From Brian Massumis forward to Deleuz and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus

State philosophy is another word for the representational thinking that has
characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least
momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally. ...it (state
philosophy) reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the
concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of
sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the
world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the
self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical;
its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically
structured domains. The faculty of judgement is the policeman of analogy,
assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper
correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The
weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of
the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the
others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of
perfection of a terms self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man,
god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x=x=not y.
Identity, resemblence, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for any
order. (xi-xii)
What is objectionable in state philosophy from the standpoint of dance, from the
standpoint of being a woman, from the standpoint of here and now?
X=X not Y occludes the possibility of transformation and of multiplicity. To me,
being in the world is very much a practice of holding two disparate (and
sometimes even contradictory) things at the same time and regarding them both
as equally valid and true. X=X not Y, resemblance, these are not just limiting
functions, enclosing or based upon negation - at the worst these concepts lie, at
the best they are a kind of wish. I wish we could all agree that a signifier signifies
a specific signified. I wish we could gather data points about a group of people
and run them through a linear regression model and know understand whats
causing them to I wish there was cake right now.

What does this have to do with dancing? A dance is a place that I can ask people
to literally sit with the disparate events. There they are, situated in space, one
thing happening to the left another thing to the right. Does this sound familiar?
Tere would say, thing to thing and I agree. I would also add, simply: things.
What is it that were looking at when we look at dancing? Bodies moving. OR:
Bodies. Moving.

Body to body. body does not = body. Reconstitution of self/selves. No cases, no

categories, no examples Instead of the truth I think dancing suggest we watch
for the actual and, at the very same time, the imagined. In viewing bodies moving
we hold the actual and imagined next to one another without having to settle
between one or another. And this is unsettling.

To unsettle. To arise, uproot, displace and shift. This is a score for a body moving
as much as it is a score for what we might think of as social unrest.
FLOOD
After four days of rain the sun appeared in a white sky, febrile and
dazzling, and the people who had left for higher ground came back
in rowboats. From our bedroom window we could see them patting
their roofs and peering in their attic windows. I have never seen
such a thing, Sylvie said. The water shown more brilliantly than the
sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the
road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light.
(Robinson, 62)
Marilyn Robinsons Housekeeping is a story of diffusion, redistribution and
unsettling. Throughout the book a series of floods mark the slow un-doing of a

household as both the objects within the house and the family of women within it
drift out outward of the literal thresholds, and the figurative boundaries of
community. Each flood, each day spent out of school, each walk longer and
further into the woods makes the boundaries between inside and outside more
permeable. Objects and daily patterns shift and slide, and as they loose fixity so
to does their purpose and meaning.
During those days Fingerbone was strangely transformed. If one
should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be
told, That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring
dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed
where Pilates wife dreamed her dream, the very ordinariness of
the things would recommend them.
(Robinson, 73)
The video Flooded McDonalds made by the Danish artist collective Superflex
shows us another flood. In the video we watch as a life sized replica of a
McDonalds is filled with water. As the water rises we witness a tray carried off of
a trash can, its contents submerged. Given that the inside of a McDonalds is a
somewhat familiar entity to many, one can image the space as it was before the
flood while also viewing the flood. 1 When I watch this video I recognize two
things about floods that seem important. First, I find myself wondering why it
even matter that the water moves a tray. A tray on top of a bin, and tray floating in
the middle of a room. Why one and not the other? Try some answers: a tray on
1 Is this film an example of interchanging the actual (a McDonalds franchise
interior) with the imagined (a McDonalds franchise interior, filled with water)? In
one sense, yes, obviously. But this also happens on a deeper level. By taking a
place or set of recognizable, familiar places Superflex nearly ensures that the
viewer is also able to replace the actual (a flooded McDonalds franchise interior)
with the imagined (a McDonalds franchise interior). A corporate Allegory of the
Cave?

