Spins John Mowitt University of Minnesota mowit001@umn.edu (c) 2008 John Mowitt "Books that teach how to dance-- There are writers, who, by presenting the impossible as possible and speaking of morality and genius as if both were merely a mood, a caprice, produce a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if one were to get up on tip-toe and simply had to dance for joy." --Nietzsche, "From the Souls of Artists and Writers" (139) Testing Leaping right in I offer the following as a way to find one's footing in what follows. Despite the epigraph from Human all too Human, this is not a study of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes up, but the text is not about him. For that matter Elias, Marx, Kierkegaard, de Man, Plato, and Derrida all come up, but the text is not about them. It is about dance and philosophical reflection as they are taken up by these figures. What recommends these figures is that they thematize different but related aspects of the matter at hand, and they do so with different degrees of intensity. In Marx dancing appears, as it were, in passing. In Nietzsche it returns eternally. Both, however, are concerned with the limits and force of philosophical reflection, a concern that achieves a distinctly reflexive urgency in the fashionable latecomers, Derrida and de Man. This said, what follows has no ambition to be either a philosophy of dance or a history of the relation between philosophers and dancers. Instead, this is a text that seeks primarily to raise questions about dance by detailing how dance is staged within philosophical reflection. In effect, it pushes off from the hardly controversial hunch that there is more to dance than we might otherwise think, and that this "more" becomes accessible when tracing, however erratically, the way philosophical reflection (of the sort embodied in Nietzsche's remarks above) puts dance to work. Specifically, I am proposing to speculate on the way dance figures in the work of philosophical exemplification. That is, the procedure, altogether routine, whereby the labor of abstraction is interrupted in order, through recourse to an example, to concretize a particular thought. This interruption need not be announced--"for example"-- indeed, as in the case of Nietzsche's remarks, it may in effect engulf the labor of abstraction, providing it with an animating figure. But an interruption it remains. Doubtless, one of the reasons Nietzsche is something of a philosophical renegade derives from the way his entire corpus is something of a philosophical interruption--as de Man, following Schlegel, will say, a permanent parabasis. Be that as it may, a striking thing about one of his favorite interruptive devices, dance, is the way it (or its avatars, leaping, jumping, pirouetting, etc.) races back and forth over its semantic status as a figure, an exemplary point of reference (when Kierkegaard appeals to the ballet), and as a designation of the very gesture of exemplification itself. Indeed, in attempting to engage this racing I have turned to my titular motif, "spins"--a term now capable of signifying interpretation, move, and turn. This text then unfurls as a series of passes, spins, over its animating hunch regarding dance. What repeats in each spin is a stratified reflection on how, in effect, dance puts philosophy on edge. That is, first, a reflection on how the gesture of philosophical exemplification is exemplified, even codified, in the example of dance, and second, a reflection on how philosophical discourse appeals to the example of dance to articulate both its relation to its own limits (the problem of reference), and its relation to the (an)other world conjured through its critique of the world to which it refers (the problem of revolution). What emerges is an admittedly eccentric genealogy of the philosophical maneuvering that, if we are to believe Perry Anderson, came to a head in the postmodern, a condition whose emergence was prompted by the belated and thus decisive encounter of Charles Olson (or Black Mountain College) and Jean-François Lyotard. Important here is not the postmodern as such, but the way the concept has come to serve as a way to think the socio- historical break I invoked under the heading of "revolution." That dance, precisely in the way it is deployed to figure, to refer to the social link and the question of leading--or, stated etymologically, of hegemony--insistently comes up here is part of what suggests, perhaps even hypnotically, that there is, as I said, more to be said both about and with it. One When in 1968 Norbert Elias republished the dissertation he had written with Karl Mannheim, The Civilizing Process, he added a substantial new introduction to volume one, The History of Manners. As its opening paragraphs clarify, Elias is keen to establish the relevance of a study originally conceived and written in the wake of World War II to a present marked by imperial wars, anti-colonial struggle, and the insurgency of groups later referred to as "the new social movements," just to pick out some of the more well- recognized challenges to the increasingly problematical