Benjamin on Kafka

At times he seems to come close to saying with Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: So we have before us a mystery which we cannot comprehend. And precisely because it is a mystery we have had the right to preach it, to teach the people that what matters is neither freedom nor love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they have to vow – without reflection and even against their conscience.

Biopolitics as event.

Lately I had been reading the new book of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt “Common Wealth”. I got interested in the way they explain the notion of “biopolitcs as event”. Specially in the distinction they made about that concept in relation with the notion of “event” in Alan Badiou.

The explanation of “biopolitics as event” connects to the work with “The Half” in the idea that the performer is producing his-her way of being there in front of the audience. Moreover, that the action of producing his being there is an active work that needs to be constantly awkened. When working with Paz and Pablo we stressed the importance of “being on”, in a state of constant production of physical movement and mind attention.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri find the term “biopolitic” in the writings of Michel Foucault. They go distinguishing the term “biopower” with the term “biopolitic”. This is the way they express biopolitic:

None of these interpretations captures what for us is most important in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Our reading not only identifies biopolitics with the localized productive powers of life – that is, the production of affects and languages through social cooperation and the interaction of bodies and desires, the invention of new forms of the relation to the self and others, and so forth- but also affirms biopolitics as the creation of new subjectivities that are presented at once as resistance and de-subjectification.

…

The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges , so to speak, from the inside.

Later on Hardt and Negri compares the notion of “event” in Badiou and Foucault which brings more light about the way to understand “biopolitic as event”.

In Badiou an event …acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward – rather than backward – looking gaze. The event is to speak inside existence and the strategies that transverse it.

What I rescue from those excerpts is the idea that the event is internal to the subject. The subject has the will to produce an event and not just only recognize himself inside of it. The performer is actively producing his subjectivity in front of his audience. How? Opening, throwing out, persistently the movement vocabulary (gestures, postures, intentions, energy, etc)  store in his body. And not only that, not only positing out his manifold catalogues of movements but by the same action re inventing them. Re inventing them while knowing that a crowd there in front is paying attention to him. Using the energy that audience’s attention brings not to get captured inside of it, but transforming it to help to the state of constant self-production.

For an event to happen is not enough just to set out audience, musician and performers on stage with a predetermined choreography. For an event to happen is needed to activate the internal state of each person on that set.

What on earth is that internal state?

In the case of the dancer, light designer, musician, choreographer and dramaturge means to awaken a “here and now” awareness. It is an awareness not of the overall picture of what is going on stage (not a visual awareness of the stage). It is the visceral awareness accompanied with a mind intention to create new impulses that reshuffle the manner to organize the activities they are on charge of (dance, lights, music, direction, thinking, etc).

In the case of the audience is to perceive the piece viscerally and visually.

If audiences connects with their own visceral sensibility this will alter their visual perception, affecting the overall timing of perceptions of the piece. In this sense they are adding to the re-invention of ways to perceive the piece. In another words: audiences are in active charge to reshuffle the way the piece is externally perceived.

Both audience and makers are shoulder to shoulder and step by step re shaping the way to perceive and deal the reality around them.

OK. This is all for today.

presentation.

The major difference between “The Half” and “About falling” (the last project that Igor and me we made) is that we are not dealing necessarily with a process of transformation; this is to say, with the notion of change, but with the notion of presentation.

Igor, Tarek and me found the pressure to research new ways of collaboration and new ways to create material for a performance in a short period of10 days. Because of the short time to research we needed to think in parallel, how to present the material to the audience at each step of its creation. At that moment we had agreed to keep the parallelism research-presentation for our future investigations. Therefore the concept of “presentation” is the one to work in Amsterdam with Paz and in Berlin with Pablo.

Thus, that the main concept of “The Half” is about the performer presenting him-herself in various (multiple) manners. The extension of the presentation on a field larger that the body of the performer implicates the investigation of the mechanism of theatre that makes it possible to function as a re-presentation machine.

When I connect the issue of the one single performer presenting himself there in front of the audience on stage, with my personal interest on philosophical ideas (By the way, a very poetic interest and under any circumstance not academic at all) I relate it with the notion of ontology from (again) Alan Badiou in his book “ El ser y el acontecimiento”.

