paul rae : presencing

Part 4: Body

image by Veronique Dubin

In his recent book, Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi addresses the condition of virtuality by considering the implications of movement and sensation for cultural and social theory. Although informed by an understanding that new technologies represent a radical challenge to conventional subject positions, Massumi neither equates the virtual with the digital, nor opposes it to the real. On the contrary, he argues, the virtual attends all human action, and although it cannot be represented, its felt effects are what prohibits an assertion of absolute presence. Actual movement is in a constant state of emergence out of manifold potential movements, its trajectory only ever 'back-formed' once it has moved on: "In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary"(Massumi, 2002: 4). Cultural theories that seek to locate the subject on grids of discourses and practices are unable to take such emergence into account, since the pre-emptively set down grid captures the subject in 'cultural freeze frame'. Only then is movement factored in, by which time the force of its becoming is lost. Massumi summarises as follows:

A thing cannot be understood without reference to the nonpresent dimensions it compresses and varyingly expresses in continuity…these dimensions are abstract yet real. They are virtual. Logics of presence or position that box things in three-dimensional space strung out along a time line just don't doppler. Logics of transition are needed: qualitative topologics (201).

In these terms, Self Unfinished (1999) by Xavier le Roy is exemplary. Far from being a 'hi-tech' production, this solo dance-performance uses a minimum of props and technology to investigate the status of body and self through an appeal to the virtual.

The set consists of a table, a chair and a portable stereo system, which plays no music until the end of the show. The backdrop is stark white, and the florescent lighting constant. There is no text, and le Roy wears a grey shirt, black trousers and gym shoes, which he removes as the performance progresses. Following a preface of robotic movements, le Roy moves between several points (chair, wall and stereo) at different paces and using various methods of locomotion, and contorts his gangly but extremely supple body into an increasingly complex series of poses. At one point while walking, le Roy takes off his shirt, and pulls up a long vest, which resembles a dress, as far as his wrists. He then folds over at the waist, places his palms flat on the floor with fingers pointing towards his toes, and continues to walk. The impression is of the lower torsos of a man and a woman fused cross-sectionally at the pelvis and by turns dancing together and wrestling each other. Arriving at the wall, he does a handstand, splays himself flat, and scuttles sideways across it. Thereafter, he stands up straight, takes down the dress, lies on the floor, and walks on all fours, his hands balled into fists. And so it goes on until the final action, where, naked, he walks on his shoulders, his head and legs tucked in and his arms unfurled out sideways.

Initially, the physical intensity of le Roy's performance (which includes the experience of watching it) would appear to relate it to such momentous attempts at presencing as the early work of Jerzy Grotowski, who sought to bring about an 'inexplicable unity'(1969: 131) in performer and audience through an intense and absolute focus on the body of the performer. Yet le Roy's own deadpan attitude to his activities, and the pauses and repetitions suggest otherwise. One rather has the sense of an investigative process, of which the performer's body is both subject and object, and the quality under investigation, selfhood. As the title pre-emptively discloses, such an investigation is destined to go unresolved: what is of compelling interest, however, is not the failure to achieve the self-realisation of presence, but the process of 'qualitative topology' engendered along the way.

The disorienting effect of Self Unfinished arises not from le Roy's virtuosic suppleness, in which he is matched by many dancers, but from the persistent way in which his poses and movements elude apprehension. One simply cannot 'come to terms' with them, for there are no terms that describe them. Even the sequence with the dress mentioned above is only 'gendered' through an effort of coding that must first overcome the debilitating bizarreness of the image *.