relation between capital and civilization. Never shy about appealing to the power of theory, Elias establishes the relevance of his study by teasing out some of its important theoretical innovations. His introduction situates the project at the point at which figural language gestures toward what it would otherwise have trouble getting at: The concept of figuration has been introduced precisely because it expresses what we call "society" more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a "system" or "totality" beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals . . . . What is meant by the concept of the figuration can be conveniently explained by reference to social dances. They are, in fact, the simplest example that could be chosen. One should think of a mazurka, a minuet, a polonaise, a tango, or rock 'n' roll. The image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine states, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist and feudal systems as figurations. By using this concept we can eliminate the antithesis, resting finally on different values and ideals, immanent today in the use of the words "individual" and "society." (261-62) Elias goes on to rephrase Yeats's point in "Among School Children"--that one cannot know the dancer from the dance --and stresses that while dance is nevertheless relatively independent of specific dancers, it cannot be treated as a separable "mental construction." Imagine something like the eidos of the tango. Indeed, for Elias figuration names both the differently scaled and paced systems of Durkheimean interdependencies that interest him, and the properly social fact that their explanations and the "tools" that enable them belong to these very systems. In effect, sociology has partnered, or paired up, with society. So what is Elias telling us about dance? Insofar as dance exemplifies figuration it is through figuration that one is obliged to sidle up to dance. As the cited passage makes clear, Elias appeals to figuration in order to transgress, that is disclose, a certain disciplinary limit. Specifically, figuration helps one get at an enabling insight of what for several decades has gone by the name of social constructivism, that is, the proposition that the presumed agents or bearers of social relations are themselves the products of those very relations. They are not simply products in the sense that they see themselves this way, but they are--down to the very matter of their being--social constructs. Now, truth be told, Elias does not explicitly advance this sort of vigorous constructivism, but his entire effort to demonstrate how affective thresholds of disgust, shame, and civility are rendered historical through the means by which specific societies identify and regulate such thresholds assumes, if followed to the end of the line, precisely such a view. In this he is clearly a "fellow traveler" of the Frankfurt School, although his relation to Marxism was always more ambivalent than theirs, which was ambivalent enough. Figuration then falls into step with concepts like mediation and articulation. Like them it expressly designates the Moebian interface between the inside and the outside of the agent, and the inside and outside of the structure, or as Elias puts it, the individual and society. The individual is not in society like an animal in a cage (whether iron or not). Instead, the individual is in society the way speaking, at least for Saussure, is in language. Sensing that sociology (at least in the western European tradition) cannot think outside the box, that is, cannot understand the preposition "in" without converting it into a designation of containment and therefore distributing it across the divide between container and contained, Elias feels compelled to introduce figuration. As if to concede but also thereby accentuate the concept's strangeness, he immediately seeks to exemplify it. Hence the appeal to dance. But before elaborating further what this tells us about dance, consider the gesture of exemplification itself. On the one hand, although figuration might be opaque to sociologists, it is perhaps a little too self-evident (meaningfully opaque?) to students of literature, especially those aware of the traditions and practices traced by Auerbach in his probing meditation, "Figura," or, to invoke a post-de Manian rhetoric, to those familiar with the concept of figural language. Might this not suggest that the gesture of exemplification is an apotropaic one? Is Elias gesturing toward exemplification not in order to render the strange familiar but to fend off a certain reading, specifically a reading in which the figural would install itself at precisely the point where agency and structure can no longer be either differentiated or confused? To invoke the intellectual high point of the Clinton administration, perhaps the decisive matter is not what "is" means, but what "in" means. On the other hand, setting aside without discarding the apotropaic possibility, the gesture nevertheless assumes the profile of what Austin in How to do Things with Words calls a performative, that is, in reaching