Agency in the Age of Control
André Lepecki
In an interview published under the title “Control and Becoming,” Toni Negri asked a pointed question to Giles Deleuze: “Why is the relation between movement and institution always problematic?” We could expand Negri’s question with the following one: given the problematic relation movement and institution, How can dance and choreography contribute to an understanding of the political in our times? Is it at all possible that these particular forms of artistic expression may offer ways to approach, analyze, critique, and perhaps re-invent the political dimension, one that seems always somewhat beyond the reach of danced actions, choreographed bodies, staged movements, and representational behaviors? And, if we decide to answer positively to these questions, how can we then consider the specificity of dance and choreography’s relations to the political? How can we move away from the somewhat generic formula offered by Jacques Rancière over the past decade or so that equates art and politics in the current “aesthetic regime of the arts” given their sharing, according to the French philosopher, of the same constitutive “kernel” or “element” he called “dissensus”?1
I would like to pursue these questions by aligning them with an overview of some developments in experimental choreography over the past two decades. What I will be proposing is that the many tensions emerging between choreographic imperatives (or the illocutionary force of the score) on one hand, and their execution by dancers (or the materialization through labor, of those scored imperatives) on the other, reveal a particular political-aesthetic dimension that reflects, refracts, and attempts to answer one of the crucial questions of our times: how to claim agency for our movements and actions within our highly (even if subtly) choreographed societies of control, societies where, “nothing is left alone for long”? (Deleuze 1995: 175).
Even if we agree with Rancière’s terms, the generic nature of his approach cannot offer a full account of the specificity of dance and choreography’s contributions to both thinking and producing the political dimension. The aesthetic specificity of dance and choreography includes: corporality, the ongoing tension between presence and absence, a high degree of ephemerality in the witnessing and production of the dance piece, the display of dance’s workers as laborers serving the work of dance, the calibration of movement and stillness in the general economies of perception and valuation, and the activation of historicity thanks to dance’s deep relation to transtemporal and trans-spatial transmissibility. These elements, when bundled together as necessarily constitutive of dance and choreography, prompt us to ask under which guises and dynamics, under which velocities and stillnesses, bodies and gestures, regimes of presence and regimes of absence, acts and non-acts, objects and techniques, words and spaces does a choreographic dimension of the political emerge. A dimension that, by emerging, subverts, reinvents, and liberates some overdetermined views on what constitutes“dance” and“choreography” but perhaps even more importantly, I would claim, liberates overdetermined, cliché understandings of what constitutes the “proper” political dimension in which our lives and actions seem to be trapped, pre-defined, regimented, and policed.
This quest for dance’s particular connections to the political informs Randy Martin’s crucial argument—in his groundbreaking book Critical Moves—that the task for critical dance studies is to “explore not simply the politics of dance but also what dance has to offer politics” (Martin 1998:14, emphasis added). Noting that dance’s contributions can never be set “a priori” and require instead particular and detailed approaches to the material and historical conditions under which dances and choreographies emerge, Martin nevertheless identifies two points of articulation that bind the political to the choreographic. According to him, it is because dance activates bodies (even if activating stillness) and demands from those bodies a commitment to action that “the study of dance can help one appreciate the context for ‘mobilization’ and ‘agency’” (14). Moreover, for Martin, this “political specificity” characteristic of dance overflows the boundaries of aesthetic confinement to reveal “an entire political horizon” (14). It is towards this political horizon that I would like to move, by taking the question of agency (or dancing) within formations of pre-established movements (or choreography) as an entryway to analyze and map the conditions under which contemporary power builds its particular forms of entrapment—the entrapment (filled with movement!) Gilles Deleuze called, after Michel Foucault, “control societies” (Deleuze 1995).
