"Is it possible to express emotions without the movement of the face?"
--Bill Viola
During the last fifteen years of his life, roughly from Phenomenology
of Perception of 1945 to the lectures on "Nature" of 1958-61,[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of the gestural that has
provided a fruitful new direction for continental philosophy. By combining a set of unique
commitments--to Husserlian phenomenology, to Gestalt psychology, to Marxist
materialism--Merleau-Ponty inaugurated a school of thought that associates human
understanding not with cogitation but with embodied cogitation: he is interested
in the body's implication in what the mind thinks it knows. Indeed, it has become almost
banal to claim that Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher par excellence of embodiment.[2] But what has been far less frequently acknowledged is the
degree to which that embodiment is conceived by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the gestures the
animate human form can execute, the movements by means of which that body explores the
world. Phenomenology of Perception is, almost from the first page to the last,
a meditation on the role of the gestural in acts of embodied perception and cognition.
Gestures clearly hold a privileged place in Merleau-Ponty's philosophical and aesthetic
writings, but what he means by the word is not always easy to discern. In
Phenomenology of Perception, The Structure of Behavior, and the
lectures collected in Nature: Lectures and Course Notes, "gestures" ("gestes")
cover the same ground as Mauss's "techniques of the body," especially when treated in the
context of the acquisition of habit. Elsewhere, though, "un geste" appears as a rather
amorphous type of sign, a smile, for instance, but also a way of clenching the brows,
scratching an itch, playing a keyboard, or applying paint.[3] It would seem that gesturing, for Merleau-Ponty, is the inescapable
medium in which animate forms navigate environments and enact intentions. Gestures are
therefore, for him, the link between a naturally given body/world and an
existential/cultural situation. Neither produced entirely by culture, nor imposed
inevitably by nature, gestures are a culture's distinctive way of conjugating what
Merleau-Ponty once called the body's "general power." Gestures are a social manifestation
of the body's biologically driven "cleaving" to the world.[4] -
It is perhaps due to this crucial, intermediary position of the gestural that it has become an
important category for contemporary theorists of the body, especially those interested, as is
Merleau-Ponty, in examining how cultural, organic, and technological forces interact to give birth
to embodied beings. Nowhere has this interest been more pronounced than in the area of new media
theory. In fact, new media theory has become a locus for a renewal of interest in Merleau-Ponty's
writings, just as the aesthetic objects privileged by new media theorists frequently thematize,
register, and even dissect the gestural dimension. Although performance studies and dance
ethnography have made headway in championing the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, it is arguably in
the area of new media theory that his insights have been most fruitfully explored.
José Gil, Mark Hansen, Brian Massumi, Brian Rotman, and Sha Xin Wei each argues
persuasively that
phenomenology's approach to embodiment promises to correct a technological determinism that in the
past has rarely considered the role of situated performance in humanity's commerce with
machines. One of the most provocative thinkers of the gestural is the video artist Bill
Viola, whose works have not incidentally been at the center of a number of studies by new media
theorists. Like Merleau-Ponty, Viola finds in the performance of gestures a key to
how socialized beings manage to
convey spontaneous, unscripted meanings through sedimented forms. It is productive to
analyze Viola and Merleau-Ponty side by side, for Viola throws into relief aspects of the
phenomenological project, especially with regard to the significance of the gestural, that have not
previously received attention, while Merleau-Ponty suggests a new and provocative reading of Viola's
works.
-
The analyses I generate here of both Merleau-Ponty and Viola go somewhat against the
grain of current scholarship. By focusing on the gestural, I upset a trend in new
media theory that associates embodiment not with motricity but instead with a far more
mysterious entity called "affect." Throwing the spotlight on affect in his 1983
Image-Mouvement, Gilles Deleuze in effect inaugurates this trend, leading a generation of
young scholars back to texts by Henri Bergson (and, to a lesser extent,
William James) that emphasize the mind's debt to the body understood largely in terms of
sensation.[5] "Movement" also emerged as an important
term, but always in its abstract form, associated with change and passage, something the
body does in time (bodies "move," as Massumi underlines), but subordinated
nonetheless to affect (bodies "feel," he adds) (1).[6] As a consequence of this priority accorded to affect, new media
theorists have too frequently credited affectivity--an affectivity divorced from specific
motor sequences--with the capacity to lend human subjects independence from both
the species-related response mechanisms and social conditioning so central to
Merleau-Ponty's own speculations. However, in Bergson's work, to which Merleau-Ponty
is also indebted, affectivity and motility are not only profoundly intertwined, but
the latter is accorded an ontological priority with respect to the former. In a
passage from Matter and Memory that has become a kind of touchstone of some new
media theory, Bergson establishes the role of bodily affects in the process of embodied
perception, arguing that the body's interoceptive sensations mediate its interaction
with external stimuli. Waves of affect, he writes, "interpose themselves between the
excitations that I receive from without and the movements I am about to execute" (17). In other words, the body is a source of sensory
feedback that intervenes between the external world and the internal world either to
filter out or to focus on certain elements of the exciting environment.
-
Bergson also makes it clear that this affective filter serves perception, which is in turn
invariably action-oriented and intentional. In passages far less frequently cited by new media
theorists, Bergson insists on "the utilitarian character of our mental functions, which
are essentially turned toward action" (16; emphasis added). He states that "perception as a
whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement" (45), and that
therefore all aspects of perception--the absorption through the sensory organs of an external
stimulus, the affect it produces within the body, and the memories of past actions which it
evokes--work together to provide a motor response. To that extent, perception must always be seen
as "an elementary question [posed] to my motor activity" (45; emphasis added). In most
cases, the nervous system formulates a response over time; it requires an "interval" which becomes,
in Bergson's language, "a center of indetermination" (Bergson 64; Deleuze 92). During this interval
in which the motor body seeks the appropriate way to respond, there is certainly an experience of
qualitative, affective states; however, more crucially for Bergson, this interval is also filled
with nascent motor actions proposed by a body attempting to choose which habit, which embedded motor
memory (skill, or "I can"), will best serve the demands of the present moment.[7] Voluntary ("represented") memory works in tandem with motor (enacted or
"lived") memory to produce a response that is not entirely predictable and yet is supported by the
past: "The progress by which the virtual image [the representation of movement, or voluntary memory]
realizes itself is nothing else than the series of stages by which this image gradually obtains from
the body useful actions or useful attitudes" (131). Humans are thus not machines, they do not
execute automatic reactions, precisely because, although "turned toward action," they mediate their
actions through another layer of experience that Deleuze associates with affect, Bergson with
memory, and Merleau-Ponty with what he calls a kinesthetic "background" ("fond") that includes
skills and the kinesthetic memory of performing them.[8]
-
It is important that when Bergson introduces "affection" it is not as a
variety of emotion but as the experience of pain. Elaborating on affect for the first
time, he writes: "There is hardly any perception which may not, by the increase of the
action of its object upon our body, become an affection, and, more particularly,
pain. Thus we pass insensibly from the contact with a pin to its prick" (53). This
affect-image, or "prick," is itself a "source of positive action" (55); the
affect is "nothing but the effort of the damaged element to set things right--a kind of
motor tendency in a sensory nerve" (55-56). Most decidedly, affect does not alone
fill up the interval, the space in between. Instead, "choice is likely to be inspired
by past experience, and the reaction does not take place without an appeal to the
memories which analogous situations may have left behind them" (65).
-
Deleuze is faithful to Bergson with respect to his account of affectivity, but,
significantly, he neglects Bergson's emphasis on motor memory as it interacts with affect to
shape the subject's ultimate course of action. In fact, Deleuze tends to
exaggerate the role of affect, attributing to it the capacity to produce, on its own,
the action that is "unpredictable" and "new" ("quelque chose d'imprévisible et
de nouveau" 91). For Bergson, in contrast, affect is only a "tendency" that aids the
organism in preparing itself for a more meditated response. In Bergson,
affect is associated with bodily states such as pain, while in Deleuze it takes on the
color of emotion. Deleuze goes so far as to identify the human face (as opposed to
the pinprick on the skin) as the locus of affection, or at least as the site where it
is displayed. By identifying self-affection with the cinematic close-up, Deleuze
makes it seem as though affect were entirely an affair of large-screen emotions, and
that it is these emotions that ultimately govern the way a subject will respond.
However, Bergson himself makes it clear that while an affect such as pain may play a
role in producing an attitude toward virtual action, memories of past actions are what
capture and filter the sensory information in the first place and continue, throughout
the interval, to offer their skilled answers in response to pain.[9]
-
Merleau-Ponty develops to a far greater degree what Bergson assumes as a
given, namely, that human subjects are primarily engaged in answering a motor
question with a motor response by searching through a catalogue of movement
memories or gestural routines. In fact, Merleau-Ponty returns to Bergson in
Phenomenology of Perception to confirm that "attention to life
is the awareness we experience of 'nascent movements' in our bodies" (90-91).
