Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 1, April 2012
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Manning, Erin. 'Relationscapes'. Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge MA and London: The MIT Press, 2009.
Reviewed by
Bilkent University, Turkey
A highly celebrated study on movement as a generative principle, Erin Manning's Relationscapes is of special interest not only for scholars working in disciplines as diverse as dance studies, new media, art history, film theory and philosophy. By conjoining a thoroughly empirical analysis of movement with its re-conceptualization at the theoretical level, it does present a profound source for the broader field of consciousness studies, especially for theoreticians working in the interdisciplinary areas that link up artistic performance and production with aspects of consciousness. By engaging on the complex processes that evolve at the threshold of consciousness, it sheds light on the notion ‘becoming’ pursuing and explicating the co-constitution of movement and thought. Grounding these within an inquiry that conjoins empirical detail, analysis of experience and philosophical conceptualization, Relationscapes is a book essential also for all those that are interested in the intricate micro-processes interlocking the physical and the mental, which participate in our constitution as body-mind.
I approach this book review as an architect – a member of that latter broader group of scholars. My academic interest lies with 'lived' experience in/through space and the productive possibilities - affective and cognitive - borne through its unmediated effects. As this entails analysis and re-articulation of discreet phenomena embedded in the corporeality of space-body relationships, for me 'Relationscapes' has proven of special value. This book has turned out to be an inspiring and informing reading not only regarding the approach from which I deliberate space -- confirming the relevance of inquiry into otherwise unregistered minute detail, of paying close attention to the seemingly self-evident, and of probing into the gray zone of the largely pre-conscious. It has also helped me arrive at a deeper understanding of body and self in that movement is examined both as a way of being with and formulating space, and as a generative principle – as the perpetually active modality of the body. Furthermore, it has helped me make another step towards 'grounding' the constellation of philosophical concepts and propositions on 'becoming' which characterize the lineage of the process philosophers - especially Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari - as well as thinkers in current non-representational theory, in that it provides an explication of these concepts in correlation with concrete empirical experience.
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Relationscapes pertains to the series 'Technologies of lived abstraction' which entails transdisciplinary work inquiring 'critically and creatively' into the processes of emergence of the subjective, social and ethical-political. Hence by definition work on these lines is oriented towards bringing together 'facets' of thought and body, abstract and concrete, individual and collective, local and global. Inquiries in this series, therefore, are not characterized by adhering to a particular methodology, but evolve along/through a multitude of possible paradigms. Rather, they share a common aim: to shed light onto the generation of thought and action. Placing emphasis on the processes of embodied cognition, these focus on experience not in terms of an object of re-cognition, but in terms of the fundamental encounter underlying the modes of embodied experience and thought – i.e. these seek to build up understanding in terms of the ‘cross-genesis of action and perception as it opens up onto thought’.
One of the special qualities of 'Relationscapes' is the development of the argument from bottom-up, which ensures for an engaging and easy flowing reading. The discussion grows gradually around and out of some (nodal) micro cases of movement (taking a step, standing still), analyzed at the bodily level, and builds up towards the complex notions and mechanisms of 'becoming'. Thereby these notions are first made tangible, and then theorized and explicated in a logically consistent manner and palpable physical detail. This meticulous concretization and analysis of movement allows the author to pursue its systematic conceptualization as it (movement) generates and/or evolves into more properly mental events and processes. Thus what would otherwise pass unnoticed is 'foregrounded' - depicted in ample empirical detail, and explicated by interweaving relevant theoretical material. Hence the reader is gradually led to the conceptual / theoretical level by an argument is readily followed -- both persuasive and convincing. The other special quality of the book is that it co-relates the empirical analysis of movement with a reinterpretation of key notions pertinent to artistic thought and practice, converging the aesthetic and philosophical within inquiry into the context of disparate art media such as dance, photography, cinematic art, sculpture, or contemporary aboriginal art.
The first part of the book entails the analysis and conceptualization of movement in the context of dance. Based on the proposition that the current conception of movement as displacement is limiting, the author argues for the need to re-conceptualize movement in ways that would allow spanning and interlocking the physical and the mental in their continuous mutual fertilization. In this, Manning relies on, and explores the premise that there is a generative nexus between action, perception and conception, a nexus that can be analyzed, and perhaps also modulated by considering the ways in which the body reverberates with its constructed environment. Examining movement in terms of the micro events at this level, then, leads to an altered understanding of both movement and consciousness. It allows demonstrating how thinking is more than the final form it takes in language, by shifting the focus on movement so as to understand the 'taking form itself'.
