Revelation
My friend is in a corner of his garden looking over the patched stone wall at the line between earth and sky where fields fall over cliffs to the patient, stalking sea below. He is balancing oranges on the wall, drawn by the possibilities of their presence to see how they might stack up to the pressures of this place and reveal a pattern. Two oranges, one beside the other, reveal a separateness in proximity, then rise to become four, six, eight oranges, in two tall presences, looking into the garden and out to the sea. They start to lean towards each other, disclosing a desire not anticipated to touch, to support each other in their efforts to stand together between earth and sky with a slight opening between them. Mary Booker 20.02.2019 Thank you Mary This sounds clever. Here goes from Deleuze & Guattari and people writing about them:
"... social-organisation violently transposes the production of desire from the Body with Organs (ourselves seen as flows and drives) to the socius – the face (ourselves as social and political constructs)." Charlie Mills (my italics) So this is something about the way we have become detached from our 'animal' or corporeal selves. "Faciality... is the human system of organisation of our present times. It lies at the intersection of two regimes: the signifying regime (premised on signifiance; on the desire for interpretation) and the post-signifying regime (subjectification; consciousness, or the turn inwards)." Simon O'Sullivan Could we see these as the sometimes competing desires for a) meaning and understanding [signifying regime] and b) awareness/presence [post-signifying regime]? Where this latter desire is described as 'the turn inwards' we can see the turn towards psychology, psychoanalysis and understanding intention and motivation. Perhaps Move into Life work, which seems to combine a turn inwards with a turn outwards (to incorporate environment and others in the so-called 'ecological body') offers a third way. "...if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes." (Deleuze & Guattari ) Perhaps Move into Life work is a spiritual and special becoming-animal. "What is a probe-head? ...A probe-head might in fact be any form of practice – any regime – that ruptures the dominant (faciality). An individual “subject” in his or her life might operate as a probe-head in this sense (but in which case are they any longer a subject?). Groups might also function as probe-heads (radical political groupings, but also any intentional community that turns away from typical regimes and transcendent points of coordination). Art works might likewise operate as probeheads (Francis Bacon’s portraits for example (at least as Deleuze writes about them), but we might also add the more expanded practices from the 1960s to today that offer even stranger – non-human, non-facialised – diagrams for subjectivity). In fact, it is in the realm of art that we can identify a key modality of probe-heads: that they are somehow orientated against the present time." Simon O'Sullivan So our Move into Life practice might be a probe-head and our Project Group might be another probe-head. Both ways of disrupting the dominance of faciality, the reliance on the power structures associated with facial (rather than bodily) expression. And perhaps facial is to corporeal as digital is to manual? "The face in the modern Western world, they claim, is primarily a disciplinary mechanism, its smiles, grimaces, glares and twitches enforcing social codes, identities and power structures. Yet the face is also open to “defacialization,” to a usage that decodes and unfixes identities, faces mutating into “probe-heads (têtes chercheuses, guidance devices)” … that counter the restricting operations of the socially constructed face. Probe-heads open 'a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to [the face’s] arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence'” Ronald Bogue Bogue's bit sounds brilliant but I can't think of anything to add to it. "In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Erving Goffman points to the origins of the word “person” which originally meant “mask.” He argues this is a recognition of the fact that everyone is 'more or less consciously, playing a role…in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves-this mask is our truer self'.” "In their essay on Faciality Deleuze and Guattari identify the face as the site of social production of this performative self, a production that encodes the hierarchies of bodies through signifiers such as race and gender. They call for an end to the operations of the face machine through “deterritorialization,” a process of making things unfamiliar and setting “faciality traits free like birds.” The “probe-heads” answer this call to dismantle the operations of the face machine. Not conventional portraits, the disembodied faces resist easy signifiers such as “personality,” “character,” or “expression.” They point instead to the masks of personhood, the binary nature of identity, and the social construction of the self." Alexandra Phillips So maybe what we're doing through movement is trying to practise a kind of 'deterritorialization' in the Deleuzian sense, where we shake off the fact of being 'owned' by our hierarchical (vertical) socio-political roles and performances and allow ourselves to be reintegrated into the ecological (horizontal) landscape of natural environment, interdependence and affect. The Pillars of Creation are three elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Serpens constellation of the Eagle Nebula, 6,500–7,000 light years from Earth.