Moving through dance and choreography towards a broader political horizon, yet always bound to localized forms of danced expressions, requires supplementing Martin’s view with Andrew Hewitt’s intriguing, somewhat misunderstood, often critiqued, but extremely useful concept of “social choreography,” which Hewitt defines thusly: “I use the term social choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order directly at the level of the body” (Hewitt 2005: 3). As an ideological apparatus that derives from the aesthetic realm images for implementing social order that are subsequently reified and then forcefully inscribed in and through bodies in motion (the dancer’s body, the people’s body), choreography becomes for Hewitt a non-metaphoric concept, one that crisscrosses the aesthetic formation of corporeal disciplines and gestural systems with social expressions of those formations. As Hewitt concludes:
dance has served as the aesthetic medium that most consistently sought to understand art as something immanently political: that is, as something that derives its political significance from its own status as praxis rather than from its adherence to a logically prior political ideology located elsewhere, outside art (6).
Hewitt’s book is concerned primarily with modernist dances from the late 19th century and early 20th century (Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis) and with the ways gesture, mobility, and bodily control (or lack thereof) are represented in the literature of that period (Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Jean Cocteau). But Hewitt’s insistence on the non-metaphoric dimension choreography offers in its capacity to account for, discern, and critique the multiple forces at play within formations of power (and within power’s structures of imagining, producing, and reproducing pre-determined, policed, or normative modes of moving and behaving) is quite helpful in any analysis of how dance impacts the political by reinforcing the centrality and materiality of the dancer’s agency.
Dance and choreography display and practice how bodies get to be mobilized as well as made passive. Both show how dispositifs orient gestures and subjectivities. In this way, both offer ways to identify those elements that momentarily, yet quite literally, inform the “movement” component in the expression “political movement.” And even though, as Mark Franko recently suggested, “dance [ … ] does not operate directly in the political sphere, and thus dance is not strictly speaking political” (Franko 2007: 14), we can still insist on the fact that dance and choreography simultaneously express the political conditions under which it materializes, and produce and “carr[y] inevitable political effects” (14, emphasis added). Franko’s particular understanding of the ways dance and choreography participate (or not) of the political realm obviously begs the question of defining what the “political sphere” might indeed be. The only way that, for me, Franko’s statement makes sense, is if his notion of the “political sphere” is defined (or confined) by the conglomerate of policy-making institutions and agencies, by legislative and/or executive activities, and by the counter-activities of non-governmental/non-legislative social actors such as unions, political parties, professional organizations, lobbyists, etc. If this is the case, if this is indeed Franko’s particular understanding of the political sphere, then his statement on the limits of dance’s operational capacities within such sphere makes sense.
However, countering this particular understanding of politics as the set of daily activities performed by macro-political professional agents, another definition of the political can be offered. This would be an understanding of the political that refuses, indeed, radically resists, being contained by the daily business of politicians (and parapoliticians) and the busybodies of policymakers (even in corporate life). This other definition of the political invokes a dimension of similarly incessant, but certainly much more invisible, minor, or micropolitical daily labor (usually substantially performed away from, and against, the interests of institutional politics) of carefully rereorienting life, art, affect, desire, the corporeal, the incorporeal, the gestural, the linguistic, movements, actions and voice towards ever more emancipatory, joyful, ethical, and co-responsive modes of living—individually and collectively. This other understanding of the political dimension (perhaps forever virtual, perhaps forever utopian, but certainly not centered around the permanent issuing of policies, and always minoritarian) remains that broad horizon one must keep in mind in the minutely daily negotiations that fabricate, out of bodies and out of gestures, the singular potentialities of micro-political movements. Recently, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney offered such a vision of the political, which they called “planning” in contradistinction to“policy” (Moten and Harney 2013). We could define their notion of “planning” as a kind of soft, non-authoritarian, choreography, predicated on the notion that a (micro)political life takes place against and away from the constant urge to fix life, remediate life, set life in balance that obsesses the policy-driven politician. Departing from a more explicitly choreographic point of view, Erin Manning also offered recently another articulation of this alternative political horizon: “Politics: a tentative attentiveness to the conditions through which an event expresses itself, a tentative constructing toward a holding in place of a distributed relational movement, an attending, in the event, of the how of its deformation” (Manning 2013: 148).
