Re: <documenta X><blast> urb anim age

Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Mon, 15 Sep 1997 11:05:52 -0400

I've been thinking quite a bit about pacings in relation to many issues
we've located (in terms of adhesion, etc.) in the matrix between viewer
and image. What seems to occur is a mental and corporeal "storage" (as
Keller has referred to it) of the conditions of the representational
apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its
language or grammar (which Serge Daney described as "the jump from one
element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that
'ensures' the transition"). Mental, in that one processes and
internalizes stimuli in terms of normative modes of viewing and
perception, thereby shaping the cognitive and perceptual faculty
according to emerging standards. Corporeal, in that one habitualizes a
stimulus, walks through it, practices it, uses it to determine
acceptable parameters of movement and behavior. As Katherine Hayles
points out (in post of 17 July), there is a performative aspect to
bodily practices that an analysis of the content does not grasp.
Rituals and ceremonies, for example, must be enacted in order to take
place, and through those enactions, gestures and movements are
sedimented into the body, sinking below conscious awareness.
Habitualized actions are performed more or less automatically, as if the
knowledge resided in one's fingers or physical mobility rather than
one's mind. To compel the performance of such routinized actions is to
compel one to accept them, whatever one's conscious belief may be. This
habitualization therefore has political implications. Bourdieu (cited
by Hayles) comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man"
approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and
"reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries
place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of
dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to
[the body] in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic, form the
fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture."

Concurrent with this "storage" and routinization, the representation
"stores" the changing perceptual modes of its viewer, prompting its own
internal reprogrammation and adjustment. Viewer and representation
co-determine each other within a matrix of co-determining currents,
codes, and channels, many of which operate "below" perception.

Could this matrix be articulated in terms of a *logistics of routine,*
its "grammar" comprised of pacings? Pacings would be routinized,
performed gestures and movements: incorporations enacted through
sensory responses, motor control, and proprioception, as initiated and
encoded by, and calibrated according to the demands of, the
representational apparatus (which, of course, faces technology and
economy). It is here -- in conjunction with other powerful sites, such
as that of visualization and perception (cf. Virilio's "logistics of
perception") -- where emerging struggles for the terms (of communication
and materialization, of "mattering" itself ) are "taking place."

These pacings, as both impulses and artifacts, might be indicated by
vectors that both encode and compel mobilization, much like a traffic
sign whose arrow commands one to "turn this way."

Such a mobilization increasingly involves contradictory movements and
impulses, infusing the corporeal or representational body with a
multiplicity of competing vectors, often seeming to fragment or fracture
it. Mobilization engages a capacity or sensitivity to the mobilities of
the world, links it to a corresponding technology of transport, and
prompts materialization.

-
-------------------------------------------------------------
a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
texts are the property of individual authors
for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
the following line in the message body: info blast
archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
-------------------------------------------------------------