top of a bin is easily thrown away, a tray floating in the middle of the room implies
that some force (water, lack of gravity) that would be counter to human habitation
is supporting it there. There are no bodies in this space, there is no sense that
this flood is a danger, impediment or disaster. The second thing I recognize as a
viewer is that this flood seems to suggest that a familiar schematic could also
become unfamiliar. Not through deduction but via saturation. And this property of
flooding is perhaps what sets it apart from other destructive events, from fires
and earthquakes and tornados. Displacement and saturation.
To continue: flow/intensities in Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus, my
visit to the Centre Pompidou.
At this point I would like the document I hand in to be configured in such a way
that the reader has to turn it upside down or inside out or something. Maybe the
pages are a different color. Basically I want to indicate on a physical level that
weve left the the drumroll/crescendo of MY THESIS and were delaying the
cymbal crash. Here I interject with the particulars of what I am actually thinking
about when I make dances/this particular dance that is my thesis.
Here are the things I think about and read about that help me to make dances:
Border between oneself and the world, foreground and background, body
as porous or self contained, figure and field and each of these
categories/questions within the particular context of the female body.
Border between oneself and the world
In terms of phenomenology/thinking about material(s) as extensions of my
body in space, and of my body being/behaving like those materials.
Describe making/Making project and how this process changed the way I
work, and shifted the relationship I have with my body.
Describe how this process has played out within the making of my thesis.
Considering the body as an object, and asking how this is different than
letting ones body become objectified, specifying how this relates to
gender.
Concept of the Well made object (Morris)
Bodily horizon Ahmed
Foreground and Background

Space/perception Continuous Project Altered Daily Robert Morris

Queer Phenomenologies Ahmed
return to idea I wrote about Fall 2014 in Contemporary Directions, the
fact of the body, or corporeality, as something that can be foregrounded
or put in the background within live performance.
Discuss how this switching is at work within my thesis/process also how
this switching is necessarily affected by gender

Body as porous or self contained

Becoming Woman Deleuze and Guattari paired with Elizabeth Groszs
writings on this idea and its potential issues.
Female body/sex organs in particular as sites of flows
laughter and other actions that are a site for externalizing the interior
(Jenn Joy, The Choreographic)
how does replication/unison/mirroring interact with or interrupt this
concept? Is there something of a question about subjectivity here?
Discuss ways this is shown choreographically for me.
Figure and Field
Reading body within landscape, category/context, portraiture
An interest I have in representations of the female body within western art
history (Idols of Perversity), and a disinclination to reproduce these
representations or directly reference them. What is this? I think I am
acknowledging female archetype as a thing that shows up in my making,
but also questioning my use of it. How does this possibly square with an
interest in undoing categories/organizational systems?
Document gets turned right side up because now its time to connect some dots,
as in what does this stuff have to do with the larger project that Im interested in,
in terms of asking how a dance can undo/suggest alternative
arrangements/systems/organizations/schematics for making sense of the world.
What does it mean to ask a dance to undo logic? I think I ask this with two
possible stumbling blocks in mind. First, I could end up examining the logic of a
dance. This might necessitate questions like: How does a dance begin? How
does a dance end? What do we expect from a dance? I am not interested in
these questions, in that the answers to each would be highly subjective and Im
not looking for personal conceptions of what makes a work complete. Second, I
could ask what is logic? Ill google that because my determination to never, ever

apply to law school has thus far dissuaded me from ever actually engaging with
Logic, capital L, as an academic subject matter.
Logic is an American Rapper born in 1990 in Maryland. He has released four
mixtapes to critical acclaim and his album Under Pressure debuted at number
four on the Billboard 100 in the fall of 2014. 2This is not the logic I am asking
about. This is the first hit when you search logic on Google.
Logic is the branch of philosophy concerned with the use and study of valid
reasoning. 3
Logic is the branch of philosophy concerned with the use and study of valid
reasoning.4 What is the use in looking for a dance that has no validity, and more
importantly, no reason? Put in a more constructive sense, what is a dance that is
un-reasonable? I look to the work of artist Camille Henrot as an example, not of a
dance, but an installation that demonstrates a possible suspension of reason and
validity for the viewer. Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers? (20122014) consists of a series of ikebana (flower arrangements) correlating to books
in a library chosen by the artist.

2 "Logic (rapper)." Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 2014. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_%28rapper%29>.
3 "Logic." Wikipedia. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic>.
4 If I was interested in interrogating logic with a dance perhaps the first question I
would ask is, what is valid? I think this question has been asked before. I could
point to, for instance, the entirety of post-modernism. Merce Cunningham and
John Cage in using chance methods chose a reasoning that was not, at the time,
considered valid. But it was still a form of reason. It was (and is) a form of reason
that can systematically untether causality, representation, authorship. It can (and
I would argue does) systematically cover up choices that are being made by
focusing on choices that arent being made.. Is this covering a way to bypass or a
way to ignore who is doing the dancing?

