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She Stuttered: Mapping the Spontaneous Middle
Sher Doruff
Forthcoming: Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies
He stuttered.
She stuttered and.
He stuttered.
She stammered repeatedly.
She she she she …. walked, talked and tripped on the incipient middling of the event.
Speeding, slowing, slipping, in the perceptual quaver between sensuous and
nonsensuous experiencing. Between conscious choice and intuitive impulse, between
thought and feeling. She was languaging; performing the gerund. Inging. Moving as
parataxis moves, an oscillating vibration that separates as it connects. She performs
the immediacy of the slipstream between past, present and future memory. You know
you know you know. She performs the surge of an impulse coincident to its entropic
dissipation. Her stutter exposes the aleatoric tension in a compositional choice,
exposes the relational intersect between the already and the not-yet.
He, Gilles Deleuze,1 said that would happen if and when saying is doing, although,
literally, he meant to distinguish the scripted stutter from speech, to trace a vibrant,
mutant languaging in its written form. He projected a plane of non-style where
language meets its limit to confront silence. He alluded to a far from equilibrium
languaging that generates a ‘boom, close to a crash’2 to spin a disjunctive linguistic
process distinct from speech. Beckett, he said, does this in creating a ‘perpetual
disequilibrium’ to give flight to language.
She, choreographer Jeanine Durning, insists on the stutter of languaging within the
proprioceptive flow of spoken words. Insists on exposing the body-tension caught
between forces of the determinate and the indeterminate. Insists on a boom-crash
1 Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
2 Ibid, 109.
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dynamic in the risky, precarious business of improvised theater. Exhaustively, she
push-pulls the spoken word, instantiating the instantaneous, growing it from the
middle - in medias res -- its rubber-band tautness stretched to thwap performer and
audience in a moment of lapse and/or a moment or excess. “You start in the middle,
as Deleuze always taught, with the dynamic unity of an event.”3 She negotiates the
friction of resistance between the unpredictability of the spontaneously spoken and
the habitually, literally composed. It looms in front of her like a tightrope stretched
between forethought and the unthought suspended over the gap of a caesura.
3 Brian Massumi, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008,” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, 3 (October 2009), http://www.inflexions.org (accessed 02 June 2013).
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Figure 1: Durning in performance of inging 2 June 2010, Frascati WG, Amsterdam4.
She chose to fix an initial set of conditions that by their very equilibrium, enable
counter gestures of spontaneous potential - the table, the books, the camera, the
maximum audience seating of 25, the lighting, the silently gesticulating talking head
video in the background. Set pieces. She uses precarity as a reflexive technique in her
public encounter with the contingencies of orality, with the exposition of thought as
memory, as idiom, as nuance, as novelty.
She improvises. She starts in the middle, in the event of creative stutter5 to grow an
experience of the incommunicable,6 to perform the rush of a singular coming-to-
consciousness as it fields the qualitative relations that emerge with it. One feels the
rhythm of the interval, the proximity between the phonemes, syllables, words; feels
distance between the digit, finger, arm, mouth, eyes, camera lens, table leg, book
spine. She percolates as she heats up. She stammers. She stammers repeatedly when
the movement of thought is confronted by performative re-membering. What is the
you know you know what is the kinetic potential of the rhythmic interval as it middles
its present as future-past. And then and then to dance the dynamic reciprocity of
inside and outside.
Felix Guattari placed orality at the intersection of simplicity and complexity. His
orality dances with a mouth full of inside and outside in the same space at the same
4 The development of inging was a major component of Durning’s research practice in the Amsterdam Master of Choreography programme from 2008 to 2010. 5 “Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium III Seen, III Said (content and expression)”; Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” 111. 6 “When inging ‘worked’ least is when it appeared to others that I actually had something to say with the stream of words that I spoke. inging ‘works’ best when nothing is construed in that cascade of words, when meanings are stacked and then dismantled but not in that order or in time and not as part of a compositional score for a performance.” Jeanine Durning, “AMCh Final Report Number Four,” documentation, Amsterdam Master of Choreography programme, 2010,http://ingingperformance.wordpress.com/ (accessed 04 June 2013).
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time. 7 A roaring mumble that envelops ‘the unintentionally expressed and the
intentionally unexpressed.’8 Choreographing this movement is a practice of phase
transitioning, directing the dance of relations between intensity thresholds. Its subject
is the always-individuating event. Durning noted this excerpt9 from Beckett’s The
Unnamable, contextualising a performative subjectivity that in-forms her own
practice, the folding of an outside inside.
And I'll have said it (without a mouth I'll have said it). I'll have said it inside
me, then in the same breath outside me. Perhaps that's what I feel: an outside
and an inside and me in the middle. Perhaps that's what I am: the thing that
divides the world in two - on the one side the outside, on the other the inside.
(That can be as thin as foil.) I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the
middle.10
Resonant with a Guattarian turn on orality, she described the making of inging as
a practice of non-stop saying, acting and being in the continuous present.
