Maaike Bleeker

Perceiving and Believing: An Enactive Approach to Spectatorship

This essay proposes an enactive approach to spectatorship. This enactive approach involves a shift in focus from what is (re)presented onstage towards the relationship between what is staged and the modes of perceiving of the audience. Staging and spectator are mutually implicated, and modes of staging (willingly or unwillingly) imply positions, both in concrete embodied space and with regard to the ways in which our perceptions of things include attitudes toward them: assumptions, expectations, beliefs, desires, fears. Starting from two theatre performances that position their audiences in ways that self-consciously destabilize habitual modes of perceiving (Dries Verhoeven’s Funerals and Alexandra Broeder’s NATURE or NURTURE), the essay demonstrates the potential of an enactive approach for understanding the political and ethical implications of theatre. It shows how Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor helps to explain the confusing experiences caused by these performances in terms of how they confront us with what they describe as the “metaphors we live by”: the systems of metaphors that structure our bodily perceptual-cognitive encounter with what we find ourselves confronted with. The essay also shows how theories of embodied simulation help us to understand the uncomfortable experiences evoked by this performance as a result of how the performance mediates in multiple, sometimes contradictory identifications and subverts our sense of self as observers of a world that exists independently from our perception of it.

Media Dramaturgies of the Mind: Ivana Müller's cinematic choreographies

The development of 20th century theatre is intertwined with the rise of media culture. This article engages with the effects and implications of this development from the relationship between the ‘mind-set’ of the audience and what is presented on stage. Being ‘natural born cyborgs’, we are not merely users of technology, we are also used by it. Technology places demands on us, affords modes of interaction, and mediates in the development of new skills that impact how we enact perception, and even how we think. This incorporation of media technology is staged in a self-reflexive way in Ivana Müllers While We Were Holding It Together (2006) and Playing Ensemble Again and Again (2008), two durational performances that play with modes of perceiving and thinking characteristic of cinema. The direct way in which these performances address their audiences is typical of the shift in axis of theatrical communication that according to Hans-Thies Lehmann is an important characteristic of the post-dramatic theatre. Instead of aiming towards the construction of a closed, unitary and coherent world on stage, the post-dramatic theatre engages more explicitly and directly with the modes of perceiving and thinking of the audience. The implication that follows from Lehmanns observation (but is not elaborated by him) is a ‘shift in axis’ with regard to dramaturgy as well, from a focus on constructing worlds on stage towards the relationship between the ‘mind-set’ of the beholder and what is presented on stage. With her performances, Müller draws attention to how the cinematic mode of thinking that Deleuze has termed terms ´thinking through images´ has become part of this mind-set and how this allows for a rethinking of the notion of choreography as a ´writing of movement´ in the beholder rather than on stage, movement in which we are implicated.

Passages in Post‐Modern Theory: Mapping the Apparatus

In her seminal Passages in Modern Sculpture Rosalind Krauss observes a transformation in twentieth century sculpture that moves it from being a fundamentally spatial, into an increasingly temporal, art. She terms this development the ‘reformulation of the sculptural enterprise’ and describes how this reformulation entails a radical transformation not only of what the sculptural object is, but also both of how we know that object, and of what it means to know it. More precisely, the reformulation of the sculptural enterprise entails a shift towards a relational understanding of art, i.e. a movement away from an understanding of art as autonomous object. Within this relational understanding the meaning of sculpture is a function of lived time. In tracing this shift, Krauss references works that emphatically install, as part of the artistic enterprise, the relationship between artworks and their makers, as well as between artworks and spectators.

Introduction: On Technology & Memory

Between 11 May and 16 June 2011, Štromajer, one of the pioneers of net art in Slovenia and worldwide, carried out a ritual expunction of his classic net projects, which he created between 1996 and 2007. Every day during that period, he deleted one net art project; he removed it permanently from his server, so that the projects are now no longer available on the web server of Intima Virtual Base. He completely deleted 37 net art projects, totalling 3288 files or 101 MB. (Make Love, Not Art 2012)

Un)Covering Artistic Thought Unfolding

“W hat does it mean to reconstruct a dance?” wonders Martin Nachbar in his text “Training Remembering.” Following Henri Bergson, he proposes an explanation in terms of images that are actualized in ways that involve not only the visual sense, but also hearing, touch, and proprioception. Remembering something is actualizing it through the senses. Such sensory actualization is instrumental not only to literally remember moments from our own past, but also to our modes of engaging with the thoughts, ideas, experiences, and creations of others. In this process, Nachbar observes, our own body, with its movement knowledge and experiences, becomes the frame through which remembering takes shape, while at the same time this frame may be questioned and trained anew within the process.

