. First, it is an event of theory to imbue its concepts with such creative power of transforming and reinventing themselves as if they were fluidly growing through a wildly mixed, self-varying and sometimes even motley pool of material that makes up the everyday. World appears as a reservoir of activity. It compels you as reader to plunge into it with user-creative tools you constantly need to revamp yourself in attuning them with that same material, or else, you might miss out on change.

Second, the potential to overcome the cynically critical or relativist moods of academic poststructuralism beyond a simple vitalist affirmation of joyful affects about being more intensely in an ever-changing process is not only foreshadowed. It is already operative in Massumi as a theoretical practice lacking no complexity in its intensity and pragmatist readiness for interactions with a far-ranging materiality of culture.

However, this conclusion also anticipates some objections: is the politics of affective empowerment adequate to every society or situation today? What would it mean to apply it to geopolitically different contexts, like post-socialist transition in Eastern Europe, where newly-born old fascisms and dramatic social inequalities demand collective coercive action? In this case, the politics of particular identitarian interests, advocated by U.N., Amnesty International, Soros Open Society Foundation and the like, have failed in achieving the aim of de-fascization, and moreover, served to make a smooth space for free market capital to move into. However, the politics of being more intensely there where the post-war social and political conflicts still divide society, would mean to maintain the political status quo with one hand while embracing neoliberalism to come with the other. Doesn’t the politics of affect mainly address the individual (often literally so in second person singular advice) in an advanced capitalist free-trade system? Doesn’t it reveal a traditionally liberal-individualist bias of Western thought that doesn’t apply to many third-world pockets of a still struggling world? The question remains whether Massumi intentionally avoids tackling that passage of individuation from the individual to the collective, or whether with insisting on a transversal subjectless movement of thought in and of the body he counts on dispensing with society altogether as an obsolete thing.

Footnotes

LITERATUR

Auslander, Philip: From Acting to Performance, London: Routledge 1997.

Broadhurst, Susan: Digital Practices. Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007.

Etchells, Tim: Certain Fragments, London: Routledge 1999.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika; Pflug, Isabel (Hg.): Inszenierung von Authentizität, Tübingen / Basel: Francke 2000.

Hartwagner, Georg; Igehaut, Stefan; Rötzer, Florian (Hg.): Künstliche Spiele, München: Klaus Boer Verlag 1993.

Heathfield, Adrian: Live Art and Performance, New York: Routledge 2004.

Helmer, Judith; Malzacher, Florian: Not Even a Game Anymore. Das Theater von Forced Entertainment - The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, Berlin: Alexander Verlag 2004.

Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1956.

Jullien, Francois (Hg.): Die Kunst, Listen zu erstellen, Berlin: Merve 2004.

Kaup-Hasler, Veronica; Claus Philipp (Hg.): Schwarzmarkt für nützliches Wissen und Nicht-Wissen, Maske und Kothurn, Wien: Böhlau 2007.

Klein, Gabriele; Sting, Wolfgang (Hg.): Performance. Positionen zur zeitgenössischen szenischen Kunst, Bielefeld:  transcript 2005.

Buchhart, Dieter; Fuchs, Mathias (Hg.): Kunst und Spiele II, Kunstforum Internationale Bd. 178. Nov.2005-Jan. 2006.

Pfaller, Robert: Die Illusionen der anderen. Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2003.

Römer, Stefan: Künstlerische Strategien des Fake. Kritik von Original und Fälschung, Köln: DuMont 2001.

Sasse, Silvia; Wenner, Stefanie: Kollektivkörper. Kunst und Politik von Verbindung, Bielefeld: transcript 2002.

True truth about the nearly real, Katalog der 4. Internationalen Sommerakademie im MousonTurm, Frankfurt 2002.

(11.11.2007)