ray langenbach : gesture, stutter, state


TIC

P-p-perf-formances, and p-performance sp-speech is always sta-staturory, or represent-tative of the state. It is a stat-stat-ment as a st-st-st-stutter.



The s-s-stutter is a nervous tic of the tongue. The stutter/tic performance is a deflection, a warp, a turn, a door that closes on in one direction as it opens in another, like Duchamp's closet door at 11 Rue Larrey ... speech as doubled, tripled: a neurological propagation. A stutter/tic is also an identity, a flag, a manifesto, a kind of patriotism of the body. Those of you who have see Ivan Illych perform understand this 'pedagogical' use of the nervous tic.

 The stutter/tic is a repetition in a state of delay... the appearance of a neurological bottleneck... a gap. It is a sign of a system in feedback, and feedback produces and reveals bottlenecks - structural impediments to information flow in the system. We might  expand on the mechanistic model of the bottleneck with  the word 'embolism'. In the body, the tissue of the arterial walls is too thin and in the presence of high blood pressure, balloons out and ruptures: 'blows'.  An embolism, then, is a site in flow-system where the underlying design or fabrication of the channel is defective or malformed brought on by increased flow or by feedback. Blowback, the CIA term for a delayed revenge for a successful operation - what happened on 9-11 - is effectively a form of extended and long-delayed feedback revealed through the spectacular exploitation of an embolism.  As either a restored be-behaviour or a pro-product of a per-performative, performance art, when it is successful, by virtue of its nature as a re-repetition, forms either information bottlenecks, freezes and stoppages or embolisms about to blow. 

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Marcel Duchamp: Porte, 11 rue Larrey 1927 (Wooden door made by a carpenter following Duchamp's instructions) 86 5/8 x 24 11/16 inches. (Detached from original location; collection Fabio Sargentini, Rome). Photograph from Thierry De Duve, 1991, The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, p.62 pl.2.12.