* This particular section can be viewed online at the website of the New York performance venue The Kitchen, where the piece was performed both in 1998 and 2002. It is telling that this segment was chosen. It is precisely because of the possibility of coding it in terms other than those of the rest of their piece that it is able to ‘stand alone’. It is unique in its exemplariness.
Thereafter, such codes are comprehensively scrambled. At one point, for example, he assumes an upside-down crouch position, his head and knees tucked away, his back to the audience, all his weight on his shoulders. Out of this, he stretches his arms up straight into the air, his hands in fists. Searching for order in this lump of flesh, one cannot help but ascribe these fists the status of featureless heads; physical manifestations of the mouthed, ball-like heads on fleshy stalks in Francis Bacon's famous triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Moreover, as the performance proceeds, le Roy's transitions see him resolve less and less frequently into recognisable human shape. For the final twenty minutes, one is at a loss to identify one's own seated form with the fleshy object that parades itself upon the stage.

"Whatever medium you are operating in", writes Massumi, "you miss the virtual unless you carry the images constructed in that medium to the point of topological transformation"(134). Topology is the 'qualitative science' of tracing the infinite geometrical variations through which a pliable figure might pass without rupture, such as the many manifestations of the old children's televison character, Morph. Through his on-going process of corporeal transformation, le Roy re-figures himself topographically. It is akin to looking at a home video in slow-motion, and noticing all the unruly contortions your body passes through on its way from one position to another; except in Self Unfinished, the beginning and end-points that retro-actively order these chaotic motions into a trajectory are absent. That is what gives his actions their emergent quality: they cannot pre-exist the doing. Moreover, as Massumi points out, topological forms cannot be related to anything other than their own variations. My post-performance notes include: 'cartoon roast chicken'; 'dusgruntled Hindu demon'; 'strip-yoga'. But recourse to analogy will always fall short. "Here, there is no model. Only infolding and unfolding: self-referential transformation"(Massumi: 135). Self Unfinished is befuddling and compelling because, more than most human activity, more, even, than most Western dance (although some of William Forsyth's work with Ballett Frankfurt is another good example) le Roy's movements are charged with potential: the potential of all the other actions that might have been, and are ever on the brink of being realised: the 'real abstractions' that ghost the actual. It is this charge of potential that causes analogy to fail, and the virtual to make its presence felt.

This potentiality, Massumi is at pains to stress, is something that largely eludes the digital as it is conventionally conceived. In code, potential can only be accounted for as probability: "Digital technologies in fact have a remarkably weak connection to the virtual, by virtue of the enormous power of their systematization of the possible"(137). Potentialization is only produced with reference to the digital at those points where it interfaces with the analogue, that is, at points of qualitative transformation across media. Self Unfinished gives rise to similar questions of interfacing. The laboratory conditions alluded to by the set-up, and the investigative, objective quality of le Roy's approach suggest a scientific gloss to the performance. With le Roy's body both subject and object of the investigation, a medical theme seems to hover around his actions. Significantly, however, they are far from the direct interventions into medical discourse of an Orlan, for example *.
* For more information on Orlan, visit her homepage

On the contrary, in light of le Roy's performance, Orlan's operating theatre appears cumbersomely over-determined. Looking for all the world like a man being rearranged within his own skin, le Roy, who has a PhD in molecular biology, seems to pre-figure much more subtle - although no less powerful - medical interventions: the genetic, and the nano-technological. Accordingly, where most interactions with code (such as surfing the Internet) are extensive, le Roy stages a kind of internal interfacing. That it is performed gives it a further dimension, for the physical experience of spectating is a powerful one. Intense and focussed, one cannot help but be drawn into a relationship of empathetic micro-choreography characterised by a restiveness in place. Yet even as one's attention is projected out towards le Roy, a heightened physical sensitivity draws attention to the harshness of the light on one's eyes, and the increasingly cacophanous soundtrack brought about by the breathing of others, and one's own beating heart. This is Massumi's 'qualitative transformation across media', and it is not achieved without difficulty. And yet, it is precisely that difficulty that is le Roy's achievement. His work is a reminder that technology has no prior claim to the virtual, just as the body has no jurisdiction over the actual. Reflection - sensation - effort: this is how the virtual makes its presence felt.

Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Grotowski, Jerzy (1969) Towards A Poor Theatre. London: Methuen.

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