across from the theoretical to the quotidian, in referring to a world of readers not already prepared to follow his theoretical lead, Elias makes exemplification act out something like the Moebian interface of figuration, where the meaning of a text is in its readers the way speaking, to invoke an earlier example, is in language. On the one hand and on the other, together they join the figural and the performative, reminding us not only that the apotropaic is trope-like, but that the act of exemplification is also a feint, a dip where the quotidian has already slipped into or out of the philosophical, the text into or out of the reader whose lack of familiarity with figuration is then disclosed as a mirage. As Nietzsche said about those books that make us get up on tip-toe and dance, presenting the impossible as possible, genius becomes capricious, morality a mere tone. This implies, does it not, that Elias's turn to dance is already part of what he wants us to import into figuration from dance. And vice versa. Dance, insofar as it both exemplifies figuration and exemplification itself, does so because dance taps out the fleeting but impassable frontier between an inside and an outside that in arising everywhere belongs to the endless, though hardly seamless, referential encounter between theory and society, or, if one prefers (although the differences matter), between thought and world. Important here is not the leap from dance as stylized movements to dance as example, for the example, however theoretically rich, is nothing more than steps and movements, but the spin out on the other side of the frontier negotiated by the concept of figuration from among the concepts Deleuze and Guattari, as if in commemoration of their own relation, call friends. "Dancin' with myself," indeed. This said, historians of popular dance would certainly not miss the trajectories--popular/elite, collective/singular-- sketched in Elias's list of examples. But precisely because this list is an example within an example, it points beyond its contents. It thus invites consideration of what Elias actually knows of the dances listed. The following excerpt from "Biographical Interview with Norbert Elias" is suggestive. In discussing Elias's Nazi-provoked exile in Paris, the interviewer asks: In which quarter of Paris did you live? Probably Montparnasse; I lived in a hotel. It was very nice to go dancing at the Apache, near the Bastille, and to sit at the cafes in Montparnasse. You could eat very well at cheap restaurants, and meet everybody-- except French people. But at the same time it was a very difficult time, the only time I ever went hungry because my money had run out. (Reflections 50) This exchange refers to a context marked by frustration, specifically Elias's frustration with being excluded from Paris and the French despite his command of the language and his appreciation for French intellectual traditions. It is intriguing that the experience of dance figures here. Intriguing as well that Elias liked to dance at a place called the Apache. The term "apache" actually entered the French language through the exertions of Emile Darsy at Le Figaro when, in the early years of the twentieth century, he introduced "apache" (modeled, it turns out, on a eighteenth-century British appropriation of "Mohawk") to designate Parisian gangs given to various forms of urban violence and crime. With an ethnographic ignorance to rival that of people rabid about the right to name athletic teams "redskins," "chiefs," and the like, the French adopted this instance of rebarbative "primitivism," and happily used it to name clubs and bars that may or may not have catered to such gangs, but which obviously promised patrons a rowdy, even wild (Darsy picked the term up from American stories of the "wild west" being translated at the time) atmosphere in which so called apache dancing (an especially aggressive, even misogynistic form of gymnastic gyrating) almost certainly took place. In the absence of reliable witnesses it is impossible to know whether Elias was, as we say, dancing on the tables at the Apache. In the end, this is probably only interesting, but not important. What is important is that this example dips the concept of "figuration" into an interesting genealogy, one that becomes clear when in addition to all the other edges evoked and finessed by Elias--foreigner, Jew, intellectual (just to name a few)--one recognizes here Marx's engagement with Hegel and the secret of fetishism. It is significant that in Capital Volume I Marx has occasion to deploy his famous figure of corporal inversion both in the postface to the second edition (where he is acknowledging and settling the debt with Hegel) and in his analysis of the commodity. In the first, he proposes husking the dialectic from its mystical shell by recognizing that with Hegel "it is standing on its head" (103). In the second, he describes the commodity: but as soon as it [his example is that of a table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. (163-64) The implication is clear, namely that transcendental idealism is the commodity in