The Star and the Eclipse. Remarks on Forgotten
Science
(by Salon’s Performance Collective / June 4th, 2025,
UCR Arts100, Riverside, California)
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier
University of California Riverside
So, the writing becomes a translation of the dancing?
/ Well, obviously writing and dancing are profoundly different endeavors, and
you can’t really translate the one into the other. But you can create a parity
of status for each, so that the writing doesn’t ‘capture’ the dancing, and the
dancing doesn’t elude the writing.
(Susan Leigh Foster)
Murmur to the night
Hide her starry light
(…)
Weeping willow tree
Weeping sympathy
Bent your branches down along the ground and cover me
On Wednesday, June
4th, 2025, at 8 p.m., at University of California, campus Riverside Arts100 Dance
Studio, it took place the performance Forgotten Science, by Salon’s
Performance Collective (Dimitris Chatziparaschis,
Jorge P. Yánez, Jessica Maccaro, Jae M. Adams, Sasha Korotneva, and Gonzalo
Díaz-Letelier) –a section of Salon Transdisciplinary Collective. Salon
Transdisciplinary Collective is an experiment in the composition of bodies and
ideas involving graduate students and researchers from different disciplinary
areas of the university (arts and humanities, social sciences, natural
sciences, formal sciences, medical sciences, and techno-engineering). The group
meets weekly to discuss concepts and epistemes that cut across different
disciplinary fields, not to reach a common language, but to destabilize the
basic conceptualities that the bureaucratic tendencies of university
departments tend to fossilize. Salon’s Performance Collective is a transnational
(Greece, Ecuador, United States, Russia, Chile) and transdisciplinary (electric
and computer engineering, dance and performance, biology and entomology,
physics and mathematics, music, philosophy and translation studies) group. I am
just one member of the collective, but I would like to share some reflections
that also arise from the group’s collective intelligence, although I elaborate
on them here from my perspective —from which I see
the collective is played out as a singular-plural and anarchic entanglement,
not as a community of faith.
This reflection is not concerned with art criticism or technical issues related
to the mounting of the piece, but rather with the epistemological, ethical, and
political dimensions of this performance.
THE
AESTHETIC-POLITICAL QUESTION ABOUT THE PIT
There is an old
motif, repeatedly taken up from antiquity, about the pit or separation
invented by the Greeks between the stage and the audience (theater), and
between knowledge and its subject matter (theory).
This later theological-Christian separation between the luminous ascending life
of the spirit and the dark, cadenced nature of sensible life (the light of the
stage, the shadows of the stalls; the light of knowledge, the shadows of its
subject matter) would have been translated into its conventional Cartesian
secular form in the European and American modernity of the technoscientific
representation (subject-object, res cogitans et res extensa), the
society of the spectacle, and the sovereign theater—fascism, monumental revolutions, neoliberal
“democracy”, etc. Regarding the possibility of a “dance theory”, Susan Leigh
Foster writes: “Seems like the whole idea of what a theory is—a hypothesis
about what something is and how it works—implies that there is more than one.
Aren’t there multiple theories about dance? I mean, hundreds or thousands? / But
if the use of the singular is your only objection, can’t you just imagine
‘dance theory’ as the broader category that encompasses all theories? / Maybe.
But now you’ve made me see another problem: To call it ‘dance theory’ cordons
it off as its own thing, separate from and comparable to ‘dance history’ or
‘dance ethnography.’ And I can’t envision theory as operating at that kind of
distance from either method or subject matter. / Wait. You’re saying theory is
an integral part of research. / It’s woven into the entire creative-critical
process. / Maybe we should call it ‘theorizing’ instead of theory? / Ahhh. The
gerund is always so satisfying. But seriously, theorizing can happen throughout
the process of conducting research, whether one is making a dance or writing an
essay. Theorizing is instigated whenever one asks oneself, ‘What am I doing and
why am I doing it?”’.
Leigh Foster, similarly to Kember and Zylinska, emphasizes the translative
chiasmus between theory and dance-performance as an abolition of the “distance”
(or “leveling of the pit”): performative theory / reflexive performance.
Leigh Foster: “(…) theory helps you discover new things. As an integral part of
investigation, it provides a flexible corpus of assumptions that are always
subject to change depending on what you uncover during your ongoing research. I
guess I tend to stress the role of theory in research because the emphasis on
objectivity in Western culture over the past three centuries has obscured this
dialectical back and forth between theory and inquiry that constitutes the
research process. / That whole objective/subjective debate? / Exactly. I don’t
think there is such a thing as a neutral tool for looking at dance. Every
checklist of movement features, every notation system devised, has values and
preferences built into it that influence the resulting profile of the dance.
(…). Even the ‘neutral’ notions of space and time are culturally specific. Is
space some geometric grid into which bodies move? Or is it produced by the
interaction between body and environment? Is time metric? Cyclical? Steady or
in flux?”
We thus observe a desire to abolish that ontological
gap between the dancer and what is danced (or between praxis and theory), and
often also between the stage and the audience: the separation between
subject and object in the Western modern sense. An abolitionist tendency we
often find, since the 20th century, both in “theater” and in “theory”, because
both are born from the idea of a gap or a distance between knowing and “what”
is known, or between dancing and “what” is danced—in other words, both are outcomes from the
passage from ritual to the Greek invention of theater and to the modern
spectacle bearing exhibitive value. But a new ontology seems to emerge,
according which the medium is the message, and the medium is metamorphic.