Thought becomes action in and of itself, at the intersection of body and
language. The mouth mobilizes thought in the transition where language exits
the body. The circuitry of the mind is embodied through the movement of
mouth, lips, tongue and liquids. The practice of inging moves forward, away
from particular, fixed image or representation, and toward the edges of
intelligibility and comprehension where thought itself persists and insists.11
7 “But strictly orality is at the intersection. It speaks with its mouth full. It is full of inside and full of outside. In the same space, it is complexity in chaotic involution and simplicity in the process of infinite complexification. A dance of chaos and complexity;” Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 88. 8 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Sub Rosa, Released 05 Aug 1994, track 1 (7:25). 9 Durning, “AMCh Final Report Number Four”
10 Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
11 Durning, “AMCh Final Report Number Four,” (emphasis added).
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Incipient in the fringes of perceptibility, in the experiment of Durning’s research
practice, is the repetitive instance of spontaneous tendencies made palpable,
pronounced in a combustive jerk between their genesis and terminus, between inside
and outside, between instinct and intention, between me and we.
Between breaths, she did this in the near middle of inging, 8’22” into the non-stop
talking of it on 2 June 2010 in Amsterdam with an audience of twenty-five scattered
in the theater space, across from her worktable with assorted books, water bottle,
camera, computer:
inside inside inside inside inside inside inside inside inside inside inside you
when I say you I actually mean me and when I say you know it you know I
mean something else you know when I say us I actually mean us when I say
them I actually mean we uh you know where where where is the group? where
is the group? where is the group? where is the group? where is the group?
where is the group? where is the group? where is the group? where is the
group? where is the group? where is the group? that experience all of the
things we do to constrain all these strategies and constructions and you know
you know what is the score? what is the score? what is the score? what is the
score? to actually make you do the thing that you’re doing and flipping the
table then you get up and then you’re really emotional and then it’s like uh
you know what is the score to actually bring people together we’re already
together it’s just a matter of recognising it recognising recognising
recognising [to be continued]13
Persistent insistence. Repetition doesn’t function in this flow as a descriptive
modulator amplifying micro-differentials of meaning. It rather tends to operate as the
rhythmically taut suspension of a trigger, the springboard to a phase transition as
water at the threshold of boiling transitions to steam. Insistently persistent, she moves
within the unstable confluence of content and expression.
13 Jeanine Durning, transcript of inging performance, 2 June 2010, Frascati WG Theater, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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On Spontaneity’s Transversality
The question of just how spontaneity arises as a dynamic phase transition in the ‘far
from’ equilibrium of a performer in relation to herself, audience and milieu, framed
within the activity of improvisational practice across disciplines, is arguably best
taken up by speculative-pragmatics.14 The historical movement of thought from
Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to Brian Massumi’s take on radical
empiricist techniques of practice has generated numerous referential traces in the
often volatile contemporary debate on the exigencies of artistic research practice in
which Durning’s inging is situated. Whitehead provided an inspirational metaphysical
discourse for postwar American artists such as the poet Charles Olson, who presented
his theories throughout the 1950s and 1960s in various lectures and readings:15
In English the poetics became meubles – furniture –
thereafter (after 1630 & Descartes was the value
until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk
by getting the universe in […]’16
The painter Robert Motherwell, who attended Whitehead’s Wellesley College ‘Modes
of Thought’ lectures, extrapolated on the way in which the artist is in a constant
perceptual mode of placement and displacement and that in ‘relating and rupturing
14 Brian Massumi has reinvested the philosophical “field” of speculative pragmatism with fresh vectors and insight. “To speculate is to turn in on yourself. You turn in, in order to connect immanently with what is absolutely outside—both in the sense of belonging to other formations monadically separated from your present world, and in the sense of what may come but is unforeseeable.” And speculative pragmatism is “understood as a species of empiricism closely akin to William James’s radical empiricism”; Brian Massumi, “The Thinking –Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, 1 (May 2008), http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n1_massumihtml.html (accessed 02 June 2013).
15 Robert von Hallberg, “Olson, Whitehead and the Objectivists,” boundary 2 2/½ (Autumn 1973-Winter 1974): 85-112.
16 Charles Olson, untitled lecture, Goddard College, 12 April 1962), http://slought.org/content/11091/ (accessed 02 June 2013).
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relations, his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering
toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.’17
The influence of Whitehead’s materialist cosmology on artistic practice erupting in
the 1950’s such as the gesture-action painting of Jackson Pollock, the spontaneous
prose of Jack Kerouac – ‘swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than
rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down
on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash) - Blow as deep as you
want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want […]’ 18 – and the kinaesthetics of
Merce Cunningham, is less direct but can be traced as a zeitgeist effect of Olson’s
pervasive thinking and impassioned belief in the primacy of the proprioceptive body
as a creative force. He described proprioception as:
The data of depth sensibility / The “body” of us as object which spontaneously
or of its own order produces experience of, “depth,” Viz. SENSIBILITY
WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES.19
This attitude was resonant with the concerns of the beat poets and bop musicians at
that time. 20 The mid-twentieth-century avant-garde development of spontaneous
methods in the arts diffracts through a Whiteheadian influence on contemporary
speculative-pragmatics and the work of interdisciplinary artists interested in
17 Robert Motherwell, “Beyond the Aesthetics,” Design 47 8 (April 1946): 38-39.
18 Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” quoted in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York: Viking, 1992). (please check original source) I believe this is the most cited reference to this work.