philosophical form, or spun in the opposite direction, that the commodity's grotesque ideas are Hegelian. Equally clear is the assertion--rendered stenographic in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach--that in order to cross from an interpretation to a transformation of the world, a revolution, Marxism must break, and break decisively, with the commodified forms of philosophical discourse. Marxism, however faithful it must be to objects, cannot, in the end, allow itself to be thought by them, a risk actually entertained by Marx when slightly later in Capital I he presents Marxism as the content of what commodities might say about their value if provided an interpreter. He calls this sustained instance of prosopopoeia an example (ein Beispiel). So, to put the matter concisely, is figuration--precisely to the extent that it rediscovers society in the individual and the individual in society--an expression of this vamp toward the philosophical repudiation of the world of the commodity? Or, what is the difference between dancing tables (note Marx's dependency on the figure of catachresis here) and dancing that might take place on tables? Reading these as two versions of the same question, we are confronted with the truly wild, perhaps on the way to the postmodern, articulation of the co-implication of philosophy and dance. Both Elias and Marx write as though dance figures and figures essentially on the path from reference to revolution. Surely this is not the dance, the writing of the chorus, we thought we knew. Two Those who have wrestled with the angelic corpus of Kierkegaard (including, of course, those texts authored by him as well as those authored by his pseudonymic masks) know that it is a body of material sprawled across the discursive practices of philosophy, theology, and poetry, to mention only the most obvious landmarks. Indeed, many of his texts worry precisely over the matter of which law of genre they may be in violation of, a worry, in fact an anxiety, that he passed along to Heidegger when, in 1955, the latter sought to separate thinking out from philosophy in a way pre-dicted by Kierkegaard's struggle to separate faith from theology. At issue here is an edgy reflection on the question of "what is philosophy?" that finds trenchant expression in, among other places, that most autobiographical of texts, Fear and Trembling. If, as has been argued, the example of dance is likely to haunt any such gesture of delimitation--especially when executed with passion--then one is not surprised to find the figure of the ballet dancer leaping and spinning around in de Silentio's text.1 Its most sustained appearance takes place in that section of the text designated, "Preliminary Expectoration": It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it--but this knight [the knight of faith] does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth --and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian--only that knight [the knight of faith] can do it, and this is the one and only marvel. (41) This passage follows an extended stalker's monologue in which de Silentio describes his pilgrimage to the abode of the knight of faith and his effort once there to discern in the knight evidence of what in the passage is referred to as his sublimity. Restating in narrative form the relation between public and private reasoning as formulated by Kant in "What is Enlightenment?" (in private we can give no sign of our critical and if so desired public repudiation of our professional obligations), de Silentio draws attention to the paradoxical and ultimately absurd character of the knight of faith's singular relation to the absolute. As he puts it in the very steep climb, "Problema II," the paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual--to recall a distinction in dogmatics rather rare these days--determines his relation to the universal [the ethical] by his relation to the absolute [god], not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. (70) As if channeling Spinoza's misnamed pantheism, de Silentio insists that under such circumstances one loves god not by dutifully loving one's neighbor, but simply by truly loving (although presumably not coveting--even in one's heart) one's neighbor. Seeking outward signs of this paradox, of the "optical telegraphy" signaling its movements, de Silentio stalks the knight of faith, not leaving him "for a second," watching him walk about town, go to work, go to church, and so on. Enter the ballet dancer. In the passage cited de Silentio, like Elias, uses the dancer in order to exemplify a crucial distinction, that between the knights (NB: plural) of the infinite and the knight of faith. However, instead of resorting to exemplification in order to leap from the theoretical to the ordinary, de Silentio assumes the reader's familiarity with, on the one hand, classical ballet, and on the other, with standards of aesthetic execution that only a trained eye would pick up. What the trained eye will pick up is precisely what the stalker does not pick up in the knight of faith who could otherwise pass for a tax collector, namely, the