In some ways, this idea can be linked to this other one: the obsolescence of
the “museum” dispositive (artworks as untouchable objects of contemplation and
representation; the lifeworld as an untouchable order to be contemplated and
followed, but not transformed), in contemporary political aesthetics. And this
can also be connected to the concepts of interruption (Bartleby’s “I
would prefer not to”) and profanation (as in Agamben’s work, sacred,
privatized or institutionalized forms or objects are returned to common use; a
child, flouting adult surveillance, playing with sacred objects desacralizes
them, reveals the potential to disrupt normative economies of meaning and
power).
That interruption and/or profanation has to do with
the relationship of each human being with the world (the order of words and
things), and particularly with art and politics (the abolition of “distance” as
an abolition of the museification of the world). But there is also the
relationship between the stage and the audience in art (the abolition of
“distance” as an abolition of the theater pit), and this has had a
decisive impact on the configuration of Western political imaginaries. But in
this direction the problem becomes more complicated when the gap of theatrical
distance is leveled: it is another thing to understand this distance as a
“critical distance” (in the sense that goes from Kant to phenomenology, among
others, as contemplation and exposition of the predominant forces-discourses without
subjecting to it) that is broken when the stage imposes itself on the
audience or when the audience assaults the stage.
In a Benjaminian-Deleuzian entanglement, Willy Thayer, in his 2010 book «Technologies of Critique», describes a series of technologies or ages of
“criticism,” each linked to a single metaphor: 1) the organism:
discernment of the ei\do~ (intelligible
formal aspect) that, as an exceptional unity or e{tero~ ti (“something other”), articulates the
pre-understanding and theorization of things and events, giving them unity and
meaning, transcending the immanence of the material aggregatum; 2) the theater:
exterior point of view with respect to the events, photological and judicative
dimension, subject-object correlation); and 3) the singularity: unworking
immanence, interruption of the theater of the organic totality; hylomorphism of
immanence, undecidability and untranslatability. In his book, Thayer points out
the traditional distinction between structure and aggregatum,
which operates here as an old ontological assumption rooted in Aristotle: while
structure is an organic, living totality, the aggregate is a mere combination
of elements, a sum of parts. Structure, then, is more than the sum of
its parts: it is a solidary whole whose elements and parts are in a
relationship of reciprocal dependence. If we consider the formula “the whole is
more than the sum of its parts,” this more (as plus ultra)
is neither a mere part nor the sum of its parts, but something else.
This “something else” (e{tero~ ti),
one and indivisible (the glass can be broken, but not the idea-of-glass as a
formal and teleological cause) is what Aristotle thinks of in terms of the
“cause of being” (aijtiva tou` ei[naiv),
as ontic “presence” and “for the sake of”, as ontological “stability” (oujsiva, substantia): a compound (suvnolon) of “matter” (u{lh) and “form” (morfhv) by virtue of which the form separable by
intellectual perception (nou`~) as
“formal aspect” (ei\do~) maintains
something articulated in its constitutive multiplicity as a unitary organic
presence. The old performance of the Greek lovgo~ as “that which gathers and weaves,” whose heritage is
expressed in the ideas of centering and transcendent function, general
principle of composition, teleology as rigid determinant, soul, etc. Of the three “technologies of critique” (organism, theater,
singularity) formalized by Thayer, the first two develop the idea of
criticism within the framework or according to the established rational framing
(the figure of the art critic who knows the principles and rules of art and
taste and who judges according to them); while the third one deploys a critique
of the framing itself, questioning its exceptionality (anarchical or
postfoundational criticism).
SINGULARITY
AND INTERRUPTION OF ORGANIC THEATER
How does the performance Forgotten Science relate
epistemologically to this set of ontological problems concerning art and
politics? I insist that this corresponds to my view of the piece and the way I
worked on it, and that the collective is not a community of faith (so I do not
speak as a “representative” or “spokesperson” for the group). I think that, in
line with the collective’s discussions on method before and during the process,
we brought the third technology into play: singularity and interruption of
organic theater. How did we play such an interruption? Let’s see. First, by
avoiding the subordination of the action under a plot-and-director dispositive,
and also the narratives woven from clear and distinct propositions, as well as
diegetics in its classic Aristotelian structure. This involves the destruction
of the archaeo-teleological narrative schemes which produce the standardization
of perception (automatisms): the dislocation of the schematism of Aristotelian
time—the
reduction to the One brought about by the dihvghsi~
in the «Poetics». Or, to put it in Walter Benjamin’s words: the problem
is the bourgeois conception of language as a “means of communication” of
fetishized meanings—by analogy
to the trade of commodities, if we understand this in connection with the
critique of commodity fetishism in the first book of Marx’s «Das
Kapital» read in an aesthetic key—so that the recovery of the
communicability of language would involve assuming that experience in its
singularity resists its fixation in the ideal element of language and its
spatio-temporal schematisms. What are these automatisms and how can performance
“break” them? Thayer has observed the first elementary phenomenon: the position
of the image under the word to articulate its meaning, “the image is
resolved in the unity of the word, of the concept, the endless grammar of the
cliché.”
This is a critical question, analogously to how John Cage states that, for him,
the position of sound under the word, its cliché, was a critical question.
New music:
new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for,
if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words.
Just an attention to the activity of sounds. / (…) And what is the purpose of
writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with
sounds. (…). This [purposeless] play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an
attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation,
but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living (…).
Automatisms
would operate as standardization and redundancy in the cliché, and would
pass through perception, judgment and spatial-temporal syntheses of experience—in the
forms of cliché of perception (production of perceptual clichés), cliché
of narrativization (from the Aristotelian diegesis to the Hollywood
industrial one), and the consequent “entertainment” of the “objective
spectator” who, in turn, is an “expected subject,” a type of subjectivity to be
produced-and-reflected.
