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  • Mobilization, Force, and the Politics of Transformation
  • Gerald Siegmund (bio)

In his seminal book Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (1998) Randy Martin proposes to rethink the relation between dance and politics based on his concept of mobilization. He asks what dance and the study of dance can bring to politics given that both are forms of articulation of the social. For Martin, the dynamics of mobilization are already inherent in politics although political theory has given very little thought to its implications (1998, 4). On the other hand, the dynamics of mobilization are just as crucial in bringing about a dance performance gathering together performers and members of the audience alike. Dance for Martin therefore resonates with what he calls “the entire social kinesthetic” (24). Mobilization traverses diverse social, artistic and political practices shaping and connecting bodies and creating agency and difference along the way. Thus, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière pointed out twelve years after Randy wrote this, art and politics do not reside in separate spheres. Rather, one needs to think of their primary connection as one of being embedded or enfolded in the raw material of our sensory world. Art and politics both shape and distribute sensory experience as both legible and sensate in their own right and as necessary to their own ends and needs, with the former re-distributing and re-negotiating what the latter has posited as hegemonic (Rancière 2010, 148–49).

On embarking with Randy Martin and Rebekah Kowal on what was one of Randy’s last projects, the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (2017), I was trying to find my own definition of the relation between art and politics (Siegmund 2017). Confronted with discussions about the legitimacy of making dances in the era of neoliberal capitalism and post-Fordist labor in the seminars of the Choreography and Performance program at Giessen University in Germany, I was increasingly driven to counter my student’s impulse not to move at all anymore, since according to their understanding, any kind of movement can be exploited by creative capitalism. I found myself reverting to what at first glance looks like a conservative stance, that of making a point for making art that moves. Thus, in my essay for the Handbook, I argued for the political within the aesthetic dimension of art. Along with Rancière, I tried to make a point for art as being political as such because it takes apart and reassembles what had been configured elsewhere. Art creates agency for those whose voices could hitherto not be heard and thereby changes the field of social articulation. To make matters more complex, I held that the two dance productions I analyzed rearticulated the social in such a way as to create ambivalence. They throw into doubt truths held elsewhere by offering multiple points of view at one and the same time. They remained open productions in the sense that they ultimately refused to settle for any interest—even the interest of those they arguably spoke [End Page 27] for—in favor of a playful exploration of forms, bodies, strictures, rules, and protocols. Eschewing the logic of either-or, I find the political within the field of aesthetics resides in the ambivalence of attitudes and possibilities that dance creates. Its disturbing quality lies in the fact that what it has to say, what it creates, and what it displays—and it says and displays a lot—both emotionally and intellectually, refuse to settle.

To sharpen my argument, I drew upon the field of philosophical aesthetics, amore prominent approach to the study of dance in Europe and Germany than in the US. Christoph Menke’s writing on art provided me with a concept of “force” that underlined the foundational risk inherent in the production and reception of art (Menke 2011). Since human beings have force, they are able to imagine and to transform themselves. The working of force in a work of art is twofold: force gathers material from beyond the realm of performance, which stabilizes these forces in the shape of form. Yet, force also jeopardizes form by threatening to undo the bodies form has created. It creates...

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