barely perceptible "waver" that separates his ordinary acts from the movement of infinity that, in not yet being doubled, syncopates his being. By contrast, the singular knight of faith is capable of leaping directly and imperceptibly into his positions-- first, second, third, and so on. Something like a pas de chat, but done in reverse. So let us pose the decisive question again: what must dance, here ballet, be such that it can exemplify, can instantiate this edge between faith and philosophy? Or, as is becoming more obvious, what must philosophical exemplification be if dance must carry it out? A response, if not an answer, can begin by observing that dancing makes two other entrances in Fear and Trembling. The first occurs earlier in "Preliminary Expectorations" where, among other things, de Silentio gets the concept of "the leap" off his chest: It is commonly supposed that what faith produces is no work of art, that it is a coarse and boorish piece of work, only for the more uncouth natures, but it is far from being that. The dialectic of faith is the finest and most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can make the mighty trampoline leap whereby I cross over into infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer's, twisted in my childhood, and therefore it is easy for me. (36) As the Hongs note, this is an early invocation of the one thing "everybody" knows about Kierkegaard: the leap. Thus, it is likely significant that here the leap is paired with dance, indeed types of dance, a pairing that carries out the confirmation of the claim that faith is indeed a work of art. Awkward though it sounds, this is the proper way to make this point because if the leap is precisely the way to supplement what is otherwise strictly conceptual (the non-aesthetic), then the leap is the trace of the work of art in de Silentio's text. It is also an example. As such, its pairing with dance is an adumbration of the later encounter with the knight of faith who can leap into position without wavering. In designating the cross over into infinity, the tightrope dancer also prepares us for the passage, the referential back and forth between thought and world that the knight of faith imperceptibly embodies. But the shadows cast here reach much further ahead than that. In fact, they would appear to reach all the way into the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra where, in section three, we witness, along with Zarathustra, another tightrope performance (the German here, Seiltänzer, makes the link to dancing obvious), indeed one in which a high wire leap (this time by a demonic partner) allegorizes the overcoming of "the last man" by the "over-man," in effect, the revolution. Although Nietzsche's awareness of Kierkegaard's corpus comes, as it were, too late (Walter Kaufmann says 1888), it is clear that both writers find something compelling in figuring fundamental concerns of their thought in this particular way. Indeed it is this figuring of figuring that is so striking, and it is crucial that Nietzsche's philosophy of the future had to generate a non-Kierkegaardian repudiation of Hegel to get off the ground. The third and final appearance of the dancer takes place in "Problema II" now in verbal form: Anyone who does not perceive this [Abraham's absolute inability to explain the necessity of sacrificing the long awaited son] can always be sure that he is no knight of faith, but the one who perceives it will not deny that even the most tired of tragic heroes dances along in comparison with the knight of faith, who only creeps along slowly. (77) Here, a new negation-fraught contrast is introduced between the knight of faith and the tragic hero, a contrast designed to clarify the importance of Abraham's speed, or lack thereof (one thinks here of Kafka's waiter). Perhaps because there is no symmetry other than structural between the tragic hero and the knight of the infinite, dancing is apparently set opposite the knight of faith who, faithful to the topical motif of procrastination, creeps along. As if to undercut any balletic association with gracefulness, the knight becomes a figure of subreption, and dancing, insofar as it survives this apparently contradictory trans-valuation, realigns with implacability. Thus the imperceptible waver is rendered not as the instantaneity of the leap between philosophy and the world, but as the glacial, perhaps even tediously minimalist advance of the Abraham-machine. Both intense acceleration and intense retardation cause motion to disappear, the point, I take it, of the evocation of the Eleatics with which Fear and Trembling concludes and, subsequently, the frequent editorial pairing of it with Repetition. At the risk of reducing the dancer to the creep, the passage remains true to the earlier evocation of ballet in highlighting the problem of the appearance of transcendence in immanence, or what I have rephrased as the encounter between the world and its philosophical interpretation. Like Elias and Marx, Kierkegaard sustains recourse to dance as the way to point to the revolution that lies out ahead of referring, even