It is possible to approach works in new media in such a way as to recall
Bergson's original emphasis on "nascent movements," an emphasis too often
forgotten in the reduction of the interval to "self-affection." This can be
attempted even in the case of new media artists famous for heightening our
awareness of the affect supposedly recorded on the screen. For instance,
although Bill Viola has been treated by theorists as an artist concerned with
the emotional intensity communicated through the screen to the
viewer, it can be shown that he is equally interested in the gestural
routines that frame the emotions his filmed subjects perform. In my analyses
of Viola's "The Passions," a series of digitalized video installations first
exhibited in 2003, I reinstate the significance of muscle memory in the
productive moment of indetermination by focusing on the relation between
gesture and affect, rather than on affect alone. In doing so, I aim to
reanimate the notion of embodiment that new media theory has borrowed from
Bergson and from Merleau-Ponty. I balance a celebration of affect as
autonomous resistance to sedimentation by revealing affect's reliance on the
habitual muscular articulations Merleau-Ponty diagnoses in the
Phenomenology as "I can"s. In my readings, embodiment is not
simply a matter of sensory feedback, or "self-affection"; rather, embodiment
is a dynamics inflected by social patterning and thus impossible to theorize
without reference to gestural regimes.
"opening up the spaces between the emotions"
- Bill Viola's "The Passions" series, first exhibited in its entirety at the J. P.
Getty Museum, consists of twenty-one video installations, almost all in color, mounted on
various types of LCD and plasma screens.[10] According
to the artist, "Quintet of the Astonished" (see Figure 1) was the first piece composed,
the avatar from which the other installations were generated.
w
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Figure
1: Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000 Color video
rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room Photo: Kira Perov
|
At the time of its composition (1998), Viola was in residence as a Fellow at the Getty
Research Institute. He had already been studying the Renaissance paintings housed in the
Getty collection, but when he was invited to participate in an exhibition at the National
Gallery in London, he decided to base his commissioned piece on a painting the National
Gallery owned, Hieronymous Bosch's "Christ Mocked" (see Figure 2).
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Figure
2: "Christ Mocked" Hieronymous Bosch, ca. 1490-1500 ©
The National Gallery, London. |
Imitating the compositional grouping (but not the verticality) of Bosch's painting
(c. 1490-1500), Viola placed five actors into a tight arrangement in which they
could dramatically change their postures over time without invading one another's
intimate emotional space.[11] The figures in "Quintet of the
Astonished"--four men and one woman--transpose the four darkly-clad
tormentors and the one fair Christ-figure in Bosch's painting. Viola filmed the
five actors with high-speed 35-millimeter film (with frame rates of up to 384 frames
per second instead of the normal 24), which he then transferred to video, thus
creating a sixteen-minute-long video strip out of approximately one minute of
real-time performance. The display conditions of "Quintet of the Astonished" were
also carefully controlled: the color video was rear-projected onto a screen,
measuring 4'-6" long by 8' wide, mounted on a wall in a dark room. The influence of "Christ Mocked"
can be seen in Viola's choice of colors, lighting, and
the framing of the screen, which was recessed in space, evoking a small chapel in a
cathedral. -
Similar to the other three "Quintets" that would eventually emerge
from the same inspiration ("Quintet of Remembrance," "Quintet of the Unseen," and
"Quintet of the Silent"), the "Quintet of the Astonished" portrays only the upper
half of the body of each actor (pelvis to head), with a special emphasis--as in the
painting--on the hands. Indeed, as can be witnessed by observing the short clip
available at the Getty website (<www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/viola/index.html>),
the actors' hands attract the viewers' attention as much as, if not more
than, their facial gesticulations. At one point during the sixteen-minutes that
compose "Quintet of the Astonished," a hand with four fingers spread wide occupies
the center of the screen; if we compare the composition with that of "Christ Mocked,"
we see that this hand has been placed at the location where in the Bosch painting we
find the corresponding four folded fingers that rest on Christ's shoulder. A visual
echo of these folded fingers can also be found on the left-hand side of the frame,
where a male figure rests his hand on the shoulder of the pale female
figure that recalls Bosch's Jesus. In the video, the outstretched fingers in the center of the frame
remain immobile for a long time, but the two hands of the figure on the right-hand side, and
one hand of the figure in the right-hand corner next to him, sway back and forth distractingly,
evoking the intensity of the posture assumed by the figure in the
lower right-hand corner of the Bosch canvas.
-
In his preparatory notes to "Quintet of the Astonished," Viola writes that he hoped to
capture "a compressed range of conflicting emotions from laughing to crying"; the emotions
were to "come and go so gradually," Viola continues, that it would be "hard to tell where
one begins and the other leaves off" (qtd. in Walsh 33). In a later interview, Viola
explains that he was less interested in a dramatic portrayal of the emotions per se
than in the transitions from one emotion to the next. He asked his actors to move fluidly
and gradually through sorrow, pain, anger, fear, and rapture in such a way as to "ope[n] up
the spaces between the emotions" (qtd. in Walsh 200). In order to achieve this
effect, Viola gave his actors two sets of instructions: they could either "work from the
outside in," as in the technique analyzed by movement theorist Paul Ekman, "or from the
inside out," as in Method acting.[12] The first choice
would put the body "in a place that will engender emotion," and the second would create "an
emotional life within that is then expressed outwardly."[13] Although the two approaches to the connection between (externally
observable) bodily movement and (internally felt) emotion derive from two different theories
of acting, they both presuppose a causal relation: what happens emotionally finds its
correlate in kinesis. According to Viola's account, his directorial style emphasized the
inner-toward-outer Method approach, for he refrained from choreographing the actors in any
way and simply gave them an emotion to express. Actors "were free to invent whatever
gestures and expressions suited their individual tasks," recounts one observer (Walsh 36).
This statement is belied, however, by the placement of the actor's hands, which
intentionally (one cannot but assume) evoke the hand positions of the figures in the Bosch
painting.
-
Although Viola is clearly interested in the physicality--almost athleticism--of the
exercise, no accounts I have found attend with anything like thoroughness to the
pelvis-to-head embodiment of the labeled emotions. For instance, Mark Hansen's readings
of "The Passions" in "The Time of Affect" and New Philosophy for New Media
concentrate exclusively on the facial gestures and the transitory phases between them,
phases that reveal, according to Hansen (following Deleuze), "the unpredictable . . .
and the new" (New Philosophy 6).[14]
Viola locates a space of freedom in the excess of affect over categorical emotion, that
is, in the fuller "field of intentionalities" revealed by the transitional phases
captured on the screen. In his readings, Hansen relies faithfully on Bergson's concept
of a self-affecting organism, but he strips this self-affection of its relation to "the
movements [the subject is] about to execute," and thus to the "motor intentionalities"
identified by Merleau-Ponty. To some extent, Hansen can do so because he takes
in only the facial gesticulations, which correspond more neatly, at least according to
some, to distinct categorical emotions (and thus disclose, under deceleration, their
ambiguous "in betweens"). Ignoring the physical manifestations of feelings (or,
rather, performed feelings) in the shoulders, hands, and sternum of the actors, Hansen
assumes that the strong emotions Viola seeks to capture, such as joy ("laughing") and
sorrow ("crying"), are registered and communicated by facial features
alone.[15] The face, according to Hansen, displays a
kind of semiotics of emotion, and it is between these facial signs that we should
locate unpredictable and new affects. In Hansen's account, the larger
body gestures, such as the waving of the hands back and forth in the right-hand corner
of the frame, do not maintain the same tight relation to expressive values (such as
joy, or grief), nor do they seem to have the potential to release the unscripted "in
betweens."
-
If we were to watch the actors' performance in real-time, we would see a rapid succession of
emotions that would probably appear as exaggerated grimaces, a kind of facial typology or
catalogue of stereotyped emotional expressions. But we would also observe violent and rapid
upper body movements and be made far more aware of the actor's choreographic blocking.[16] Slowing down the frame speed has the effect of revealing
the in-between facial gesticulations, but it also discloses the enchained movements, and the
ambiguous pauses between enchained movements that the body makes as it moves toward the
expression of a violent emotion. Specifically what the viewer believes to have witnessed
while observing these transitional, in-between states may in fact depend a good deal on the
training the viewer has received. For instance, as a scholar of video and film, among other
media, Hansen focuses primarily on the facial expression of the actors, what he terms their
"affective tonality" ("Time of Affect" 611). In contrast,
when a phenomenologist trained in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty observes the actors, it is
more likely the muscular tonicity rather than the emotional tonality of the
gesticulating bodies that catches the eye. In my own case, for instance, the facial
gesticulations appear in the context of the subjects' larger body movements. Trained as a
dancer, I am struck by the changes in posture, the shifts in weight, the strange angles at
which the head is carried, the degree of tension in the hunched shoulders, the compositional
play of arm positions, the vectors created by the finger, as well as the dynamics of facial
muscle tone. Further, as a former performer, I view these figures bringing the Bosch
painting to life as performers, not subjects engaged in spontaneous emotional
release. Studying them closely, I attempt to imitate their blocking: I learn their roles,
copying the large body movements such as shoulder crumpling, hand lifting, and mouth
contorting. Yet, try as I might, I cannot produce through sheer will the twitch of a facial
muscle or the trembling of a cheek. In that regard, Hansen is correct when he insists that
new media technologies can expose to sight elements of aliveness (he says "affectivity," I
say "motility") that are performed without volition.