Clichés, clichés everywhere... It is
the world of cliché-images, the world conceived as a vast production of the
cliché-image. And clichés can be sound or optical: words, visual images. But
they can also be interior or exterior. There are no fewer clichés in our heads
than on the walls (…). What does that mean? That inside there is the same as
outside, namely, clichés and nothing but clichés. And when they are in love it
is as if they were telling another in the most stereotyped way in the world the
feelings they experience, because the feelings they experience are themselves
clichés. The cliché is in us. And our head is full of them, no less than our
body.
Images
that are legible in advance, with the eyes elided from the trick: the
question would be to expose the trick in order to undo the fetish. To
discern and expose the grid of visibility, which determines vision, but which in
itself is not visible while operating normally. “What else would the
word-image or cliché be but the diversion of the eyes towards the unity of the
concept to prevent them from becoming accustomed to looking closely at the
workmanship, the external debris, the montage, the paste, the clay, the soil of
the image, its material mediation?” Automatism as a technology for
capturing the living in “culture”—its imaginaries, public opinion, etc.—, against the entropy of bodies—of their desire as seeing and saying—and their coefficient of deviation from all standardization.
Thayer points out the dimension of these automatisms as a “gigantic arsenal of
imago-powers: painting, photography, cinema, rather than as fine arts, as
artifacts of conquest, colonization and neocolonization, of imperial or
national avant-garde propaganda, of naturalization and promotion of domination
as culture.”
The concept of imago-power defines in Thayer the relationship between
the production of automatism—standardization of the soul and its “correlative”
world—and normative-governmental power: “the
image as mise en scène of power, of the image as power, as an artifact
of government and regulation of bodies.”
There
is no affirmative politics of the image if it is not by dismantling the varied
and transversal governability exercised by the gigantic columbarium of cliché
and slogan (…). The cliché must be dismantled by elaborating, against the grain
of it, a visionary image that allows us to see through the cliché, not only its
regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals.
And a few pages later, addressing
Raúl Ruiz’s poetics of cinema:
(…)
Ruiz’s poetics attempts to situate us in the becoming without genesis of what,
in many ways, Ruiz finally calls a metamorphic image, not as a passage from one
form or metaphor to another and another and another—because in this way one does not leave
the synthetic narrative translation—, but as a variation of the quality
without transport-of-something, a variation of the quality that is subtracted
from the unity, identity and totality of the character, of the action, of the
film; sheltered, at the same time, according to another sort of rigors, from a
mere mishmash.
Ruiz’s writing of the image would
therefore be, against the grain of that of the imago-power, a writing of
the metamorphic image as a “variation of quality without
transport-of-something”, which would allow “to see through the cliché, not only
its regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals.”
But why the insistence on the
standardization—or total
mobilization of the law of value—of perception as an articulation of
“intentionality” (correlation of adequacy between perceiving and what is
perceived, between wanting and what is wanted, between conceiving and what is
conceived, etc.) with a certain diegesis? As we already know, the
concept comes from Aristotle’s «Poetics», and we can translate it in a
gloss as follows: dihvghsi~ (diegesis)
is the way in which the event is narrated more or less unitarily and
directedly, around a central conflict. The term is composed by the
prepositional prefix dia; (‘through’) and hJgevomai (in Latin ducere,
‘to lead’), referring to a power of shepherding or government—hJgemoniva (hegemony) is,
as we know, ‘leading’, and hJgemwn (hegemon), ‘the leader’ or ‘the
leading’. But in Greek it refers not only to a power, but also to a knowledge:
kavqhgevsi~ (catechesis), to
e-ducate, to show the way; ejxhvghsi~ (exegesis), to
explain the meaning, to guide seeing/thinking; ejxhghth`~ (exegete),
interpreter (of sacred law), counselor, guide or conductor (as docente
in Spanish, from Latin ducere); ejxhgevomai (exegéomai),
to di-rect, to guide, to govern, to order. So, the function between knowledge
and power is drawn here as that of teaching-and-commanding.
If
we translate the narrative-industrial principle (narrative determines image)
into the language of Aristotelian poetics: narration (dihvghsi~)
subsumes the gaze (o[yi~), linking the eye to a spectacle. The diegetic articulation of
the gaze passes through narration structured as a unitary and teleological
composition, whose action revolves around a central conflict.
Such is the structure of the mise en scène: to mount (arrangement
or disposition, separate form, formal entelechy) / the scene
(metamorphic matter converted into spectacle, a narrativized cliché-vision).
The “cultural battles”—whether around the global commodity-form or national-popular
aestheticization—make it clear that there is no political and/or religious hegemony
without narrative-interpretive hegemony (or “cultural” hegemony as it is called
today). Thayer: “To the extent that one can speak of a diegesis of the
life of the polis, in each case, the living populations would seem to be
aestheticized daily in narrative software.”
Against
the grain of the narrative-industrial paradigm, it would be a
question of breaking down the intentional apparatus through an “unprepared
potentiality” (Averroes), not teleologically organized, of imagination and
image (potentiality of imagination versus the facticity of the “imaginaries”
that capture it). If it is a question of a writing of the image that allows “to
see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the multiplicity that said
regime conceals”, then it will be the disarray of the intentional apparatus
that leaves in view, at the same time, the regime of the gaze and what escapes
of it. To this end, Ruiz will assume the postulate that, in his “writing of the
image”, it is the image that determines the narration, at the same time it
unworks the pre-given diegesis:
(…) it is the type of image produced what
always determines the narrative and not the other way around. This
suggests that the image not only fulfils, as it would dominantly do, a
metaphorical, illustrative function, representing principles prior to it to a
subsequent subject; it suggests that the image would not be reduced to being
simply a medium through which a
script, a message, a concept, is communicated, subordinating its movement and
possibility to it. (…). Ruiz’s image would then defraud the traditional
understanding of the image as a means of communication subordinated to a
principle, to a prior intentionality. (…) / (…) always, in each case, in an
unworking relationship with the pre-given hegemonic diegesis of the
case, the device of prejudices or world, the factual a
priori already arranged—a kind of genesis of the world, genesis of diegesis,
in each case a former a posteriori of the
world in its diegesis. But, far from
suggesting a menu of possible diegetic games (…), it introduces us, each time,
into the unworking of the pre-given diegesis. Hence the
political character of its diegesis.
