Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology

Foreword

Deborah Jowitt Reading—in some cases, revisiting—these essays by Kenneth King, I feel my brain start to whirl, to become hyper-aware of its own circuitry, to shy away from discursive thinking. It's a familiar sensation. Almost forty years of watching-hearing-reading the works of King, perhaps our only dancing philosopher, have attuned me to his unique voice and vision. Through him, I learned to sense dance as language—not in the sense of bearing a narrative, but as a language with formal correlations to spoken and written word structures, a language whose significance flashes out from the patterns it traces on the floor, from the alterations in the air as one body passes another. Dancing, to him, is "writing in space." Like early ritual dances that mapped visions of stellar order, King's choreography , for the watcher as for the doer, flared along the nerves and muscles, hinting at cosmic correspondences you couldn't explain yet somehow comprehended. The experience went beyond watching, say, one of George Balanchine's storyless ballets and attributing human feelings to patterned interactions; it made you sense a system operating at full steam— or the design of a system. Long before postmodern theorists from a variety of disciplines discovered "the body," and science promoted the notion of cellular intelligence, King had wreaked havoc with the old mindbody split. For him, dancing may have triggered the impulse to create the texts that often accompanied his performances. When I interviewed him in 1976 for the Village Voice, he remarked that "Language is bound up with how we see in ways we're not even aware of. And often when I do a movement, words come to mind—not because the movement means them, but because the gestures, the act of dancing, become a reflective device." This was when he was finishing Battery: A Tribute to Susanne K. Langer. (Langer, a philosopher he deeply admires, wrote in her threevolume Mind about the role of primal choric dance and rhythmic chant in stimulating the frontal lobes of the brain to invent symbolic thought.) Whether dancing, talking, dancing-while-talking, or writing, King's linguistic processes are exhilarating, not to say occasionally hilarious. Dense with movement and/or words, they explode and reconfigure the familiar, crack syntax open, invent startling words. Always extraordinarily well-read, he gained new brain fodder from French literary theory but gave his intricate and witty theoretical musings the rhythms and dynamics of a dance: Let's face it, the French have turned thinking into a glamour industry; they furnish the latest trompe de textes or topos logos du jour. And more specifically, marketing difficult, abstruse thinking freighted in sparkling, complex rhetoric that stymies in the effort to liberate itself from ontometaphysics, it ends up being even more paracryptic . They've refined, defined and redefined the exigencies and border turfs of modern philosophy, poststructuralist exegesis, cryptoanalysis, and non-narrative narrativity. They resurrect and exergeticize Descartes daily, jousting with a Cartesian cottage industry on the scale of the Taj Mahal! ("Writing Over History and Time: Maurice Blanchot & Jackie O") His mind absorbs what he reads, and he's off—as if literature were fodder for a veritable Preakness of intellectual acrobatics. In his fascinating essay "Dreams and Collage," he begins by referring to Aristotle's On Dreams, moves to bring in Langer, Michio Kaku's explication of string theory, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir on Freud, before launching into a discussion of collage and dreams as saboteurs of linear continuity. Wilhelm Reich also figures in this piece of writing, as do Mircea Eliade, the Lascaux caves, and MTV: "Collage objectifies the mimesis of oneiric configurations and unlocks the keys to dimensionalizing how many strata of brain, mind, being and world resonate simultaneously, thus moving representation beyond representation, and thereby telescoping cognitive and systemic transferences." (How typical of King's mindplay—that "unlocks the keys.") And the references are no scholarly showing off; they're another sort of collage, in which sharp minds, brought into proximity, clang satisfyingly off one another. When Kenneth King began to show dances in New York in 1964, he was still a student at Antioch. The college's work-study plan enabled him to spend several months a year in the city. He couldn't have arrived at a better time. The vanguard bunch of dancer-choreographers, musicians, and visual artists grouped under the rubric of Judson...