-
It could be argued that what we witness when we observe Viola's videos is not a performance
that actually took place and that therefore it is incorrect to designate Viola's subjects as
"performers." From this perspective, the bodies we see on the screen are not real bodies
but only digital photographic reproductions of real bodies manipulated in post-production to
appear in guises otherwise not exposed to view. Yet however distorted the images may seem,
they have not been digitally transformed. That is, the bodies filmed did indeed execute the
twitches, tremblings and contractions that are only visible to the observer when the
execution of their movements has been slowed down. A trained actor's body has actually
executed the movements that radical deceleration allows us to see. Furthermore, it is to
those bodies and their movements that we, as spectators, kinesthetically respond. True,
many of the actors' facial gesticulations and upper body movements have not been voluntarily
produced and are therefore not "performed" in the sense of being intentionally constructed
to express a particular categorical emotion. But these movements are nonetheless human
movements available as potentials belonging to the human kinetic disposition. They
cannot be considered skills per se, but they are the building blocks of skills.
They are decidedly not products of digital remediation, pure manipulations of playback that
no human body could perform.
-
I would insist in addition that these involuntary facial gesticulations escaping both
categorization and real-time perception occur--and on some level are experienced by
the subjects--as tension in the jaw or as the sudden release of constriction in
the brow. That is, they are kinesthetically available but culturally meaningless. This
distinction is important, for in some cases the in-between gesticulations
can be felt by the body performing them even if they
are not voluntary gestures invested with meaning. Although
people cannot always voluntarily reproduce twitchings and tremblings, some varieties of
twitch or tremble can in fact be reproduced by trained actors or
mimes. An observant
and skilled performer will be able to train herself to imitate, for instance, those
involuntary contortions of the face that a human subject makes upon
awaking from sleep; the acquisition and willed reproduction of such normally
involuntary forms of motility is a large part of an actor's métier. I
am not claiming that Viola's actors are in control of or
consciously experience the finer shifts in their musculature during the in-between phases the video
exposes, but rather that such shifts are experienced somatically and remain accessible,
under certain conditions, as movement material from which performances--and even
cultural signifiers--can later be made.
"on the basis of the animal's embodied history"
- The muscular dynamics I perceive could be seen to belong to
what Merleau-Ponty calls the "autonomous" body, the "prepersonal" body
that "gears itself" or "cleaves to" the world, even before the subject
assumes a perceptual, cognitive, sexual, or emotional attitude toward
it (Phenomenology 97). For Merleau-Ponty, as for Bergson,
there is always a crucial connection between affect (that which is
felt) and movement (that which is performed), that is, between the
anticipatory, protentive attitudes and the nascent motor actions the
body, cleaving to the world, prepares to make. The clenching of the
brow and the twitching of the cheek do not only express an
indefinable emotion; they are also elements of a nascent motor
project, one that contributes to the realization of intentions on the
order of the kinetic. The body's sensations of itself (its
"self-affections") may indeed, as Hansen states, provide a constant
flow casting itself forward before the actual initiation of activity
(in the protentive moment); however, the body also has its own
intentionality, which is "essentially turned toward action" upon the
world (Bergson 16). This motor intentionality (or what Merleau-Ponty
sometimes calls a "motor project") relies for its execution on already
acquired skills, the "I cans," that a situated, socialized body is
capable
of performing. For Merleau-Ponty, the moving body has a prior claim
on the world, or rather, the world demands movement of the body, and
this incontrovertible exigency produces movement patterns that will
determine--as actualized gesture in the present but also as a history of
gesturing in the past--the production of the unpredictable motor
response.
-
Recent research in cognitive psychology and neurobiology tends to support Merleau-Ponty's
schema, which subordinates all varieties of intention to the motor body. In a 2003 essay,
the phenomenologically-oriented neuroscientist Francisco Varela asserts that movement is
the trigger for all further perceptual, sensory, and affective activity: "Whenever
motion is an integral part of the lifestyle of a multicellular [organism]," he
writes, "there is a corresponding development of a nervous system linking effector
(muscles, secretion) and sensory surfaces (sense organs, nerve endings)" (89).[17] Varela takes it as axiomatic that "cognition depends
on the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor
capacities . . . themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological and cultural
context" ("Reenchantment" 329). This context is composed of the kinetic
dispositions of the animate body (the biological context) combined with its history of
realized movements. Protention, on the neural level, he explains further, is "incoherent
or chaotic activity in fast oscillations . . . until the cortex settles into a global
electrical pattern . . . selectively binding a set of neurons in transcient aggregate . .
. a creative form of enacting significance on the basis of the animal's embodied
history" (333; emphasis added).
-
What Varela suggests here is that the sensorimotor capacities of the
body are not entirely free and independent but rather
underwritten by neural circuits laid down by past actions ("the
animal's embodied history"). At the same time, however, there is
creativity in the act of making significant (or making significant in
a different way) a past action with respect to the situation at hand.
Varela hypothesizes that when the subject is confronted with a new
situation that does not appear to conform to a previous one (and that
therefore might not be resolved by rehearsing past actions), the
neural circuits suffer what he calls a "microbreakdown." During this
"microbreakdown," or neural reorganization, the system hesitates,
searches among a "myriad of possibilities," multiple ways of creating
new aggregates, connections, circuits, and eventually, behaviors.
What is called upon here, though, is a creativity that is partial and
responsive, still enchained by the kinetic dispositions and realized
gestural routines (the "embodied history") of the organism itself.
Neural connections are not made in a vacuum, Varela asserts, but
instead with reference to the organism's physiological possibilities
for flexion and its acquired "I cans." The motor resolution to the
"microbreakdown" is always performed within a cultural,
intersubjective context. The number of possibilities for realized
neural connection, albeit extensive, is nonetheless limited by the
pressure of the social, the requirement that the movement be a legible
(appropriate) interpretation of an environmental challenge. Thus, when
Viola asks, "is it possible to express emotions without the movement of
the face?" he is asserting, as is Varela, what one contemporary
philosopher has called "the primacy of movement."[18] To this extent, Viola adds his voice to a
growing chorus of cognitive scientists, such as Varela, and
developmental psychologists, such as Daniel Stern, who have actively
sought to extend and corroborate experimentally the tradition of
phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
-
Stern and Varela are essential references here, for they both counter, in provocative
ways, the current preference in new media theory for analyzing the role of affect rather
than gesture in the exfoliating independence of the self. Addressing the relation
between movement--in this case, the earliest gestures performed by the neo-natal
infant--and the meanings these movements soon assume, Stern introduces in The
Interpersonal World of the Infant a distinction between "vitality affects" and
"categorical affects" that has proved significant for dance and new media theorists. The
distinction is especially pertinent for analyzing the works of Viola, for it neatly
summarizes the difference between a named emotion--the anger or joy the actor has been
asked to perform--and the in-between gesticulation--twitching, trembling, or
clenching--that I have been relating to a kinetic, motor order of action. Stern locates a
domain of sensibility in the newborn infant that he associates with the infant's
"vitality," its first interoceptive experiences in and outside of the womb. "Vitality
affects" are the body's sensations of itself as an animate form, one that is
constantly in movement.[19] Stern spells out clearly
that "vitality affects" are not "feelings" in the sense of "anger, fear, or rapture."
Instead, "vitality affects" involve kinesthetic distinctions, such as between jerky and
smooth, taut and relaxed, corresponding precisely to the clenching and releasing
movements I pointed out in Viola's "Quintet of the Astonished." According to Stern,
these kinesthetic discriminations are the true background of both cognition and affective
(in the sense of emotional) experience. In The Interpersonal World of the
Infant Stern proposes that "all mental acts . . . are accompanied by input from
the body, including, importantly, internal sensations . . . . The body is never
doing nothing" (xvii; emphasis added). According to Stern, the motor body is at
every moment supporting and informing mental processes in some way, by assuming or
holding a posture, by displacing itself in space, by contracting or relaxing its muscles.