19 Charles Olson, “Proprioception,” Collected Verse, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 181.
20 Daniel Belgrad’s history of the American postwar avant-garde has been an important referential source for thinking through the premise of spontaneity in the arts. “Following this [Whitehead’s] model, postwar spontaneous art and poetry dramatized the emergence of the self through the interaction of the human organism with its environment. Whitehead’s ‘energy field’ suggested a model of human society contrary to the liberal idea of civility as a function of reason alone”; Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and arts in postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11.
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modalities of lived abstraction’s relation to expression.21 These discursive threads
interweave genealogies of practice that entrain techniques of improvisatory
composition while tending toward what will be proffered here as diagrammatic and
biogrammatic praxis.
Tackling the ever-elusive question as to how the event of spontaneity emerges and
how it might specifically function in the artistic practice of durational improvisation is
a complex proposition. Scientific theories, from thermodynamics, biology and
psychology identify spontaneous processes as causa sui, a cause of itself, occurring
without outside intervention, without perturbation from external sources. The three
laws of thermodynamics, for example, describe the conservation of energy (first law
of sameness), the spontaneous process in which an energy field in disequilibrium, full
of potential, dissipates (second law of change). The third law states that as the entropy
of a system increases it selects the pathways that best maximise the dissipative effect,
adding more disorder to the universe. Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has
said of transformation in thermodynamic physicochemical systems that: ‘Far from
equilibrium, fluctuations may cease to be noise, instead becoming actors that play a
role in changing the macroscopic regime of a system.’ These fluctuations are
incessantly generated in systems with random behaviors. She reminds us that
according to the laws of entropy in thermodynamics, to some degree, chance chooses,
and that any “fluctuation in itself does not cause anything.” It’s the kinetic
phenomena of its amplification that “gives way to an intrinsically collective
phenomenon.” 22 The collective turbulent effect of the apparently insignificant
flapping of a butterfly’s wings, an axiom focal to chaos theory’s sensitivity to initial
conditions, is analogous to the potential in the interval of the stutter. Change changes.
21 See the “Series Forward” in Manning’s Relationscapes for the contextualization of Techniques of Lived Abstraction; Erin Manning, Relationscapes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), ix-x. 22 Stengers is, incidently, an eloquent analyst of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism; see Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, ed. Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, and Brian Massumi, tr. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8 and 70.
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And then there’s the perspective from psychosociology to consider. J. L. Moreno’s
definition of spontaneity clearly references processes in thermodynamics and biology
in stating: “Spontaneity is generated in action whenever an organism is found in the
process of warming-up.”23 It’s the heat of the moment in an energy field, the catalysis
of phase transitions “capable not only of sliding toward disorder and indifference but
also of making order and difference suddenly appear.”24 They act as “thresholds of
intensity causing spontaneous transformations in the spatial organization of bodies.”25
In quick-step from the science of the organism to a Whiteheadian philosophy of the
organism comes a theory of how these and other transitions are felt. Whitehead
claims that a “mutual determination of the elements involved in a feeling is one
expression of the truth that the subject of the feeling is causa sui.”26 For Whitehead,
the ontogenesis of an event of ‘feeling’ requires a concrescence of prehensions that is
1) inclusive of the initial and objective data (a positive prehension) of phenomenal
experience that 2) mixes with negative prehensions (the selection of data to be
excluded from feeling) and 3) the subjective form (affective tonality) of the
experience. Feeling is the dynamic fielding of an outside inside. How a spontaneous
feeling differentiates from the continuous prehension of feeling is the question at hand.
Stuttering Spontaneity
It’s of interest here, in the multiverse of a Deleuzian middle, Whiteheadian
prehensions, Olsonian proprioception, to consider spontaneity itself as a stutter, a
23 “No one has ever seen spontaneity. Spontaneity is a hypothesis. It is supposed to manifest itself in the warming-up process of a creative act. Spontaneity itself has been hypothecated as ‘unconservable’ energy (6), a type of energy which is spent as it emerges, a type of catalyzer which may have its ‘fellow travelers’ in all departments of the universe”; J. L. Moreno, “Theory of Spontaneity-Creativity,” Sociometry 18/4 (November 1955): 117. 24 Stengers, Power and Invention, 69. 25 Manuel Delanda, Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 121. 26 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (Toronto: Free Press/Macmillan Company, 1969), 258-59.
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fluctuation, a tendential hinge, that effects states of order and disorder in systems, in
bodies, in praxis. To consider the event of a spontaneous stutter as an impetus for a
more stabilizing territorialisation or a more deterritorialised chaos. It is immanent to
both self-organisation and rupture in systems. It speaks to the variable intensities of
informal processes at play in compositional formalising.
Spontaneity, like creativity, is arguably not a linear causal force but an affective
principle of a quasi-cause, a qualitative relation that doesn’t alter the determination of
an effect but does “color” it. For Deleuze the quasi-causal doesn’t create anything, it
operates on representations. Its effects are virtual, fictive but nonetheless “felt.”