The
hegemonic paradigm of industrial narration (narrative determines image)
stabilizes the dispositive of intentionality—the “perceptive
and narrativized cliché of the soul” to which we have pointed—that is, a
certain order of the world as an order of words and things inseminated in the
soul as pre-organized perceptive potency.
Ruiz, against the grain, not ceasing to narrate, lets the image determine the
narration, eroding the narrative intentum itself. If the cliché and
theological narrativization “authoritatively frame the multiplicity of the
image,”
Ruiz’s cinema tries to get that neither the images nor the film stabilize in a
representational unity.
(…) before
the code and before the multiplicities, there would be the image, but as
an immanence of multiplicities and code in a differential tension that, now
breathes towards the becoming multiplicities, now suffocates towards the
stabilizing code, always in a back-and-forth motion. The cliché image, the
multiplicity that burdens it, the floating virtuality that over-enhance it,
co-insist in a single immanence that goes from one to the other, shaping the
flows of the image. (…) / The immanence of this double anteriority would then
be the image: at the same time its code, at the same time the sensations
that overflow it; at the same time the plot of the design, at the same
time the complot of multiplicity; at the same time the death mask of
representation, at the same time the fugues without contour; at the same time
the stabilized quality, at the same time the metamorphic variation. (…). Before
anything else there would be the image as co-belonging of multiplicities and
code in differential tension. (…) / Ruiz’s image is not external to the narrative,
it does not subsist outside of narrative dialectics. The cliché, the narrative
articulation, is a necessary condition of the image. It is not, however, a
sufficient condition. The image, according to Ruiz, takes place supplying the
narrative dialectics and exceeding them at the same time, eroding them in that
supply as far as possible. Janic face of the image as power and as
potentiality; as containment and as multiplicity. It is in this destituent
erosion in the midst of the tenacity of the instituted where the affirmative
quality of the Ruician image resides. It is because of this affirmative
potentiality of the image that unworks the cliché that Ruician poetics of the
image is also a politics; a poetics-politics.
Here
there is a key: the “image” is always before the “dispersive material
multiplicities” and the “codes” that unify and contain them, as a differential
tension between them—and not as a mold, model or formal entelechy
that is only read as a dematerialized and authorizing code. In this sense,
Thayer emphasizes that this cleavage can be understood as a differential
between body and technique, or, put another way, between body and
culture: such a differential will constitute the styleme or exote
image—what Ruiz
said allowed “living inside and outside of culture [grammar, logic, cliché]
simultaneously, integrating and not integrating.”[26] Thayer points this out in relation to the
more “folkloric” aspect of Ruiz’s films:
[It is] an art that compiles the
inapparent arts of daily life, gestures of popular hustle and bustle that,
because they are adjusted to rules, constitute arts in themselves, “the art of
climbing stairs, of sitting down, of looking out the window, filling a glass of
wine, whistling, doing the math, recounting events, speaking (…)”, etc. / Ruiz
does not refer with this to what was once called direct cinema, cinema
in which the director and his team devoted themselves to recording “natural”
events and actions, compiling them impartially in a supposedly disinterested
record, without intention; a kind of cinematic historicism that would record
life in its most authentic or autochthonous moment, to which certain
avant-gardes adhered, seeking a native gesture against the endless horde of
clichés, slogans, codes that the modernizing and governmental agendas of the
body put in motion. That supposed native, pre-cultural or pre-technical gesture
was, for Ruiz, long ago, always, submerged under some mode of production, some tekhné
or culture. (…). / Ruiz refers rather to a vestibular zone in which body and
art (tekhné), body and culture, do not end up accommodating themselves
with each other, in a reciprocal dis-adjustment or mutual violence.
Misalignment, resistance, mutual violence, from whose friction emerges less
than a pose and more than a wiggle. Unstable gesture in which body and tekhné
hesitate in mutual resistance and insistence. Insufficient resistance of the
body to the tekhné and insufficient insistence of tekhné on the
body, and vice versa. It is in this daily misalignment between body and
culture, body and tekhné, where the style that a body singularly adopts
when climbing a ladder, picking up a spoon, painting a chair, speaking a
language becomes visible/producible for the camera. / (…) The stylematic image
(…), halfway between the unconscious and the code, gesture and technique, would
be the structural character of Ruiz’s so-called “Chilean films.” For Ruiz, the
“Chilean” would be the stylematic as insufficient resistance of the body to
culture and as insufficient efficiency of culture on the body. The styleme
would be the differential of insufficient resistance to culture and
deficient incorporation of culture. Stylemes constitute a catastrophic
place. Catastrophic here does not mean the disaster of culture sinking into
primarity or body, nor the disaster of the body suffocated by the code. It
refers to a fold of instability (…). It is an abstract image that belongs to no
one, neither to genus nor species, that is not stabilized in any identity or
representation. It barely names the clash between power and body and the line
without border that lives in that clash.
