Date:        Fri, 05 Jan 1996 10:21:12 EST
From: Karen Ocana <CXKO-AT-MUSICA.MCGILL.CA>
Subject: Habiter la chute


When I last retransmitted this post of Douglas Edric's, the end
was chewed off.  Could have been my machine (it has a bad habit
of taking bytes out of things).  It's had a huge breakfast though,
so let's see what happens in this next retransmission.  Next
question is, do I have anything to add to this post.  I think I
pretty much went over the territory of the fall-flow thing in
responding to Karinne Keithley's post, by opening this apparent
opposition to the more pliable concept of forces.  And I haven't seen
'Smoke' nor 'Stardust Memories' either.

However, I know there is more work, or rather more dancing to be
done here, definitely.  I have a hunch it has to do with double
articulation.  I'm working on this, with the flesh-house-cosmos
hinging thing, but Ch.7 of WIP? deals, on the whole, mostly with
architecture and painting.  What is bugging me, I think, is just
the notion that in any dance, as in any encounter between forces
there is always a struggle; it isn't as seamless as it appears; one
force is always slightly more forceful, but this is not necessarily
 a bad thing, because it is this difference which creates the
encounter in the first place; the difference is productive.  And
the forces remain different, remain singular, but they may be swept
up in a bloc of becoming that multiplies their potentialities,
as in a dance, a painting, a novel;  I guess I just keep coming back
to Massumi's example of the woodcutter and the wood, the opening
example of the *User's Guide to Cap & Schiz*, and put myself in the
place of the tree (although at other times I put myself in the place
of the woodcutter, after all what else is a thesis-writer?) and
shudder at the becoming-table.  But, to end on a more provocative note,
here's William Burroughs on the mysteries of tabling:

"Now, I've fucked here and in a different way and for different
reasons there, sometimes just with an old friend who wanted to try
some new tricks...And there have been beautiful mergings, wherein the
two of us were no longer nous, but verbs.  Just as we always try to
place ourselves in time and space, between here and there, now and
then, the phrase "doing its thing" is actually a marvellously simple
and satoric statement.  Tables are not TABLES. If you will agree with
me that everything is constantly changing, then you  must agree that
tables cannot be such a narrow simplification.  I realize the
convenience, but will retain my right to think in terms of "tabling".
(_Kentucky Ham_,48)

Cheers,
        Karen
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Karen wrote,

>Having just, literally just, read through your Shankai Juko
>experience, and without time to reflect, let me just ask the
>question I can't help asking:  What would become of your
>falling-machine if instead of falling we were to insert
>*flowing*.  Is there a difference between a falling and a
>flowing-machine?  I know you're stuck on falling because of
>Bacon and the Logics of Sensation...but there, the operative
>concept, or rather the field in which Deleuze is operating and
>creating concepts is painting, painting forces and painting
>usually flesh...whereas your Shankai Juko butoh theatre performers
>are alive and dancing, a very different operative theatre --
>so I couldn't help thinking, why not flowing, as in the
>flow-stops of desiring-machine fame.  Inhabiting the flow,
>which of course stops and goes, but then, perhaps this is too
>easy.  For what would become of the problem of making the
>fall horizontal, diagonal, transversal. . . since a flow flows
>in any direction indifferently.  It would be no problem.  Dang.

Yes, I appreciate your comments and I don't see where we disagree. Yes, the
fall has everything to do with the flow, at least for me personally it
does. That is how I come into it : par le milieu. So in the sense that the
flow is just flowing, that it is part of life to flow and that dance is the
dance of life, yes, we are really talking about flow. Inhabiting the fall
is a question of inhabiting the flow, this is why at the end of "Unetsu"
the dancer's body has inhabited the pile of sand (which is part of the
fall) and hence becomes part of the flow rather than resisting it. This is
very eastern and it was actually my wife who said it to me when we talked
about this performance. To her, the question of the flow (she even used
this word) was what was interesting and the idea of the fall just seemed
too abstract once one had become sensitive to just such a flow. I think
that this is why she is against my usage of the word "violence", because to
her there is no idea of violence in the flow. "Going with the flow" is just
a way of being and requires no violence.

Only this is where you, in a second sense, are also right: perhaps this is
too easy because a flow flows in any direction indifferently. And this was
my point. This is why I picked up on Deleuze's fall (Sensation) rather than
Deleuze's flow (Anti-Oedipe), precisely because the fall is not indifferent
to the different sensations or levels of sensation it is passing through.
It is not indifferent to it's traversee, to it's fall, and certainly not to
it's direction. The fall falls in one direction, it needs this direction,
only it does so without a pre-programmed path. It doesn't know exactly
"where" it is falling, only that it often needs this "somewhere" in order
to fall. But not necessarily. In this sense, there could not be anything
more in opposition than the fall and the flow. Yes, the fall and the flow
are the "same" in the sense that they both affirm the difference of that
which they pass through. They are the process of a passage from one state,
one energy, one situation to the next : the flow of a wave. They are both
what constitutes the event for if they have a goal this goal is only to
better make the whole process flow, to better produce the fall : hence
defenestration...