Quasi-causal operations double a physical causality by embodying an instantaneous
present - ‘the pure instant grasped at the point in which it divides itself into future and
past, and no longer the present of the world which would gather into itself the past
and future.’ 27 When this pure instant fluctuates, shimmers in the vibration of the
future-past hyphen that divides its present, it stutters. When it momentarily resists the
dissipation of its potential it can be said to creatively stutter.
Deleuze, in another context, called this act of resistance a counter-actualisation,
spontaneously conserving the potential of the pure event in much the same way as the
first law of thermodynamics conserves energy: ‘we must take risks . . . to double the
actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the
true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being
confused with its inevitable actualization.’28 Given this mode of operating, quasi-
causality becomes the affective energy field of the counter-actualising creative stutter
as it exposes its resistance to capture. As Steve Shaviro explains: ‘The quasi-cause is
27 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester (London: Continuum Press, 2004), 166. 28 Continuing: “Counter-actualization is nothing, it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have the value of what could have happened. But, to the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. . . . To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned in its actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times.” Ibid., 182.
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also a principle of creativity. Looking forward, it induces the process of actualization;
looking backward, it is an expression of that process.’29 Deleuze offers further
explication:
The quasi-cause which runs through the entire straight line must itself be
represented. It is even in this sense that representation can envelope an
expression on its edges. . . . It is the present without thickness, the present of the
actor, dancer or mime - the pure perverse “moment.” It is the present of pure
operation, not of the incorporation.30
In spontaneous processes the artist selects and increments linear causality without
violating it, preserving its inexhaustible potential.31 Spontaneity supplements. Not as a
secondary gesture but as the movement of potentiality parallel to its concretisation. It
is the present of this “potentialing” in which the performer incites the decisive: selects
and/or abstracts from experience by way of a processual composing that qualitatively
affects the linear rush of causality through the arrow of time. The stutter functions as
a kinetic fluctuation in the coming-to-form of an actualization. It momentarily
obfuscates entropy’s chosen path of least resistance to gather fresh momentum,
paradoxically, aesthetically, surging as it dissipates. BOOM! bang! The improvising
performer “expresses an unlimited future and an unlimited past.”32 The affective
tonality of the spontaneity afforded this instant further situates the spoken, written, or
gestural stutter within a wider discourse of spontaneous processes. It also
emphatically situates it in the discourse of the diagram.
29 Steve Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 37 and passim. 30 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 191-92. 31 Shaviro explains: “An act is free, even though it is also causally determined. . . . That is to say, Deleuze’s counter-actualizing ‘dancer’ makes a decision, or a selection, that supplements linear causality and remains irreducible to it, without actually violating it. This is what it means to preserve ‘the truth of the event,’ in its inexhaustible potentiality, from the catastrophe of ‘its inevitable actualization’”; Shaviro, Without Criteria, 6-7. 32 Ibid., 37.
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USE USE USE must must must MOVE
Charles Olson spoke, scribed and diagrammed kinetic energies in a field of
spontaneous relations. To read his poetry on the page is to experience relations at
work, to feel quasi-causal effects. When reading his poetry to an audience, it is said it
“was hard to tell when Olson had ‘broken’ into poetry out of the talk between poems.
All of it, verse and other, seemed perpetually unfinished, perhaps always ready to
betaken up again.”33 Excerpted from his poem qua manifesto “Projective Verse”
written in 1950:
(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet
got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all
the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a
high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. . . . From the
moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION— puts himself in the
open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares,
for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some
several forces just now beginning to be examined.34
The “field of composition” dear to Olson can also be expressed in the phase space35
logic of complexity and chaos theory. Every phase space (possibility space) enabling
transitions describes its system by the number of “degrees of freedom” that particular
system models. Singularities, points of phase transitioning, determine where attractors
can be found in phase space. A bifurcation in this energetic field indicates a
qualitative change, an intensity threshold. Simply put, there are three types of
attractors: point (stable), loop (oscillating), and strange or fractal (chaotic), and they
form, within the energy field, basins of attraction. Their positions in phase space
33 George Bowering, “Vancouver as Postmodern Poetry,” Colby Quarterly 29/ 2 (June 1993): 106.
34 Olson, “Proprioception,” Collected Verse, 240.
35 From the mathematician Henri Poincaré: “The physical entity’s state at any instant becomes a point in state space, while the behavior the entity displays as it changes states become a trajectory (a series of points)”; see Delanda, Deleuze, 126.
13
describe the patterns and behaviors of the system. Most basins remain stable,
homeostatic, through the controlling modulations of negative feedback that regulate
sameness (think thermometers). But some have dense bifurcators that tend to make
the basins more sensitive to the slightest movement and may trigger a shift to another
basin of attraction causing a new pattern to emerge through positive feedback (think a
Jimi Hendrix solo), the exponential growth of alternations, of difference. Tendencies
towards the strange attractor instantiate a boom-then bust effect. A boom-crash
economy of practice. The relations between unstable bifurcating processes and
stabilizing recursive processes can be said to meet in the energetic field, in the
potential of creative advance. This doubled feedback process exemplifies the
coexistence of ontogenesis and autopoiesis in zones or fields we will ascertain as
biogrammatic.36 Located here in an impulse of changing change we encounter an
immanent spontaneity. Here in the hinging stutter between a simple determinism and
a simple indeterminism, between positive and negative feedback processes is an
underpinning machinic process of emergent novelty. The quasi-causal tonalities of
felt perception affect, and are affected by, any formulation of chance and redundancy
operating and working in a compositional field.