I will transcript some fragments from that book that help me to anchor some ideas about how the performer could proceed to perform on stage.
There is no one, or the one is not, there is count for one.

The one by being an operation, is never a presentation.

The multiple is the regime of presentation; the one is, in respect to it, an operating result, the one is that what presents, not being for that fact, neither one nor multiple.

What is needed is that the operating structure of ontology discerns the multiple without having to make it one and in consequence, without disposing of a definition of the multiple.

What I find interesting is the idea that the performer, as one body, persists on stage by actualizing the situation. He actualizes the fragments of time happening on stage and the interrupted movement of his body. To actualize is to name to oneself (to think) what is going on at present time on stage. To actualize, talking in kinetic terms, is the use of an internal metronome that divides each physical impulse of movement infinitively, into micro and macro movements. In both cases the performer thinks and feels “divisions” of time (situation) and body (movement).  I link in a poetic way this performative technique with the notion of count-for-one.

The technique of counting and naming what is going on, presents the performer but not in his unicity, but in an unstoppable proliferation of gestures, signs, energies, postures, etc. Indeed the performer breaks himself into many pieces that unfolds as such.

In order to respect this multiple proliferation the performer cannot be tight to the repetition of the gestures. The multiplicity cannot be defined or capture. The multiplicity needs to be generated but not controlled.

Badiou talks about mathematical axioms. Instead of axioms I think on “principles”. The principles generate a proliferation of unpredictable movements and gestures. The gestures and movements although unpredictable, they appear each time with certain regularity. The regularity makes possible that the multiplicity does not get totally chaotic, but certain order is appreciated. This makes possible to repeat the proliferation without repeating its effective result.

One task for the weeks in Amsterdam and Berlin would be how to find principles that proliferates gestures and movements of presentation without repeating them in an exact way. How to create a principle that does not define or capture the multiplicity that it creates.

The Half and the Two (versus the One and the Multiple).

In Buenos Aires I got the book of Alan Badiou “El Siglo”. In english means “The siècle”. I found the fragments below very much related to the last post on “What the Half could be”. Specially the numeric relation between one and multiple and one and two (which after reading the book I need to reconsider). I dont want to do further comments and just transcript certain fragements that I found very inspiring. The Spanish to English translation was made by me, sorry for the imprecisions.

Fragments extracted from the book “The siècle” from Alan Badiou, Ed: Buenos Aires- Manantial 2005.

The siècle has thought itself simultaneously as an end, exhaustion, decadence and as an absolute beginning. The siècle conceived itself as nihilism and Dionysian affirmation. The relation between both intentions is not simple. It is not about a dialectic correlation, it is something interwoven. It is a non-dialectic relation between necessity and will. In another words, there is not dialectic synthesis between nihilism and affirmation.

The siècle has been the carrier of a combative conception of the existence, which equals to say that the totality of the existence, in each of its real fragments, must represent itself as conflict.

In the xx siècle the shared law of the world is not the One neither the Multiple, but the Two. It is not the One because there is not harmony, hegemony of the simple, unified power of God. It is not the Multiple, because the aim is not to reach equilibrium of powers and harmony of faculties. It is the Two, and the world represented under the modality of the Two excludes the possibility of a unanimous surrender as well of combinatory equilibrium. The war is the resolute visibility of the Two against the combinatory equilibrium. In this sense the war is omnipresent. Nevertheless the Two is anti-dialectic. The Two contents a non dialectic disjunction without synthesis.

The passion of the siècle is the real, but the real is the antagonism. And that is why the passion of the siècle, whether it concerns the empires, the revolutions, the arts, the sciences, the private life, is not anything else than war.

Towards 1965 in China begins a fight of classes in the field of philosophy. This fight opposes to whom believes that the essence of dialectics is the genesis of antagonism, given in the formula “one divides in two”, and to whom considers that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis of the contradictory terms, and therefore, the correct formula is “two fuses in one”.