"Envision Rodin's Thinker," he proposes:
He sits
immobile, posing his head on his hand and an elbow on his knee. True, he is not
moving, but there is extraordinary tension in his posture, suggesting active, intense
proprioceptive feedback from almost every muscle group. This feedback, along with the
thinker's presumably heightened arousal, provides the background feeling against which
his specific thoughts are etched. (xvii-xviii)
-
For Stern, then, "background feeling" is produced by "intense
proprioceptive feedback" and kinesthetic sensation ("extraordinary
tension"), not necessarily by emotional tone.[20]. Stern's kinesthetic and proprioceptive
"background" can be productively compared to what Merleau-Ponty calls
"praktognosia," or kinesthetic background, a non-cognitive
(or better, non-verbal) knowledge composed of signals the body
receives all the time. These "body signals" are received in the womb,
in the crib, seated in a chair: they issue from what Stern calls an
"as-yet-unspecified self," they are the "background music of an
autonomous body that, under certain circumstances, can become louder
and enter our awareness" (xviii). These signals are indeed a type of
affect, but they are related more to motor intentions than to
formulated feelings or desires. If one of Viola's actors were to
become aware of the tension in her shoulders (even while concentrating
on the emotion the tension accompanied), she would be accessing the
normally muted "background feeling" underlying her thoughts and
emotions. (And it is only by focusing her attention on such a kinetic
arousal or "vitality affect" that she might develop the capacity to
repeat the movement voluntarily.) Although vitality affects eventually
become linked to specific emotions, the tension in the shoulders could
conceivably be experienced as just that: a rapprochement of the
shoulder blades at a particular spot on the upper back. As Stern
points out, our movements, before we attach meanings to them (or, more
accurately, before meanings are attached to our movements in an
intersubjective milieu), are indeed capable of providing us with a
rich somatic awareness of executing them. Executing movements, then,
can allow us not only to feel emotions but also to feel ourselves in
the act of performing them. The performance of emotion through motor
action renders a kinesthetic knowledge of what it feels like to move
as well as a heightened sensitivity to our motor projects. Somatic
attention to movement qualities can bring us back into contact with
embodied "proto-signification" before it acquires what Merleau-Ponty
calls a "figurative significance" or emotional charge
(Phenomenology 225).[21]
-
"Vitality affects" precede "categorical emotions," according to Stern;
initially, an amplified somatic awareness is, Stern conjectures, the
only type of awareness the neonatal has. It precedes full-fledged
consciousness of self yet it is the basis upon which all future
experiences of emotion and acts of cognition will be built. For
this reason vitality affects are different from the
more culturally-inflected "categorical emotions" that
Darwin identified. Vitality affects are the earliest and most primitive cultural
organization of the sensorimotor apparatus. The "emergent self" that
entertains these affects is precisely that: emergent, in the process
of being constituted as a distinctive, bounded, socialized body
according to "embodied schemata" developed with slight differences by
each culture.[22] It is
important to note that for Stern, the movements the
human body performs and the vitality affects with which these
movements are associated, undergo almost from birth some degree of
cultural
organization, a point to which we shall have occasion to return.
Unlike Hansen, who insists on the radical openness of the
sensorimotor body to situational contingencies, Stern recognizes the
extent to which cultural patterning imprints itself upon even the
earliest gropings of the human infant. Stern observes, however, that
while "vitality affects" are associated primarily with the "emergent"
subjectivity of the infant, they nonetheless remain available to
humans throughout their adult lives, albeit in a less pure, more
semanticized form. In a formulation relevant to my later argument,
Stern proposes that under certain conditions we may become aware of
these "elusive qualities" of kinesis, such as "explosive," "surging,"
"fleeting," and "fading away" (Stern 54). As in the case of the actor's
métier, layers of sensorimotor
organization that are normally inaccessible ("pre-reflexive") can at
times become the matter of a reflexive consciousness. The
"categorical" and the "vital," the culturally meaningful and the
kinesthetically meaningful, are constantly in a relation that
can be revealed through the application, as we shall see, of specific
techniques.
groping through the space of the present
- Turning to "Anima," another installation from "The Passions"
(see Figure 3), we can see how Viola addresses, artistically, Stern's
distinction between the categorical and the vital, emotions and
kinesthetic experience.
|
|
Figure
3: Bill Viola, Anima, 2000 (video stills)
Color video triptych on
three LCD flat panels mounted on wall Photo: Kira Perov
|
In this color video triptych, three actors express by gesture four
categorical emotions--joy, sorrow,
anger, and fear--but at a technologically decelerated pace that
reveals the "in-between" gesticulations, the constant movement or
aliveness, linking one to the next.[23] Recorded in a single take, "Anima" originally
lasted one minute; extended through digital manipulation, the finished
piece is comprised of over eighty-one minutes of playback time.
Strangely, the name "Anima" evokes the categorical, fixed posture,
rather than the vital, or forever-in-continuous-motion. At first
glance, "Anima" would seem to refer us either to the word
"soul" or else to an equally transcendent register, that of Carl
Jung's archetypal female, associated with the "humors," or moods and
feelings. At the same time, however, "Anima" strongly suggests the
word "animation." The tension in the title between "Anima" as
archetypal fixity and "Anima" as pure mobility is reflected in the
piece itself, which involves a set of emoting (rather than talking)
heads. -
As Hansen observes in "The Time of Affect," the faces in "Anima"
appear to be "registering an overabundance of affective information"
(594). But while these faces may indeed be supersaturated with
emotion, engaged in displaying "interstitial microstages of
affectivity," they also unveil a
surprising diversity of movement possibilities available to the human
face. Again, whereas I am struck by the lugubrious or sudden shifts
in the underlying muscle tone of the faces, Hansen remains fixated on
their "emotional tone" (587). To Hansen's eye,
Viola's technologically manipulated playbacks bring us to
confront a "constitutive vitality" (613) in excess of our
perceptible emotional states. But if we are to remain faithful to the
dialectics of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach--as well as
to Stern's insistence on the "emergent" semantics of
kinesthesia--then contact with our "constitutive vitality," whether
visual
or somatic, would be strictly impossible. In existential terms, there
is no lived vitality purified of all socialization, no life-force that
could be manifested by an actor--or seized by a spectator--that wasn't
already organized into recognizable expressions, or gestural routines.
The form of vitality that the actors might be experiencing in these
"in-between" states has to be, in Stern's and Merleau-Ponty's view, an
emergent signification, a motility in the process of being
shaped by the cultural (expressive) weight it will soon bear and
toward which it is ineluctably moving. To give just one example drawn
from "Anima," the play of rippling muscles on the actor's cheeks might
not be immediately equivalent to any one of the categorical emotions
the actors were asked to reproduce. However, these (as yet)
non-taxonomized micro-gestures, these in-between phases through which
the muscles pass, are nevertheless already directed toward, moving
toward, the legible gestures between which they fall. To that
extent, they remain elements of skilled practice, points on a movement
continuum that the gesture, as sign, splits into fragments.
-
It is entirely plausible that during the performance of a gesture such
as a pout or a grin, that is, during the in-between phases we witness
in "Anima," there occur any number of microbreakdowns, moments when
the features of the face (the continuously rippling muscles) could
depart on alternative motor paths. The execution of the gesture could
thus be seen in Husserl's terms as a layered instant composed of both
retentions--the body's grasp on that which was just performed--and
protentions--the body's grasping for that which it could enact in the
future. Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the phenomenology of
embodiment could be said to lie precisely here, in the application of
Husserl's paradigm of time consciousness to motor, rather than to
cognitive, intentionalities. Merleau-Ponty understands movement to
be, like thought, shot through with retentive patterning, the
sedimentation of previously executed gestural routines, and at the
same time future-oriented, groping through the space of the present
in search of those movements that will best address the demands of the
next lived moment.
-
In kinetic terms, however, this does not mean, as Hansen would have it, that the protentive,
anticipatory element of the lived present "intends the new prior to any impression or
perceptual present" (New Philosophy 252).[24] Merleau-Ponty is clear on this point: protention can only prepare for
the future by relying on the actions of the past. (What counts as this past, however, still
needs to be defined.) In Varela's view, protention, as an activity of the neural system, has
to depend on "already established circuits, each of which is generated by gestures the human
animal has the resources to perform. Although Varela wishes to maintain the creative moment
in the neural grasping toward "a myriad of possibilities," he concedes that it is "out of
the constraints of the situation and the recurrence of history, [that] a single one is
selected" ("Reenchantment" 334). In other words, the continuum of rippling facial muscles
will be tamed into a legible grimace or smile. Merleau-Ponty is even more restrictive in
this regard, for he adds that constraints are not only cultural (the facial gesture must be
legible) but biological as well: that is, constraints derive both from "the situation" and
from the nature of the animate form, the anatomical capacities for certain types of
ambulation and joint flexion that are reflected in the varieties of neural connection that
can be made.
-
Ultimately, what we witness in "The Passions" is the pull of two forces, each
of which contributes to the uniqueness and yet repeatability of the gesture.