The pillars are composed of cool molecular hydrogen and dust that are being eroded by photoevaporation from the ultraviolet light of relatively close and hot stars. The leftmost pillar is about four light years in length. That's long. The finger-like protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than our solar system, and are made visible by the shadows of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which shield the gas behind them from intense UV flux. EGGs are themselves incubators of new stars. The stars emerge from the EGGs, which then are evaporated. A hot dust cloud nearby suggests that a supernova shockwave may have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. This destruction will not be visible from Earth for another 500-1,000 years because of the time taken for light to travel that distance. Perhaps the same applies to our desire. Our desire may already have died and we are waiting to hear about it - running on borrowed time. Heartbreak cure“The main time that love is painful and needs treatment is heartbreak,” says Brown. For most people, heartbreak goes away with time, or with the help of therapy or even anti-depressants, says Brown.
But people struggling with love addiction may one day benefit from other types of drugs. Theoretically, drugs could be developed that disrupt the bond we feel with someone. A study in 2013 manipulated hormones in prairie voles. These animals are monogamous, forming strong pair bonds – a process that involves the hormone vasopressin. The team found that blocking the voles’ receptors for this hormone caused males to stop defending their mates, and spend more time with other females. There is also evidence to suggest we may have anti-love networks in the brain, that help us become less attached to people we have previously felt close to. Tapping into these might help accelerate a person’s ability to get over someone, but we don’t know how to do this yet. From New Scientist 14/2/2019 I worked with the pale blue cloth tied around my foot and my thigh so that I couldn't fully extend my leg. Down side: When I tried to stand up I fell over. Up side: I could hold my leg (and the other one wrapped over it) in impossible positions for a long time and find new gestures and movements. The unanticipated joys of constriction. (tx Sandra)
I am an occupied country - multiple individuals make up the occupying force, including an unwanted and overly pious vicar, whom I can perhaps amplify and learn to accept. Even welcome. Even learn to love. (tx Claire Baudrillard et al.) The quality of attention and awareness that we are invited to bring to our movement is the same quality of attention and awareness that we bring when somebody is telling us something really, really important. (tx Sandra) The crone or hag, with all her parched desiccation, invites in the figure of the Juicy Hag. (tx Sue Claire and Mary Booker). In this way we can imagine rewatering the desert, refleshing the picked-clean bone, resapping the dead wood. I made out of clay a blue tooth. A bluetooth. Bluetooth is already a symbol of communication. I was symbolising a symbol. But my clay tooth was not recognisably a tooth. It looked like the bottom half of a bandy-legged old man. And it was not blue. A symbol does not work when it does not work. But I knew. And I loved making it. This is expression (poiesis) at the expression end of the expression-communication recursive binary. (tx Krostina) We can 'move a poem' or 'a poem can move us'. Both approaches are equally valid and give a different sense of control or agency. The former is more about communication (if only to oneself). The latter is more about expression. (tx Joyful) I am not a swan. I long for the stretch of a swan's wings, the ruffle of a swan's feather, the grubbing of swan's beak in the weed, the glide (effortless) of swan through water, the phlonk of swan in flight, the crazy, feet-first landing of swan on lake, the laying of swan's head amongst the wingfeathers on its back. None of these is available to me. (tx Theresa) The feral being appears (including to itself) to have control over its movement. The puppet appears to have none. And yet it becomes clear that the feral being is conditioned by its form, environment, upbringing, inheritance, desires, so that it has very little say in its movement. Whereas the string puppet suffers none of the last four constraints and is unhampered by a belief that it is free. (tx Claire B) When we are overtaken by desire, who is in control? Where is the power? Where is the agency? Who chooses? We turn away from the other. In the act of turning away we provoke myriad unknown neurochemical responses in ourself and in the other. (tx Caroline) Amongst the desires I had not yet spotted (or had forgotten) are: the desire to turn away the desire for comfort the desire that stutters through me as well as the desires that courses through me the desire for understanding the desire to be another the desire to go back the desire for control and for loss of control the desire for thwock and plump the desire of an ejaculating moth to continue to ejaculate even if it is being eaten by a woodlouse (tx Krostina, I think) I can give my movement(s) more credit by letting them grow rather than hurrying on to the next one. (tx Claire B) There is power in the light and love in the shadow (tx Paule) Some remarkable things happen with the minimum of preparation, but just enough. (tx Kevin) |