And in «Imagen exote»:
Instead of
being in a world and seeing through the world that arrays the eyes with which
he/she sees, the exote becomes that which is worldless, which, without
the eyes of the world, palpates, gropes between worlds, in a twilight, a
fade, a continuum of transformations in which the passages do not
establish borders. (…) / (…) these films propose singularizing images, a
testification of the popular much more as an exote than as a utopia of
the identitarian national and popular. My
hypothesis for reading Thayer as a reader of Ruiz is that, in addition to
bringing into play a concept of a metamorphic image (variation of
quality without translation-transport), Ruiz brings into play in his poetics a multiplication
of perspectives that seeks to destabilize the intentional apparatus until
the place-without-place of all of them appears, a certain profane illumination
that has nothing to do with the assumption of a theological meta-reader.
Metamorphic potentiality does not germinate if it
does not permanently experience in its performance the rigors and inertia of
the narrative diegesis that surrounds it everywhere. The potentiality of
the metamorphic image does not take place if it is not eroding, in
media res, the propagation of the narrative image that permanently
besieges it. (…) / The produced image that determines the narration
obeying figural rigors, so to speak, non-compositive, non-argumentative,
non-causal, on the brink of experience, destabilizing in each plane its unity
in qualitative variation. Each fragment of the puzzle or film will demand, in
its dictation, to be inscribed in other—indefinite—compossible and
incompossible puzzles between them, multiplying each puzzle and the referential
film from each plane, raising in each image virtual films in parallel, as if
each plane of a film of five hundred planes were converted into a main film,
and the main one exploded into five hundred films.
THE
PLAY AND THE QUESTION ON EXPERIMENTALITY
We are now in a better condition to
answer the question: How does the performance Forgotten Science relate
epistemologically to this set of ontological problems concerning art and
politics? In my view, it does it putting at play the technology of singularity
and interruption of organic theater. How did we play such an interruption?
First of all, regarding the problem of the pit: although we attempt to
abolish the representational distance between performers and the performed
(eliminating the classic separation and subordination of praxis to theory, and
conceiving of theory in a performative and defective way),
with regard to the pit between stage and audience, things are a little more
complicated: we are not trying to assault the audience by transmitting some
instructive or edifying message, winning them over for some “cultural battle”
(the work, in my view, has no pedagogical or pastoral intention, but rather
seeks to destabilize the perceptual apparatus); nor do we invite the audience
to assault the stage, in the sense that they might leap over the pit and occupy
the stage to be invested with the spectacular brilliance of it (now everyone
could be a “star” in that luminous, magically doubled world). None of that. The
first abolition of the pit (the interruption of representational distance)
determines that the stage is not a glowing, glorious, harmonious, and coherent
representational space, but an opaque one, subject to accidentality, conflict,
and ambiguity, where the event always exceeds my subjectivity and its glares
with things and events, and with itself. That is to say, the abolition of the
representational principle determines that the stage is a place of chiaroscuro
and indeterminacy, just as life outside of it is, and just as the life of
the members of the audience is as well. Then, on the one hand, following a
Benjamin’s formula, we interrupted the operation of the bourgeois conception
of language as a “means of communication” of fetishized meanings—by analogy
to the trade of commodities—,
so that we tried to recover a communicability of language which would involve
assuming that experience in its singularity resists its fixation in the ideal
element of language and its categorial and spatio-temporal schematisms. For the
same reason, we avoided the subordination of the action under a
plot-and-director dispositive—the narrative woven from clear and distinct
propositions, as well as diegetics in its classic Aristotelian structure. The
absence of the centering-sovereign figure of “director”
was essential: for this
performance we rehearsed practicing responsiveness in the absence of a
central command, so that instead of coordinating behind the direction of a
predetermined script (focused on the director’s organizing intelligence of the
meta-narrative), what we did was exploring other ways of articulating our
responsiveness as a group, following the anarchical and sympoietic figures of queerness
and entanglement.
Regarding the diegesis, what we did was displace the
causal-linear narrative, and rather to play with a kind of narrative collage.
Each of our actions or subtractions plays with the others, like a sounding
board, and something is generated that is greater than the sum of its parts
(but that “something” emerges as a momentary effect, not as a cause). At first,
you can’t see anything, but the results can be very interesting. During the
rehearsal days, we talked about the “plan” that didn’t exist, or that in any
case was an emergent property (the “emergent plan,” we called it). We told each
other that, in between our daily businesses and daydreams, we had been
imagining things for the performance. “The other day—I
wrote on our chat—you were
talking about nature and technique, technology and forms of relationship
(symbiosis, devastation, etc.). For that, the sound section could offer field
recordings processed by Sasha, which cover a spectrum from the everyday to the
unfamiliar, in the sound of lab elements. With the MIDI controller, Sasha can
deploy the sound clusters with great dynamics. In my case, I have some sections
of electronic sounds (with a synthesizer connected to the circuit of knives,
oranges, and my body), mixed with field recordings of flickering light bulbs and
night singing crickets that I drew from an online sound library, and also the
looped sound I recorded with my mobile phone of a jet of water from a sprinkler
hitting the metal light post in front of the studio entrance. I am going to
generate a more corrosive noise too, for a more devastating noise section,
since the previous section is rather pleasant for electricity lovers. And
finally, the plant’s sonification system is ready. Sasha, as a sound section,
we can perform separately or together. The plant system might interact with Jae
or with any of you who imagine or come up with something with it. I’m also
imagining a bassline with the plant system in a mode where the synthesizer, in
its translation, highlights more the electrical flow of the plant’s metabolism,
which is more constant and mantric, achieving a more ambient feel with the
addition of the basslines of the bass guitar. All this is emergent, so it will
connect and mutate with your gestures.”