The "vital" and the "categorical" are linked together in decelerated video
images: on the one hand, the in-between movement that Merleau-Ponty dubs a
"protosignification," such as a twitch or a tremble, and, on the other, a
fully legible signification, an iterable, acquired gesture, such as a beaming
grin. My own viewing of the installations reveals not a body freed from "I
cans," not a mass of "vitality as such," but rather a motor body in the
process of organizing itself within an intersubjective situation to play the
role to which it has been assigned. After all, what we are looking at in
"Anima" is a troupe of actors who were told to imitate a given set of
nameable emotions. The things their faces do may not always be subject to
classification, but the salient point is that their in-between muscle
movements are nonetheless part of the body's directedness toward the
performance of a certain task: here, the emoting of nameable emotions
according to established (aestheticized, perhaps even commercialized) modes
of communicating them.
the hold of the
habitus
- If we take Merleau-Ponty seriously, then we have to conclude that the moving body
cannot be captured, by any technology whatsoever, in an entirely non-oriented state for the
reason that it is always in the process of moving toward socially meaningful gestures in an
intersubjective milieu. Making meaning, for Merleau-Ponty, is inescapable, but
paradoxically it is also an acquired skill. Such skills, or "I cans," are the way an
organism "gears itself" to an environment, the way it makes this environment meaningful in
the first place.[25] Without a defined set of motor
capacities establishing our proprioceptive and kinesthetic being-in-space, the world around
us lacks meaning for our body. According to Merleau-Ponty, then, affects are
epiphenomena of movement, and not the reverse: "Our bodily experience of movement is not a
particular case of knowledge" Merleau-Ponty insists; "it provides us with a way of access to
the world and the object, with a 'praktognosia,' which has to be recognized as
original and primary" (Phenomenology 162). Merleau-Ponty thus provides a
convincing understanding of protention as drawing not from a self "prior to any impression"
but rather from "praktognosia," the body's embodied knowledge, a resource of "I
cans" that cast before us a set of movement possibilities capable of making sense of a given
world. For Merleau-Ponty, we are only "open" to the unpredictable arrangement of
circumstances because we have autonomous bodily functions--such as breathing, focusing the
eyes, and grasping with the hands--that "gear" us to an environment. This paradox is
central to a rigorous, dialectical phenomenology, the paradox that we are only "free"
because we are capable of being enchained, that we can only see because anatomy, training,
and experience cause us to see a certain way (139).
-
For Merleau-Ponty, what makes us capable of spontaneity is not the
limitless capacity of the neural system to create new movements but
rather the limitless capacity of the neural system to connect the
movements human anatomy allows, to enchain human possibilities of
kinesis in new ways.[26] "Human"
always includes both anatomical and social elements. As we have seen,
it is impossible for Merleau-Ponty to imagine a movement entirely pure
of cultural inflection simply because such a movement (even an
autonomous one) is never performed outside of an intersubjective
space. The "freedom" to innovate, to produce "the unpredictable" and
"the new," then, should be seen to derive not from a projection of
"emotional tone" ahead of bodily performance and beyond learned
response; instead, such "freedom" could be attributed to the untapped
movement potentials of the human animate form, potentials that are
emergent and in the course of being explored. On this reading, the
subject's motor body does not contain limitless new ways of moving
but rather new ways of moving that have not yet been organized by
a single culture. The subject's body knows more about
movement, both as kinetic possibility and kinesthetic experience, than
any one cultural habitus allows the subject to name. We
could imagine, for instance, that at least some of the involuntary
facial contortions produced by the actors in "Anima" derive from
movement potentials consistent with the human kinetic disposition that
have not yet been invested with cultural meaning. But they could
conceivably achieve the status of meaningful, voluntarily produced
gestural signs in a culture other than our own. These ways of moving
(and the neural connections underlying them) might be inscribed in a
habitus, but they are nonetheless inscribed on a deeper,
phylogenetic level, on the level of the kinetic dispositions of
bipedal anatomy. This in no way implies an a-historical biological
determinism for, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly states in the late
lectures in Nature, the explicit limits of bipedal anatomy remain
unknown and subject to continuing exfoliation in an intersubjective
milieu.
-
It is significant, of course, at what point a gestural routine (an "I
can," habit, or skill) intervenes in the acculturation of the body.
As anthropologists from Mauss to Bourdieu have observed, a gestural
routine learned early on can influence in seemingly inescapable ways
the body's motor being.[27] Later
training and observation, however, might eventually allow us access to
alternative movement capacities, options that will themselves be
limited by the personal history of the singular body, its injuries and
the peculiar shape of its bones. Many of those movement possibilities
exist as virtual pathways, movement logics that could be pursued, even
within the gestural routines we already possess.[28] Most of the time, as Drew Leder has remarked,
the subject remains ignorant of kinesthetic feedback and therefore of
the alternative logics the body might pursue. Following the lead of
Heidegger, Leder calls the normative state of the body
"ecstasis," a condition in which we execute gestural
routines with the sole intention of accomplishing specific tasks (like
smiling). But the awareness of movement is not eradicated by its
"absenting"; instead, this awareness merely recedes into the
"background" (Leder 21), potentially available to be called up again.
In the wake of Leder, dance ethnographer J. Lowell Lewis has proposed
that situations of skill acquisition are particularly ripe with
occasions for heightened kinesthetic awareness, and thus provide a
more immediate contact with both the socially acquired "I cans" and
the movement possibilities they fail to privilege. "The hold of the
habitus is not absolute," writes dance theorist Deidre
Sklar; in fact, that hold may be "broken, inviting opening beyond
routine." Against Bourdieu's objection that anything beyond the
habitus cannot be an intentional object of consciousness,
Leder, Sklar, and Lewis maintain that this "beyond" can, through the
application of culturally-elaborated practices, become an intentional
object of motor consciousness.[29]
-
It is thus arguable that normally absented motor intentions, those
nascent motor actions never fulfilled but fleetingly proposed, are
precisely what we witness in "Anima" and "Quintet of the Astonished"
at the moment when the actors pass from one emotional expression to
the next. That is, these actors are drawing on a kinesthetic
"background," a continuum of motility that they will eventually parse
or differentiate into gestures we recognize as fully meaningful in our
shared cultural context. Clearly, Viola's subjects are not in the
process of learning a new skill, and thus they are not necessarily
exercising a heightened consciousness of what their bodies, at every
stage, are doing. Yet the camera recovers the consciousness of a
process that the subjects themselves may not have, a
consciousness of a process through which the body discovers within
itself a movement, a virtual "I can," that is not immediately
exploited but that could eventually be bent to the service of a
meaningful cultural performance. It is during the transitions between
recognizable gestures that the body's history emerges as a resource
for kinesthetic experience, motor action, and, in the case of
expressive gestures, signifying power. What Viola's videos show is that
legible, categorical forms of expression (gestural signifiers for
particular emotions) possess, when performed, a quantity of motility
that exceeds the recognizable form of the signifier, the
parsed gestural sign.
-
The videos of "The Passions" series also show that this excess motility, the body's
"vitality," is not free of the structures of signification, the legible forms and routines,
toward which it is moving and into which it will eventually resolve. For this reason, it is
not possible to identify a movement that is not traveling toward the legible form it will
ultimately embrace. The tension between the categorical and vital, the legible and its
excess, is also a tension between conventional meaning and what Merleau-Ponty calls
"gestural meaning." The term "gestural meaning" is a catechresis for a meaning that falls
between iterable terms and that opens up a new space in the system of signs. The "gestural
meaning" of a movement is that element of its phenomenalization that troubles the structures
of signification in which it is caught, not, however, because "gestural meaning" is outside
of these structures entirely, but because it is in the process of conforming to them.
Arguably, movement practitioners are especially attuned to this gestural excess, the
"beyond" of routine, and can accordingly intervene more successfully in the process of
conformity, derailing--if only briefly--the resolution of kinesis into sign. Telling a
story about skills with skills (as Gregory Bateson might put it), the trained movement
practitioner may appropriate to a greater extent than other people do the kinetic
possibilities of the individual body, redirecting movement toward sequences previously
undefined.[30] What we see in Viola's videos, however,
is not the choreographer's dramatic and purposive reinvention of the moving body, but the
material out of which such reinventions are made.
the architecture of the hand
-
If we insist on naming the "in between" gesticulations perceptible to
viewers of "Anima" "microstages of affectivity," that is, if we
emphasize affect over kinesis, then we imply that at every moment the
filmed subjects move they are expressing rather than
doing something with their bodies. But what if we were to
pull our focus out of the affectivity we think we see as we regard
Viola's images and retrain that focus on the gesticulations
themselves? Could the lived present then be treated as primarily a
movement phenomenon, as I believe Merleau-Ponty wished it to be, a
phenomenon to which movement analysis should be applied? How would
this change in emphasis affect our approach to Viola's performing
bodies? What other works would have to fall within our purview if we
were to take this analytical turn, and how else might we want to look
at them?