It is about the identification of the revolutionary identity, of its constitutive desire. Is it the desire of division, of the war or is it the desire of the unity, the fusion and the peace? In any case, in China at that time is declared leftist to whom hold up on the maxim “one divides in two” and rightist to whom claim the formula “two fuses in one”.
Why? If the maxim of synthesis (two fuses in one), taken as a subjective formula, as desire of the One, is declared rightist, it is because in opinion of the Chinese revolutionaries this formula results completely premature. The subject of this maxim has not trespass the Two until its end, does not know yet what is the war of classes integrally victorious. From this is deduced that the One that nourishes its desire is not yet even thinkable, this signifies that under the appearance of synthesis, that desire evokes the antique One. This interpretation of the dialectic is Restaurateur. Not to be conservator, to be a revolutionary activist in the present is to desire obligatory the division. The question of novelty is immediately the question of the creative excision in the singularity of each situation.

dance and the name.

I was  thinking that if “The Half” will be constructed as a “dance” piece, the problematic of production and communication is going to turn around the  natural “impersonal” aura that movement grants to the performer.

The problematic comes when we consider the movement of the body as the previous step for a sign to be interpreted, or as the previous step before to give a “name” to something and “think” about it as an “idea”.

This “impersonal” previous step of  a “sign”, “name” and “idea”  is going to produce friction with the movement material that I called  personal (intimate) and fictional (entertaining).

Thus, we will have a clash between “abstract” dance and the ambition to do it “personal” and “fictional”. We will have a contradiction between the abstract nature of dance and its possibility to be presented as a theatrical event.

I will quote a text of  Alan Badiou from his “Handbook of Inaesthetics” to clarify from where my thoughts comes from:

Dance would provide the metaphor for the fact that every genuine thought depends upon an event. An event is precisely what remains undecided between the taking place and the non-place in the guise of an emergence that is indiscernible from its own disappearence.

…

The name is what decides upon the having taking place. Dance would then point toward thought as event, but before this thought has received a name – at the extreme edge of its veritable disappearence.

This is to say that if we don’t do “theatre” we would not be representing any idea that will encounter the audience.  If we do “dance” we will be articulating “time” or the pre-time before an idea could be captured and represented as a figure of thought.

When the organization of the body movements of the  the performer will be “recognized” as a clear sign, idea or thought, the question is: which kind of idea is that body giving away? Which type of recognizable movement we will be talking about?

In other words, when the previous moment of thought (event) , finally is made possible to be thought with ideas of common opinion, how to direct that process of thought for all ?

short resume about what “The half” could be.

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The Half is an investigation about the –multiple- capacity of –one- man (we could call it subject to avoid discussions about humanism or post-humanism) to present him/herself on stage.

The generator of the material will be the performer himself, in relation with his way of enacting private, public and artificial-fictional situations.

Looking the result with an eye hawk I would say that what interest me is to see the cross pathway in which contemporary man find himself having to enact those three roles (private, public and fictional) all at the same time and in any kind of successive order.

The private role is the role in which man spends the time of his desires and emotions.
The public role is the time of communication with other people. This is the common, normal, reality based way to see the persona of the performer.
The fictional role is the more exaggerated one, the most intensified. It is a performance enacted not for oneself, not for couple of people but enacted for a multitude of people watching, expecting and desiring something right there in front of you. The use of time is over stretched, made to be understood and to affect a large amount of people.

Music and dance are the two elements to navigate the three performances stages.

The private songs of the performers will be the starting point to work on his intimate state of being. The over sophistication of that musical track will reach the fictional state of being, escalating an almost entertaining spectacle. In the middle of those two registers we find the public state of being.

Music could sound as follows: starting from a pop song remixed until it reaches the intensity of music for circus or a rock concert.

Half means the methodology to work with “separations”.

The normal assumption of a group working together is that they are integrated into a harmonious integrated whole. Giving for granted that state of affairs we will separate each one from the other one’s. Augmenting the void between people to person. The methodology is of non-relation. The same methodology is applied in the use of time. The continuous flow of time will be interrupted like in a Brecht play. Each person will be asked to separate himself from his own actions, jumping from intimacy to the public arena at any moment. The separation operates in the middle of any performative action. The act never completes itself guarding the unfolding of potency. Actions are always in-complete and therefore remain possible.

There is a lot of aggression and violence involved in this methodology. I see the play as an antagonistic arena. The final result could be imagined as a musical concert or a varieté where each act, each person, each element, in its defined unity, connects (via non-relation) with the total performance through energetic counterpoints. The energetic collisions are the very connection between the different elements.

It is a passionate fight to survive all together under the gaze of the audience, and that very fight of separation is what bounces back bringing us together.