This assemblage has to work in order to live, to processualise itself with the
singularities which strike it. All this implies the idea of a necessary creative
practice and even an ontological pragmatics. It is being's new ways of being
which create rhythms, forms, colours and the intensities of dance. Nothing
happens of itself.37
Recall that Deleuze exhorts language to enter far from equilibrium regions exciting
phase transitions that effect change. Spontaneity, like the quasi-cause, runs through a
line to its edges—straight, curved, zig-zagging—to be represented. Beckett’s line,
36 “If feedback from the dimension of the emerged reconditions the conditions of emergence, then conditions of emergence change. Emergence emerges. Changing changes”; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 10.
37 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 94.
14
Olson’s breath LINE, Kerouac’s polyrhythmic line, Motherwell’s overlaid lines,
Foucault’s line of the outside, Deleuze’s line of the fold, Durning’s linings. It’s
evidenced very particularly through speech, a trajectory that fluctuations of stutter
amplify. Olson adamantly follows the breath of the line:
Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape
the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down
to one statement. . . . ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it
says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of
daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed,
the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts,
the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also
set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem
always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON
ANOTHER! . . . Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so
scrupulous, the exaction must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is
purchased at the highest— 40 hours a day— price. For from the root out, from
all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance.38
At all points, get on with it. For Durning, articulating the movement of thought
through speech and speech through movement bring the performing speaker/listener
to a “threshold of communication and relation.”39 The ensuing encounter with this
transformative threshold is the spontaneous event of stutter in which resistance is
represented. She stuttered:
[continuing 9’30”] and then and then and then and then and then you know but
really what’s in the middle? what’s in the middle what’s in the middle? what’s
in the middle? what’s in the place you know between the G and the D or the or
the or what’s in the middle middle middle middle middle? where is the O O O
O like oh oh oh Oh! the wonder wonder wonder wonder wonder wonder
38 Olson, “Projective Verse,” Collected Verse, 240. 39 Durning, “AMCh Final Report Number Four.”
15
wonder do you I mean I I I and then and then you know you think about threes
you think about threes you think about 1 2 3 a b c me myself and I the thing
that brings us all together the holy trinity aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh 40
[to be continued]
A proposition
Spontaneity as a technique of the performing artist, is nourished by fluctuations in a
far from equilibrium field of intensive transformation. These fluctuations are the
stutter of quasi-causal effects that condition and affect how what is felt feels. Quasi-
causality is spontaneity’s informal abstract machine, enfolding and unfolding
prehensions. As such, diagrammatic operations can be honed as techniques of
improvisation that distinguish a biogrammatic artistic praxis.
She wondered about this.
Where is the where is the middle of a middle middling? Where is the point a snarl on
the where where inside enfolds the outside and the outside redoubles the inside?
She wandered.
Between here and now now now. Between this and that. Now attracted to this stable
point. Now drawn to that looping point over and over. And then, again, spinning on
the edges of fractal danger with unknown consequences, her languaging reaches the
threshold of a stutter and transitions. Becomes otherwise.
She is diagramming in plain sight. Performing an outside-inside biogram in-formed
by techniques of spontaneity.
Shimmer, snag, snag, snag, bang! Shimmer again.
A tourist’s map of the diagrammatic
The diagram is a transversal concept if ever there was one. The interrelation of
relations, it moves as a variegated yet supple assemblage with re-markable transversal
40 Durning, transcript of inging performance, 2 June 2010.
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relevance. 41 To imagine spontaneous processes as the quasi-causal effects of
diagrammatic operations requires some speculative acrobatics. Spontaneity has been
postulated thus far as affective stuttering fluctuations that tend to amplify in far from
equilibrium systems. This understanding helps to frame techniques of precarity
employed by boom-crash improvisers. Enter the diagram as a concept for situating a
kinetic field of compositional potential in which these fluctuations occur.
For Manuel De Landa the diagram is most simply expressed as the virtual component
of an assemblage acting as the “structure of the possibility space [phase space]”
associated with that assemblage.42 This diagram state for Michel Foucault is a mix of
chance and necessity, the diagrammatic as a cartographic practice displaying relations
between forces that constitute power. Deleuze and Guattari have famously called it an
“abstract machine” as it draws assemblages with continually varying lines of relation
and conjugates intensities43 as it “constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of
reality.”44 Deleuze identifies the turbulent affects of diagrammatic, strategic forces as
the “visual dust and sonic echo” of the strata, of the archive,45 further drawing the
Foucauldian diagram into a knowledge-power-subjectivity continuum.