-
It is noteworthy that the installation in "The Passions" series that
has received the least critical attention is "Four Hands" of 2001 (see Figure
4).
|
|
Figure
4: Bill Viola, Four Hands, 2001 (video stills) Video
installation Black-and-white video polyptych on four LCD flat panels
mounted on shelf Photo: Kira Perov |
Here Viola mounts four small
LCD flat-panel display screens on a shelf (the dimensions are 9" x 51" x 8"). On each screen
Viola projects moving images of a pair of hands: those of Bill Viola's son, his wife, his own hands, and the hands of an elderly actress named Lois Stark (intended, perhaps, to
evoke his mother who had recently passed away). The Getty catalogue informs us that "Four Hands"
was shot with a black-and-white low-light film. In the frame, we see only the
subdued
iridescence of taut or creased skin as it moves over the spiny bones of the hands. Peter Sellars
describes the scene beautifully in "Bodies of Light," one of the critical essays included in the
Getty volume: a "series of gestures," he writes, "are shared across the 'four hands'"--really, four pairs of hands--"in
sequencing that remains slightly elusive. Sometimes a gesture initiated by a son is taken up by
the mother; sometimes the mother is teaching and leading her son" (161). -
Although in the finished work the emphasis is clearly on the transmission of symbolic gestures from one generation to the next,
Viola tells us that his initial inspiration came from images of isolated individuals in the act of gesturing, such as "The
Annunciation" by Dieric Bouts of the Netherlands (see Figure 5), the seventeenth-century English chirogrammatic tables of
John Bulwer in which hands are cropped and placed into grids (see Figure 6, engraving from Chirologia, or the Natural Language of
the Hand, of 1644), and paintings of Hindu and Buddhist mudras (see Figure 7). Viola's account of his sources has somewhat
misled his critics into believing that the sharing of gestures in "Four Hands" underscores their universal quality as opposed to what
Sellars clearly seizes: the passing down of a gestural habitus from mother to son.
|
Figure
5: "The Annunciation" Dieric Bouts, 1450-55 © The Getty Museum |
|
|
Figure
6: Chirologia, 1644. John Bulwer, Chirologia;
Or the Natural Language of the Hand. |
|
|
Figure
7: Hindu Mudras. Bill Viola: The
Passions (253) |
In his own comments on "Four Hands," Viola recounts how he determined which
gestures to include, explaining that he sought to display those that are
found in many cultures and religious traditions. He had been struck, for
instance, by the resemblance between the depicted gestures of Christ and
those of Buddha, but wanted to lift them out of their narrative contexts,
present them solely as embodied signs capable of evoking on their own the
intense emotions with which they seemed to be infused. Viola asserts that
certain gestures are universal and innate, that human physiognomy, like that
of animals, assumes shapes that signify in ways determined by genetic
endowment rather than cultural conditioning.[31] He does not entertain the theory that different
cultures might provide alternative gestural vocabularies for the expression
of a particular emotion, a theory that is advanced, in contrast, by
Merleau-Ponty, for whom culture and nature are always clasped in an
inextricable embrace.
However, in "Four Hands" Viola's claim that the meaning of performed gestures is universal and
innate is undercut by the scenes of transmission the video registers. Embedded in the sequential
structure of the piece is the implication that such gestures are transmitted and acquired in an
intersubjective setting, as a result of acculturation, miming, apprenticeship, and dialogic
response. The mother and son, especially, appear to be miming each other's hand gestures,
communicating in a motor language that develops through exchange, performance, appropriation, and
variation. The unity of the two hands is broken by responsive differing,
just as in intersubjective situations two subjects might
perform the same gestures but in slightly modified ways, qualitatively contrasting with, replying to, the dynamics, velocity, and
tonicity of the other's performance. The transmission scene of "Four Hands" implies that gestural
vocabularies are at least partially
acquired (rather than received at birth) and derive at least some of their meaning from the context in which they are performed.
"Four Hands" illustrates perfectly Merleau-Ponty's contention that no sign
is completely divorced from a biological substrate or immune to
cultural
re-shaping. The separation between pairs of hands (each pair appears on a linked but detached screen) suggests
the subject's independence; he or she has chosen to express a signification in this manner, and thus the gesture must bear some
relationship to its symbolic meaning if it is chosen for that purpose so frequently and by so many hands. At the same time, the
easily discernable orange cables connecting one screen to the next like an umbilical cord foreground the interdependence of
the subjects and their gestural responses: Would the son make the same gestures as the mother if they were not linked by
apprenticeship, furnished with occasions for the teaching and learning of expressive means? -
Ultimately, the architecture of "Four Hands" is ambiguous, allowing
both readings their due: the performed gestures can be seen as
necessary and innate or, alternatively, conventional and acquired.
But what "Four Hands" demonstrates unequivocally is that the
in-between microgestures, displayed during the interval and captured
by the eye are not undirected "waves of affect" or "emotional flows."
In contrast with the highly dramatic--even melodramatic--facial and
upper-body gesticulations of the actors in "Anima," the quieter,
monochromatic hand gestures performed in "Hands" announce far more
clearly their approaching conformity to the categorical and the
legible gestures of established gestural sign languages or mudras.
Thus it is more difficult to claim that the "in-between" movements
are fully free of cultural conditioning, an illustration of protention
inventing movement without any recourse to the sedimented past. When
we watch the hands moving in and out of defined, chiseled forms, we
become aware of the activity of hands not as they search freely in a
limitless continuum for the next pose, but rather as they move through
a catalogue of nascent motor actions toward the categorical,
legible pose. "Four Hands" exemplifies the thesis that Viola's work
reveals not vitality as such, the "feeling of being alive" in some
abstract form, but instead motility in its dialectical essence, at
once illegible kinesis and "proto-signification," the body as it edges
slowly toward the codified expression of a culturally established,
arbitrary, and conventional meaning.
-
More than any other work in the exhibition, then, "Four Hands" exacerbates the tension
between legibility on the one hand and, on the other, the ambiguous qualities of kinesis
that exceed codified gestural forms. Because we are looking at hands, not at faces, we tend
not to experience an intense affective identification with the image but instead engage in a
detached, aesthetic contemplation of the architecture created by muscle, flesh, and bone.
That is, in "Four Hands" the potential for a de-anthropomorphizing gaze is exponentially
increased because the hands stand alone; they have been cropped from the expressive
faces which, as Deleuze has argued, prove to be such a strong magnet for human affect. Once
affect is not the theme and intense affective engagement no longer the solicited response,
Viola's works can reveal a story about indetermination as a set of nascent motor
actions drawing from kinesthetic memories that cast our next move before us. Viola's
achievement is to have succeeded in capturing praktognosia itself, the kinesthetic
"background" to being that Merleau-Ponty identifies with the gestural, situated meaning of
our acts.
the rewarded destinations of the face
- In conclusion, I want to return to the question raised at the beginning of
this essay concerning the source of the unpredictable and the new. If, as I
have
been arguing, self-affection is both triggered and hemmed in by the culturally specific
gestural routines on which we rely to act, then to what process or force
can we attribute innovation,
resistance, and the emergence of the previously unknown? If not affect, then what? A partial answer is
indicated by Merleau-Ponty when he turns to the issue of gestural conditioning (the
acquisition of a habitus) in the chapter entitled "The Body as Expression, and
Speech." Here, Merleau-Ponty offers the example of the infant's smile as one of the
earliest instances in which the given, autonomous body first confronts the pressure
of cultural norms. When the smile is proffered, he notes, it is merely one gestural
possibility among others emerging from the bone and muscular structure of the human
face. But in an intersubjective setting, this movement possibility takes on a
specific meaning; under normal conditions, the infant who repeats the now meaningful
smile will receive reinforcement from surrounding adults: "a contraction of the
throat, a sibilant emission of air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of
bringing the body into play suddenly allows itself to be invested with a
figurative [cultural rather than biological] significance which is
conveyed outside us" (Phenomenology 225).
-
In this passage, Merleau-Ponty identifies a social dynamic that has been
confirmed in more recent studies, such as those of the child developmental
psychologist Andrew Meltzoff. In tests conducted with newborns, Meltzoff
recounts, it was found that starting around twelve days after birth, infants
regularly protrude the tongue "in imitation of an adult model" (qtd. in
Sheets-Johnstone 247). Meltzoff claims that sticking out the tongue is
something infants simply do from birth; it is one of their earliest "I cans,"
detached from an assigned meaning, the closest thing we know to a precultural
reflex. Sticking out the tongue first appears to the infant as a feeling of
movement (the movement of tongue on lips) and only later takes on cultural
meaning as infants find their behavior repeated on the faces of their
caregivers. Infants even begin a few days later to correct their ways of
protruding the tongue; if at first they protrude the tongue in order to
explore the tongue's dimensions and sensations, its "vitality affects" for
their own sake, soon they will be seeking to approximate more exactly the
behaviors they observe in others around them.[32] Apparently, self-correction efforts inspired by the
observation of others have the secondary effect of reducing the number of
other gesticulations performed, or postures assumed; socially-motivated
self-correction causes the muscles of the face (or body) to tend
toward the execution of only a certain, culturally-specific, even
family-specific vocabulary of gestures. From very early on, then, the
"in-betweens" (such as those we witness in Viola's "Passions" series) are not
entirely free of cultural inflection; once even minimally socialized, the
infant is less likely to engage in playful exploration of a fuller range of
movement possibilities because only some of these possibilities have been
experienced as culturally significant; only some of them have become the
rewarded destinations of the face. However, that does not mean that, on the
way to these destinations, the body has not passed through, or will not
continue to pass through, many culturally non-invested gesticulations that
could become, under the right circumstances, the movement matter of other
types of performance. The process of correction that Meltzoff identifies
implies that the body is born with a very extensive "motor power," as
Merleau-Ponty puts it, a motor power capable of generating a host of
gestures that will eventually have meanings and a host of gestures that will
not. Further, and most importantly, every gesture that will be granted
meaning in a cultural milieu will also, always, be merely another movement
possibility, providing an experience of kinesis, a gestural materiality upon
which "figurative significance" has contingently come to rest.