But the flow and the fall are stunningly different depending on their need
or ignorance of direction. The fall needs it's direction, even if this
direction is without direction as in a Woody Allen film like "Stardust
Memories". Woody's just going all over the place but never is he
indifferent to the directionality of this fall. He is not going with the
flow because he senses each passage, each "oh no not another one" as
precisely that : part of a mobile section, part of a direction. He just
can't get out. This is what makes Woody Allen so cinematographic : the way
in which his fall is part of a general direction which is parallel to that
of the unwinding of the reel. "Woody Allen" would never work on a CD-Rom,
or at least you'd have to re-do his whole routine. And this is why he is a
profound filmaker : he has created a storytelling that in the end really
just wants to attain the state of the reeling-out of the film. Which is
non-narrative. In this way a film like "Speed", as well tries to reproduce
such a situation: in which the story tries to mirror that of the physical
bodies there in the theatre. Trapped on a bus is just like the cinema-goer
trapped in the theatre, which is just like Bacon's Figures which are so
often trapped in cubes, in circus-style rings, and so on - all to better
isolate the Figure and render its deformations all the more experienceable.
Once you know you're trapped on that bus (and you've got to believe in the
film, or at least not leave the theatre to experience it) you're destined.
You are flowing on a certain destiny which, although it is going somewhere,
is not going to that somewhere for the end but rather for the ride
in-between. And this is why the end of an action film is often for the
viewers a bit of a let-down (although for other's it is a salvation); which
also explains why so many films try to prolong their end and create some
sort of symbolic or happy-ending that will stick with the viewer and he
walks out of the theatre. Again, it is to further bypass the end in the
fall. This is why a fall is not a flow : it needs a direction (like a film
needs direction), it needs matter in which to fall and it needs this matter
to be organised around the logic of a destiny. There is a destiny to the
fall. This is the way in which Deleuze's suicide struck me. The destining
of his fall, and yet the way in which the destining of the fall is not an
end-point, nor an abstract finish line. It is just what makes the fall able
to fall.

>It is stunning this totally different conception
>of theatre, only of movement, of exquisitely restricted,
>exquisitely directed movement.  How less is more, in the sense
>that without narrative, without anything you would expect in
>theatre except a sort of pure movement, with just an erratic
>trickly descending of four white bodies on a wall, such an
>intensity of affect curling, uncurling.

This is a lovely description and is precisely what Deleuze seems to be
opening up in his construction of Bacon. I too have been moving in this
direction and have been speaking with some dance researchers who as well
have been dealing with this question of the gesture. I have been wanting to
work the gesture of the street, of the metro, for example: inhabit the
stratified gesture of the street by isolating it, restricting it, and
working it not "for-itself" but rather "in-itself". This is probably why I
used the word "inhabit". As well the group I mentioned a few weeks back,
"Les peripheriques vous parlent" are very much dealing with this question
of a gesture in which "less is more" and how "without anything" one must
construct a "becoming" and not an "expression". But I'm being too abstract.
It's just got everything to do with Deleuze and Bacon and oddly enough I
was just working on a section of his book that has to do with this idea of
a restricted movement that takes us even stronger into a more general
movement or as you said, "flow":

"...m=EAme quand le contour se déplace, le mouvement consiste moins dans ce
déplacement que dans l'exploration amibienne =E0 laquelle la Figure se livre
dans le contour. Le mouvement n'explique pas la sensation, il s'explique au
contraire par l'élasticité de la sensation, sa vis elastica. Suivant la loi
de Beckett ou de Kafka, il y a l'immobilité au-del=E0 du mouvement; au-del=E0
d'=EAtre debout, il y a =EAtre assis, et au-del=E0 d'=EAtre assis, =EAtre cou ché,
pour se dissiper enfin. Le véritable acrobate est celui de l'immobilité
dans le rond. Les gros pieds des Figures, souvent, ne favorisent pas la
marche: presque des pieds bots (et les fauteuils parfois ont l'air de
chaussures pour pieds bots). Bref, ce n'est pas le mouvement qui explique
les niveaux de sensation, ce sont les niveaux de sensation qui expliquent
ce qui subsiste de mouvement. Et en effet, ce qui intéresse Bacon n'est pas
exactement le mouvement, bien que sa peinture rende le mouvement tr=E8s
intense et violent. Mais =E0 la limite, c'est un mouvement sur place, un
spasme, qui témoigne d'un tout autre probl=E8me propre =E0 Bacon: l'action
sur-le corps de forces invisibles (d'o=F9 les déformations du corps qui sont
dues =E0 cette cause plus profonde)." (p.30)

=46ollowing Backett and Kafka's laws, there is an immobility beyond movement
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