The diagrammatic can be felt as the movement and dynamic mapping of relations that
spontaneously affect and are receptively affected by unstable matter and informal 41 “Remarkable” has a triple reference: 1) to Deleuze’s notion of the “remarkable” prehension that distinguishes itself and is “drawn into clarity” to become a “conscious perception,” as quoted in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque (London: Continuum Press, 2006), 104; 2) to “diagramma,” from the original Greek, which is a marking and a re-marking tending toward a visual display; and 3) the comment or remark which tends toward the utterance.
42 De Landa, Deleuze,103.
43 “The diagram functions as an ‘abstract machine,’ in that “it makes no distinction between content and expression, as a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation”; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, 34. “It is the immanent cause of the assemblages that “execute its relations” (37). 44 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 142. 45 “It is the strategy's job to be fulfilled in the stratum, just as it is the diagram's job to come to fruition in the archive”; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, 121 and passim.
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functions that constitute the conditions of emergence emerging. Its play of forces is
often cited in the service of describing creative processes in artistic practice in all its
differential exigencies of resisting and inciting a coming-to-form; in the actualizing
and resistant counter-actualizing (often as an ethico-political aesthetic) of the
composed thing, artifact, product. As such, spontaneity as diagrammatic technique
variably draws and redraws its own self-forming as it’s always on the move, operating
in a field of relations. Deleuze: “There is no diagram that does not also include,
besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points,
points of creativity, change and resistance.”46 When the abstract machine operates in
an articulated phase space, vacillating between equilibrium and creative
disequilibrium, it operates as a performative zone of potentiality in which these
techniques function as relays between content and expression, visibilities and
statements, light and language as they differentiate and integrate through a folding
zone of subjectification, the force of the relation to oneself. This zone topologically
biograms as it converts the most distant outside to the most intimate inside. It’s an
operation of auto-affection in the space of the mouth full. Recalling Beckett: ‘an
outside and an inside and me in the middle.’
Figure 2: Riffing on Deleuze’s ‘diagramme de Foucault’47 the Line of the Outside 46 Ibid., 44. 47 For the original diagram see Deleuze, Foucault, 120. For more speculative mutations on this diagram see Sher Doruff, “The Tendency to Trans-: The Political Aesthetics of the Biogrammatic Zone,” Interfaces of Performance, ed. Janis Jeffries, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, and Rachel Zerihan (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 121-140.
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enfolds a doubling dynamic in the middling zone of subjectification (subject-event) as a biogrammatic process affecting/affected by informal diagrammatic strategies, the formal archive and spontaneity. This doubling allows for the risk-taking of the counter-actualization.
The biogram ings as inging ings
What is perhaps most pertinent to speculating on diagrammatic improvisational
techniques are the relational intensities between their pragmatic, corporeal dimension
and their incorporeal operations. The body necessarily takes center stage as a “site”
of lived experience to effectively reuse its emergent powers. It is the site of
proprioceptive immanence that channeled Olson’s open composition. For Massumi it
is the middling dimension between stimulus and response, the “cumulative memory
of skill, habit and posture.”48 Enter the biogram, conjugating incorporeal operations of
memory, prehension and thought to make themselves felt. This dimension of the body
becomes a fluctuating interval of spontaneity techniques conditioned through skillsets
that function as point, loop, and chaotic attractors.
The diagram continually re-emerges as a new map through its own eventness as
praxis, mapping intensities of echo and relay between an individuating subject and her
milieu as she modulates the flux. The biogram as subject-event interleaves forces that
determine “how the abstract machine performs,” how the diagram diagrams. The
biogrammatic then, individuates the specific features of far-from-equilibrium
relational processes, drawing upon zig-zagging dynamics of chaos and control
through techniques of performative action.
Durning’s inging—a choreography, a dance, a spoken-word performance—
exemplifies a biogrammatic practice. It emerged from intensive experiment as the
presentation of her MA research practice. It has now taken on the qualities of a
completed work in that it adheres to a set of territorialising conditions in every
performance iteration. But from the moment of the first spoken word it begins to
deterritorialise through languaging. Erin Manning describes the biogram as “the
48 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 59 and passim.
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intensive passage from force to force that moves a body to express its durational
intensity.”49 This serial trajectory, like Olson’s serial perceptions, envisages the
premise and practice of inging as biogrammatic.
In 2002, Massumi introduced the notion of the biogram as a teaser: “It has been
suggested that extending the concept of the diagram into the biogram might be a
vector worth pursuing.” He continued:
The biogram is a perceptual reliving: a folding back of experience on itself . . .
in such a way as to hold all its potential variations on itself in itself: in its own
cumulatively open, self-referential event. . . . The biogram is experience
reaccessing its powers of emergence, for more effect. It is the existential
equivalent of lifting oneself up by the bootstraps: ontogenetic and
autopoietic.50
The biogram is still a fledgling concept. It has been pursued as a cumulatively open,
self-referential event (Massumi), an interval of intensive passage (Manning), and as a
zone of diagrammatic praxis (Doruff). Massumi’s biogram necessarily suggests an
invigorated reading of autopoiesis in much the same way as this paper suggests an
invigorated reading of spontaneity: from structurally closed to cumulatively and
relationally open; an auto-affection of the outside-inside.