-
Finally, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of infant language acquisition
illustrates well the way in which kinesis, rather than affect alone,
offers the possibility for gesticulatory innovations beyond the gestures
prescribed by any one cultural system. In "Indirect Language and the Voices
of Silence," Merleau-Ponty depicts language acquisition as a process of
continual self-reduction, the "self" defined here as the vocal apparatus and
its physiological, we might almost say material, possibilities of
manipulation. "The important point," stresses Merleau-Ponty, "is that the
phonemes are from the beginning variations of a unique speech apparatus, and
that with them the child seems to have 'caught' the principle of a mutual
differentiation of signs and at the same time to have acquired the
meaning of the sign" ("Indirect Language" 40). If the child can grasp
the difference, in an intersubjective setting, between "babbling" and sounds
that bear intersubjective meaning, then this child knows on a kinesthetic
level how to do more than she will be required to do by any one given
culture. The "principle" the child discovers is that a sound gains
its meaning not purely from what it is, or purely from what it feels like to
produce it, but rather from the way it differs from another sound. As well
as learning the differential, conventional meaning of the phonetic clusters,
then, the child also feels the not-yet classified or rewarded sensations
produced by pronouncing these clusters, the qualitative continuum of movement
she has been forced to segment into communicative or operational units. She
has felt something that cultural representations do not allow her to store as
perceptual image (or as nameable, categorical emotion) but only as motor
memory, part of a "kinesthetic background" from which the future--as
protentive projection--will later emerge. Physiological potentialities of
the lips, throat, tongue, and vocal chords will be "repressed"
(Merleau-Ponty's word) but they will remain as prior inscription on
the level of motor experience, that is, on the level of kinesthetic memory of
past action. The child can draw on these lived "I cans" belonging not to
culture but to the apparatus, if given the opportunity to do so.
-
Perhaps inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva also turns to infant
language acquisition to explain the acculturated body's gesticulatory,
expressive, and affective excess. In a clinical research
experiment recorded in "Contraintes rythmiques et langage poétique,"
Kristeva studies the sounds produced by infants between four and six months
of age. At this point, infants are engaged in a process of self-correction
similar to that observed in Meltzoff's study on sticking out the tongue, only
here, they try to shape (and parse) a continuum of unintelligible
vocalizations into the significant phonemes of a single human language. With
the help of audiotape, Kristeva trains her ear to hear the sounds
in between the phonemes of French, or, alternatively, Chinese (the
cultural backgrounds of her clinical subjects). The sounds she hears in
between recognizable phonemes belong to the extensive "motor power" of the
human vocal apparatus, the physiology of which offers a range of sound-making
movements capable of being conjugated into any one of the existing 6000
languages humans use--or even other languages not yet invented. And it is
important to preserve this space of the not-yet-invented, the
to-be-organized-into-culture, for, as Merleau-Ponty observes time and again,
we do not know what nature beyond culture is. We do not even know what our
own anatomy allows. "The psychophysiological equipment," underscores
Merleau-Ponty, "leaves a great variety of possibilities open, and there is no
. . . human nature finally and immutably given" (Phenomenology
219-20). On this reading, a human being's past, or "the animal's embodied
history," as Varela puts it, includes culturally specific gestures acquired
in infancy and skills learned later on, but also movements sketched out
perhaps only once, available to the apparatus, the "equipment" with which we
are born. All of these varieties of kinesis fall under Merleau-Ponty's
capacious category of "I cans." The individual's motor repertory is thus not
limitless, but it is certainly richer than any single culture can encode. We
are a self-disclosing motility, the parameters of which undoubtedly
exist but are not yet charted. They are certainly in excess of where each
culture places them. This gestural excess, this "gesticulatory" excess of
physical movement over cultural meaning is the protentive aspect of human
being in time. It is this excessive, self-disclosing motility that,
I suggest in conclusion, provides the conditions for the emergence of the
unpredictable and the new.
-
But to what extent can the neonatal or even prepersonal body play a role in
creating new forms of motor actions once the habitus has left its
mark? How can we become aware of our own "kinesthetic background," how can
we reflect on the prereflexive self? Like Stern,
Leder, Sklar and Lowell Lewis, Merleau-Ponty maintains that we indeed have
numerous opportunities to return to and sensorily recapture the "vitality
affects" or kinesthetic "background" investing our socially legible
gestures with situated meaning. According to Merleau-Ponty, we can shift
our attention from the meanings we are making to the kinesthetic sensation
of making them, thereby revealing an alternative approach to the body as
"proto-signification," a materiality upon which meanings will be inscribed.
Merleau-Ponty refers to these moments as "dropping away," periods of
extended attention to performance, when the semantic value of a word, for
instance, recedes into the background and instead the "verbal
gesticulation" is perceived as "a certain use made of my phonatory
equipment" (Phenomenology 469).[33] If we can manage to separate ourselves momentarily
from our semantic projects, not only do we hear the noise of the
sound-clusters we call words, but, more importantly, we seize the cultural
organization of sound at the level of what it feels like,
qualitatively, to produce it.
-
Extending Merleau-Ponty's insight, the anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas has proposed
that every culture offers its own set of "somatic modes of attention," skilled
practices that encourage subjects to access this kinesthetic layer of knowledge and
experience. "Somatic modes of attention," he writes, "are culturally elaborated ways
of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence
of others" (244).[34] (His examples range from yoga
and meditation to love-making, charismatic healing, and learning to dance.)[35] What Merleau-Ponty dubs "the tacit cogito,
myself experienced by myself," is available through culture's own technologies of
self-monitoring, somatic modes of attention that are themselves, of course, limited by
the languages in which they are couched. We can only have a framed apprehension of
that which resists already available cultural frames.
Perhaps there is no complete escape from acculturation, no
blissful "dropping away" from acquired routines. Paradoxically,
however, each culture provides routines to counter routines, a set of
procedures to reveal the gap in another set. Through slow motion
technologies or somatic techniques that make us more aware of the
continuum from which gestures have been cut, it is possible to
increase one's sensitivity to the gap, to lie in wait for the
emergence of that short but pregnant in-between, or interval, that the
next step on the chain both renders possible and leaves behind. The
freedom to produce the new and the unpredictable should not be
attributed to protention as a total, unalloyed openness to the
unknown, a projection of "emotional tone" or affect ahead of bodily
performance and beyond learned response. Instead, such freedom to
innovate should be seen to derive from our rich mnemonic store of
socially acquired "I cans" as well as the proto-signifying resources
of bipedal anatomy, that is, from an as yet unexhausted set of kinetic
dispositions that are in the course of being explored, either to be
pressed into the service of already established gesture vocabularies
or, in privileged cases such as choreography, to be expanded into a
logic of their own. Viola's works are indeed precious, for they
expose alternatives to conditioning that emerge as we move from the
past toward the always already will be.
Department of French and Italian
University of California, Irvine
cjnoland@uci.edu
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Notes
1. These lectures have been collected and published in
La Nature: notes, cours du Collège de France.
2. Despite Michel Serres's claim in Les Cinq
sens that Merleau-Ponty largely ignored sensation and thus the role of the sense
organs in shaping understanding, most philosophers, dance theorists, and anthropologists
would agree that Merleau-Ponty is preoccupied with the question of the subject's sensual
engagement with the world. With respect to kinesthesia in particular, Merleau-Ponty was
influenced by Husserl's ideas concerning the primacy of movement and kinesthetic sensation.
For a helpful rendering of these ideas in English, see Varela, "The Specious Present," and
Petit.
3. See especially
"Cézanne's Doubt" and "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence."
It could be objected that Merleau-Ponty confuses expressive facial gestures
with instrumental gestures or gestural routines. But there is reason to
approach both varieties of gesture as skills, a point Ingold has recently
argued persuasively. Ingold insists that even "speaking should be treated
as a variety of skilled practice" (292); for him, verbalizations and facial
signs are expressive gestures that are culturally acquired rather than
biologically innate.
4. The notion of the body "cleaving" to the world comes from Husserl; see Petit 220.
5.
See especially Part I, chaps. 6-7; see also
Le Bergsonisme.
6. Massumi is wonderfully suggestive in his
treatment of movement, but he does not analyze specific movements or movement patterns and
their relation to the production of sensation.
7. Bergson devotes a chapter to
motor memory and its tendency to seek resemblances
between past responses and present solicitations ("Of the Recognition of Images: Memory and the Brain," 77-131). He distinguishes
motor memory (images of habits, or gestural routines, "lived and acted" [81]) from intellectual memory ("representations"). The
former enacts memory by directing the body toward a possible action, whereas the latter, which Bergson renames "attention,"
pictures a possibility in thought: "To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action
of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort"
(83).
8. By "kinesthesia" is meant the
body's sensation of its own movement. With reference to
Schneider, Merleau-Ponty writes: "The patient either conceives the
ideal formula for the movement or else he launches his body into blind
attempts to perform it, whereas for the normal person every movement
is, indissolubly, movement and consciousness of movement. This can be
expressed by saying that for the normal person every movement has a
background [fond] and that the movement and its background
are 'moments of a unique totality'" (Phenomenology 127;
emphasis added). Subsequent studies on this pathology have identified
Schneider as the "de-afferented subject," one who lacks a "body
schema" (another way of understanding what Merleau-Ponty means by
kinesthetic "background"). See, in particular, the work of Gallagher
and Cole. Hansen mobilizes their research to argue that contemporary
new media artists amplify the body schema, rendering subjects more
aware of the role of kinesthetic feedback in their actions; see
Bodies in Code.