On the next page we see Henrots The Order of Things, Michel Foucault. It is
definitively not the object we expect from the title. It is not a book or a
representation of a book. It has an almost cheeky literality to it. There is, indeed,
an order to these things. Color pallets follow. The precarious leaning of one
material upon another implies purpose. There is that which we know as The
Order of Things (the book) and that which appears in front of us, clearly labeled,
The Order of Things (the ikebana). As viewers we are asked to acknowledge
both/and without the two occurring in space and time simultaneously. A mental
hiccup. The mind spasms and then closes the circle.
Henrot formed these by arranging materials associated with the content of books
according to the language of flowers that constitute ikebana. Many write ups of
the exhibit refer to the works, in total, as the translation of a library. 5 So there
are standards to this practice. But for the viewer these lines of reason (and their
validity, whatever that is) are not to be followed, or at the least they are not
spelled out for us. We look, and then we read the title card, and as we glance
back (a jump, a jerk, a spasm) our comprehension unexpectedly, and
inexplicably closes the gap.

5 Lawrence, Alexa. "See 11 Heady Books Transformed into Ikebana Flower

Displays." ArtNews. N.p., 18 July 2014. Web. 26 Sept. 2015.

Photo credit: Benoit Pailley (question, how do I cite this image correctly?)

I first saw this work in person at The New Museum in the Summer of 2014. A
year later I returned to the same site (same museum, same floor) and saw the
work of photographer Sarah Charlesworth in a retrospective Doubleworld. Her
series Objects of Desire (1983-1988) echoed Henrots Is it possible to be a
revolutionary and like flowers? (2012-2014) Or perhaps I should say that
Henrots work echoes Charlesworths because it predates Henrots. Is echo the
correct term here? I want to be careful to set these series next to one another
without presuming, or allowing a reader to presume influence or lineage. An echo

occurs because of spatial anomaly, otherwise we would be constantly

bombarded with ricocheting sounds which would fade but never disappear. (Is
this actually how sound works?) Is the appearance of Objects of Desire in the
same museum as Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers? one year
later another kind of spatial anomaly? Im inclined to think not, and not because I
expect the curatorial staff of the New Museum to program with such subtlety, but
more on this later. Back to Charlesworth.

Above is Figures (1983) from Objects of Desire. Sarah Coleman, writing for Art
News describes the diptychs in this series as implying text and subtext as one

image appears to subtly recede. I would call our attention to an alternative

reading of this simultaneity. The images, together, imply equal degrees of
presence and absence. There are bodies here, somewhere, but they are not to
be seen. There is a literal sheen to the material we see but cannot physically,
tactily experience. This is literally the same object. These are literally not the
same objects.
Henrot and Charlesworths work evidences something I would refer to a kind of
undo-ing of logic. In their rearrangement of images and materials they create
visual hiccups, anomalies, echos. Both womans work deals in re-classification
and re-organization reliant on systems of reasoning that overturn and interrogate
accepted or known categories. Often, as with the two works I look at here, this
results in a kind of both....and (as opposed to either...or) outcome that asks us to
accept two disparate truths as equally valid. One could look at Henrots
arrangement as a representation of Foucaults The Order of Things, or at
Charlesworths piece as an example of visual text and subtext. We read the first
result of a google search for the word logic about a rapper and we can know
that this is not the logic we are interested in defining. But I am proposing a
reading of these works (and a google search) that asks us to look at them not as
representations of something but instead as the (same) thing and also another
thing. The pile of paint samples, cardboard, brightly painted willows and mesh
both is The Order of Things (Michele Foucault) and not The Order of Things by
Michele Foucault.

How could a dance interrogate accepted schematic organizational systems? And

why would it want to?
Where I see a potential for this in my work/ Radical Taxonomies
Recap initial question re: My interest in exposing an absurdity to the ways
we seek to organize the world.
Discuss making/Making exploring ways our bodies can be experienced as
well made objects.
Discuss use of space in DRK in relation to figure/field
background/foreground as attempts to merge/reorganize these categories
and our perception of them.
Discuss possible methodology using different orderings (tarot cards, mis
en scene, Richard Serras verb list, the Dewey Decimal System) to
generate material.
Discuss interest in museums/curiosity cabinets the ordering of objects by
alike-ness and value or as representative of a type. Looking at this
dance as a museum, as an arrangement of objects(bodies) in space and
asking where and how the arrangement can be disrupted or can
evidence a resistance to orders. Also discuss the switching between
bodies (objects) and objects (bodies) and possible implications of this (is
this where I want to talk about the problem of impossible authenticity?)
Discuss influence of Robinsons Housekeeping particularly the flood as an
event of dis-order, un-doing, saturation, slippage, liquidity.
Look to Jenn Joys The Choreographic and maybe Dissolve into
Comprehension (Burnham) to discuss where I feel this particular project of
dis/re-organizing, particularly using female bodies, particularly through live
event, is situated within the historical present - in other words - why does
this matter to me/others/anyone?