The piece also refers to the relation between
identity and difference, through the question of replication,
metamorphosis, and translation of subjects, things, and events. It is a
simple and fundamental hypothesis: nothing and no one coincides with
themselves. In the piece, this takes place in the changeability of roles
both among performers (the entomologist who sings and dances, the dancer who
makes music, the philosopher sonifying a plant through electronic transducers,
the physicist who plays noise and clusters of field recordings, etc.) and among
characters (in the dimension of the illusion of action: characters whose roles
are not clearly discernible, whether they are scientists who become artists or
vice versa, etc.). The piece radically derails the centrality of the person
(my subjectivity, my identity, etc.) and its social function (my
discipline, my work, etc.): everything is triggered in the dimension of relationality,
its encounters and deviations. In the dimension of identification and
function, the piece rather introduces decentering and disidentification,
displacement and dislocation. In this sense,
despite the fact that at times there seemed to be a certain disconnection
between the elements in play, “as if they were navigating through different
channels,” a significant part of the performance’s opacity has to do
with this interplay of connection/disconnection: as in “real communication” in
everyday life, there is no absolute connection and harmony (the ideal of
successful and functional communication which often coincides with a religious
or functionalist idea of the social “bond”), but rather ambiguity, blind
spots, conflicts, and communication difficulties. A good example of the
exploration of this coefficient of (dis)connection is the collaboration between
John Cage’s music and Merce Cunningham’s dance.
Other times, connection and responsiveness occur through hidden channels, as is
the case with Chatziparaschis’s character, who sometimes seems disconnected
because he is focused on his laptop screen, while he is actually connected and
responding, translating himself through the eyes of his robot, which he
mathematically calibrates on his computer to adjust to variations in the
performers’ distances in space and the lighting conditions in the room. An
interesting observation concerns the low lighting in the room (a
powerful archaic element of opacity) and the “multiple activities competing for
attention,” all of which produced an “initial confusion” that was not
equivalent to “lack of clarity” (“I took this to be intentional, meaning
audience members had to decide for ourselves where to focus”). The piece, in
effect, plays like a constellation of (dis)connected elements: people dancing,
singing, and playing instruments (artists?); people working on computers and
offering scientific explanations as if in a David Lynch dream (scientists?);
people manipulating electrical circuits to produce layers of noise with
distinct electrical textures (what kind of activity is that?); people
interacting with a sonically expressing plant (dancing with it, studying it,
etc.). There are layers of acoustic sound (singing, voices and short speeches,
leather drum, steel drum, sounds from the audience and the street, a baby called
Lucian Amaru suddenly crying), electroacoustic sound (bass guitar), electronic sound
(plant sounds and the circuit of conductive objects translated by synthesizer),
field recordings (clusters of lab noises organized by a software); in the
dance, relationships are done and undone, “different solos, duets, trios,
quartets, and the mutations between them that blend into each other.” Finally,
an important key regarding the question of identity and difference: there is a
moment when, in the middle of a passage describing experiments involving
observing electrical signals between humans and plants, the character performed
by Maccaro says the magic word “replication,” referring to the idea of
experimentation as repetition and reproducibility in the modern scientific
method. The idea here is Deleuzian: repetition implies difference, miracle.
And then the performers begin reproducing the movements they had done so far
and change roles, unraveling the subject-object relation and the tautological
idea of repetition.
Dance, music, multiple sonic and bio-sonic layers, and
the space of the robot’s visual projections constitute the metamorphic
medium in which the responsiveness and translation between humans, a
plant, machines and audience are played out. Regarding “the plant,” it is
an important icon in the symbolic constellation of the piece. It appears in the
handmade poster I made for the piece—a linocut engraving, in black and in
red—which refers to the geminate life of the plant, oriented both towards the
sky and the center of the Earth (heliotropism and geocentrism), and also to the
human violence against Earth (exploited, devastated), of which technoscience
allied to the power of capital is a part. Of course, beyond the human, it also
refers to a dark ecology (involving non-human agency, beyond the human
and its representational and operative sovereignty and enclosure). Not an
animal, but a plant is the one interacting in this case with humans and
machines. The plant, traditionally considered an inert ornament on the stage of
the human-animal drama, indifferent to its environment and lost in a chemical dream,
detached from any life of relationship, appears in the piece acting, expressing
its own sensitivity, responsiveness and agency. To achieve this, I have “sonified”
the plant by performing two translations: using an electronic transducer and
electrodes, I have translated the plant’s electrical signals (its elemental
metabolism and its responsiveness to the environment) into computer data, and
then, using a MIDI controller, I have translated this computer data into
synthesizer assigned sound. The result is that one can perceive the plant’s life
and responsiveness through the sound of the regular electrical flow of its
metabolism, as well as its responses in interaction with surrounding animals
(through touch contact and, before and after that, in its perception and
response to the electromagnetic field of our bodies and those of other animals
around) and as a reaction to other environmental factors (ambient light,
temperature and humidity levels, stress, receiving water, etc.). Through the
electronic transducer (as a mechanical mediation), the plant can interact with
humans, it can “dance” with them, and respond to their approaches and requests.
In some ways, the system operates similarly to a theremin… except that the
plant’s responses are not mechanical, but varied in timing, manner, and
intensity, like those of all life forms. The plant, through machine mediation,
interacts with human animals, and plants and humans interact with other
machines—like the circuit of electrically conductive objects to produce noise
with electricity coursing between my body, knives, and Riverside oranges; or
like Chatziparaschis’s mathematically calibrated, real-time robot eyes, staring
at us from the sides of the studio while, in the act, such a robotic vision is
visually projected back onto us, with all those light beams being responded to,
in addition, by the plant.