The proposed approach to such an exploration entails the re-articulation of bodily events in the making. Analysis is centered on movement in terms of micro-events, which, once brought to the foreground, allow showing how these predominantly pre-conscious occurrences actually open up to more properly conscious processes. Movement, then, can be understood in terms of the complex passage from thought to feeling to concept, thereby highlighting the auto-genetic potential of ideas as they become 'articulations' while movement takes form. In contrast to the notion of movement as displacement, which relies on measure and position and does not account for the inherent continuity of the experiential flow, the proposed re-conceptualization around 'incipient movement', allows understanding the productive potential of the integrative nexus. This productive potential can be accentuated and explicated when movement is construed in terms of the processes of pre-acceleration – i.e. in terms of an activating/activated force. This notion then can be utilized in construing of movement as a pulsation towards directionality – i.e. as an event in the making that does not foretell a definitive outcome in terms of location, position or form.
Hence movement, felt as incipient potential in the intensity of extension, remains essentially open both as 'singular' actualization, and as abstract conception. These shifts in understanding of movement can serve to ground the notion of 'becoming body' – the sensing body in movement. Situated in this context, the ‘self’ resists pre-definition in terms of subjectivity or identity, but is rather involved in reciprocal exploration of thought that is not strictly of the mind, but of the bodily becoming. Manning elaborates on this notion by building up on the Bergsonian conception of 'duration', which supports her argument for an understanding of the interrelatedness among movement and thought, where pre-articulated thought shifts through movement to thought to concept. Hence duration, rather than in temporal terms, is to be construed as the process of a becoming aware, where the ‘sensing’ of duration emerges as the first instance of drawing events into awareness or perception. This ‘sensing’ of duration amounts to an articulation of immediate experiential space-time – the plane of experience where occurrences begin to be registered. Of crucial importance to the current argument, this instance is analyzed in further specificity through the system of concepts in Whitehead's philosophy: 'actual occasion', ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘symbolic reference’. Recognizing the underlying influence of Whitehead’s thought on the twentieth century process philosophers, Manning employs Whitehead’s system of concepts as an explanatory and/or mediating tool. This allows her highlighting how these propositions actually correlate with, and can be brought to bear back on events of immediate experience.
An important aspect of such explication concerns the status of space and time, which, rather than preceding the events, are to be construed as events taking form in the concreteness of time and space. In this regard the conception of 'actual occasion' is central to the understanding the 'spacedness' of events. From within the context of a discreet experience, actual occasions generate as aided by occurrence pertinent to ‘incipient movement’. The events of perception are always called forth through prehensions, which create the parameters for the taking form of space-time. Hence for instance the prehension of a chair is not ‘of’ the chair as an object, which would be just one pole of the actual occasion. Rather, this prehension concerns the relation between body and chair, which, as a movement of thought or experience of stability, marks the opening of future relational experiences colored by stability. Hence while ‘actual occasions’ are always singular events – never relational in their actualization but rather existing in a concrete (and perished/completed experience of space-time), they nevertheless do relate across the nexus of experience.
The notion of incipience is crucial also in that it opens up experience to the unknowable. For instance the ‘body-room stratum’ is neither object nor form, but rather infinite potential of recombination, where the room becomes ‘configuring’ while the body ‘recomposes’. Such perspective, then, allows accounting for aspects of novelty situated within these processes, which can be understood in terms of the onto-genetic force through which immanent movement is felt in becoming-form. In regard of consciousness, what happens in this interval is first felt, and then, as the actual occasion expires, registered – i.e. movement becomes available to consciousness only in terms of how it was left behind as a trace.