This particular definition of politics, of the political, is what both dance and choreography offer to an expanded vision of what constitutes political movement. A movement requiring a choreographic imagination taking the dancer, the choreographer, and their audiences away from certain predetermined images of what such a movement is supposed to look like, to sound like, and to move like – regardless of whether this movement takes place inside or outside the boundaries of art. This expanded vision of the relations between movement and politics I like to call “the choreopolitical” (Lepecki 2013).
The formations of the choreographic are many and varied—expanding dance beyond the field of the esthetic. To understand nonmetaphorically the political nature of choreographic practices is to embrace what Paul Carter once called “a politics of the ground” (Carter 1996)—one always attentive to the concrete placing of all the elements that constitute and form, animate and orientate, each specific dance situation (including supposedly asignifying or extraneous elements to the work, such as climate, political regime, accidents, local laws, geological formations, and so on).
Within this framework, I have recently been exploring the tension between the concepts of “choreopolitical” and the concept of “choreopolicing.” The dynamics between the two are crucial for an understanding of the dynamics between movement, conformity, revolt, and politics in our neoliberal and neocolonizing times, when it is imperative to reimagine the ways movement and political protest find new articulations, expressions, and intensities for themselves. Very succinctly, the notion of choreopolicing derives directly from my understanding that Jacques Rancière’s notion of “police” (which he opposes to “politics”) is essentially a choreographic one. We can think here of how Rancière affirms that the police is not only an institution, or an individual cop, but a whole system that assigns and maintains bodies, subjects, and their modes of circulation to preestablished spaces, considered the only ones proper for (proper) circulation. In other words, the police is whatever system that enforces the fiction forming the path that precedes the subject. Such precedence helps shape subjectivity thanks to a confined or impoverished experiencing of mobility within the social space—subjectivity is gained by conformity to fit the path assigned as proper. To this system, or abstract machine, Rancière gives the name “police.” In contradistinction, choreopolitical movement would not be just “improvised” or “free” movement, which would be a weak definition of both politics and movement. Rather, choreopolitics extracts from choreography the capacity to make plans (plans of immanence as much as plan(e)s of composition) able to function simultaneously as cartography of policed ground, mapping the situation, as much as being able to propose and activate what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “programs” as “motor experimentation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 151). Inspired by Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons, particularly through their distinction between “policy” and “planning,” choreopolitical planning rescues choreography from being understood only as synonymous with normativity, as prescribed or forced mobility, or as a system of command and obedience (all of which certainly are part of choreography, historically as well as esthetically). Since, for Harney and Moten, “planning” is always diagrammatically unfolding, since it always takes place away from those places where the most prized subjectivity is to be a busybody permanently defining the other as in need of being fixed through permanent policy-making, since it is a practice of joyful sociability, then choreopolitics would be the planning of such activation of movement away from preestablished paths. Choreopolitics is predicated on a gathering and activation of that urgently necessary (but so often curtailed, censored, or controlled) capacity to make plans for alternative collective modes of existence, away from conformity, sad affects, tamed (even if hyperactive and “vital”) bodies, prescribed routes, which define choreopolicing.
With a new understanding of movement and politics, dance and choreography can rearticulate the political itself so that politics may also reimagine itself alongside a refigured understanding of dance and a refigured understanding of choreography. In this mutual rearticulated reconfiguration, the main energy, impetus, and motions are whatever is needed to break free from the neoliberal agitation of permanently controlled circulation and from the contemporary microfascist formations of individualistic, intra- and interpoliced collectives.
But the question remains: what is at stake in this choreopolitical reimagining of the political? It is here that the tensions between choreography and dance (or rather, the tensions between systems of commanding movement and subjectivities for executing those commands) should be analyzed in order to discern the limits of agency in our control societies.