Forgotten
Science is a piece that is more tactile than
representational, more suggestive than propositional, more opaque than
luminous, performed through the activation of involuntary memories and
unexpected compositions of bodies and ideas. In the poetic process, responsiveness
was in each case directed toward the singular and plural and its metamorphoses
in relationality, and not toward a director nor a predetermined plot. During
the creative process, as Chatziparaschis states in the travelogue of his post
factum reflections, there was at the beginning a gray area of searching
and confusion that suddenly turned into encounters and connections: the way
in which we found each other (and ourselves) in the middle of this play mimics
life, which never begins with clarity, and community is always to come. But this sort of indetermined starting
point is not about starting from a blank canvas, but rather about suspending
intentionality in the poetic process—which is usually articulated through the
concepts of author and work (anticipated as an intentional design to be
materialized). What we put into circulation in the piece were nothing more
than clichés, muscular, affective and representational memories (the
“scientists”, the “bare-chested drummer”, the “queer people”, the “plant”, the
“science”, the “dance”, etc.), but these were put into play in an ambiguous
way, without the communicative clarity and distinction of contractual language
(Benjamin): it is about to see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the
multiplicity that said regime conceals, and then
it will be the very disarray of the intentional apparatus what leaves in view,
at the same time, the regime of the gaze and what escapes of it. The “image” is
always before the “dispersive material multiplicities” and the “codes” that
unify and contain them, as a differential tension between them—and not as a mold, model or formal entelechy
that is only read as a dematerialized and authorizing code. It is about the differential
between body and technique, or between body and culture that allows us
to live “inside and outside of culture [grammar, logic, cliché] simultaneously,
integrating and not integrating.”[35] In that direction, it seems to me that
Forgotten Science experiments playing a game between concealment and
unconcealment, and responsiveness at the existential level. In this
sense, it seems to me that Forgotten Science experiments in a play between
concealment and unconcealment, and responsiveness at the existential
level, in the midst of a queer entanglement. This play, for example,
with respect to science, can make visible the scientific habits of the subjects
of actually existing science (critique of our scientific ideologies and
violences through the expression of involuntary memories), and, at the same
time, show forms of relationship and knowledge that, while they already always
occur in everyday life (virtuality of popular imagination that escapes from
power dispositives, unexpected compositions of bodies and ideas), we leave them
aside because they do not coincide with the idea of normal science and normal
society. For that reason, and
regarding the title of the piece, I think the “forgotten” science as one that “does
not yet exist”: the counterintuitive formula is because what is forgotten is
already there, concealed in the very relationality of existence. “Forgotten
Science” is not that which once was, but one which is not yet: as the emergent
event is always to come, it doesn't stop to arrive and has to do with the
openness of imagination and affects, experience becoming experimentality, both
in arts and sciences. The bureaucratic tendencies inside the university
institution tends to forget the science that does not yet exist, in order to
administer, reproduce and innovate in that which already exists. We assume that
the science that does not yet exist is not just that of the innovations of
present-day science (the innovations to come, but relying on the same logics
and affects), but rather some kind of “strange or foreign” (strannyye,
in Russian it simultaneously means “queer” and “strange”) science, a science
that thinks differently, an unfamiliar science that remembers or pays attention
to things that are imperceptible and forgotten for the science of today. It
resonates with Salon’s discussions about queerness, entanglements, symbiosis
and sympoiesis, khôratic spaces (climate, language, love, etc.), Gaïa and Gaya
hypotheses (complexity-relational oriented and “gay science”), the relationship
between mathematics and the untractability of matter, the measurable and the
immeasurable, the attention to the (more or less uncontrollable) metaphoric
nature of scientific language, experimental art and “intentionality”, the
originary technicality of life and the becoming dispositive and war-machine of
late modern technocapitalism, etc. A new idea of non-Cartesian science relying
on queer entanglements?
In any case, Forgotten Science would propose a
postfoundational form of “critique” understood as reflexive indocility and
expressiveness, instead of the naive and/or comfortable ideological
normalization, overprotection of one’s own subjectivity, obedience to and
mimesis of normal (normalized) forms of subjectivity and sociality. The way of
addressing the question of the “pit” would also imply a political positioning
of non-alignment within the current war regime, that is, a position neither
hegemonic nor anti-hegemonic, but post-hegemonic—the question of “positioning,”
again… although the political right wing is always the party of the established
order (while the “left” means interruption of that order, transformative
popular imagination and performance), the question here would not be taking
an “extreme left position”, but rather placing oneself to the left of any
position (Thayer).
Finally, some reflections on
“experimentality” both in the sciences and arts. Let me present three
little scenes.
The first scene
corresponds to the Ancient Greek definition of experience as “ecstasy.” Erin
Graff Zivin offers us a concept of exposure
that can give us a clue to begin here: exposure, from the Latin exponere,
“set forth, lay open.” It is a concept that allows us to think of a figure of
the subject’s opening that goes against the grain of that of the “sovereign
subject, to whom, according to Derrida, nothing ever happens.” It is a movement
of departure, from the proper and familiar to the other, to the strange and
unfamiliar. In the ancient Greek figure of ecstasy, the soul appears precisely
as exposure, and the world as an excess (to put it in the style of the
intentional analysis of phenomenology). Experience always exceeds experience,
and what it discloses never fails to arrive—whether corresponding the sense of
our projections, or on the contrary, as a countersense (a fire or an
earthquake, or a war, etc.).