This registering of a final form of movement is not the experience as a whole. The passage to activated perception is explicated through Whitehead’s notions ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘symbolic reference’. These concepts denote how in the context of an actual occasion a small focal area is singled out of the large penumbral region of experience, and brought into illumination and consciousness. Causal efficacy refers to the stage of perception that ensures the immanent rationality of all experience. In this, a relation is ‘causal’ in the sense that it acts causally on a sensing body in motion as a force towards that to which to connect – i.e. it operates not as a rational decision, but a relational encounter. Causal efficacy activates the ‘how’ of experience as a feel of the connectedness with the world, and as a ‘knowing’, immediately, how to field ‘space-time’. Hence in order to reach full perception, the state of perception in ‘presentational immediacy’ – a state that provides an immediate sense of how things go together - need reconnect with causal efficacy. Their re-connection leads to culmination of the act of perception in relational synthesis – causal efficacy providing the datum for presentational immediacy, which in turn propels the given-ness of the causal event towards the complexity of immediate experience. These two perceptual modes become linked in ‘symbolic reference’. This concept accounts for processes which connect thought to experience in that the relation through which such reference was created is brought to the fore – it explains how rationality is activated through direct conditioned action. The conscious analysis of perception in the aftermath of the event is principally concerned with the analysis of these two perceptual modes.
In the context of an actual occasion, then, movement can be understood in terms of two perceptual poles: the physical and the mental. Perception is construed as a ‘folding’ of these poles onto each other, and entails an infinite play of fore-grounding and back-grounding – an elastic process of pulling detail in and out of the experiential continuum. This allows acknowledging ‘feeling’ as key to memory, and confirming the element of newness of immediate experience. Memory hence is to be construed not as an unfolding of a past in a neutral present, but as an activation of contrast: an aspect of ‘then’ which is felt in terms of its difference to the ‘now’. The perceived resemblance to something (the operations of symbolic reference) forces us to think, while an object becomes the threshold for thinking the feeling. The ‘event’, then, is understood not as the seeing of an object, but as the object contributing to the unfolding of perception. As object-ness is felt relationally, the activity of perceiving with objects evolves in terms of participating in the relations they call forth.
The productive potentiality pertinent to the realm of pre-articulation, holds in relation to the conceptual level as well, a potential that grounds Deleuze's insistence on concerns with 'becoming' and the 'elasticity' of the ‘almost’. Invention and novelty, then, can be construed in terms of processes that remain at the ‘plane of composition’ where concepts continue to evolve. Hence this perpetual cross-fertilization - from force to form to force – operates also in terms of selves and identities, where such a ‘taking form’ is to be understood as an always brief individuation – in process. Having arrived at a rendition of the processes of individuation generating with movement, Manning argues for an understanding of self that is both active and stable and evolves through the dynamic equilibrium between individuation and identity: neither total becoming, nor fixed identity.
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In the following, second part of the book, Manning extends the argument on incipience and pre-articulation into the realm of artistic work. She holds that perception and representation are no longer a sustainable dichotomy, but need rather be construed as different rhythms of a singular event of relation. While elaborating her theorization of movement, the author examines a range of artistic works in different media in terms of their capacities to capture and express instances of incipience within the series of movement–body-thought-concept correlates. This part entails, among others, a reading of art-works as diverse as Etienne-Jules Marey’s image events, Norman McLaren’s cinematic art, Leni Riefenstahl’s biograms, David Sprigg’s animate sculptures, and Dorothy Napangardi’s contemporary aboriginal art. In Manning’s reading, what connects these seemingly disparate artistic studies, is their orientation towards the ‘interval’, exploring how the 'almost' might become activated in the context of different media. Hence the reader is drawn into an analysis that interweaves aesthetic and philosophical, seeking to identify how such art-works attain a capacity to express ‘emergence’. Each in their own terms aim to extend the potential of their respective medium in order to retain its ‘openness’ - generating an ‘almost’ and not yet, activating a sense movement prior and beyond vision, expressing movement in the pulsations of processes through shifting relations taking form. From this perspective, the power of these works lies in that they engage on language - in the making. Language, then, is construed in a broad sense, spanning from visual to verbal: a means to focus on and express forces of becoming. Perpetually occupying the plane of composition, the language of these works is concerned not with signification but with responsiveness, seeking to express the body's continuing conversation with environs. It (language) entails a way of thinking that is affectively resonant, conceptually complex and inventive in its articulations – pairing pre-acceleration with pre-articulation and making felt the force of movement taking form. It is such way of thinking and expression that would also offer a different modality of viewing – a capacity to trigger perception that evolves as ‘becoming with’, and a different way of participation in the work.