Let us start with the question of choreography, or rather, with the question of choreography as commanding force. William Forsythe once referred to classical ballet as an “art of command” (in Franko 2007: 16). If this is the case, it follows that to dance within the choreographic regime is to embrace an art of obedience. Indeed, the question of obedience and command are central for the very possibility of choreographic transmissibility. A specific work will not reemerge back into visibility unless its dancers agree to follow, as strictly and as correctly as possible, the authorial commands/commandments that fix the work as that specific work. It is the necessity of diminishing as much as possible any divergence in execution, of maximally reducing any possibility of disobedience, that has defined choreography as a very strict disciplinary apparatus. Dancers are trained to fulfill the technical requirements of certain movements, but they are also trained to surrender a certain degree of their autonomy as agents for movement. Again Franko citing Forsythe: “William Forsythe has recently identified the connections between dance and politics in the relation between dancer and choreographer in that the choreographer curates the dancer’s autonomy” (16).
The interestingly chosen word “curating” camouflages as much as reveals the dynamics at stake: to curate means to care, but also to care under the force of a transcendent principle of sovereignty, under which bodies dance inasmuch as they surrender their autonomy, or delegate it, to the choreographer. Curating masks a perverse “taking care”—very far away from the attending Manning defined as constitutive of the choreopolitical dimension. When the choreographer “takes care” of the dancer’s autonomy in her stance, his caring gains a theological and juridical connotation very close to the one that defines the power of the sovereign. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the “curator” is first of all: “A person appointed as guardian of the affairs of someone legally unfit to conduct them him- or herself, such as a minor, an insane person, etc.”. Second, the curator is: “One who has the cure of souls,” has custody over one’s animus, animation.2 In other words: in order for choreographers to curate autonomies, an institutional unconscious logic of “underage” or “unreasoned” dancers must be in place so that choreography may be executed under a sovereign (authorial-commanding) force. It is here that the question of the dancer’s agency within systems of command, curating, and control emerges as essential to help us rethink our current political imagination and help us plan on how to move (or not) inside and outside its domain.
Between the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s several choreographic works explicitly aimed at deconstructing, analyzing, and critiquing choreography as representational apparatus that confines and orientates both dancers and audiences within a narrow regime of perceptibility and valuation. The most relevant examples include several of French choreographer’s Jérôme Bel’s pieces: Jérôme Bel (1995), The Last Performance (1998) and the extraordinary Véronique Doisneaux (2004), commissioned by the Paris Opéra. In all of these works, choreography appears as an element to be reckoned with, compositionally and politically, and therefore it appears under a very precise definition, as a powerful dispositif that truly distributes the sensible and predetermines behaviors and perceptions according to a double logic revealed by the writings of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben on art and politics. If Rancière establishes that different aesthetic regimes must be defined according to their distinctive capacities to operate dissensually (i.e., to create art objects that specifically explore and expand the fissures of representation), or to operate consensually (i.e., fill in the gap between what is being shown and what is possible to be said of what is being shown), Agamben defines the notion of“dispositif” according to a logic that is fully corporeal and choreographic. For Agamben a dispositif (or “apparatus” as it is problematically translated into English) is “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings“ (Agamben 2009: 14). Affirming that our contemporary world is one where dispositifs take command, one where every single object orientates and conditions behaviors, gestures, and postures, Agamben posits that to live as subject in this world is to exist in a generalized system of permanent gestural/corporal/behavioral domination. I would call this domination “choreographic” invoking once again William Forsythe’s insight of choreography as art of command. It is this condition of choreographic domination that was clearly identified by Bel’s works mentioned above. Thus, experimental choreography became a critical cartography tracing the conditions under which dispositifs precondition dance, through choreography, to be an art of conformity— where dancers perform not only according to disciplinary forces, but where the whole logic of composing is under the spell of a tight distribution of the sensible that demands no fissures or divergences in what dance is supposed to represent – in other words, choreography is posited as a form of policing dissensus, of choreopolicing (Lepecki 2013).