if that revolution is all about a love for god that establishes its worldly and thus secular dominion here and now. Pivoting back then to the example of the example, one turns perhaps inevitably to de Man. In "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's 'Uber das Marionettentheater,'" de Man broaches the matter of the example in the context of a general consideration of the inscription of the aesthetic in literature and education. Arguing that Kleist's account of the aesthetic is more rigorously faithful to Kant than Schiller's deployment of the concept in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, de Man locates this "account" in the formal mechanism, literally the form-machine, that manifests itself in the titularly evoked marionettes suspended between the ephebe and the bear of the text. The dancing executed by these puppets solicits the allusion to the correspondence between Körner and Schiller with which the essay opens, correspondence in which dance is held forth as the very image of a society committed to aesthetic education. Elias, in effect, but in reverse. Although passing reference is made to Kierkegaard in the essay, de Man's own rhetoric suggests a more complicated relation, one that nuances and intensifies how dance and exemplification affect each other. De Man stresses the impossibility the logic of exemplification puts in play by drawing out the paradox of the example. "Is not its [the example's] particularity, to which it owes the illusion of its intelligibility, necessarily a betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey?" (Rhetoric 276). Adding that properly literary texts convert this dilemma into their mainsprings, de Man resumes his reading of Kleist by observing that the three narratives that comprise "Über das Marrionettentheater" (those of the ephebe, the puppets, and the bear) are allegories of the "wavering status" (276) of narrative as regards the epistemology of proof. The appeal here to wavering is notable, in fact so notable it suggests that the distinction between proof and narrative is virtually a re-articulation of the distinction between the tragic hero and the knight of faith, with narrative in the position of the tragic hero, that is, of a dancer incapable of imperceptibly striking a pose. As if plowing de Silentio's entire discussion back under, de Man finds the work of art (whether or not in faith) not in the exemplary grace of the ballet dancer, but in the conspicuous wavering of a text that, though driven by a grammatical machinery, spins relentlessly toward even the most illogical and unpersuasive conclusions. Thus, it is this relentlessness that puts the paradox of exemplification on display, but in the form of the permanently interrupted, almost therefore filmic performance of the text allegorized in the dance moves of the gravity defying puppets. A further twist occurs in "Excuses (Promises)," the essay on Rousseau that closes de Man's Allegories of Reading. Written almost a decade before his sustained reading of Kleist, this discussion of Über das Marionettentheater comes up in a reading of Rousseau's excuses. Specifically, de Man appeals to Kleist in order to exemplify what it might mean to talk about an automatic excuse, that is, an excuse that one is driven to offer virtually without reference to the specific circumstances of its solicitation. Anticipating the later reading of Kleist, de Man underscores the "anti-gravity" or dance-like dimension of Rousseau's text, proposing that the Marion episode of The Confessions is perhaps most fundamentally about the compulsion to confess otherwise known as writing (Allegories 294). His discussion is set within the context of both a general meditation on the rhetorical effect of anacoluthon (the abrupt intrusion of, in de Man's case, the performative code within a text otherwise dominated by the cognitive [constative] code) and a reading of particular textual passages. As a consequence, anacoluthon-- to the extent that it is automatically implied in the breaking off of narrative--appears to designate precisely the sort of interruption represented by a citation or an example. As if to mark and instantly re-mark this, de Man interrupts the presentation of Rousseau's excuses with the example from Kleist, or to put the matter as succinctly as possible the discussion of Rousseau's Marion is interrupted, that is, exemplified in the discussion of die Marionette. As this point is not made by the very reader least inclined to miss it, de Man himself, one is invited to assume that the machine-text, the grammar without which no text can exist, is here exemplifying itself in much the same way as it is shown to be at work in Rousseau and later in Kleist. In appealing to Kleist's meditation on the link between dancing puppets and the automatism of the aesthetic at the very point where the constantive, in fact referential movement of his own text is interrupted by the performative protocols of academic citation (a discursive feature "excused" in the volume's fitful "Preface" (ix-xi)), de Man deftly pulls at his own, now plainly visible, strings. His text, qua