The second scene corresponds
to a medieval concept of “experimentation”. Let us consider the concept of
“potency” established in the Western philosophical and theological tradition:
in the process of becoming, potency precedes the act in the subject that is
brought from potency to act (in this sense, potency is understood as a praeparatio
or preparation inherent in the subject of change). Contrary to this
definition of a teleologically captured potency (that is, the potentia
in the narrow sense that we have just mentioned), in Averroes we find a radical
and anarchic idea of potentiality (what Averroes calls the possibilitas),
a possibility that is expressed in the aneconomic effects of experience,
thought and translation (effects that are not susceptible to transcendental
control by the subject). This radical possibility is also expressed in as a
potentiality of interrupting, deactivating, disarticulating, deposing,
destituting or even derailing the archaeo-teleological machine, in order to
open for other common and experimental uses of the imaginative flesh and the
life of relation, that is, for profane uses beyond the consecrated ones. Potentia
would work already inseminated as a formal a priori in the soul, while possibilitas
would have to do with exposure, relationality and interruptibility, a radical
potentiality not captured by intentionality—whose concept has become a
dispositive for sovereign-pastoral power in its Aristotelian-Thomistic drift.
The “material intellect” as a common and anarchic potentiality occurs in a
space that is not reduced to a “geometrically objective space” or a
“psychologically subjective” one, but is played out in a “relation of free and
common use,” an “aneconomic place irreducible to any possible economy,” since
it exceeds, in its possibility, both the phantasmatic ground of the “original”
representationally fetishized and anthropologically inseminated, as well as the
archaeoteleology of means-ends and their specific technical behaviors.
The third scene: the detour
from experimental science to experimental art and politics. In Averroism we
find an experimental concept of intentionality (that is, the soul as exposure,
the world as excess). However, its drift in the late Middle Ages intersects
with the transformations of modern epistemology; I am mainly thinking of the
transition from the demonstrative science of Aristotle to the experimental or
inductive science of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. Instead of
demonstrating the world without recourse to sensible experience, but only doing
it from the attributes contained in the idea of God, it was now a matter of
opening up from the reflective closure of the mathematical cogito to
experimentation with phenomena that we find in the openness of the natural
world, in that field of perception that apart from being vast, never stops to
arrive. But this experimental nature of science was quickly marked by the
development of modern science as a humanistic and anthropocentric horizon of
power and predictive control over nature (“knowledge is power”, says Bacon). It
is against the grain of this modern epistemic-political horizon that, after the
war catastrophes of the 20th century, art emerges in its “experimental” aspect:
just as David Lynch said that there had to be room for wandering beyond the
Aristotelian control of narrative, so we can also say that the expressiveness
of experimental art suggests, in line with Benjamin’s idea of the “death of
intention”, that the world cannot be reduced to a home, nor psychic life to a
subjectivity. Connecting with Korotneva’s concerns about the measurable and the
immeasurable—and analogizing the methods of experimental sciences and
experimental arts—, Maccaro said that, viewed from the perspective of the
modern scientific method, perhaps while science was the research of the
knowable, art would rather be a search of the unknowable, that which escapes
and cannot be controlled in the categories and fixed in the tongue of modern
science.
That is why it seems to
me that Forgotten Science is a performance in which the spectator who is installed in the comfortable
habit of the narrative-industrial diegesis “does not find the subject”
and “does not see where it is all going,” sometimes even “missing what
is happening.” The intentional structures of recognition and empathy are
broken—and a “dimension of strangeness” or “enigmatic corpus” breaks in, and
one experiences a “constellation of signs that conspires against plain
reading.”
Cf. Walter Benjamin, «Sobre el
lenguaje en general y sobre el lenguaje de los humanos», in “Iluminaciones IV. Para una crítica de la
violencia y otros ensayos”, translated from German into Spanish by Roberto
Blatt, Ediciones Taurus, Madrid, 21998, pp. 59-74.
Thayer quotes Ruiz, apropos of the
pastoral notions of hegemony and institution, unity and teleology
(Providence) around a central conflict (civitas Dei versus civitas diaboli),
illustrated in the ecclesiastical dispositive: “The Church ‘constitutes the
institution par excellence. To speak of the Church (...) is to speak of
bureaucracy and dogmatism (...), not only for the simple fact that every
decision depends on another (...) in perpetual ongoing, but also because (...)
the untouchable dogmas by definition (...) engender that appearance of
democracy that constitutes the permanent debate of ‘interpretation’ (...); the
Church is, then, the totalitarian system par excellence, since it is not based
on police violence, but on the free acceptance of its members (empathy). The
Church is, perhaps, the most accomplished expression of the ‘fascination with
totalitarianism’, which explains its two ‘sources of pleasure’: (...)
discipline, (...) power’ (Ruiz). Its mission was to ‘transform the world (...)
and to the extent that it achieved this, we are no longer even aware that its
effect is absolute. It has been assimilated (...), I was very impressed when I
read Gramsci for the first time and discovered that he compared the Party to
the Church, and recommended the Jesuit model as an example to follow. And then
there are naturally all the American theories of institutions. But what none of
these theories express, and which from my point of view is an essential element
in all institutional behavior, is the symptomatic bad faith produced by the
fascination with the perfection of the institution itself, apart from any
interest in the deep reasons for its existence’ (Ruiz), reasons that the Church
administers on the deep surface of its earthly estate” (Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen
estilema”, pp. 17-18).
[35] Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”,
p. 6. In this regard, Leigh
Foster writes: “Well, the problem with the theory
that dance reflects culture is that it makes dance a kind of passive byproduct
or imprint of other more dominant cultural forces. But couldn’t you also think
about dance as producing culture, as generating cultural values through the
ways in which it cultivates the body and brings people together?” (Leigh
Foster, opus cit., p. 22).