9. I am reducing here a very complicated argument
in which Deleuze divides Bergson's "image" into three types: roughly, the "movement-image"
(the first image of the stimulus filtered in such a way that the organism can react
according to its interest); the "perception-image" (the response based on memories of
previous actions); and the "affection-image" (the response based on interoceptive
feedback). See Image-Mouvement 91-96. In L'Individuation psychique et
collective, Gilbert Simondon recasts Bergson's tri-part schema in the following
way: Bergson's first moment, in which potential movements are sketched out by the
organism, becomes the unconscious ("a fundamental layer of the unconscious which is the
subject's capacity to act" [la capacité d'action du sujet]); the second
moment, in which affect mediates the response, becomes the subconscious ("the layer of the
subconscious which is composed essentially of affectivity and emotion"
[affectivité: et émotivité]); and the third moment, the end
result, becomes consciousness, or the realized action (99). For Simondon, individuality is
located in the second moment, the intermediary layer of subconscious affection. He
therefore focuses his inquiry solely here: "An analysis of what we call psychic
individuality must center on affectivity and emotion" [Une analyse de ce que l'on peut
nommer l'individualité psychique devrait donc être centre autour de
l'affectivité: et l'émotivité]). Accordingly, he neglects to
consider "unconscious" kinetic potentials as constituting the very movement history of the
subject, a history that I claim is equally central to the unique psychic and somatic
composition of the subject. Nearly all of affect studies has emulated Simondon's
approach, one supported by Deleuze's early work on Spinoza in which he separates
"affections" (sense impressions) from "affects" (emotions) and privileges the former. See
Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.
10. For a full list of titles, see the Getty exhibition catalogue, Bill Viola The
Passions; all further references cite this volume.
11. The actors--John Malpede, Weba
Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity--sometimes grasp each
other, but they remain wrapped up in their own emotional and physical space.
12. Ekman has found that technically
"putting-on" facial gestures is a more effective way to create emotional
states than is searching
the soul for emotional equivalents, as in Method acting. See Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen,
"Autonomic Nervous System Activity" and "Voluntary Facial Action." For an application of
Ekman's ideas to the acting, see Schechner, "Magnitudes of Performance."
13. Weba Garretson, describing
Viola's process in an interview (qtd. in Walsh 35).
14. For Hansen, affectivity "comprises a power of
the body that cannot be assimilated to the habit-driven, associational logic governing
perception" (7). As a "framing function" (8) belonging to the body at any moment in
history, "affectivity" can help explain the surging forth of agency, innovation, and
resistance within and despite the material conditions of culture, within and despite, that
is, the standardizing regimes of power that have appeared so inescapably coercive to Judith
Butler and to Michel Foucault. Differentiating his own view from those of Jonathan Crary and
Gilles Deleuze, Hansen writes that "the frame in any [technologically produced] form," such
as the photograph or the video signal, "cannot be accorded the autonomy Deleuze would give
it since its very form (in any concrete deployment) reflects the demands of embodied
perception, or more exactly, a historically contingent negotiation between technical
capacities and the ongoing 'evolution' of embodied (human) perception. Beneath any concrete
'technical' image or frame lies what I shall call the framing function of the
human body qua center of indetermination" (8). I am indebted to Hansen's
critique of Deleuze, but I add that this frame is socially constructed as well as
physiologically informed.
15. See Hansen's discussion of the face and its
privileged relation to the communication of affect in "Affect as Interface." Hansen is
clearly influenced here by Deleuze's discussion of the human face in
Image-Mouvement.
16. See, for example, the blocking of the arms and
torso in Bill Viola's "Silent Mountain" (2001), also included in "The Passions."
17. He continues: "The fundamental logic of the nervous system is that of coupling
movements with a stream of sensory modulations in a circular fashion."
18. Sheets-Johnstone reads phenomenology (especially Husserl) in a way that both
complements and complicates Hansen's own understanding of the relation between time consciousness and motility.
19. Stern understands affect
differently from Deleuze, but captures Bergson's emphasis on pain and discomfort,
qualities of sensation related to bodily states.
20. Stern is collapsing here a difference that some theorists chose to maintain between
"kinesthesia" and "proprioception." The latter has more to do with being able to estimate the body's spatial orientation and position
with respect to some external coordinate. For more on this distinction, see
Pieron. Stern defines the emergent
self with respect to a sense of constant movement, even if this movement is that of the organs.
21. "The knitting of the brows intended, according to Darwin, to protect the eye from the
sun, or the narrowing of the eyes to enable one to see sharply, become component parts of the human act of meditation, and convey this
to an observer"; the shift from a reflex motion to a signifying gesture is described by Merleau-Ponty as a moment when the body
"suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figurative significance which is conveyed outside us" (225).
22. The vitality affects
that relay the body's sensations back to itself are not entirely
pre-cultural but rather the first matter upon which cultural
distinctions play. According to Stern (as well as Merleau-Ponty), the
autonomous body is never available to us in its precultural purity,
but we can, as I discuss in this essay, catch glimpses of its resonance
in the "embodied schemata" by which it is caught and brought into
cultural (perceptual/cognitive) being. On "embodied schemata"
(smooth versus rough, up versus down) as early cultural imprinting,
see the groundbreaking work of Mark Johnson, The Body in the
Mind.
23. The actors in "Anima" are Page
Leong, John Fleck, and Henriette Brouwers. "Anima" was completed in 2000; it
measures 16-1/2" x 75" x 2" and is mounted on three LCD flat panels--small
computers with the maker's name, logo, etc., covered by a frame.
24. Hansen continues: "The future is unknown, and therefore consciousness can only depend
upon itself." Compare this to Massumi's conclusions in Parables of the Virtual, which are closer to mine:
If the body were all and only in the here and now, unlooped by dopplerings, it would be cut off from
its "was's," not to mention its "would have been's" and "may yet be's." How could a body develop habits and skills? Are these not
pastnesses primed in the present for the future? . . . . A body does not coincide with its present. It coincides with its
potential. The potential is the future-past contemporary with every body's change. (200)
25. "Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body," he
states (Phenomenology 159).
26. For a reading of Merleau-Ponty (and
phenomenology more generally) that supports my own, see Patocka. I thank Mark Hansen for
directing me to this work, one which, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has not yet
been translated into English.
27. See especially Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. One finds the
same division between macro-conditioning and micro-conditioning in analyses by Brecht (see Brecht, Ihde, and Howes).
28. On the virtual body and its
exfoliation, see Massumi and Gil.
29. For Bourdieu, bodily hexis is
"embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as
history" (The Logic of Practice 56).
30. This is how Bateson defines creativity.
31. Theorists of gesture still ask
whether the meanings of certain facial expressions are consistent across
cultures (and thus can be considered universal and innate). McNeill
summarizes the relevant research up to 1992 in Hand and Mind: What
Gestures Reveal About Thought; Kendon provides another overview in
Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance that focuses on the
relation between speaking and gesturing. See especially 327-54, where he
discusses arguments offered by Ekman and Friesen, who follow Darwin in
believing that expression of emotion is innate (1972), and those of Kita and
Ozyürek and McNeill, who are convinced that culture plays a much larger
role in determining how emotion is communicated through gestures. In
contrast, Sheets-Johnstone claims in "Corporeal Archetypes and Power:
Preliminary Clarification and Considerations of Sex" that there are indeed
universal gestures; she draws on research in primate behavior to demonstrate
that there are species-specific gestures universally employed in
similar situations. These gestures can thus be seen as "natural," or
biologically driven (in Body and Flesh).
32. Commenting on Meltzoff's study, Stern adds that
blind infants will perform the same gestures as not-blind infants during the first few
months, but when they do not have the experience of seeing these gestures mirrored in the
faces of their caregivers they stop making them or make them at culturally
inappropriate times.
33.
One day I "caught on" to the word "sleet," much as one imitates a gesture, not, that is, by
analyzing it and performing an articulatory or phonetic action corresponding to each part of
the word as heard, but by hearing it as a single modulation of the world of sound, and
because this acoustic entity presents itself as "something to pronounce" in virtue of the
all-embracing correspondence existing between my perceptual potentialities and my motor ones
. . . . This is why consciousness is never subordinated to empirical language, why
languages can be translated and learned . . . . Behind the spoken cogito, the one
which is converted into discourse and into essential truth, there lies a tacit
cogito, myself experienced by myself. (Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology 459)
34. "The ways we attend to and with our bodies, and
even the possibility of attending, are neither arbitrary nor biologically determined, but are
culturally constituted" (246).
35. As Csordas points out, in "Techniques of the
Body" Mauss proposes that there is a "somatic mode of attention associated with the
acquisition of any technique . . . but this mode of attention recedes into the horizon once
the technique is mastered" (245). The anthropologist J. Lowell Lewis also insists that the
period of habit and skill acquisition is particularly rich: "one is constantly monitoring how
it feels for the body to do what it is doing, trying out and evaluating different feelings,
and measuring the effects of those feelings as action in the world" (229).
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