Stroboscopic Stutter: on the not-yet-captured ontological condition of limit-attractions

Opening

Affect as critical point
suggests that parasite affects and lateral barely perceptible moves might be welcomed to undo any will to reach a too-managed critical judgement and remove any remaining mastery wishes from the process of critically exploring.

A desire only:
might (also) writing and (also) reading cease to be practices of mediation to become interfused modulations?

Inter-Fusion Pre-Story

The interconnection of the senses was graphically illustrated by an experiment that ingeniously combined anesthetized skin and high-altitude flight. A scientist who was also an experienced pilot and had been trained to orient expertly during high-altitude manoeuvres anesthetized his own ass. Amazing but true: he could no longer see where he was. He could no longer orient. He had scientifically proven that we see with the seat of our pants. The interconnection of the senses is so complete that the removal of a strategic patch of tactile/proprioceptive feed makes the whole process dysfunctional.

—Brian Massumi (2002:157)

Inter-Logues (jeux de piste)

Partitioning senses or the politics of daily sensory experience.

Some-thing is fusty on the shelf of a much reiterated view on dance and its performance as vanishing present bodies. That view—one anchored and inscribed in dance and performance's supposed ontological specificity—seems hard to re-move. Specifically, it still equates with a (pre-)view of both presence and movement as formal disappearances, displayed on the very grounding grounds of a measurable Euclidean space and with-in a perception of time as a flowing linear line. An assumption difficult to re-move not only from the sort of diffuse perception we have of our day-to-day moving bodies, at every step in our daily rounds, but also from more elaborate perceptions still moving through certain circles of dance and performance researchers,¹ as well as through a good portion of dance and performance practices.

The persistence of the assumption that dance and performance are best defined by the formal disappearance of present moving bodies, calls for a reframing of ongoing temporal and spatial perceptions, along with a reframing of subsequent perceptions of perception itself.

Before we move on though, let us take some time to convey how intrinsically aesthetic and intrinsically political these matters are, and how intrinsically they collaborate. The commonsense notion that situates aesthetic perception in a flowing linear time and in a measurable Euclidean space is not contained in the realm of artistic practice alone, but concerns both aesthetic and so-called nonaesthetic experience. More exactly, it concerns what aesthetic and nonaesthetic experiences might have in common or lend to one another. This is the interface that inevitably acquires a political dimension, the point where we should ask to what extent that common-sense notion of perception limits both our conception of sensory experience and our modes of sensing, perceiving, moving, and thinking. Furthermore, we should ask how far a notion that perpetuates a consensual order of the senses, assigning specific parts and positions to identified bodies, locating them within precise sociocultural frames according to their abilities or nonabilities, is or is not a political matter worth discussing.

At this point, I am following Jacques Rancière's most recent politico-aesthetic works (1998; 2000), particularly the concept of "partition of the sensible" (2000) on the basis of which he argues that there is an intrinsic knot between aesthetic practices (including literature) and politics.²

According to Rancière, a "partition of the sensible" can be understood as a first sense of aesthetics, which is to say, not as a set of artistic practices, not as a general theory that concerns these practices, and not as a theory of sensory experience in general; rather, aesthetics (as "partition of the sensible") is "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to experience" (2000:13). As such, it can be understood in a Kantian sense (if revised by Michel Foucault's genealogy³) Hence, Rancière defines it as:

the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something...