As proposed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela in 1971,
autopoiesis (self-production) insists on subordinating change within an organism to
the maintenance of its homeostatic unity. The emphasis is on the conservation of
continuous change, similar to the first law of thermodynamics. This now classical
scientific reading of autopoiesis is useful in understanding the recursions and
fluctuations that phenomenal experience excites in the life functions of organisms.
However, since it stubbornly pertains to the sustainable equilibrium of creative
processes in a closed domain of relations,it is insufficient to the advance of a
49 Erin Manning, “From Biopolitics to the Biogram, or How Leni Riefenstahl Moves through Fascism” in Relationscapes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 127 and passim. 50 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 194, 206 (emphasis added).
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biogrammatic practice as it sidelines the creation of novelty through far from
equilibrium events. Just as Olson’s “bio-poetics” rejected “closed” verse for an open
yet proprioceptive, fleshy composition, Guattari pushes “bio-logical” autopoietic
operations to effect an openness he calls machinic autopoiesis52 which requires far
from equilibrium boom-crash conditions to generate the production of subjectivity as
a singularity. He was presciently aware of the biogrammatic in what he called the
proto-subjective diagram:
This continual emergence of sense and effects does not concern the
redundancy of mimesis but rather the production of an effect of singular sense,
even though indefinitely reproducible. . . . The difference supplied by
machinic autopoiesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual
Universes far from equilibrium. And this doesn't simply involve a rupture of
formal equilibrium, but a radical ontological reconversion. The machine
always depends on exterior elements in order to be able to exist as such. . . . It
is itself in a relation of alterity with other virtual or actual machines . . . a
proto-subjective diagram.53
The reciprocity of autonomy’s singularity with a machinic process that enfolds
alterity extends the classic understanding of closed, auto-generative, spontaneous
processes. It forces autopoiesis beyond the characterization of black-box unitary
individuations without input or output. Guattari points us towards a more collective
machinism in which autonomy accommodates alterity, assemblage affects assemblage,
novelty emerges. Spontaneity can then be thought and felt as both self-produced and
relational, much like Massumi’s description of the biogram as self-referential and
52 It’s important to distinguish Guattari’s “machinic” from other more common sense references to machinic operations. “A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms”; Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 50.
53 Ibid., 36-37.
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cumulatively open. Spontaneity becomes a biogramming technique.
Boom-crash praxis: like fly fishing in whitewater
When Durning questions the mimetic redundancy of perception in the practice of
inging, she introduces transductive operations at work as content and expression
fluctuate and transition. Practice itself becomes aesthetic. For Durning, “beauty” is
the very fact of indeterminate performative precarity. One is tempted to add, with a
nod to Guattari, that the risky recursivity that constructs relations of sensuous and
nonsensuous perception in real-time is an ethico-aesthetic of far from equilibrium
performance. It prompts the production of subjectivity as the ontogenesis of the
subject in a biogrammatic process of becoming outside-inside. It disrupts the
existential “I”-ing of a personality-driven liberal humanist pretext of sovereign
freedom for the self-affirming production of autonomy. It’s an emphatic ethico-
political aesthetic that diffracts discursive negotiations of subject-object relations. So
too with Whitehead. In his universe the world does not emerge from the subject but
rather, the subject emerges from the world, continuously. The subject is an event of
becoming with three interleaved phases: the subject of the event, the objective data,
the subjective form or affective tonality of the prehending. The subject is an event of
feeling, of its eventful entanglement in diverse prehensions (positive, negative,
conceptual). He concludes, “This mutual determination of the elements involved in a
feeling is one expression of the truth that the subject of the feeling is causa sui.”54 We
can follow the inflective points of “lines of thought” through which a diagram of
spontaneous feeling, as a technique of practice, emerges as the middling biogram.
54 “A feeling—i.e., a positive prehension—is essentially a transition effecting a concrescence. Its complex constitution is analysable into five factors . . . : (i) the 'subject' which feels, (ii) the 'initial data' which are to be felt, (iii) the 'elimination' in virtue of negative prehensions, (iv) the 'objective datum' which is felt, (v) the 'subjective form' which is how that subject feels that objective datum. . . . The subjective form receives its determination from the negative prehensions, the objective datum, and the conceptual origination of the subject. The negative prehensions are determined by the categoreal conditions governing feelings, by the subjective form, and by the initial data. This mutual determination of the elements involved in a feeling is one expression of the truth that the subject of the feeling is causa sui”; Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (Toronto: Free Press/Macmillan Company, 1969), 258-59.
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Suspicions of the aesthetic legitimacy of spoken-word spontaneity have long been
voiced as it often clearly relies on conventional phrases at ready disposal.55 Detractors
have historically critiqued aleatoric methods of improvisational music, theater and
dance claiming it produces nothing but the repetition of habit and learned patterning;
that its incessant recycling suffocates, rather than stimulates, the emergence of the
new. This is the reflexive challenge Durning embraces. In doing so she amplifies her
risk-taking in an acceleration of emotional intensity that is calculatedly unrehearsable
yet exhaustively prepared. The performance intensifies with the palpable strain of
keeping the rhythm of words in non-stop flow as the content wavers between sense
and nonsense, between the personal and the impersonal, the anecdotal and the epic.