Introduction: What ‘body’ works and what bodies do not fit

For this special issue of parallax we proposed thinking about how the body functions as a kind of apparatus or dispositif in the divergent disciplines of dance studies, installation art and cinema studies. We envisioned the suggested task of reflecting on not what a body can do, but what ‘the body’ has done as a way to get a critical grip on the burgeoning bulk of body theories. Over the past thirty-five years, many versions of such theory have established ‘the body’ with a certain prestige in a variety of fields of theoretical, artistic and other inquiry. Now that the body has been set into a ‘ready-for-use’ position, installed as it were, this issue of parallax sought scholars and practitioners willing to evaluate the collective job. Our proposal, which did admittedly include an invitation to perverse routes, garnered instead the attention of theorists who slice the current edge of ‘body theory’. Rather than assess body theories and the desires invested in using the concept of the body at all, the texts we selected further specialize and specify the body apparatus that they manufacture in the factory of their disciplinary field. Except that it is not easy to place with certainty any one text into a single field. Each text benefits from the successful installation of ‘the body’ as a central theoretical issue that brings into view the relational aspects of experience and meaning making. But, in their hands, the body becomes something else: an apparatus for political tinkering, a means of movement, a condense archive, choreography, resistance, a way out. What differentiates these texts from the bodies that regularly appear to veil the author’s conceptual programmes is their reflexive, dare I say knowing, use of the body for other ends – they need the body, not just any body, but one that is carefully distinguished from a generally normative and vague container.

Thinking No-One's Thought

What is it that dramaturgs do? Is there a dramaturg that has never been faced with this question? Contemplating possible answers, I am reminded of lists provided by former teachers of the activities performed by a dramaturg: background research, analysis, observing rehearsals, being a first audience, writing program notes and grant applications, and so on. While such lists may indeed provide an initial impression of the kind of activities with which dramaturgs often occupy their time, they do not offer insight into the specificities of the dramaturg’s role in the creative process. Importantly, the use of the term specificities here does not in any way imply an argument for an essential or singular way of doing dramaturgy; on the contrary, we might suppose that there exist almost as many ways of doing dramaturgy as there are dramaturgs. Nonetheless, if we examine the dramaturg’s function within the creative process, instead of considering the particular manner in which each dramaturg individually fulfills a preordained role, we can begin to distinguish some common characteristics that make an appearance time and again.

Science in the performance stratum: hunting for Higgs and nature as performance

Recent traditions such as posthumanism and new materialism propose that non-humans and matter are active participants in processes of signification, so that humans do not give meaning to matter, but matter and meaning co-constitute each other. Notably, Karen Barads plea for ‘the study of practices of knowing in being’ implies that performativity – with its conforming as well as its norm-shifting effects – is situated at the very heart of both scientific work itself and engagements with it. Understanding how matter and meaning are entangled requires a shift in focus from the relationship between them as it has come about towards the ‘processual relating’ within which this relationship comes about. This means to study the identities and subjectivities of entities in the laboratory as they are ‘in the making’. Following performance studies scholar Jon McKenzie, we argue that this ‘processual relating’ takes place under the pressure to perform, or else. Read in tandem with Barad, McKenzies approach to performance in terms of a challenge (of being challenged to ‘perform, or else’) raises the question of whether in scientific experiments not only scientists and technology are put under pressure, but also nature itself is required to ‘perform, or else’. Using the hunt for the Higgs particle at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Geneva) as our case study, we will show the productivity of this perspective as it was first developed within the humanities not only for understanding human bodies and by extension of what it means to be human, but also for our understanding of knowledge production in the sciences. Furthermore, we suggest that such understanding may provide a useful perspective on the transformations in research and knowledge production currently brought about by the rise of the Digital Humanities.

Death, Digitalization and Dys-Appearance

In proving that the body is a mechanical, mathematical entity, free of all soul attributes, Descartes laid the groundwork for modern scientific medicine. He hoped to discover ways to prolong embodied life. However, since life cannot go on forever, he also felt the need to prove the immaterial nature of the rational soul, and thereby its immortality. Descartes’ scheme serves to combat death on all fronts. His strategy for overcoming death is precisely to capture the body fully in the third person. It is the body of the other that Descartes anatomizes, his own body is then reconstructed on such a model.

Showing What Cannot Be Seen

‘We can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen’ observes Mitchell (1986, p. 39). He makes this observation in the context of a discussion about the way perspective produces an image of the visible world, an image that is constructed according to a particular logic and as seen from a specific point of view. This construction is explicitly visible in perspectival drawings, in which receding lines serve to constitute unity as a result of which all elements appear as part of a meaningful totality. The point where receding lines meet (the vanishing point) mirrors the vantage point, the point from where the scene depicted is seen. The scene reaches out to the viewer, inviting him or her to occupy the vantage point. By taking up this position as implied by the construction of the image, the viewer is granted a perfect view from where everything looks the way it should. Seen from this point, the image is like a finestra aperta, a window opening on the world.1