And yet, Bel’s works also reveal the (political and critical) paradoxical status of choreography. By having choreography critiquing choreography as dispositif, it follows that choreography contains in itself the critical capacities and principles of performing its own disobedience. Bel’s work reveals how choreography already offers in itself and through itself the potential for undoing its own sovereignty—as long as theoretically and compositionally bound to a commitment to the choreopolitical dissensual. This commitment is already the emergence of agency from within the most constricted or tight spaces for movement, it is the insurrection of autonomy, finding ways for choreography to re-elaborate itself as a movement away from sovereign “care” or choreopoliced curating. Again, as Manning writes, what matters is how “in the dancing of the form’s outdoing of itself” one “literally make[s] a place for the political” (Manning 2013: 147).
The paradoxical (yet constitutive) possibility for choreopolitical critiques of choreography through choreography complexifies the field of the political in dance—since now the question of agency in choreography can no longer be understood as simply affirming or enacting the ever-present potential for the dancer to deviate from, or disobey, the choreographic imperative. It is then the question of understanding (and redefining) what is the status of the imperative in choreography. The imperative is double sided. It is, on one hand, obviously demanding, commanding, authoritarian, and disciplinary. As Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer explain: “A directive utterance of an imperative (I) expresses a certain content related to the addressee’s future actions;(II) conveys that the speaker wants the content to become reality; and (III) acts as an inducement for the addressee to bring about the content” (Condoravdi and Lauer 2013: 38). The imperative demands: “Jump!,” or “Jetée, followed by fouetée six,” or “Stand and urinate in place, then walk upstage,” or “Stand still center stage as other dancers throw tomatoes at you.” This is the transcendent, godly, sovereign-magic or choreographic-sovereign function of the imperative: “imperatives can be used by magicians, gods, and other agents of supernatural powers to bring about the thing they ‘command’: [ … ] Stand up and walk!” (49). But on the other hand, the imperative can also be ethical. It reminds one of what truly matters in the act and passion of committing oneself to bringing into the world a difficult, collective task. For instance, the commitment to dancing so that a work-event may come into the world through shared labor. All it takes to get to that other side of the imperative is to treat the same illocution (“Jump” or “Stand up and walk”) no longer as a command but as a verb in the infinitive. This small difference (from imperative to infinitive) enacts a radical, indeed political alteration of the verb function. Deleuze aligns the infinitive to the power of the event, since “it is not true that the verb represents an action; it expresses an event, which is totally different” (Deleuze 1990: 184). “Jump” then becomes not the imperative command of sovereignty but the impersonal occasioning for an event to be expressed, actualized, brought into the corporeal. Politically speaking, the question then is to deviate from blind obedience to a personal commanding voice (total discipline to authorial authority) towards a commitment to an impersonal force called the work-event. Would there be no commitment there would never be the possibility of affirming a work, as each dancer could simply not show up for the evening’s performance, or dance another choreographer’s piece instead of that evening’s assigned work, or come up with infinite varieties of gestures and non-gestures that had nothing to do with the choreographed score. Would there be infinite obedience, infinite conformity, there would be no dancing. Certainly there would be no political dimension. As Hannah Arendt writes in Introduction into Politics: “To speak in the form of commanding and to hear in the form of obeying” cannot be “considered actual speech and hearing” (Arendt 2005: 118) since both happen through a commitment to action that defines the political dimension as an exercise in shared freedom.
In an interview with Toni Negri titled “Control and Becoming,” Gilles Deleuze tells us that, “there is a whole order of movement in ‘institutions’ that’s independent of both law and contracts” (Deleuze 1995: 169). This movement, both autonomous in relation to (explicit) law enforcement and to (implicit) social contracts, is both ethical and political—even when it takes place within authoritarian institutional spaces and disciplined institutionalized forms of mobility. This is why, countering Agamben’s notion of dispositif as gestural command, Deleuze shows that in our current control societies it is within movement itself (be it macro-institutional movement, or micro-political movement) that resistance takes place: “our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move” (176).