The audience feels the immediate flux of the acceptance and rejection of patterns and
topical safe havens, riding the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes uncomfortable,
always tenuous ramp-up of give and take with the performer for thirty odd minutes.
Thought and sensation, language and movement, future-past memory, all co-arising in
the event of Durning’s vocal gestures, are emblematic of the multivalent relational
interplay at work. She locates this voice, her voice, in a transitioning middle:
Mostly what happens when the voice speaks out, it forms sounds as signs that
are then met with conditions from the outside that transform them into
something other than what they were. Translations into permanence, material,
meanings. It seems that the “true” voice, the voice of the self that is, exists
exactly in the transition of emission from the vast space of the interior world
to the reasoned concreteness of the exterior world, escaping, impermanent,
immaterial. At the blurred, and sometimes terrifying edge of speech and body,
of interior and exterior, untranslatable as separate, as difference, this is where
the voice is.56
55 Affirmations are also plentiful. “Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity. Sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the creation of writing”; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1982), 39.
56 Durning, “AMCh Final Report Number Four.”
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She diagrammatically maps the unformed matters and functions of her voice through
their translations into permanence. She accepts the exhaustion of the resistant gesture,
the transition of the truth of the event to its inevitable terminus. She locates this
dynamism in the topological plasticity of a middle. In the creative stutter.
So, after this cartographic exposition as a fish-as-far-down-as-you-want expedition,
can we speak of a spontaneity specific to the far from equilibrium conditions of
improvisational practice, as the event of an inside-outside, that still preserves the
autonomy of its de facto causa sui? Olson’s ‘proprioceptive immanence’ allows for
this, allows for the body as a zone through which transpersonal affective forces
construct a becoming-self as a medium of transport, through breath and memory,
through bones, tissues, flesh. Whitehead’s concrescence of prehension demands it.
Can a practice of spontaneous composition field informal intensities at their most
deterritorialized and unstable to select and shape a formal product? As we have seen,
Olson queried a processual principle of practice that “can be made so to shape the
energies that the form is accomplished.” And, it’s the diagram’s “job,” according to
Deleuze voicing Foucault, to come to fruition in the archive. Water at the threshold of
freezing crystallises.
Artistic practice cannot really help but be diagrammatic and, by virtue of its dynamic
situatedness, biogrammatic. It works like an ing-ing works, as a hyphenated vibration
between matter and function, between informal energetics and formalized
representations. Praxis can be viewed as the autonomous relation of phase
transitioning between process/product polarities. In biogrammatic praxis, spontaneity
and feeling are relationally autopoietic. Whitehead’s theory of feeling so influential to
Olson and Motherwell as a metaphysics of artistic practice helps to situate spontaneity
in a biogram at work, heating up. In Olson’s time, the politicized aesthetic was
predicated on the hope that an artistic practice of spontaneous composition would
democratise the stifling hegemonic cultural authority of expert traditions; create
resistance through flow, the resistance of a literal line of flight. The body held
processual primacy. Years later, Guattari mapped an aesthetic universe of praxis in
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which artists produce toolkits, in a sleight of hand evasion of product
commodification through a processual diagrammatism. Praxis itself in this universe
becomes ethico-aesthetic. The “bio” vector explored here, as one among others, from
bio-poetics to bio-logical to bio-grammatic, assumes with some urgency, the vagaries
of bio-political discourse [to be continued].
By way of assembling a relational play of points and vectors put forth thusfar, we
have traversed a radical ontogeny of spontaneity as technique that oscillates an
outside-inside in disequilibrium. It heats up from the revving of a resistant quasi-
causal stutter to a boom-crash praxis of biogrammatic middling that feels like fly
fishing in whitewater.
[continuing 11’10”] And then you think about you know you can’t help but
think about B-b-Beckett you know like thing the thing and then you think
about the B because its two circles and then you think about infinity you know
you think you know you think about the thing that connects the two circles
that its always going on you know you know because its always going on and
you just skip a couple of ah ah symbols there then go to the end you go to the
end because the thing about it’s like the beginnings and the ends we really put
a lot of importance on those things right like the beginnings and ends of things
like the beginning of a life the end of a life the beginning of a day, the end of a
day or you know you know other things like that there such for with and for to
have to ah you know and then I say these statements and put on you know in
fact and indeed and make it seem like its really important and for to have with
and you know what light through yonder window breaks and shit like that and
you know then and then you can’t help but quote you know because then you
think you can’t help but think if you actually quote something of importance
Then you you’re actually saying something the you’re actually doing
something that people can go away with away away away away away away
and then all of us all all all all all all we just fly fly fly fly fly fly fly fly fly fly
fly away like you know maybe you know one day ah like one day we can just
we can go we can go fly fishing. Cast the cast the cast the cast it out and just
for the sake of it you know because they say about the fishermen the fly
fishermen actually they ah they it’s not about the catch it’s the science of the
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capture. [continuing to silence 32’02”]57
57 Durning, transcript of inging performance, 2 June 2010.