Deleuze reminds us how after World War II the disciplinary model of power is replaced by a control model: “the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination” (174). But it is important to note that Foucault, in his essay “Governmentality,” also tells us that “discipline,” despite being a distinctive characteristic of the era of governance, replacing the “sovereign power” of the prince, does not totally disappear in the late 20th century—just as sovereign power also does not totally dissipate with the advent of disciplinary power: “we need to see things not in terms of replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society of government and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security” (Foucault 1991: 102). More than thirty years after Foucault wrote those lines, and twenty years after Deleuze wrote his notes on control societies, the overlapping of the three forms of power (sovereignty, discipline, control) is the norm in western democracies: sovereign power is exemplified by the extent to which executive orders and commands are essential to punish, kill, maim, and torture those deemed enemies of the State; disciplinary power appears in the increasingly more incarcerated populations of the West (concentration camps, migrant camps, as well as prisons); and control power is enacted by all sorts of governmental security agencies as they permanently track citizens and non-citizens in their daily activities, just as these populations introject (self) tracking to the very core of their subjectivity, each individual becoming his or her most astute (self)controller.
It is telling then that after the decade of works concerned in exploring and dismantling the very tools through which choreography sets itself up as dispositif, we start seeing works over the last five to six years, where what matters is to affirm dance reclaiming its force and autonomy within choreography. In Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater (2013), what takes the actors’ bodies away from all perceptions and assigned identities as “mentally impaired” bodies is the sheer force of them dancing. Here, something bigger than control takes over and reshuffles the whole perceptive/representative fields; dancing spilling over fixed notions of what is a dancer, what is choreography, and what is to live. In Turkish-German visual artist Nevin Aladag’s Dance Occupations, that she started to create circa 2008, large groups of all sorts of people (sometimes a hundred people) occupy without warning quiet public spaces to start dancing wildly to no music—from ordinary cafes in Berlin to the most formal occasions like openings of biennials and opening speeches during international festivals. In both these recent cases, the main question is no longer the choreographic critique of choroegraphy but to experiment with the force and limits of the dancer’s agency within choreography. Can we say that these choreopolitical dancing practices intervene directly on the political sphere? I believe they can and already do— at least at two levels. First, by performing before our eyes the possibility of enacting a commitment to a different kind of activism, fully political, because engaged in a movement that works for the actualization of an event. This activism stays away from the stifling apparatuses and micro-fascisms of activist politics. Second, choreopolitical practices offer an altogether different experiencing of the very constitution of the political – away from its confinement to electoral cycles and policy-making decisions, to a much broader quest for a political life as a collective experimental exercise that brings into the world that impersonal force called “a work,” or event.
It is also telling that several of these recent works have been taking place in the dark, where one may dance away from the panoptical-disciplinary model, but also from the (self)control constant (self)surveillance entails. In Tino Seghal’s This Variation (2013) for Documenta XIII, a large room in pitch darkness was the inviting, welcoming space of optical relief and corporeal freedom to experiment dancing away from the assemblage that control power creates in its enforcement of full visibility. Mette Invgartsen’s The Artificial Nature Project (2012) also choreographs impersonal motions in the dark. While in Brazilian choreographer Marcelo Evelyn’s Suddenly Everywhere is Black with People (2012), the dark field extends itself onto the bodies of the dancers, covered in pitch black paint, all rubbing against each other in a massive mesh, creating an amalgamated collective where nothing seems to exist except a shared persistence to enact an emergent, chaotic, meta-stable, co-existence of which we are invited to partake in the penumbra.
Whether critiquing the choreographic dispositive through choreography’s critical potential, or affirming the event through the agential capacities of the dancer, choreopolitical works express—speculatively and compositionally—another conception of the “political sphere.” In this sense, they echo Brian Massumi’s insight that “practices we call doing politics, and practices we call doing art are integrally aesthetico-political, and every aesthetico-political activity is integrally speculative-pragmatic” (Massumi 2011: 12&-13). Dancing wildly, dancing in the dark: enactments of alternative sociabilities, materializing choreopolitical imaginings away from control.
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1 “If there exists a connection between art and politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus, the very kernel of the aesthetic regime” (Rancière 2010: 140). This is why Rancière can define the political in aesthetic terms, to claim the political literally as “an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (37).
2 “curator, n.”. OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/45960 (accessed February 5, 2014).